Bernard Malamud's rediscovery of women: the impact of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Lucio Ruotolo

"Don't go in the rain, Willie, not in the rain. You will catch a cold, the doctor will come, you will get pneumonia" (Dubin's 68-69). Dubin walking in Venice thinks of death and his mother, an association that recurs throughout Malamud's fiction. He has just begun a new biography of D. H. Lawrence after thinking very seriously of writing one instead of Virginia Woolf, "whose intelligent imagination and fragile self had drawn him to her" (12). One concludes after reading Dubin's Lives that, despite Quentin Bell's head start, the biographer should have stuck with his original choice.

Exuberantly egotistical, Dubin, like many of Malamud's male protagonists, proves incapable of dealing with, much less loving, women.(1) Influenced, no doubt, by Bennington College undergraduates whom he had been teaching for more than two decades, as well as by his daughter, Malamud became increasingly sensitive to the problem. Sometime during the five and a half years of writing Dubin's Lives he decided to devote an entire course to Virginia Woolf. He did so in 1979, the year that novel appeared. More than any other novelist, she was filling a void in his own experience.

Just as Woolf regretted her lack of genuine contact with working-class men and women, so Malamud expressed at this time a sense of separation from a woman's mind that severely affected his ability to draw female characters. Three of his last four published stories, "Alma Redeemed," "In Kew Gardens," and "A Wig" (all in The People and Uncollected Stories), attempt to penetrate the minds of particular women. Wishing "to know things he felt excluded from by virtue of gender and experience," according to a frequent summer colleague, Richard Elman, Malamud often questioned his students about their personal lives. At a party he was apt, unflirtatiously, to ask a married woman how it felt to be having an affair. Elman also recalls his comment that he admired the Russians but had learned more from Virginia Woolf.

Let me suggest that in teaching this Woolf course Malamud intended more than preparation for "In Kew Gardens," the experimental story which synthesizes her life and work. As with "Alma Redeemed," which, similarly, synthesizes the biography of Gustav Mahler's wife Alma, Malamud, looking beyond People, was on the verge of something radically new. If the two stories are not particularly accomplished, they reflect a method inspired directly, I will argue, by exposure to Virginia Woolf.(2) Applying the theory he termed "autobiographical essence" to the lives of two creative women, Malamud seemed poised to write, despite one denial, his own portrait of a lady.(3) Although he did not consider the two works good enough for a book, he was interested in how readers responded to his new method. Testing the waters, in 1984 he submitted "Alma Redeemed" to Commentary and a few months later "In Kew Gardens" to Partisan Review.(4) Both published stories resemble the unfinished sketches that Virginia Woolf wrote in planning for something more ambitious, one of which, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," Malamud assigned in his course.

"In Kew Gardens" and "Alma Redeemed" compress into a few pages the autobiographies of two talented women, one herself famous, the other married to a famous man. Malamud's 1983 notes written during a sabbatical year at Stanford describe his intention: "Start with a scene in one life, explicate that as a fiction, then go into the biographical element and develop further. You come out, or should, with an invention forward as a story, limited but carrying the meaning of the life as a short story" (People xiv-xv). The biographical method merges with an earlier definition of the short story as "a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time," a condensation that he likens to the effect of both a drama and a poem (Lasher 67).

Whether it was baseball, Russian history, or Oregon Indian life, Malamud carefully researched the background for each novel. The extensiveness of his research on Woolf suggests that he had more in mind than class preparation or one short story. In planning the Bennington course he focused largely on biographical material, urging his undergraduates months before it began to read Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf and assigning as much biographical material as fiction. He considered teaching one of her least successful books, the life of Roger Fry.(5) While Malamud's growing interest in Woolf was inspired by this need to explore a perspective distinctively different from his own, he was particularly curious about the problems women writers face when transcribing experience into fiction. His syllabus urges students to consider how "Virginia Woolf, woman, writer . . . mines her experience to feed her imagination," an instruction which clarifies his reply to the question of her influence: "My interest in Woolf is, in some degree, related to the problems of writing."(6) Increasingly evident as one rereads "In Kew Gardens" is how directly Woolf's thinking has affected his own.