At the end of "The Séance", Dr Zorach Kalisher, a displaced, dispossessed Jewish philosopher who has taken to seeing an obviously fraudulent medium simply because he has nothing else to do but starve, awakens from a doze and asks after his dead lover. He misinterprets the wobbling cheeks of the medium, who has been conning him for ages: "'You're laughing, huh? There is no death, there isn't any. We live forever, and we love forever. That is the pure truth." And those are the closing words of the story. We are left to make of them what we will.
If there is such a thing as an essential short story collection, this is it. Harold Bloom sighed once that reading him was a "necessary obligation", which doesn't exactly make Singer sound like a whole lot of fun but there were wheels within wheels behind Bloom's ambivalence, one suspects, and anyway, often reading Singer is a lot of fun. In "The Last Demon", a demon is stuck in a village so rudimentary that "in the tailor's synagogue a billy goat is the tenth in the quorum". He asks an imp what to do for diversion: "What Onan did." ("That doesn't lead anywhere," replies the demon, which seems about right.) Singer wrote much else besides short stories, but these are what he deservedly got the Nobel for. "The Last Demon" does not end in humour but with the destruction of the Jews and his own impending end.
Since Janice Hadda's 1998 biography people have come to realise that Singer, far from being the twinkly, ascetic old folklorist and chronicler of the Yiddish tradition, was in fact a randy, calculating old git who cared at least as assiduously about maintaining his own good reputation as he did about his prose. Recalling his vegetarian diet at the 1978 Nobel dinner, Saul Bellow, who had translated Singer's breakthrough story, "Gimpel the Fool", said: "he may have been on a green diet but he hadn't stopped drinking blood." And it is interesting that when his stories were translated from Yiddish he altered them substantially, removing, for instance, much of the anti-Christian elements which he felt would not have gone down very well in America.
But after a certain point it doesn't matter too much about a writer's human failings, assuming they are human, and not inhuman the hooha about Larkin, for instance, seems to have died down largely and the contradictions in character can be seen to have had some bearing on the contradictions in the work.
With Singer, these are plain: and they can be summarised as the tensions between having a modern mind yet having been brought up in the kind of society whose traditions are not only ancient, but seem bizarre to the secular mind. You can take the boy out of the shtetl . . . "Though I had refuted God," Singer wrote in a memoir, "I still believed that somewhere in the celestial register accounts were being kept of every person, every worm, every microbe." Here is part of the rationale for his own vegetarianism; and yet he mocks the vegetarian diet of Mrs Kopitzky, the fake medium in "The Séance".
For someone who has refuted God, he still has a lot of demons, imps and devils in his stories. And not a few rabbis, who, among other things, have to endure being tempted by demons. His characters may at times be seen in mid-20th-century New York, but the ghetto and its ghosts haunt them; and his most characteristic stories take place in some timeless, eternal past, where technology has not really advanced much beyond . . . well, frankly, beyond the chicken.
These feature prominently as victims in "The Slaughterer", where the demands of the narrator's job drive him mad: "He felt as though he were immersed in blood and lymph . . . The bodies refused to know any justification or excuse every body resisted in its own fashion, tried to escape, and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath." There's a great old Jewish saying: "If God lived on earth, people would throw rocks at his house." Here are some very cleverly thrown rocks.
