Goodbye, Old Paint

PICTURES OF FIDELMAN by Bernard Malamud. 208 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Another rueful Jewish hero! After Elkin and Roth and Bellow and Bruce Jay Friedman and Yahweh-knows-who! Will it never end? Apparently not. And what is most trying, this latest exemplar deserves special attention. For Bernard Malamud has invented a mixed-up little anti-hero all his own: the schlemiel-saint--eyes on heaven, feet on the banana peel. He has appeared in short stories (The Magic Barrel) and novels (A New Life, The Fixer). The Malamud man wobbles between laughter and tears. One minute he can be all suffering profile, squirming against his private cross. The next minute one eye winks, his shoulders shrug, his mouth gives a little downward grimace, and out comes the self-mocking voice of a Jewish comedian: "Oy, this hurts!"

Arthur Fidelman--half tragic hero, half Yiddish joke--has ranked among Malamud's finest double characters since he began to appear over a decade ago in assorted short stories. Now Malamud presents him in a brilliant full-length exercise in slapstick Angst.

Fidelman is a failed painter who has bummed enough money from a married sister for a year in Italy. Intending to make a cosmopolite and a critic of himself in his middle age, the boy from The Bronx has bought a tweed suit and a pigskin briefcase and begun a book on Giotto.

Set-piece humiliation is Malamud's game. One by one, he cuts off Fidelman's options--his little escape clauses from destiny. First, the would-be citizen of the world is sardonically reminded of the Jewish past he cannot shake by an absurd incarnation of the Wandering Jew named Shimon Susskind, wearing knickers and peddling rosary beads to the tourists at St. Peter's. When Susskind steals Fidelman's briefcase and burns the Giotto manuscript, he forces the ex-painter to reclaim another part of his grubby old identity --the role of impoverished artist.

Now a Wandering Jew himself, Fidelman goes out to face the comic disasters that life has waiting for him. He falls in love with Annamaria, a female painter distinguished mostly for her distracted eyes and tense neck, who rewards him by alternately treating him as a chore boy and a father-confessor, but almost never as a man.

Next, a gang of thieves try to bully Fidelman into art forgery. He proves to be possibly the first copyist in the world with painter's block. But when he finally does manage to complete a counterfeit of Titian's Venus of Urbino, he likes the fake so much that he steals it back from the thieves in preference to the real thing. Skillfully Malamud somehow turns this gesture into a superbly comic act of integrity.

Sculpture-Hole Grave. Fidelman's predicaments get more desperate, his humiliations more painful. He travels about Italy digging holes in public parks and passing them off to the public as a kind of underground sculpture--reminiscent of the sculpture-by-excavation once committed by another playful artist, Claes Oldenburg, in the soil of New York's Central Park. One outraged member of the public hits Fidelman over the head with his own artistic shovel, and he topples into a sculpture-hole grave. He--and the novel--emerges entirely changed, if not quite resurrected.

In a kind of surrealistic daze, Fidelman moves on to Venice, letting himself in for another of those tormenting Malamud women whose specialty is interrupted coition. The woman's homosexual husband, Beppo, interrupts this time to seduce Fidelman from his wife --and from art. Beppo is a truly queer dens ex machina; yet Malamud clearly intends him for the role. It is Beppo, in fact, who finally gives Fidelman the word on his "painter's progress": "After twenty years if the rooster hasn't crowed she should know she's a hen." And it is Beppo who points instructively to the future: "If you can't invent art, invent life."

Thus the artist "Fiddleman" (Malamud's pun) is officially pronounced dead. But out of his almost interminable death agonies, Fidelman (a faithful human being) has been born.

Malamud, as usual, is clear about his conclusion--and as usual uneasy with it. The reader turns each page of this little fable with a premonitory wince. Malamud has put Fidelman not so much through a pilgrimage as a forced migration. One senses that he may be all too aware that resurrections are always problematical. There is an uneasy shrillness, after all, to the notion of using a homosexual to demonstrate the complete way to fall in love with life.

In the end, also, the stock figure of the schlemiel supplies no answer. Like all characters programmed for one response--the sobbing laugh--he provides a pattern but finally locks his author into it. Let other Jewish American novelists take warning: even with Malamud's deeper variations, the schlemiel has begun to take on the faded look of pseudo folklore.

What saves Malamud is his own presence. Every line he writes is stamped with the intensity of personal concern. It is as if all his characters and all that happens to them are projections of an interior morality play, more interesting, possibly, than what gets staged. This funny, racking battle between unseen angels and demons is what makes Malamud vibrate so faithfully to both the hope and the despair of his age.

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