Morality begins with an awareness of the sanctity of one’s life, hence the lives of others—even Hitler’s, to begin with—the sheer privilege of being, in this miraculous cosmos, and trying to figure out why. Art, in essence, celebrates life and gives us our measure.
—Bernard Malamud in The Paris Review
Published in 1969, Bernard Malamud’s Pictures of Fidelman not only contains the story of failed Jewish European assimilation— a particularly harrowing failure given the then-recent Shoah which claimed the lives of six million European Jewry— but also centers on the failure of the artistic self, which unfolds in one particular Bronx Jew who journeys to Italy to study and paint in the Western tradition of the Great Masters. Pictures of Fidelman is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories independent from one another, but rather, Iska Alter once put it, “six panels of quixotic knight-errand of art.” And Arthur Fidelman is a frustrating protagonist; Katherine Jackson, a reviewer for Harper’s, claims that while Fidelman has “an insatiable dedication to his art,” his character’s decisions are “devoid of any common sense judgment [that] one tires of the endless troubles they get him into.”
According to Robert Ducharme, when the book first appeared, “critical response… was not notably favorable. The Italian setting was thought to be…uncongenial to Malamud, who as an urban Jew, was supposed to stick to….the Lower East Side of New York City.” It would seem that Malamud had wandered into some strange new land that he and his character are unfamiliar with and constantly surprised by, because he doesn’t seem to know what to do with Fidelman and Fidelman doesn’t know what to do with himself. In her essay “Portrait of the Artist as Schlemiel,” Leslie Field claims that Malamud derived Fidelman from the schlemiel, a stock character in Yiddish folklore, in order to justify the artist as a failure in becoming a (European-style) master, while thriving in humor and achieving selfhood as a survivor. Malamud would later take issue with this characterization, stating that he didn’t like “the schlemiel characterization as a taxonomical device… it reduces to stereotypes people of complex motivations and fates. One can often behave like a schlemiel without being one.” In any case, Arthur Eidelman’s adventures in Italy are set shortly after World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, and who is the first character that Fidelman meets in Italy but Shimon Susskind— a Jewish refugee from, of all places, Israel.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Malamud explained that he wrote the Fidelman stories “to loosen up—experiment a little—with narrative structure. And I wanted to see, if I wrote it at intervals—as I did from 1957 to 1968—whether the passing of time and mores would influence his life.” The Six-Day War had occurred at the tail end of this period, in which the State of Israel took over Jerusalem’s Old City, the Sinai, Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights. While Israel was seen as victorious against its neighbors Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Jews were expelled from numerous Arab countries in the aftermath, emigrating to Israel or Europe. And yet Malamud begins his series of stories with Shimon Susskind who, though fictional, reveals much about the 20th century Jewish psyche: its attempts and failures to assimilate into Western culture as well as to find a singular, universal, unifying and redemptive Jewish identity.
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“He belonged to the great assimilationist tradition in the melting pot of America, and loved the fusions, conflicts and combinations. Jews are everywhere, he said, everyone is a Jew. For him I think this meant that the Jewish element in the human DNA had long represented suffering but also the fight for fulfilment through it, ethics, deep feeling and warm need, the law, the exile, the longing for return and for second chances and for forgiveness.”
–-Biographer Phillip David on Bernard Malamud
In the opening story “The Last Mohican,” Fidelman steps off the boat in Rome and immediately falls into deep contemplation as he “imagine[s] all that history” of the Baths of Diocleitan and Michelangelo. From the moment he arrives, Fidelman is looking to write himself into this country teeming with ancient history, a history belonging to the West, when he “suddenly sees himself as he was, to the pinpoint, outside in, not without bittersweet pleasure.”
It’s Shimon Susskind who interrupts this reverie as he observes the idealistic, naive Fidelman. Susskind is an exiled Israeli alone in Christian Europe where Jews still live in ghettos, and the particular eye of this beholder is a gaunt, grey-haired loiter of similar height who he takes Fidelman in “though pretending not to” (4). When Susskind greets him with “shalom” and speaks to him in English (which he learned in Israel), Fidelman writes off the refugee as a cunning schnorrer who is looking for a handout by implying: look, you’re a Jew, I’m a Jew, we’ve exchanged our shaloms, so you should take care of one of your own people down on his luck.
In fact, the very idea that Susskind is a refugee from Israel seems absurd to Fidelman; when he asks what Susskind could possibly be running from, the refugee answers: “what else but Germany, Hungry, Poland? Where not?” to which Fidelman answer: “ah, that’s so long ago,” dismissing the very (recent) genocide of their people, not wishing to tarnish “all that history” he had been admiring moments before. Fidelman is not interested associating himself with the “recent” past; he has come to study the work of Italian Master Giotto who flourished during the late Middle Ages. In other words, he does not want to see Susskind (or a part of himself in Susskind) because he is a reminder of the Jewish self that was rejected, persecuted and systematically destroyed by Fascist Axis powers as well as a testament to the hardships of living in the State of Israel, the alleged Promised Land of Milk and Honey. Susskind is then a failure on two fronts: European assimilation and Zionism. And Susskind will not leave him alone.
Their first encounter begins with a debate if Fidelman has an extra suit in his suitcase. He does, but he will not give to Susskind, even when the refugee points out that one cannot wear two suits at the same time. Fidelman tries to explain that he himself is a mininimalist: the suitcase was borrowed from his sister; he’s staying in an inexpensive hotel; he brought the least amount of clothes possible. He claims that, at best, he is a student who “barely has enough money to squeeze out a year for himself” (14). His debt to his sister is also put in financial terms alone: paid for by his sister Bessie, he tells the refugee, “don’t let a few clothes deceive you” (9). But none of this deters Susskind for whom a summer suit is a suit “for all seasons” (13); he appears in Fidelman’s hotel and when he’s eating at a restaurant, begging for money, clothes, shoes.
Fidelman refuses to help Susskind because he refuses to identify with him, with that kind of Jew in post-Shoah Europe, a man who’s visibly aged faster because he simply won’t return to where he belongs— Israel. Fidelman doesn’t see, however, that Susskind is trying to help him; the refugee disapproves of the way the student writes about Giotto: “the words are there but the spirit missing” (37). Fidelman is too much a man of facts and organization; he has his hotel “picked and reserved” (7), follows a schedule, “always concerned with not wasting time, as if that were his only wealth” (11). Fidelman hurries to pack in as many museums, frescos, and other notable points of interests of Rome that he can see before his planned departure to Florence. He doesn’t understand how the refugee can live without focus or can’t seem to find a job (though he also knows he cannot obtain a work permit without being found out and deported), and concludes that Susskind simply preys on tourists or others “like himself” who come to Italy with an insignificant budget.
Fidelman tells himself that he’s not ignoring “responsibility” for a fellow Jew, but that he’s “not the only one in the whole world” (16). And his answer for Susskind is one of practicality: if there’s no work here, go back to where there is, and stop hunting down the student who’s trying to work, for Fidelman has ambitions that are difficult to understand by men who waste time by artistically and culturally unfulfilling ventures such as begging. Fidelman wants to do more than simply survive, and in a sense, be tolerated, which he doesn’t acknowledge has been the Jewish experience in Europe; he wants make a significant contribution on the work of Giotto. He seems himself as a man who will sacrifice comforts, but requires to have inspiration and enlightenment on a grand scale (i.e. the physical size, acclaim and age of the ruins in Rome) because it fits his not only his ambitions but his time-conscious capacity to take it all in. And he would never register these aspirations as having bourgeois value; in fact, he’s annoyed when Susskind points out that Fidelman is not the only one who’s studied and written about Giotto, but rather “who hasn’t?” Fidelman ignores this because he imagines he’ll find some new discovery, as if Rome has been waiting for him alone to explain to this current century.
And when someone swipes his briefcase containing the chapter of his study on Giotto, Fidelman suspects the ever-present Susskind. He delays his trip to Florence, and finds he cannot rewrite the chapter form memory or move on with the manuscript without it. At first he thinks of writing to Bessie for his notes in the States, but reveals to the reader that she is a “mother of five” who he cannot bear to think of poking around “in a barrel in [her] attic” (23) and finding the right notes to send to him overseas.
Not wishing to increase his debt to his sister, Fidelman tracks down Susskind in the Jewish ghetto, forcing the student to the encounter the plight of his people. The briefcase is then returned in exchange for the promised second suit, but Susskind admits to destroying the chapter as a favor, for it is Susskind who recognizes the rubbish that Fidelman has been was writing. For Susskind is no schnorrer; he wants Fidelman to see “a vision of Giotto’s painting of St. Francis giving the cloak to a beggar,” and only after this vision can the student identify the master as “compassionate” which he in turn must feel for Susskind by giving up such horrid behavior (77).
He wants Fidelman to understand that the student has severed the lifeline between art and life, and that if one cannot see life as it is, then one cannot create art from it. Furthermore, neither man can escape their Jewishness; for how would Giotto’s depiction of Christianity apply to two Jews living in the Diaspora with different state of affairs and agendas? Susskind is a refugee twice-over; he is also a man who sells rosaries and prays for the dead for “a small fee,” a man whose story begins as a refugee always running and “last seen he was still running” (37). Exile is part of Jewish historical memory, and here we have an exiled Israeli who seems he’s never found his place in the world. Susskind is artful because circumstances demand it; what demands have been made of Fidelman?
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In the next story “Still Life,” Fidelman, now an art student, is much more humble in his work while trying to carve his own place in the contemporary Roman art scene. He shares a small studio with a female painter Annamarie who also takes financial advantage of him. He struggles for ideas as an artist: a subtle allusion to Susskind emerges “in a panic…in charcoal [as] a coattailed ‘Figure of a Jew Fleeing,’” which he embarrassingly conceals from Annamarie. He wanders the city wondering “if Rome’s so sexy, where’s mine? Fidelman’s Romeless Rome. It belonged least to those who yearned for it” (53). At a party he eventually sees Annamarie as an “empty shell” when another artist calls her a fake; he considers how she throws up everything she eats and begs other artists to have sex with her even though Fidelman tells her he’s in love with her. Fidelman, frustrated with his own work, dons the garb of a priest in order to paint a self-portrait; again, we see a rejection of his own ethnic identity as he tries to seek artistic redemption in recreating his image. But redemption is not his; Annamarie sees him in this ensemble, and asks for his forgiveness for her earlier reproach. He offers atonement by way of intercourse, to which she agrees, but only if he stays in character, meaning that he keeps his priestly clothes on. Sleeping with Annamarie, however, is not his true victory; it is when she reveals that she had a child by her uncle and threw it into the ocean. To Fidelman, this incestuous relation suggests that Rome has used up its artistic “talent” of the purebred Italian, the “real” Italian Master, and can now only produce “an idiot” (67). Rome, then, became “Romeless” on its own, and Fidelman can now assume that Italy needs a new master from the outside. But simply donning the clothes of Christian Europe, of confessor and father is not enough; Fidelman must transform by breaking completely from his former self, beginning with his recognizably Jewish name.
In the story “A Pimp’s Revenge,” he’s introduced to as “F, ravaged Florentine” who’s walking the walk (sockless sandals, tight pants and black beret) and talking the talk (his refined Italian). In reducing his name to a letter, the artist formerly known as Fidelman hopes to earn the right to a name, a mononymous name— like Giotto— the name of a Master– the name of an immortal. And newly named F believes that he cannot to be a man in the absence of art, no matter the cost.
And this is why F fails: his morality comes second to art. He not only has his girlfriend Esmeralda return to prostitution in order to support him, but also becomes her pimp. He uses her body in his “Mother with Child” painting to resolve the death of his own mother and sexual feelings as a child for his sister Bessie. When Esmeralda protests this depiction, he asks her to put aside all her objections in the name of art. And yet he doesn’t fully understand the Christian motif to which his painting belongs; the religious iconography of Italian masters deliverers nothing to F but false promises of artistic, sexual and religious redemption. He ends up changing the title to “Prostitute and Procurer” which depicts Esmeralda and F himself; it is deemed a masterpiece, or at least a great painting, nearly bringing tears to Esmeralda’s eyes who tells F that he captured her as she really is. But when her former-pimp-seemingly-turned-art-dealer Ludovico suggests that the painting “suffers from an excess of darkness” and “needs more light” (135), F tries to fix his would-be masterpiece, and ruins it. This reckless action enrages Esmeralda, who tries to stab him until F does it to himself. Ludovico surmises this act of violence is a “moral act” (147), as if F hurting his own physical body could make up for all the ways he’s abused the body of Esmeralda, as if there is any other answer but no to Ludovico’s insightful question: “Can you change yourself, maestro?”
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There is comedy in my vision of life. To live sanely one must discover life – or invent it. Consider the lilies of the field; consider the Jewish lily that toils and spins.
In “Pictures of the Artist,” the subconscious takes over: it is the most experimental in form of the six stories and the least linear in narrative. He is Fidelman again, still in Italy, yet wandering as far as the Dead Sea and the States—this is a period of exile for Fidelman. He is now truly a non-function member of society, and this malfunction in form and narrative signifies a new insanity, one even too insane for an artist. Fidelman creates sculptures from digging holes in the ground that he describes “new in the history of Art.” Fidelman the sculptor still has not made break from trying to incorporate himself into history, to make a name for himself; he simply has moved onto illusions, and one observer (who may or may not be real outside Fidelman’s imagination) demands his money back for viewing “holes that are of no use” to him, his life “being full of them” (156). When Fidelman refuses and a demon-like apparition tosses him down into one of his holes, his art is now his grave “so now we got form but we also got content” (160).
Fidelman then dreams of Susskind on a mountaintop, delivering a jumble, nearly-unintelligible sermon that actually is good common sense masked in pseudo-mysticism:
“Tell the truth. Dont cheat. If its east it dont means its good. Be kind, specially to those that they got less than you. I want for everybody justice. Must also be charity. If you feel good give charity. If you feel bad give charity. Must also be mercy. Be nice, dont fight. Children, how can we live without mercy? If you have no mercy for me I shall not live. Love, mercy, charity. Its not so easy believe me.” (162)
Fidelman reimagines Susskind as a evangelizing Christ-like figure from Biblical times, stripped off his social worries and status as an inferior, a bother, a problem in the socio-economic and political global hierarchy, all in order to, of course, help Fidelman. This imaginary Susskind then demands “no graven images which profanation and idolatry,” and Fidelman complies by casting “in the Dead Sea all his paints and brushes, except one,” which Susskind calls him on.
Fidelman replies that he wants to paint his Master so that he (meaning Fidelman) “will be remembered forever in human history” and that is not “betrayal.” However, Susskind is unmoved: “why do you do something I forbade you?…I wish I couldnt see what I see, but I can.” And still Fidelman promises he’s a “changed man,” but the end result is Susskind’s crucifixion because Fidelman is now a Judas as well as an illusionist, a charlatan, in claiming that he wants to capture the face of the Master because it would benefit everyone but especially himself as an artist. Who needs the copy the Mother and Child (his mother, Bessie or Esmeralda) if he has this new “original?”
Of course, Fidelman fails in capturing this new masterpiece. He tries to paint “three canvases. The Crucifixion he painteth red on red. The Descent from the Cross painteth white on white. For the resurrection, on Easter morning, he leaveth the canvas blank” (162-166). Where he fails in painting, though, is a step in the direction of morality: the increasingly blankness is an acknowledge of his own fragile humanity, a step towards morality, as he learns one should not off the death in the sake of art in order to make his name known. His representation of Susskind as the Son of God failed him because he tried to elevate the refugee spiritually—he must look inward, not up.
As “a primitive Adam,” he imagines himself painting in a cave under the house of Bessie, under a “single dusty 100-watt bulb” which then speaks to him “with the sound of light,” pleading with him to go to his sister “before it’s too late, because she is now dying” (171). Again, like his reimagined vision of Susskind, the bulb has chosen him because Fidelman sees himself as special, and the bulb of his subconscious flatters him by asking: “when did you hear last that an electric bulb gave advice? Did I advise Napoleon? Did I advise Van Gogh?” And still. Fidelman cannot help himself, still stuck in his old ways, argues: “I can’t until my work is finished because I want to show what I’ve accomplished once it’s done” (172).
Comedic as this particular story is, the reader now knows this work will never be done because the dream is unattainable. His subconscious knows this, and knows it must convince Fidelman to give it up. The light bulb points out that the Masters whom Fidelman aches so to imitate were failure at life: Napoleon’s wanderlust; Van Gogh’s lunacy; the fall of Ancient Rome; the fate of the Greeks. And here is a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his sister who he’s very embarrassed to see empty-handed and artistically unsuccessful, but to whom he “owe[s] something, after all” (147). Fidelman arises from his self-absorption, having seen begun to understand something of (the real) Susskind’s words in the dimmest of light.
Enter Beppo Sassoli in the last story “The Glass Blower of Venice,” who is “a strong, muscular, handsome type, thick-shouldered, hairy…wise about life” and the husband of Fidelman latest lover. Initially worried that Beppo “suspect[s] him of usurping his rights as husband” (190), Fidelman begins to enjoy the glass blower’s company and his generosity with giving the still-impoverished artist a free dinner when he comes home after the ex-painter makes love to his wife. Eventually Fidelman shows his work to Beppo, who advises him to burn all of it because “it lacks authority and originality.”
After subtle hints of Beppo’s homosexuality (feeling an “obligation” to sleep with his wife, which he rarely does, and his “admiration” for young boys swimming naked), Fidelman comes to resist Beppo’s first advances, and goes to Beppo’s wife, only to have her trick him as Beppo enters the room with the instruction to “think of love…you’ve run from it all your life” (199), and only then Malamud tells us that Fidelman, unlike Susskind, “stopped running” (199).
“The Glass Blower of Venice” marks his entry into finally learning about life: “if you can’t invent art, invent life,” Beppo says. Finally, Fidelman can enter an intimate relationship separate from art and not like those that he has been running from: painter and model (Susskind, Esmeralda, Bessie, his mother), or painter and painter (Annamaria), or dependent and patron (Bessie, Esmeralda). Beppo teaches him how to support himself in life and to love what he does; this is not Fidelman reluctantly carving statues of the Virgin (like the idols that Susskind forbade) as he had in “Pimp’s Revenge.” Beppo takes him on as an apprentice not to enforce the hierarchies of sexuality or society where one must dominate and the other must submit. He has every intention of letting Fidelman go once he knows the ex-painter won’t repeat past mistakes, for he sees Fidelman becoming “fanatic about this accursed glass. After all, it’s only glass” (205). And as their affair looses it luster and Fidelman becomes engaged in carefully constructing all the glass figures he’s created, he constructs “a bowl…beautifully proportioned…something the old Greeks [might have] done.” And when this final “masterpiece,” which Fidelman weeps over because it signifies that he “kept his finger in art,” disappears, stolen by either an employ at the factory, Fidelman constructs one last beauty, a green horse, as a goodbye gift for Beppo, who sells it and gives the lira to the ex-painter. Then, “they kissed and parted. Fidelman said from Venice on a Portuguese freighter. In America he worked as a craftsman in glass and loved men and women” (208).
Does Arthur Fidelman return to America as a failed artist or a man who found redemption through a more ethical trade? I’m not really sure. The ending isn’t a really an ending at all because this is not meant to be read as a novel. As Ludovico once asked “Can you change yourself, maestro?” I think of Max Frisch’s words: “Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.” So I don’t think Fidelman changed at all; he simply unfolded. He continually creates, and rarely is it a successful or fruitful creation; the focus is on the attempt, the often unbeautiful attempt. Whenever I revisit Malamud’s “exhibition,” I’m inevitably drawn to Susskind and his desire for that second suit. While Fidelman returns to a place he can call home, where he can live and love whom he chooses, Susskind remains a refugee from Israel, a wandering Jew who is last seen running, whose redemption is existing in this world that has no place for him: “If you have no mercy for me I shall not live.”
Perhaps the answer is as simple as it seems: to live compassionately is the greatest art of all.