A Therapeutic Plainness

...Frank asks why Jews have to suffer so much...

...Though he knows his shortcomings and has up to now been treated without much justice or mercy by his fellow men, he avoids general conclusions and does not prejudge the future...

...The single exception is "Glass-blower of Venice," where Fidelman fulfills himself in both art and life...

...So it is astonishing how soon we throw in our lot with this man who never cracks a smile, and take him to embody the human condition...

...Except perhaps for the prefaces of Henry James, I doubt that any writer besides Malamud has told us as much as we can learn in these stories about the process of art, its haphazard efforts, paradoxical successes, and total possession of the artist against his will...

...Against this baroque congestion, there is a therapeutic plainness about the fiction of Bernard Malamud...

...We find ourselves getting on intimate terms with the dynamics of failure...

...What do you suffer for, Morris?' Frank said...

...She is undone, and they embrace tempestuously...

...Despite excellent color plates, painting materials and Belgian linen primed with lead, Fidelman cannot set started until they allow him to visit the island and he actually sees the nude's golden tones and extraordinary flesh...

...Still Life" follows the mysteries of release from art into sex...

...What unleashes the creative impulse, what puts life into art, what mars perfection?-these are the mysteries Malamud ponders...

...Here again, it is a matter of many wasted efforts, but he eventually succeeds in creating one perfect bowl-severe, graceful and upright, like something the ancient Greeks had done...

...The story is written in the language of postanxiety, as if all that we worry about had already happened...

...It is nothing new to find a Malamud lover suppliant and ready to be debased, but the unpro-testing figure of Fidelman confined to the streets all day long with a bad cold, in order to give Annamaria privacy to paint, really seems to incorporate the utter wormishness of man...

...If he is a Christ figure, it is the Christ of D. H. Lawrence's "The Man Who Died," out of touch with his own flesh...

...Like other Malamud characters (S...

...He writes in parables, seeing all of life in small grains of experience, and is in harmony with outside forces others rail against but cannot control...

...In "The Last Mohican," he rations his generosity, gives compassion grudgingly—still a Jew in spirit, although already an artist in practice...

...In "Still Life," for example, the pittrice "composed collages of rags and toilet paper...

...in Florence, supporting a prostitute and discussing art with a procurer...

...Subtle pinks, apricots, lavenders streaked an underwater architecture of floating Gothic and Moorish palazzi...

...T suffer for you,' Morris said calmly...

...Then he throws himself into his work, but it goes badly, even though he studies famous nudes in art books, tries a live model, and submits to cursory psychoanalysis by Scarpio, whose talents are eclectic...

...and when she had temporarily run out of new ideas she did a mythological bull in red clay, afterwards returning to natura morta with bunches of bananas...

...Fidelman moves, as if dancing to some hidden piper, toward low life: in Venice, working on the municipal garbage boat...

...then self portraits...

...Levin in A New Life and Yakov Bok in The Fixer), the hero of the six stories that make up Pictures of Fidelman is a man with little to show for his past life, who goes to a strange place, in this case Italy, in hopes that his luck will change...

...experimented with gold leaf sprayed with umber . . . worked intently, her brow furrowed, violet mouth tightly pursed, eyes lit, nostrils palpitating in creative excitement...

...But shortly he grows depressed, feeling that history excited his thoughts more than was good for him...

...In "The Last Mohican," Fidel-man's worst suspicions are confirmed (the precious first chapter of his book has been stolen and is in flames) and he has admitted to himself his past failure as an artist...

...Vulnerable in every other respect, he need not, like the rest of us, move cautiously toward the extreme vulnerability of love...

...When Fidelman cries, "You bastard, you burned my chapter...

...to sell an unseeded roll for three pennies—to Fidelman coming to Rome to study Giotto...

...In "Naked Nude," Fidelman is ordered by two gangster-type art experts, Angelo and Scarpio, to copy a Titian Venus, so that they can steal the original from a small castello on a Lake Maggiore island...

...He researches new angles, blows up trivia, prays for complication, heaps up endless embellishments and, one way or another, achieves what I. B. Singer calls "that awful 'modern' garrulousness...

...But, as in his painting, the execution unaccountably goes wrong, and once again she becomes contemptuous and unreachable...

...In the abstract expressionist story, "Pictures of the Artist" (Malamud's style has been progressing, like Fidelman's art, toward internality, broken lines of thought, fervent streaks of feeling), we find Fidelman at the stage of sculpting perfect square holes out of soft earth in public parks, He explains to a skeptic: "Emptiness is not nothing if it has form...

...In fact, Malamud poses a central conflict between life and art, and when they clash, art usually prevails...

...He is the master of the homely image: "Though he labored to extricate his fate from hers, he was already a plucked bird, greased and ready for frying...

...Indeed, all through Pictures of Fidelman Malamud seeks out humility for humility's sake...

...If he is troubled by a flutter of amorphous discontent, he mistakes it for philosophy...

...Mosaics glittered, golden and black, on the faces of churches...

...He can fall in love in an instant, at a touch of sympathy, a memory, a beguiling contour...

...From dejection to joy, from nullity to power, from the matter of fact to the ecstatic—these monumental and magical leaps make Bernard Malamud one of the world's great storytellers...

...The only genuine passion in this book, however, is art, for its labor as well as its conception...

...It is a long way from the grocer in The Assistant—who opens his store at 6 a.m...

...Sandali sailed under bridges, heaped high with eggplants, green peppers, mounds of string beans...

...apart from the final product, the mere act of creation has the power to transfigure...

...By one of those accidents that dog the Malamud hero, Fidel-man's first Roman experience is to be accosted by an Israeli refugee who demands a suit to cover his skinny bones (on the theory, presumably, that Judaism means communal responsibility...

...if he feels ridiculous, he proclaims again the general absurdity...

...It is this stoicism, plus his Olympian attitude of never being surprised, of assuming one's state can change without warning from the utmost shabbiness to the most intense beauty, that lend his writing its largeness in the midst of the most petty oppressions...

...The spirit of our times prods the susceptible literary man to put his simplest propositions into pretentious garments...

...he is a pushover for apocalypse...

...Yet he has taken all the old provincial emotional baggage abroad with him, not only funds and suitcases borrowed from sister Bessie in Brooklyn, but the whole Depression mentality...

...Thus begins the major drama pursued in Pictures of Fidelman, the dilemma of failed art...

...And here Malamud's style grows dazzling: "On the other hand spring came early that year: to his surprise flowers looking out of house windows...

...Best of all, he is a man who keeps trying...

...Whatever psychological truth this story brings to light, it is, on the literal level, Malamud's single piece of distasteful fiction, partly because of the travesty of religion, but mainly because of Fidelman's utter abject-ness in love...

...Having plodded his way through many styles of painting and sculpture, he finally undertakes, with his usual thoroughness, the craft of glassblowing...

...Fidelman shares an icy studio with a temperamental pittrice, "A...

...Totally attuned to rejection, failure and misuse, this urban Jew has developed, we begin to suspect, a Christ complex...

...What do you mean?' I mean you suffer for me.' " This religious merger may be going rather far, and yet, universality is the quality we value in Malamud...

...The canals widened, golden light on green water, pure Canaletto all the way to the Rialto...

...His epitaph could be: "I kept my finger in art...

...Reviewed by ISA KAPP The more freedom of self-expression we win and the more sophisticated our systems of analysis become, the more we feign confusion and conspire not to understand ourselves...

...Just as real genius keeps us at a distance, Fidelman's very inability to bring his canvases to life draws us close to him, and makes his struggles ours...

...Olivi-no," and though he dotes on her, shops for her, carries down her garbage, and meets all her unreasonable conditions of tenancy, she treats him with sullen indifference —until he paints her as a madonna with a child...

...Nevertheless, the protagonist's life has somehow proved tolerable, and there, precisely, is the secret of Mal-amud's appeal for readers of varying sensibilities and backgrounds: According to his reverse evangelism, if we expect the worst and survive, we have already triumphed...

...Still bending under the pressure of material needs, counting his lire, as awkward at eating long Italian spaghetti as he is clumsy at looking for love, Fidelman never acquires the buoyancy to see Rome in its true ocher and rose-brown colors...

...Suddenly, Fidelman thinks of personally stealing the painting, and this vision of holding, of physically possessing the work of art, is enough to end his paralysis...

...Young jewel-like leaves of myrtles and laurels rose above ancient brick walls in back alleys...

...Malamud's most high-spirited writing can be found in his descriptions of craftsmen at work...

...In the last story, "Glassblower of Venice" (one of the most magnificent short stories of all time), Beppo the glass-blower, self-styled intuitive critic, relentlessly destroys all of Fidel-man's paintings and sculptures because they are bad art: "Half a talent is worse than none...

...Wandering along the old sections of Rome near the Tiber in "The Last Mohican," he muses: "It was an inspiring business, he, Arthur Fidelman, after all, born a Bronx boy, walking around in all this history...

...Instead, Fidelman gives him four dollars for a sweater, and in revenge for such halfhearted generosity, Susskind steals his papers...

...But in Venice, open to love, Fidelman's senses also bloom...

...Fidelman sends his girl back to the streets in "A Pimp's Revenge" so he can save his own energies for art...

...in Milan, falling into the hands of the padrone of a rooming house for whores...

...In the other stories, intense and overwhelmed by physicality as he is, one has the feeling that pleasure is not really in him...

...the refugee replies im-perturbably, "The words were there but the spirit was missing...

...Later, however, when he dons a priest's vestments for a self-portrait, she is moved to confess her past sins and, as irrationally as art materializes, she succumbs to him...

...And from his low origins, how ready Fidelman is to leap...

...Even if the moment of creation is lofty and ecstatic, Malamud portrays his artist as an essentially stingy person, hoarding his time and his money...

...Martyrdom becomes Fidelman, and we remember the conversation between Frank Alpine and the grocer in The Assistant...