Condemnation Proceedings

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE TENANTS by Bernard Malamud. 230 pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

"Home is where my book is," thinks 36-year-old Harry Lesser as he hotfoots it back to his bachelor apartment in a decaying New York City tenement. There, for the past ten years, Lesser has been working on his third novel. His first was a success, his second kissed off as evidence of sophomore slump. The new novel, entitled The Promised End, is about a writer who cannot love generously. "Love up to a point," Lesser writes, "is no love at all."

But he finds himself curiously unable to finish the book. Like that of his own fictional character, Lesser's isolated life bucks the very love he is trying to imagine on paper. Holed up in his self-made prison, he writes, munches apples and turns a deaf ear to Levenspiel, the landlord who wants to get him out so the structure can be replaced by a new six-story apartment building. Lesser is the last tenant, a holdout protected from eviction by a maze of city regulations. Using the world's red tape to keep the world at bay is Lesser's way.

White to Black. Willie Spearmint is also a writer, though his ways are more direct. Black, consumed by the reality of his color, Spearmint takes over an abandoned apartment in the building and begins to cut out steaming hunks of black experience on an antique L.C. Smith. "Man, can't you see me writing on my book?" he growls when Lesser first appears. Lesser tries to be helpful --white to black, writer to writer, man to man. He keeps Spearmint's typewriter safe from night-crawling junkies. He buys the black writer a few sticks of furniture. There are parties with Spearmint's friends and white mistress, Irene.

The situation is primed for disaster, not by urban sociology or racial tensions, but because human needs lead to confusion and tragedy. When Lesser tells him that his writing lacks form, Spearmint furiously rejects the criticism as an attack on black art. When Lesser says that he and Irene have fallen in love, Spearmint assaults a flaking wall with his head and moans, "I forgot to go on hating you." Later he burns Lesser's unfinished manuscript and writes graffiti with its ashes:

REVOLUTION IS THE REAL ART. NONE OF THAT FORM SHIT. I AM THE RIGHT FORM.

When Lesser and Spearmint have a showdown, with hatchet and saber respectively, the abandoned tenement is transformed into a hallucination of a jungle battleground. The realistic props that Malamud has so expertly designed are yanked away, and the two writers assume the proportions of brutal historical forces. Significant blows are struck. White buries his weapon in black's brain. Black directs a castrating swipe at white's sexuality. Malamud himself brings the curtain down with the brooding thought that at the moment of ritual bloodletting each felt the anguish of the other.

It is as uncertain an affirmation as Malamud has ever written. In past stories and novels such as The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, suffering usually stretched a character's awareness of life's tragic limitations. In The Tenant, men hack blindly at each other's flesh, and the author labors to discern some faint compassion in the violence. Like Lesser, Malamud too has had trouble finishing his book. The difficulty is underscored by an epilogue in which Levenspiel, the landlord whom circumstance has also made a victim of the combat, sets up a liturgical cry for mercy. In effect it is an unanswered cry for a release from history.

The Tenant is not really a novel (or parable), but a bleak, relentless vision. It is full of that blend of realism and fantasy, comedy and pathos that distinguishes Malamud as one of America's best writers. That it does not end with a warm rush of saving compassion indicates that he is one of America's most honest writers as well. . R. Z. Sheppard

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