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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Lucio Ruotolo

The ambiance of Bloomsbury parties that Virginia prized undercut in particular the pomposity of those more interested in lecturing than in talking, a tendency Malamud notes in describing Mahler's relationship with his wife: "Gustav usually gave her short lectures in philosophy as they walked together" (People 262). Virginia also shared a Bloomsbury irreverence for conventional bourgeois ideologies, particularly those concerning religion, patriotism, and romantic love. With everything on trial - most especially "the old sentimental view of marriage" (Moments 196) and the conventional views of love - "we were," she recalls in "Old Bloomsbury," "full of experiments and reforms" (Moments 185). Malamud selects from the latter essay the well-known incident when Lytton Strachey enters the festivities, and, pointing at a stain on Vanessa's white dress, asks: Is it "semen?" Virginia adds: "Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down" (195). Missing this humor, Solotaroff treats the anecdote merely as an expression of Virginia's unhealthy sexuality.

From its opening scene, a factual event picturing Virginia losing her underpants in a public London park, "In Kew Gardens" effectively captures the playful light-heartedness of Bloomsbury fun:

"Christ, goddamn!" Vanessa listened at the bushes. "Don't be hysterical. No one will see through your dress." "How can you be certain?" "No one would want to." She shrieked slowly. "Forgive me, dear goat," Vanessa told her. "I meant no harm." "Oh, never, no, never." (People 253)

Such dialogue expresses and illustrates for Malamud the inherent healthiness of Virginia's personality.(9) It reveals, moreover, as do so many of Virginia's letters and diary entries, how frequently her comic sense marked an intimacy with others, particularly with loved ones. This is especially relevant because the historical event, expanded and fictionalized, involves a number of her greatest anxieties: sexuality, exposure to ridicule, and a continual sense of competitiveness with her equally gifted sister. Though they frequently teased each other, countless letters reveal the deep affection that defined their relationship. The subsequent line of "In Kew Gardens" makes this unambiguously clear: "Insofar as I was ever in love I loved Vanessa."

With Malamud, the deployment of humor in the context of family relationships reflects something fundamentally different. Joel Salzberg argues convincingly that he employed the often grotesquely comic as a strategy for evading in particular the repressed memory of a mother who died when he was only fifteen: "The abrupt loss of maternal and nurturing love," he goes on to suggest, "was eventually to be treated in the Fidelman stories as a source of humor that borders on the irreverent" ("Autobiographical" 281). The protagonist of "Pictures of Fidelman" tries to stop the movement of time by denying the reality of his mother's death.(10) Malamud's problem, reflected in Dubin, is that he requires a Jewish mother to blame for self-inflicted difficulties. Recalling Sartre's anti-Semite, the Jew becomes for Malamud a means of evading his own existential fears.(11) The full reality of such evasion is that it excludes his own history along with the real Bertha Fidelman Malamud.