Old Men of the Sea

THE MAGIC BARREL (214 pp.)--Bernard Malamud--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.75).

In taking the Old Man of the Sea upon his shoulders, Sindbad the Sailor thought he was merely performing a small favor. But once the Old Man's legs were locked about his neck, Sindbad seemed doomed to carry his burden forever. This theme, that one good turn deserves another, and another and another, runs like a magic thread through nearly half the 13 short stories in this new book by Bernard Malamud, 44, an assistant professor of English at Oregon State College whose The Assistant (TIME, April 29, 1957) was one of the best of last year's U.S. novels.

The theme is most explicitly stated in The Last Mohican, a wry and witty fable about a serious-minded student named Fidelman who goes to Italy to write a monograph on Giotto. He scarcely steps from his train in Rome before his personal Old Man of the Sea latches onto him: one Shimon Susskind, a slat-thin Jewish refugee from, of all places, Israel ("The desert air makes me constipated'').

"Why Not Five?" Susskind's hand is always out, while his mind is nimbly at work on projects that range from the selling of nylons to the peddling of statues of the Virgin Mary. Fidelman desperately attempts to fend him off, first with handouts, then with insults, but Susskind clings like chewing gum to a shoe: he pops up in a trattoria to spoil Fidelman's appetite by hungrily watching him eat; he stands shivering at his side to shame Fidelman for having warm clothing. Given four dollars, Susskind contemptuously counts the money, demands: "If four, then why not five?" Giotto forgotten. Fidelman is systematically robbed and humiliated, but learns what wise men have known for centuries: that a man is responsible for the life he saves.

In the title story, the Old Man of the Sea is played by an extraordinarily antic marriage broker who enmeshes a young rabbinical student as thoroughly as Susskind did Fidelman. The Mourners tells of a gross landlord who, in trying to dispossess an unhinged tenant, becomes instead his brother. The Loan joins a man who desperately needs help with one who desperately wants to give it but cannot: they "embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever.'' Behold the Key is a vastly comic story of a young American whose search for an inexpensive Roman apartment sends him ricocheting from one involved and Machiavellian Italian to another and leaves him on the last page dazed, dazzled and without an apartment but wholly in love with Italy. Author Malamud's deft hand slips occasionally, as in The Lady of the Lake, an oddly unconvincing tale about a Jew who denies his Jewishness, and in Angel Levine, a heavily symbolic account of a Negro angel that is not as rewarding as the old Jewish joke on which it is based.

Transfigured View. Malamud is primarily a fantasist who starts out with people as sweaty and real as subway rush-hour passengers, but soon has them clothed in white and silver and singing hosannahs. His characters have the compelling quality of doing astonishingly inappropriate things and then forcing others to recognize a Tightness in their appalling behavior. At his best, Malamud is often as funny and earthy as the great Jewish humorist, Shalom Aleichem. But in his transfigured view of the world he may lie even closer to Francois Mauriac, the Catholic moralist who also holds that "the marks left by one individual upon another are eternal, and not with impunity can some other's destiny cross our own."

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