Pictures of Fidelman: When the Design Shows
Spoilers for all six parts of Pictures of Fidelman, including the ending.
Near the end of the first part of Pictures of Fidelman, an American art student stops chasing a refugee through Rome.
Something has changed in Arthur Fidelman's understanding; the man he has been pursuing continues to run. Near the end of the book, after a sexual encounter with a Venetian glassblower, another short sentence announces a change: “He stopped running.” Between these two arrests of movement lies much of the book's unevenness. The first leaves another person's existence beyond Fidelman's revelation. The second asks a declaration to settle a troubled experience almost as soon as it begins.
This is the only Malamud book I have read, so the disappointment belongs to this encounter; his other work may offer a different one. There is enough invention here to make the weaker stretches frustrating. The first and fifth of its six parts repeatedly achieve something the others approach less securely: their peculiar forms determine how we experience Fidelman's predicament.
Elsewhere, an incident's usefulness becomes clear while the incident itself still feels provisional, as though we can hear the author deciding what might deepen a problem, provoke the next humiliation, or fill the walk to another address.
Susskind keeps running
Fidelman arrives in Italy with a chapter on Giotto and a carefully budgeted itinerary. Rome has an allotted place in the plan. Shimon Susskind, who wants one of his suits, repeatedly disturbs it. Their exchanges revive our attention when each reply changes the terms on which Fidelman hopes to dismiss him. Susskind calls the spare suit old because Fidelman has a new one. When Fidelman objects that it is for summer, Susskind makes it a suit for every season. Fidelman's possession of two suits keeps returning as an awkward fact that his explanations cannot dispose of.
Malamud's caricature has an argumentative independence. Susskind can be exasperating, opportunistic, and right within the same exchange. His need does not make him solemn, and his evasions prevent him from becoming an obedient spokesman for generosity. When Fidelman asks whether he is responsible for him, the reply, “Who else?”, transfers the difficulty back before an abstract discussion can absorb it.
The missing briefcase eventually draws Fidelman into the city his schedule was supposed to organize. Streets become routes taken while looking for somebody; the ghetto, synagogue, and refugee's freezing lodging alter the significance of his Italian education. He is already living through the time he imagined he was losing before the proper work could begin. Place acquires direction through a pursuit.
Even the final recognition cannot reorganize everything around him. Susskind has burned the Giotto chapter. Fidelman's anger gives way to forgiveness, but the refugee remains in flight. Malamud separates the two men's movements in the closing sentence. A moral insight has occurred inside a life whose other participants retain their reasons for misunderstanding it.
Bach at the piano
That independence becomes harder to feel in the second part. Fidelman's infatuation with the painter Annamaria is quickly established, and much of what follows supplies recognizable conditions of the humiliated artist: poverty, sexual frustration, domestic servitude, wounded ambition. Breasts recur as aggressive instruments, first “piercing,” later “stabbing him.” The language has already assigned the body its role in the contest. Her power and his susceptibility arrive together, leaving comparatively little for desire to discover.
The Bach passage makes the problem pretty clear. Clelia, a piano teacher, gives the sick Fidelman tea and food, then plays despite his objections. Her earlier Italian praise returns in the narration as “the spirit, the architecture” when the music moves him. He checks his face for tears and finds a wet nose. The bodily anticlimax is funny; the sequence that follows is briskly convenient.
White carnations on the piano prompt a wish to paint flowers, then something, then himself. Within a few conditional thoughts, musical uplift has supplied a new picture, and he runs to buy a priest's costume.
We can follow every connection. Bach belongs to an aspiration toward order; the flowers give attention a visible object; the self-portrait recruits renewed ambition. Yet the change in perception lasts scarcely longer than its explanation. The repeated phrase carries Clelia's account of the music straight into Fidelman's response, and the accelerating wishes deliver the next incident before any difficulty of seeing or making has detained him. The reference has a function whose efficiency contributes to the sense of an author arranging the passage.
This also links to my irritation produced by the Italian food and street names. A menu or a local word can sound like a visitor displaying the vocabulary of his visit; repeated meals and journeys then confirm a setting we already possess. Elsewhere, the same domestic materials do more. When Annamaria feeds Fidelman and attends to his food after he paints her as Virgin and Child, the small services make their altered roles visible. Naming a dish, describing a body, or specifying an address earns its place through what the detail makes happen to our attention.
The priest episode briefly promises a stranger encounter between making an image and acquiring its authority. Annamaria takes the costume seriously enough to confess incest and the death of her baby. But the confession races toward sexual gratification, completed by a crucifixion metaphor. Material that might have unsettled the whole relation is made to complete its joke. The speed feels particularly costly because the suffering introduced is so considerable.
Paint that resists its painter
Fidelman's sudden position among criminals in the third part intensifies the impression of a character reassigned to a useful predicament. The present tense gives the episode pace, but the explanations of how he got there do much of the work of establishing his susceptibility to violence.
The threatened forgery has a sharper comic intelligence: the criminals understand the practical business of art, while the compromised painter discovers principles about stealing paintings. He eventually escapes with his own copy. That choice gives his claim to originality a pleasingly crooked expression, although the art-and-sex business around it often advances through situations more quickly than through a convincing appetite for them.
The fourth part finds a more resistant substance in paint itself. In “Mother and Son,” the mother's hands and feet and the boy's face have accumulated almost a quarter of an inch of paint. Fidelman repeatedly scrapes away her face before it hardens; the surrounding work has become so solid that moving either figure might mean abandoning the canvas. Revision is constrained by the physical history of earlier attempts.
“How do you paint a Kaddish?” briefly gives this labor a more exact burden than the familiar question of why an artist cannot finish. The prayer he has failed to say for his mother must somehow become a painting. His uneasiness about insufficient grief may recall Camus, but the paint creates the particular difficulty here: making a memorial has become another way of deferring what he owes the dead. The accumulated self-questioning sometimes loosens that connection into conventional artistic anguish. It tightens again when the picture changes its human relations.
With the young prostitute Esmeralda as his model, mother and son become brother and sister, then prostitute and procurer. Fidelman considers removing himself from the compromising role and putting another man in. His decision to keep himself gives the changing image its force. Each substitution changes who owes what to whom; the painter's freedom to alter a face encounters his reluctance to recognize his own conduct. The eventual destruction of the achievement is fitting, though the closing violence arrives with the haste familiar elsewhere in the book.
Malamud also interrupts the narration with an interview conducted by Ludovico, the pimp. The labeled voices give this caricature room to press his questions, mix intelligence with resentment, and make the artist answer. Its borrowed public form becomes a personal quarrel. The final “END OF INTERVIEW” already has the snap of a breakdown; adding that Fidelman assaulted the recorder supplies the last action after the formal interruption has largely delivered its effect.
It is a small example of the book explaining a finish that its construction has already made us feel.
A bulb with no feet
In the fifth part, the construction becomes much more conspicuous, and the writing grows stronger. Fidelman passes through grotesque legend, dialogue, fragments of artworks, and the account of a print. Ordinary continuity falls away. The familiar authority of a narrated life is replaced by the uncertain authority of what “is said” to have happened. His circumstances deteriorate while his misery sometimes recedes behind a deepening satisfaction with his art.
Philip Roth's criticism of this book comes close to my frustration: “a genuine sense of what conversions cost” dissolves into “rhetorical flourishes.” He also praises the talking bulb. His preference for continuous development as a check on Malamud's fantasies leaves a useful question within that praise. This radically interrupted fifth part can make Fidelman's evasions encounter resistance too. The interruptions themselves sometimes provide it.
A square hole can be discussed as an artwork until a visitor turns it into Fidelman's grave. The visitor has something of the menace of an animated creature from folklore, though the passage identifies him through its own unstable mixture of a dead youth and a devil. The disputation over form and content acquires a consequence that its grand vocabulary had kept at a distance.
Elsewhere, an erased de Kooning becomes an erased Rauschenberg before the catalogue-like sequence ends with “Eraser. Fidelman.” A name and a full stop confer artistic standing on the tool that can remove everybody's work. The mock attribution makes the artistic lineage consume itself.
The broken religious tableau is stranger still. Susskind appears amid Christian imagery and biblical diction, with Susskind's Jewish colloquial voice breaking through the elevated register. The mosaic's missing pieces prevent us from possessing a complete holy picture. Fidelman's wish to preserve his master in art becomes entangled with his wish to be remembered, and the scene distributes sanctity, betrayal, and artistic ambition across a damaged representation. Its mixture remains disorienting. That incompleteness suits a vision in which the painter's urge to secure an image helps to destroy what he venerates.
The talking bulb brings the formal extravagance closest to an ordinary failure. Within the imagined scene of a print, Fidelman decorates a cave while his sister Bessie lies dying upstairs. He can keep elaborating the work; she cannot keep waiting. The bulb argues with him, and each reply supplies another delay. When he protests that other people's deaths are not his fault, it answers: “All we are talking about is to go upstairs.”
Responsibility contracts to a physical action he can perform. The bulb has light but no feet; Fidelman has the means to go and continues finding reasons to stay. The joke allocates their capacities with extraordinary economy. Even his interest in receiving miraculous advice threatens to become another postponement: the exceptional event flatters the exceptional person he wishes to be. Malamud makes the delay occur in the time we spend reading the exchange.
Bessie's final receipt of her brother's hello carries the grief the preceding absurdity has made possible. The scene is openly fabricated, improbably voiced, and framed as an image, yet its sentences let someone else's dwindling time interfere with Fidelman's account of himself. The fifth part makes it impossible to explain the book's weaker stretches simply by blaming exaggeration or an experimental form.
The speed of fulfillment
Venice initially renews familiar scenery, then lowers Fidelman into cold, dirty water and paid physical service. The former pursuer of Susskind has come to resemble the man who needed his help. Such correspondences prepare an account of artistic pretension reduced by life. The question is how much experience the ending gives that reduction.
Beppo, the glassblower, destroys Fidelman's paintings and later pins him down during a sexual assault. Fidelman's fear and resistance occupy the scene until Beppo tells him to think of love. Then comes “He stopped running.” The narration soon describes Beppo as tender and Fidelman as loving him without reservation. The sentence connects this encounter to a lifetime of evasion, giving the act a retrospective explanation before Fidelman's experience has adequately complicated it.
A reading of the apprenticeship as freedom from relationships of domination helps explain the generosity the ending seeks. Its account of Beppo as a liberating teacher sits uneasily, however, beside the physical means of the initiation. The later affection does not by itself supply the missing transition. We are asked to accept a reclassification of fear as the beginning of fulfillment, and the narrator's confidence exceeds the experience presented.
The glassmaking is more persuasive. Apprenticeship requires Fidelman to watch another person's work, anticipate a need, and learn what the material will permit. His ambitions return, and the household's competing claims complicate his new attachment. Making the red bowl eventually gives simplicity a practical history: the glass must be worked into proportion, and the temptation to add decorative scenes must be resisted.
Fidelman fills the finished bowl with cold water and dips his hands into it. The book makes us understand why this limited achievement might satisfy him.
Its last sentence also leaves more room than a renunciation of art followed by a single new sexual identity would suggest: “In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women.”
Making continues. His capacity for attachment expands. What remains abrupt is the certainty with which a few transitions deliver him into that future. The bowl has been given the labor of its making; the settled life receives a sentence. After so much tribulation, it is reasonable to want more of the experience by which he could come to inhabit it.
Further reading
Start with Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger for another artist divided between the life he observes and the life he longs to join. Its openly argued account of artistic estrangement makes a useful comparison with Fidelman's explanations of himself.
Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund extends the question through friendship, sensual wandering, spiritual discipline, and making art. Read it beside Malamud for the different ways a novel can give the artist's divided allegiances time to develop.
John Fante's Ask the Dust offers a nearer comic relative in Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer whose poverty, grandiosity, and desires encounter Los Angeles. Fidelman's Italianized name, Arturo, makes the association tempting; the resemblance is a reading connection, with no claim of influence.
For a tighter encounter between artistic ambition and the claims of other people, turn to Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer. Its young writer's attraction to literary authority continues the question raised by Fidelman's teachers: what does admiration prepare us to excuse?
Sources
Bernard Malamud, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, first eBook edition, December 2011. Quotations and close readings refer to the six numbered parts.
Rosebud Ben-Oni, “On Failure and Redemption: Bernard Malamud's Pictures of Fidelman,” Kenyon Review, December 27, 2015. The reading of Beppo's apprenticeship as escaping domination is qualified here through the sexual encounter's coercion and the narration's speed.
Philip Roth, “Imagining Jews,” The New York Review of Books, October 3, 1974. His objection to rhetorical conversion and praise of the bulb scene are developed through the fifth part's discontinuities.
Nino Ricci, “‘Tonio Kröger’ by Thomas Mann,” Goethe-Institut Canada. His discussion of artistic estrangement and the novella's central conversation informs the Mann reading-path comparison.
The other reading-path links lead to the publishers' descriptions of Hesse, Fante, and Roth.
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