Context
Reading Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave & Teitlebaum’s Window
Jeremy M. Davies
Speaking of Wallace Markfield
(1926-2002)—the Joyce of Brighton Beach, the great magician of old
Brooklyn rhythms—it’s impossible to avoid mentioning that he was
Jewish, for Markfield’s books are Jewish to the core: the DNA of every
sentence shaped by the inflections of the New York State Diaspora (and
a purer strain than that popularized by Woody Allen, once upon a time).
The form of his work is itself a result of, and a tribute to,
the convolutions of the English language, tortured into beautiful
bonsai shapes by the impositions of Yiddish syntax. (As my grandfather
is fond of repeating, “You don’t know English till you’ve learned it
from an immigrant.”) But Markfield is no documentarian: his
work may contain bits and pieces of what could be considered
time-capsule material—Depression-era Brooklyn; the ’50s and ’60s in the
Partisan Review-Commentary axis—but, as with the best
literature, these are points of departure: the foundations on which
another, more personal, and basically fantastic world is created, just
as the language—itself already given to parody and hyperbole—is refined
and stylized into a gorgeous pidgin of high modernism and low burlesque. Where
others give us measured and precise introspection, Markfield’s novels
brim with excess. He gives no quarter for those of us without the
Yiddishkeit—in the broadest sense—to keep up with his nonstop
references (“Scratch a Litvak [a Lithuanian Jew] and you’re peeling radishes!” Cosa significa?),
the stamina to wade through his wonderful lists, the knowledge of pop
culture necessary to match his phenomenal mastery of movie trivia (“How
I survive, I don’t know, but we’ll say I survive World War III. . . .
Then through the vapor I’ll see him. . . . And we’ll walk to each other
and we’ll touch and feel and pound on each other’s backs. . . . And
he’ll go, ‘Cagney and Robinson played together in one picture and one
picture only, and the name of that picture was . . .’ ”), about which
Markfield would later mourn that “each chapter lost another ten
thousand readers”—but who’d want to be spared even a word of his
“splendid nonsense” if given the choice? (Let the “less is more” crowd
bail out now.) It breaks my heart to know that Markfield felt
overshadowed by Saul Bellow all his working life—even claiming that
he’d dream about Bellow after the publication of every new novel, and
once that his own mother was ignoring him in favor of the Nobel
laureate, who’d turned up at her house for a visit. So let me take my
little life in my hands now and go on record to say that, much as I
like Bellow—and I do like Bellow (as did Markfield himself: “I don’t
think I especially care to compete with Humboldt’s Gift,” he
sighed in an interview)—I’d read Markfield any day in preference.
Paragraph for paragraph, page for page, Markfield had the chops. Or, to
put it less antagonistically: Markfield was a Bellow for the “other
tradition,” a Bellow for the adventurous, for the puzzle-lovers, for
the collectors of bric-a-brac and debris: a Bellow who they never
noticed, or else studiously ignored (probably because of all the
comparisons to Bellow)—and a “Jewish-American novelist” somehow doomed
to obscurity at the very moment the categorization was coined. The
rush to fill that vacuum, to profit from the sudden, post-_Augie March_
“marketability” of Jewishness, both opened the door for Markfield’s
novels, and then left their author far behind. The ascendancy of his
peers (Malamud, Roth)—writers whose versions of this world were by
comparison sanitized of “otherness,” packaged for an audience who at
worst wanted a tourist’s taste of a charmingly irrelevant, adorably
neurotic part of the culture—served to eclipse him completely. Markfield’s first novel, To an Early Grave (1964), was praised by Joseph Heller, won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was adapted for the big screen as Bye Bye Braverman,
directed by Sidney Lumet, a few years later. (DVD release, someone?)
It’s the most staid, the most buttoned-down and minimal of his great
novels, though his verbal precocity—the protean babble that would
become manifest in his next book—is already simmering behind its
seemingly naturalistic prose. Leslie Braverman, writer, schmuck,
friend, philanderer, has passed away at the age of 41, shocking his
somewhat dispersed and alienated group of compatriots (critics,
professional speechwriters, academics: our protagonist is the
redoubtable Morroe Rieff—played by George Segal in the Lumet—whose
epithet of choice is “Whoosh!”), now reuniting to organize an
expedition to his funeral. This crew is a gallery of
grotesques—lovable at forty years’ distance, but at the time bringing
out a tremendous hostility towards Markfield, who in his very first
book was taking brazen potshots at the same crowd who could have made
him the “next big thing”: the same crowd he knew intimately, and the
same crowd he ran with . . . until To an Early Grave put him in permanent exile. Braverman
is no angel himself, but two-bit as he may have been—wasting his life
on potboilers and co-eds—his friends (now undergoing one Odyssean delay
after another as they try to get out of Manhattan) are still
mediocrities by comparison. Though dead from page one, Braverman is
already the perfectly formed Markfield hero. Cheerfully amoral in life,
he was such a perfect picture of solipsism that he could write the
following to his wife, in a fit of goodwill, despite their separation
on account of his many affairs: It begins in earnest after a brief digest of recent life in
Brighton Beach, a litany that seems to hark back to some nonexistent
preface (the book begins, “Then in June, 1932 . . .”), and which gets
repeated every few chapters with updated information presented in
roughly the same order—what Teitlebaum the grocer writes on the window
of his little shop, which celebrity Stanley the taxi driver is claiming
to have picked up in his cab. Thus briefed, we’re thrown headlong into
the hot and stuffy Sloan apartment, where Shmuel is, for the moment,
asleep (he mutters things like “Pogrom” and “Piecework” through his
“agonized snoring”), and little Simon is getting Malvena the Orphan to
tell him the story of her early years again, being worked to the bone
and generally exploited by Cousin Phillie out in Hartford, Connecticut. She’s
sitting in a man’s undershirt so as not to bind or chafe her “dropped
stomach,” reading to him from her journals and scrapbooks, even though,
as she says, her autobiography, The Truth of My Life, is
still in the “drafty stage.” It’s an encyclopedia of petty complaint,
with chapters like “Cousin Phillie: How He Tried to Hire Me Out to
Schvartzers,” and all the while Simon sings snatches of songs, crawls
around on her lap, and brazenly pokes her barely covered breasts
through her shirt (“When they jiggle, you know what they look like
Mommy? Heh? . . . Just just just like Betty Boop’s eyes!”). When Shmuel
wakes up, we get his stories of being in basic training during World
War I (“‘It’s worth teh-hen armies to hear how they talk. . . .
Shee-yut!’ he cried. And as Simon and his mother whinnied and swelled
with mirth he gave them a ‘Fah-hark you! . . . In my company alone I
must have had—I had—ho-boy!—three, four kinds goyim’ ”), and a few
rounds of his ongoing fight with his son, with whom, as he says, “I try
and I try and still I don’t get close to him.” So, an old story: a writer done in—to his mind—by the very
idiosyncrasies that make his work unique, that make it sublime.
Markfield was never meant to chisel out the kind of stolid prose that
would have won him Bellow’s following—however finely crafted, however
elegant, however insightful. His muse was pricklier, sillier, and more
melodic than Bellow’s. Its precocity could barely be contained, and
maybe was a little too Jewish for readers who could only take so much
exotica in their diet. Of course, losing out to the likes of a Saul
Bellow is nothing to be ashamed of—but Markfield even lost out to his
lessers, and seeing them enshrined now on curriculums and chockablock
in bookstores, I have to wonder: why is there no room for him? Even
the great Stanley Elkin—the closest stylistic analogue to Markfield,
and a writer who used to joke that he knew all his readers by name—has
enjoyed a greater popular and critical success; and even Elkin had no
time for Markfield, because Markfield had a genius for alienating
exactly the people who could do him the most good, or else were most
likely to appreciate his work. I hope that the audience he was really
writing for—whether he knew it or not—will find him now that the dust
has cleared. And should you chance to run into him in Olam HaBah, here’s your “in”: the answer is Smart Money (1931). ___________________________ Selected Works by Wallace Markfield: To an Early Grave (1964). Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. $12.50.Such is my state that I will remit all sins, even these:
And in one of his few “in-person” cameos, he confronts Morroe Rieff in a dream, walking out of King Solomon’s Mines in a second-run house off Times Square:
That you have not read my work in three years.
That you do not utter little cries in sex.
That in company you will not laugh at the second hearing of my jokes.
Hey, hey, what are you doing there? Morroe wanted to know.
When Morroe wakes up, however, it turns out he’s been slumped against the shoulder of one of his fellow mourners in the car:
Here? Here I’m the white hunter.
Am I mistaken or don’t you look shorter? How come you look so short?
How come? How come is I said schmuck to a witch doctor!
[Morroe] sprang from his seat to follow Leslie into the brush, but found himself in [John Ford’s] The Informer. After betraying Leslie he treated half of Dublin to egg creams.
“Your grandma should one night pine for you and decide to
come down and pay a visit from heaven, and she should want to kiss you
and you should drool and dribble on her the way you drooled and
dribbled on me.”
But good as it is (and _To an Early Grave_’s subtle
accumulation of weight, of sadness and loss—and this through a pretty
much exclusive use of comedy—ought to be studied in every writing
program in the land), it’s Teitlebaum’s Window (1970)—Markfield’s “big book,” his Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses all in one—that makes him a giant. Superficially, it’s about one Simon
Sloan, coming of age in the 1930s: growing up, going to Brooklyn
College, and marching happily off to war to escape both a prospective
marriage and his violently off-kilter parents, Shmuel and Malvena the
Orphan; but no one reading Teitlebaum for the first time could possibly
mistake the book for a mere slice of Depression life. Its first
chapter—which ideally I could quote in full—is one of the best, most
astounding, harrowing, and hilarious openings of any novel in the
English language. It’s the sort of performance you want to put your
book down and applaud after reading.
“Eifelsleep,” Morroe said through his yawn.
Simon sobbed out the Pledge of Allegiance.
I could keep going: there’s more happening in this first
chapter than in any three novels—Jewish-American or otherwise—you’d
care to mention. By the time chapter two comes around, we’ve been so
completely immersed in Markfield’s world that he can cover vast
narrative distances with only a bit of shorthand. The book wastes no
time with the verities of realism—we get most of our information from
here on in through Simon’s journals, and we learn exactly what kind of
a filthy kid he is, firsthand. What he and his friends get up to might
make modern parents thankful for the relative innocence of video
games—but as the book progresses, there are hints that Simon might one
day redeem himself, grow up to be the sort of person who could write a
kind of Teitlebaum’s Window of his own . . . and, thankfully, hints are all we get.
***
“Get killed for Jackie Cooper!” his father told him.
Simon, planting an elbow on the table, made believe his was doing
Palmer penmanship, throwing in also the closing hours of the library
and the number of books he was allowed on a children’s card.
“Get killed with Jackie Cooper.”
Simon recited the holiday prices at the Lyric [Theater], the day for the changing of bills at the Miramar and the Surf.
“Get killed by Jackie Cooper.”
Markfield’s timing is a thing of wonder—how he makes dead words on a
page sizzle and hiss, how he makes us hear his dialogue: not as lines
recited by imaginary people behind a little proscenium in our heads,
but as meter, as rhythm, as set-up and punch line. Teitlebaum and To an Early Grave are nominally comedies, but they get at everything that literature is
for: they renew the language, and in the process, quite by accident,
they renew us readers as well.
Teitlebaum’s Window (1970). Dalkey Archive Press, 1999. $13.95.
You Could Live if They’d Let You, 1974. Out of Print.
Multiple Orgasms, 1977. Out of Print.
Radical Surgery, 1991. Out of Print.
