ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

A Friend of Kafka

1970

I INTERVIEWED ISAAC SINGER IN 1970. He lived on the Upper West Side of New York in an apartment block that enclosed a courtyard. Scrubby trees and bushes planted at its center gave the whole building a dark and foreign air. On the mailboxes, the polysyllabic names from Eastern Europe were like a transplant from Krochmalna Street, a setting in which the mythical Jews of Singer’s fiction had lived their mythical lives in a mythical Warsaw. He gave me A Friend of Kafka, another collection of his short stories that had just been published. On the title page he calls me “a young and already great writer,” but weakens the compliment by misspelling my surname. At the same time, he presented my daughters with a copy of Zlateh the Goat, one of his several books for children, inscribed, “To Jessica and Candida and to their charming parents with love.”

Generosity to those he thought well of came naturally to him and the other side of the coin was readiness to call writers he didn’t think well of charlatans or hoodlums. I sent him my book about the Palestinians, The Face of Defeat, published in 1972, and he endorsed it: “It is really a book which everyone should read. The truth is that the Arabs did not have to be defeated. They could have stayed in their homes in Israel and lived a better life than in exile. The main thing is that you are an excellent writer and the facts speak for themselves.”

Fame had already caught up with him. On the floor of the room in which he worked were a number of mail-bags which did not look as though they had been opened, or ever would be. “They’re always writing to me,” he said of his readers. “I can’t get away with anything.” He had a way of cocking his head to one side as if listening and learning, and immediate facial movements gave away his thoughts. “You aren’t a radical?” he asked, suddenly stricken with anxiety by something out of place that I must have said. There was a mischievous humor in him but my impression was that the fate he had managed to escape in Europe had given his inner self its special poignancy.

Unusually in a contemporary writer, Singer let the doings and sayings of his characters speak for themselves rather than be a medium for the author’s voice. When I taught creative writing for an academic year at the University of Iowa, I tried to get it across that plain statement makes any and every character and context believable, even the most unfamiliar. By way of illustrating the point, we read in class some of the sketches in Singer’s memoir of his Polish-Jewish childhood, In My Father’s Court. One member of the class drew attention to himself by wearing a heavy tweed suit and a felt hat, a turnout not much seen in Iowa. He sat at the back of the room and never spoke. A day came when I spotted him in the university library laughing at what he was reading, which I saw was the score of orchestral music by Anton Webern. He was to tell me that he had once played the tuba in a band that had toured Batista’s Cuba. It was almost midnight a few days later when he rang the doorbell and handed me the manuscript of a novel with the title Bodkin. Barton Midwood had come into my life.

Bodkin imagines a world in which all human endeavor is mere disturbance. The mysteriously silent individual at the back of the room had done consummate work. I sent the manuscript to my publisher, Arthur Cohen, the editorial director of Holt Rinehart and a man of exceptional intelligence. Thanks to Arthur, Bodkin was published by Random House in 1967. A review in the New Statesman of the English edition spoke of it with awe as “a literary discovery.” Francis King found it “weird and troubling.” Bart inscribed a copy for me. “I hope you enjoy this book. It is the best I have in me. If I had never met you, I should probably never have written it. If the author of The Stranger’s View [my novel of 1967] likes it, that will please me more than the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award or even an angry letter from the Pope.” Esquire, the Paris Review and other prestigious magazines published short stories of Bart’s that were collected in Phantoms (1970), his second book.

Isaac Singer liked Bodkin. He said that Bart reminded him of Bruno Schulz, who was shot dead by a Gestapo man in the streets of his native town of Drohobycz in 1942 before he had had time fully to use his literary gift. My father was living in New York, and in the course of a visit to him I took the opportunity to introduce Bart to Isaac Singer. I was sure they’d get on. Unexpectedly Bart turned up in London, met Antonia, Clarissa’s younger sister, and was married to her for about a year or so before he returned alone to New York. A worried Isaac wrote to tell me that he had tried and failed to stop Bart calling round so often. Bart, he went on, was completely meshuggah, he had taken to coming up to knock on the door and then to lurking for long periods in the scrubby trees of the courtyard. Real life was taking the shape of one of Singer’s mystifying stories. As a precaution, he felt compelled to go with his wife and live in their apartment in Miami.