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Bernard Malamud's Two "First" Short Stories:

"Benefit Performance" and "The First Seven Years"

Keiichi Shimada

In 1943 Bernard Malamud's first short story "Benefit Performance" appeared in a little magazine called Threshold. In this same year three other stories appeared in other little magazines, but it was not until 1950, after a seven-year silence, that his stories appeared in commercial magazines for the first time. "The First Seven Years" was one of them. I attempted in this paper to compare it with "Benefit Performance" and examined the similarities and differences between the two stories in order to reveal Malamud's development as a professional writer.

Although both "Benefit Performance" and "The First Seven Years" have in common the motif of a father's dilemma concerning his daughter's marriage, the first remains just a sketch of its protagonist Rosenfeld while the latter has distinctive Malamudian features that are skillfully rendered as in a "well wrought urn." As their names suggest, the Max versus Sobel relationship symbolizes the conflict in Feld's mind between "materialism" and "soul". The shoemaker Feld's soul has been so contaminated by the materialistic aspects of American values in his process of assimilation that he wishes Max, a future CPA, to be his daughter Miriam's husband instead of his assistant Sobel who has no interest in money, but in books. That is why he suffers from his heart condition. It is ironic that the shoemaker is no longer sure of his understanding of the sole (=soul) he must fix. At the end, he seemingly achieves his redemption through the medium of Miriam although it is undermined by the title "The First Seven Years". I suggested in the paper that Sobel's "fanatic" stoicism might reflect Malamud's disciplined work habit as a writer/composition instructor at Oregon State University from some of the biographical data I gathered at OSU.