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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by Lucio Ruotolo

Early in "Alma Redeemed" Malamud cites Bruno Walter's words describing Mahler "as a 'God-struck man,' whose religious self flowered in his music" (258). (Reportedly Walter too was her lover.) Malamud emphasizes Mahler's Judaism; Gustav in crisis seeks the Old Testament for solace as much as he seeks Freud. Clarissa Dalloway's diatribe against love and religion confronts the indomitable egotism of men such as Gustav whose fame and authority too often make them attractive. Malamud as well as Woolf, then, considers such appeal to be grounded in a metaphysics of power. Through "Alma Redeemed" this becomes an assessment of Judaism that resembles Woolf's critique of Christianity. The devouring potency of a father God whose language Woolf compares in Three Guineas to the words of Hitler and Mussolini, threatens, apocalyptically, to divide "the world of men from the world of women" (180).

Woolf's important tract against war indicts all such religiosity as one of the major causes of war. The connection she makes between the personal and the political suggests "that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other" (142). If we are to prevent future wars, she concludes, we must find "new words" and create "new methods" (143). Malamud's last short stories, however unsuccessfully rendered, suggest that, like the playwright of Between the Acts, he was about to come out from the bushes with a new plot in hand. The model was clearly Virginia Woolf.

NOTES

1 Chiara Briganti describes his female characters as "undimensional" because, lacking the freedom to make choices for themselves, "they all seek fulfillment through a permanent relationship with a man" (185). Edward Abramson, writing on Dubin's Lives, calls Malamud "a traditionalist so far as women are concerned," their destiny rooted in their biology (109). An exception to this view is Robert Solotaroff in stating that "there is no shortage of admirable women in Malamud's fiction" (118).

2 Solotaroff argues that Malamud was drawn, chiefly through Quentin Bell, to the "negative" facts of her life, namely her frigidity, depressions, and suicide attempts (115).

3 The denial was to Joel Salzberg in 1983 (Lasher 127).

4 Uncharacteristically, he sought the opinion of at least one critic, Richard Elman, whose review of The Fixer had been especially harsh. Elman told Malamud "In Kew Gardens" was "vague, ersatz and silly" and notes that after this strong criticism "he avoided me for a while" (33).

5 The desk copies he ordered for his Bennington course included Death of the Moth and Mrs. Dalloway. His last note to fourteen prospective students (March 9, 1979) added Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence.

6 This early syllabus also includes Moments of Being and A Room of One's Own. See also Malamud's words to Salzberg on Woolf's influence (Lasher 142).

7 Silver calls them "essays."

8 Silver 358, 360, 429. In the final year of Woolf's life she wrote essays on actress Ellen Terry and Mrs. Thrale, and a month before her suicide she asked Vita Sackville-West to bring her "Lady Ann Clifford or any other Elizabethan biographer" (Letters VI 470).