Pictures of Fidelman

Pictures of Fidelman

First edition cover
Author	Bernard Malamud
Cover artist	Catherine Smolich
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date	1969
Media type	Print
Pages	208 pp
ISBN
Preceded by	The Fixer (1966)
Followed by	The Tenants (1971)

Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition is the fifth published novel of Bernard Malamud. It is a novel in the form of a short story cycle, which gathers six stories dealing with Arthur Fidelman, an art student from the Bronx who travels to Italy, initially to research Giotto, but also with the hopes of becoming a painter. It was published in 1969 and includes stories from Malamud's earlier collections The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963), plus two previously uncollected stories and one previously unpublished story.

The novel consists of six linked stories. As Malamud's official biographer, Philip Davis, points out: "The first three of the six stories in Fidelman had been published previously: "The Last Mohican" in The Magic Barrel (1958), and "Still Life" and "Naked Nude" in Idiots First (1963); "A Pimp’s Revenge" was published in Playboy and "Pictures of the Artist" in The Atlantic Monthly, both in 1968.

Malamud had already published two collections of short stories by the time he gathered these stories together for a book. But his intention here was not to publish a third short story collection:

"Malamud insisted nonetheless that from the second story onwards he had intended it to be a separate book—but a looser work, written occasionally, to make a picaresque comedy freed of the pressures of a continuous life or single-minded career. Malamud particularly liked [a] Robert Scholes piece in Saturday Review of 10 May 1969, where the stories were described as ‘six comic Stations of the Cross’. As Malamud told his audience in some notes for a reading: ‘At first I thought they could be unrelated stories, each vertical, no horizontal bonds, but soon I conceived the content of the last story of the series and before long the thrust was diagonal as well as vertical."

Aside from Arthur Fidelman, the only character that appears in more than one story is Bessie, his sister, a mother of five living in Levittown, who occasionally sends him money. Bessie also loaned Fidelman her "bulky, two-strapped affair" suitcase for his Italian adventure (11).

First published in the Spring 1958 Partisan Review and later included in Malamud's first short story collection The Magic Barrel, Fidelman arrives in Rome wide-eyed with wonder ("a Bronx boy walking around in all this history" (18)), but is repeatedly accosted by eccentric beggar Shimon Susskind, "a Jewish refugee from Israel, no less" (14).