In Rough Country (7 page)

In much of Shirley Jackson's fiction food is fetishized to an extraordinary degree; ironic then, that the Blackwood family should be poisoned by one of their own, out of a family-heirloom sugar bowl. That the food-fetish has its erotic component is suggested by the means of poison—
Amanita phalloides
—and by the way Merricat so totally depends upon her older sister as a food provider, as if she were an unweaned infant and not a “great child” grown into an adult. Sexual attraction per se is virtually nonexistent in Jackson's fiction: the single sexual episode in all of her work appears to be a molestation of some kind, short of rape, that occurs in an early scene of
Hangsaman
—“Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to
touch
me?”—but the episode isn't described, and is never
acknowledged by the afflicted young woman, who gradually succumbs to schizophrenia. Nowhere in Jackson's work is food more elaborately fetishized than in
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, in which the three remaining members of a once-aristocratic family have virtually nothing to do but inhabit their blighted house and “eat the year away” in meals which the older sister prepares for them, three times a day, like clockwork; as in a Gothic parody of the comical self-portraits Shirley Jackson created for the women's magazine market in the 1950s, in such best-selling books as
Life Among the Savages
(1953) and
Raising Demons
(1956)—a housewife-mother's frustrations transformed, as by a deft twist of the wrist, into, not a grim account of disintegration and madness, still less the poisoning of her family, but lighthearted comedy. (It's ironic to note that Shirley Jackson died at the age of forty-nine, shortly after the publication of
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, of amphetamine addiction, alcoholism and morbid obesity; negligent of her health for years, she is said to have spoken openly of not expecting to live to be fifty, and in the final months of her life suffered from agoraphobia so extreme she couldn't leave her squalid bedroom—as if in mimicry of the agoraphobic sisters of
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
.)

As Merricat has uneasily sensed, “change” is imminent, and will bring with it the invasion of the Blackwood household. Without having been invited, the sisters' boorish cousin Charles arrives, intent upon stealing their deceased father's money, which he believes to be in a safe; he dares to take Mr. Blackwood's position at the head of the dining room
table—“He even
looks
like father,” Constance says. Unwisely Charles threatens his young cousin Merricat: “I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do with you…But whatever I do, you'll remember it.” It's a measure of Constance's desperation that though Charles is not a very attractive man, she appears drawn to him, as a way into a possible new life, a prospect terrifying to Merricat. Yet, the slightest wish on Constance's part for something other than her stultifying robot-life, and Merricat reacts threateningly, for the sisters' secret is the intimate bond between them, that sets them apart from all of the world. Throughout the novel there is the prevailing threat of the murderous Merricat whose fantasy life is obsessed with rituals of power, dominance, and revenge: “Bow your heads to our beloved Mary Katherine…or you will be dead.”

The hideous arsenic deaths constitute the secret heart of
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, as unspecified sexual acts appear to be at the heart of
The Turn of the Screw
: the taboo yet irresistible subject upon which all thinking, all speech, all actions turn. The sisters are linked forever by the deaths of their family, as in a quasi-spiritual-incestuous bond by which each holds the other in thrall. Food-shopping (by Merricat), food-preparation (by Constance), and food-consumption (by both) is the sacred, or erotic ritual that binds them, even after the house has been partly demolished by fire and they are living in its ruins:

Witchcraft is a primitive attempt at science; an attempt to assert power by the powerless. Traditionally witchcraft, like voodoo, and spiritualism, has been the province of marginal individuals of whom most are women and girls. In Shirley Jackson's novel of multiple personalities,
The Bird's Nest
, the afflicted young heroine's psychiatrist—aptly named Dr. Wright—tries to explicate the bizarre psychic phenomena he has been trying to “cure”:

Shirley Jackson is rarely so explicit in her thematic intentions: it's as if her literary-critic/English professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman were lecturing to her, in a manner that sounds like mild self-parody even as it helps to illuminate both the tangled
Bird's Nest
and the ruined
Castle.

After Merricat sets a fire in the Blackwood house in the hope of expelling her detested cousin Charles, the yet more detested villagers swarm onto the private property. Some are firemen who seem sincere in their responsibility of putting out the fire but most want to see the Blackwood house destroyed: “Why not let it burn?”—“Let it burn!” The jeering rhyme is heard:

Radical change has swept upon the Blackwoods through the agency of Merricat, ironically. The fire she sets causes the death of Uncle Julian, the sisters are forced to flee into the woods, villagers enter the private residence and vandalize it. Yet, when the sisters return, in a tenderly elegiac scene, they discover that though most of the rooms are uninhabitable, all they require—a kitchen, primarily, where Constance can continue to prepare meals for Merricat—has been left intact. As if by magic the old house has been transformed: “Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.” Against all expectations the Blackwood sisters are happy in their private paradise “on the moon.”

Constance has succumbed to Merricat entirely: the “good” sister has yielded to the “evil” sister. Constance even berates herself for being “wicked”—“I should never have reminded you of why they all died”—in this way acknowledging her complicity in the deaths. Now we understand why Constance never accused Merricat of the poisonings or made any attempt to defend herself against accusations that she was the murderer for, in her heart, she
was
and
is
the Blackwoods' murderer, and not Merricat; that is, not only Merricat. Her acknowledgment tacitly guarantees the sisters' permanent expulsion from the world of normal people—a world in which the psychologically damaged Merricat could not survive.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
ends on an unexpectedly idyllic note like a fairy-tale romance in which lovers have found each other and even the villagers, repentant of their cruelty, pay the Blackwood sisters homage by bringing food-offerings to them, left at the ruins of their doorstep: “Sometimes they brought bacon, home-cured, or fruit, or their own preserves…Mostly they brought roasted chicken; sometimes a cake or a pie, frequently cookies, sometimes a potato salad or coleslaw…Sometimes pots of baked beans or macaroni.” Here is the very Eros of food, an astonishing wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the agoraphobic is not pitied but revered, idolized; the destruction of her house isn't death to her, but a new life protected by magic: “My new magical safeguards were the lock on the front door, and the boards over the windows, and the barricades along the
sides of the house.” Repeatedly as in a rapture Merricat cries “Oh, Constance, we are so happy.” The sisters' jokes are slyly food-oriented, of course:

I
n this illuminating biography of Bernard Malamud by Philip Davis, the first full-length biography of Malamud to be published, a story is told how, when Malamud was in his late fifties, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for
The Fixer
, 1966) and twice National Book Award winner (for
The Magic Barrel
, 1959, and
The Fixer
), at the height of his reputation and yet assailed by self-doubt, Malamud remarked to a friend that he regretted not having known the love of several beautiful women. Knowing the writer's lifelong preoccupation with routines, schedules, and the devoting of every possible hour to his work, his companion replied that such love affairs would have taken up a good deal of Malamud's time: “Which of your books would you have given up for these loves?” Malamud was silent for a moment and then said, “None.”

The Yeatsian conundrum—“perfection of the life, or of the work?”—carries with it an overtone of (unconscious?) megalomania: for who, counting even William Butler Yeats, is likely to achieve “perfection” in either life or work; rather more, the writer might hope to perform as brilliantly in both as he is ca
pable, or simply to perform at all, with a modicum of success in both quarters. Yet, to the desperately ambitious Malamud, as he emerges in Philip Davis's sympathetic yet persuasively “objective” portrait of the artist, such paradoxical questions were of the utmost importance, for to Malamud writing was not merely “writing” but carried with it an element of the visionary and the magical:

The writer Jay Cantor, a student in Malamud's writing class at Harvard in the mid-1960s, vividly recalls:

More comically, Malamud's daughter Janna Malamud Smith, in her unsparing and oddly tone-deaf memoir
My Father Is a Book
(2006)—surely the most chilling of titles!—recalls how, when the Malamuds were living in Oregon and Malamud was teaching at Oregon State University at Corvallis, then as now not the most distinguished of American universities, as a little girl she would overhear her father talking to himself while shaving: “Someday I'm going to win.” There is a Woody Allen–esque irony to the fact that, when Malamud received the National Book Award for
The Magic Barrel
, he was at last “allowed” to teach literature at this university best known for its agricultural school. (Malamud soon quit Oregon and returned to the East, where he would teach intermittently at more prestigious Bennington College for much of his academic life.) And even Malamud's publisher, the gratingly corrosive Roger Straus (of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) would one day sneer at the possibility of a biography of Malamud: “I think it's ridiculous. There was nothing there; as a life it was unexciting. Saul Bellow was filet mignon, Malamud was hamburger.” (In droll Yiddish it would sound better: with such friends, who needs enemies?)

Shallow-flashy Straus was mistaken: Bernard Malamud is indeed well worth a biography, and in Philip Davis, Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, he has been posthumously very lucky to have been granted an ideal biographer, who has more than fulfilled laudable aims: “To place the work above the life to show how the life worked very hard to turn itself into that achievement” and to “show serious readers all that it means to be a serious writer, possessed of an almost re
ligious sense of vocation—in terms of both the uses of and the costs to an ordinary human life.” [p. vii]

 

Born in Brooklyn in 1914, of Jewish immigrant parents, Malamud seems to have been obsessively preoccupied with memories of his arduous, impoverished background, as of the stoic example of his grocer-father, through his life. Long after Malamud had ascended to the literary aristocracy of his time—president of American PEN, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recipient of countless awards and honorary doctorates, not least the author of an eccentric baseball novel,
The Natural
, made into a film starring Robert Redford—he gives evidence of being as “time-haunted” as he'd been as a boy whose father had fled Ukraine “amid a rising tide of anti-Semitism and pogroms” and whose mother died in a mental hospital when he was fifteen. (Malamud would one day remark to an interviewer that he had to find in a “second life” what he had lost in his “first life”: “The death of my mother, while she was still young, had an influence on my writing and there is in my fiction a hunger for women that comes out in a conscious way.”) Like many another child of immigrant parents, Malamud was determined to invent himself as an American; he distinguished himself as a student, attended Columbia University on a government loan and received a master's degree in English in 1942 (his thesis, on Thomas Hardy's reputation as a poet in American periodicals, seems to have been uninspired and pedestrian); he began writing fiction while teaching high school in Brooklyn, began to be published in the mid-1940s, and achieved his first notable successes in the 1950s when his
remarkable short stories, one day to comprise
The Magic Barrel
, began to be published in such magazines as
Partisan Review
and
Harper's Bazaar
. Subsequent to his marriage to “an Italian beauty”—not without warning her: “Though I love you and shall love you more, most of my strength will be devoted to realizing myself as an artist”—and their move to faraway Oregon in 1949, Malamud began to publish frequently, and well; in
Discovery
,
The New Yorker
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, and
Playboy
; his early novels
The Natural
(1952) and
The Assistant
(1957) were acclaimed, and
The Magic Barrel
, the most impressive of Malamud's several story collections, quickly acquired the aura of a Jewish-American classic. (And how aptly titled, this gathering of stories that so brilliantly combine the gritty realism of contemporary urban settings with the fabulist “magic” of the Jewish storytelling tradition.) Malamud's third novel,
A New Life
(1961), set in an Oregon academic community very like Corvallis, with an idealistic but schlemiel-like protagonist named Levin, has an idiomatic ease and accessibility that distinguishes it from Malamud's more characteristic work, and certainly from
The Fixer
, a grimly compelling fable-like tale of virulent anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, as if Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka had collaborated with Dostoyevsky to come up with the worst possible nightmare for a Jew, the accusation of having committed a ritual murder/sacrifice of a Christian child. (Yakov Bok's gradual emergence as a tragic hero is the substance of Malamud's novel, which was enormously difficult and exhausting for him to write over a period of several years: “Something in me has changed. I'm not the same man I was. I fear less and hate more.”—a trium
phant if treacherous epiphany for a Jew held captive in a Russian prison on lurid criminal charges.)

Beyond
The Fixer
, Malamud seems to have cast about for a comparably worthy subject: though he worked with his characteristic obsessiveness on the semi-autobiographical
Dubin's Lives
(1979), and on the fabulist/prophetic
God's Grace
(1982), it is Malamud's short stories that constitute the most memorable work of the last two decades of his life, notably the masterfully executed and compelling “My Son the Murderer,” “Talking Horse,” and the near novella-length “Man in the Drawer” from
Rembrandt's Hat
(1973). In 1982
The Collected Stories of Bernard Malamud
was published to much critical acclaim and in 1989, three years after his death of a heart attack, Malamud's final, incomplete novel
The Ghosts
was published along with his previously uncollected stories.

In the prime of his career in the 1960s and early 1970s, Bernard Malamud was as highly regarded as his coeval Saul Bellow and his younger contemporary Philip Roth: an accidental triumvirate of terrifically talented Jewish-American writers ruefully described (by Bellow himself) as the “Jewish equivalent of the first-generation rag trade gone upmarket—the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature.” (Add to which, as in a Chagall fantasy, the transfigured Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most triumphantly “Jewish” of twentieth-century American writers, floats overhead.) Given the relative narrowness of Malamud's subject matter, the more subdued range of his writerly voice, and an aesthetic puritanism temperamentally at odds with the flamboyant self-displays of Bellow (
Herzog, Humboldt's Gift
) and Roth (
Portnoy's Complaint
etc.), it seems inevitable, if un
fortunate, that Malamud should come to seem, in time, the least impressive of the four; Bellow's and Singer's Nobel Prizes (1976 and 1978 respectively) have given their work the imprimatur of international acclaim, and Roth's dazzling energies, that continue to this very hour, have given to Roth's work an air of improvident virtuosity utterly foreign to Malamud's more journeyman-like career. In the preface to this biography Philip Davis notes that he was invited to undertake the project by the Malamud family out of their concern “that (Malamud's) name was fading, his readership and literary standing in danger of decline.”

In the preface, too, Davis quotes the notorious remarks of Sigmund Freud on the futility of the biographical enterprise:

So irrational an outburst provokes one to wonder what Freud was desperate to conceal from biographers, and whether he succeeded; in the case of Philip Davis's life of Malamud, it would seem that the subject, Malamud-as-a-writer, was both enigmatic to observers (like Frank Alpine of
The Assistant
, “he could see outside but no one could see in”) and yet in his letters, drafts, and notes to himself, Malamud is tireless in his self-scrutiny, as if eager to be understood. Unsparing of what he perceives to be his limitations, Malamud yet takes pride in his hard-won accomplishments. Davis speaks of Malamud's com
mitment to “the human sentence”—prose that has been shaped through countless revisions: “The sentence as object—treat it like a piece of sculpture.” The biography is a virtual treasure trove of writerly
pensées
, many of a quality to set beside those of Virginia Woolf gathered by Leonard Woolf in
A Writer's Diary
. Here emerges Bernard Malamud as a tireless craftsman trusting not to rushes of inspiration but to “labor”: