The Tenants by Bernard Malamud

First published: 1971

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Harry Lesser, a white writer, tenant of an abandoned tenement, who is trying to finish a novel
• Willie Spearmint, a black writer, a daytime squatter in the same tenement
• Levenspiel, a Jewish landlord who wants to demolish the building and rebuild
• Irene Bell, Willie’s white Jewish girlfriend, an Off-Broadway actress
• Mary Kettlesmith, a black woman, a friend of Irene and Willie

The Novel

In The Tenants, Malamud blends gritty realism, absurd comedy, and fantasy to deal with both social issues and the nature of the creative writing process. The setting of the novel is an abandoned apartment house in New York City in the 1960’s, a time of racial strife affecting both the book’s Jewish and black characters. The point of view is that of Harry Lesser, rendered in third-person-limited narration. All experience, even when the narration appears omniscient, is filtered through Harry’s mind and voice.

The tenement, on East Thirty-first Street, reeks of human excrement, urine, and garbage. Harry and the rats are the only tenants, Harry holding out against a landlord, Levenspiel, who wants to demolish the rent-controlled building and construct a new building with shops at the street level and five floors of apartments above. Levenspiel continues to offer Lesser more and more money to move out, but Lesser will not move until the novel he has been writing for ten years is completed.

Harry Lesser’s isolation is shattered one day when he finds Willie Spearmint, a daytime squatter and a self-taught black writer, who types his novel in a deserted apartment next to Lesser’s. These two men are wary of each other; they form a tenuous friendship but never real trust. While Harry’s novel, The Promised End, is about love (a subject about which Lesser knows little), Willie’s work focuses on a narrative of black experience. Lesser is so obsessed with the nature of art that he does not experience life. Spearmint is torn between being a black activist and being a writer. Thus, each is an incomplete writer: Spearmint lacks form, and Lesser lacks experience.

As the men continue writing and intellectual sparring, Willie invites Harry to socialize, first at Harry’s apartment and later at the apartment of a black friend, Mary Kettlesmith. Harry becomes acquainted with both Willie’s white Jewish girlfriend, Irene Bell who is an Off-Broadway actress, and Mary. Harry has sexual relations with both of the women during the course of the novel. Harry begins an affair with Irene. After several months of secret liaisons with Irene, Harry finally tells Willie that they are in love and intend to be married. Willie strikes back at Harry by destroying his manuscript. Harry then destroys Willie’s typewriter, each depriving the other of something important to the artist-writer.

Trying to save his novel, Harry makes a desperate attempt to reconstruct his work. He hopes to write a better book than the earlier draft. He is so caught up in the attempt that he ignores Irene more each day. One morning, he finds in the rubbish container a barrelful of crumpled yellow pages, indicating that Willie is back and also trying to write. Harry never actually sees Willie, but each day he reads the discarded crumpled paper so that he can keep track of Willie’s attempts at writing. He then learns that Willie is keeping track of Harry’s progress also. Neither writer is able to perform his art in the way he wants.

Malamud combines reality and fantasy in the final climactic scene of confrontation between the two men, which occurs in a dark hallway of the tenement building. Harry imagines it as a jungle in which they are locked in a final bloody struggle. They use racial epithets to illustrate their hatred; Harry attacks Willie’s skull with an ax, while Willie castrates Harry with a sharp saber, thus reversing the racial stereotypes. The last words of the novel are spoken by Levenspiel, who discovers the two men’s bodies and prays for mercy for them and for himself.

The Characters

The characters in Malamud’s novel function both as individuals and as stereotypes. Even though the characters of the two men are quite well developed, the writer clearly intends them to be types; the other characters are less developed.

Malamud uses names to suggest the character of people—an old technique used effectively, for example, in eighteenth century Restoration comedy. Willie Spearmint is possibly the most obvious, with its echoes of William Shakespeare; Harry Lesser is perhaps the “lesser man.” Mary Kettlesmith seems to tie in to the old adage about “the pot calling the kettle black.” Levenspiel is certainly a stereotype of the moneymaking Jew. None of the characters is particularly sympathetic. The Jewish writer who should represent a humanistic tradition is obsessed with “form” in art, while the black writer seems to represent raw talent and “experience” as the necessary component of art.

Harry is working on his third novel. He mentions a first one, good, and a second one, bad, which was bought for a film, and Harry is living from the royalties. His current book has been ten years in the process. He refuses to move because he wants to finish his book where it was born; the irony is that he cannot finish his book in his condition of self-imposed isolation from life.

Harry lives in fear of the jungle outside his apartment. His apartment is an island in New York City, a place of withdrawal. Harry’s fantasies are populated by islands— stereotyped romantic ones, mysterious and beautiful, with crashing waves, trees, flowers, and native dancing girls, specifically one beautiful Mary Kettlesmith. Harry also lives in fear of fire, a real enough fear in a deserted tenement. At one point, he cries, “Where can I run with my paper manuscript?” He carefully puts a carbon copy of his current writing in a bank-deposit vault. Ironically, all the copies of his manuscript are burned by Willie and his friends. Doubly ironic is the probability that they may have been doing him a favor. Unwilling to participate in life, Harry also fears death. He feels that each book nudges him closer to death and absurdly tries to hold it off, reflecting that “one thing about writing a book” is that one can “keep death in place.”

Willie Spearmint comes into Harry’s carefully ordered sterile retreat, another writer poaching on Harry’s territory with his ancient typewriter. Willie might be the means of engaging Harry in life, but that process turns sour when they compete for a woman as well as for creativity. Willie is viewed through Harry’s consciousness. Willie, however, does have a life beyond the tenement. He comes during the day to work on his writing. He lives with a girlfriend, Irene Bell, but leaves her place in order to write. He is an unskilled raw talent trying to use his writing as a means of black activism. He asks Harry to read his manuscript and possibly help him with the formal aspects of writing.

The two women characters function as objects of competition for the men. Mary Kettlesmith is little more than a symbol so that Harry can sleep with a black woman. Irene Bell is more important to the novel in that she is central to the essential conflict between commitment to humanity and commitment to art. She could have become the way back to life for Harry, or earlier for Willie, although neither of the men is ever aware of it; she ends up being used and ignored. Harry’s initial attachment to Irene is sexual, then romantic. He professes love for her, but his only real commitment is to his work. During the relationship with her, he is engaging in life and thus freed to write: “It helped him write freely and well after having had to press for a while.” The irony is that he never realizes that commitment in a human relationship might be his own salvation as well as hers, and he refuses to discuss marriage until the book is finished.

Irene is the only one of the triangle who shows concern for others as human beings. Although no longer in love with Willie, she continues to show concern for him as a man and for his writing. She comes to realize that both men are married only to their work. She ultimately is rejected by both; their writing takes first priority always. She leaves New York for San Francisco.

Levenspiel is never more than a type. His character is not developed, and he lives on the fringes of Harry’s life, his only concern being materialism. He does conclude the novel with a plea for mercy for all of them, but the reader has no indication of his motive for doing so.

Critical Context

No matter how one reads the ending, as fantasy or as reality, this novel ends differently from Malamud’s earlier novels. The Malamud hero, from Roy Hobbs in The Natural (1952) to Yakov Bok in The Fixer (1966), is generally left with suggested regeneration and affirmation. In The Tenants, Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint are dead, with only the last line of comfort, and cold comfort it is to know that “each feels the anguish of the other.” The ending is negative, and if there is affirmation, it is in that negation. The negativist presents truth in that he renders the absurdity of life. The void that Malamud is affirming in this novel is what happens when two potentially creative men become so obsessed with art that they refuse human commitment. The result is sterility in both life and art. Malamud presents them both with a qualifying irony that loves as it condemns in offering them as part of the human condition.

Bibliography

Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Provides an evaluation of Malamud’s literary vision in relation to the entire body of his work, both novels and short stories. A chapter is devoted to The Tenants.

Allen, John Alexander. “The Promised End: Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants.” In Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Leslie A Field and Joyce W. Field. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. A short but clear analysis of the novel. The collected essays are useful for a broader view of Malamud’s work.

Astro, Richard, and Jackson J. Benson, eds. The Fiction of Bernard Malamud. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977. A collection of key essays presented by scholars at a conference featuring Malamud’s work.

Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Focuses on Malamud’s characters in terms of individual morality.

Hershinow, Sheldon J. Bernard Malamud. New York: Ungar, 1980. Useful overview and analysis of literary works treating the writer as moral activist.

Salzberg, Joel. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Useful collection of essays with a foreword by Salzberg.