Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

How do you paint a Kaddish?

Here’s Momma sitting on the stoop in her cotton housedress, awkward at having her picture taken yet with a dim smile on the dry old snapshot turning yellow that Bessie sent me years ago. Here’s the snap, here’s the painting of the same idea, why can’t I make one out of both? How do you make art of an old photo, so to say? A single of a double image, the one in and the one out?

The painting, 51 x 38, was encrusted in places (her hands and feet) (his face) almost a quarter of an inch thick with paint, layer on layer giving it history, another word for thick past in the paint itself. The mystery was why in the five years he had been at it, on and off because he had to hide it away when it got to be too much for him, he hadn’t been able to finish it though most of it was done already, except Momma’s face. Five years’ work here, mostly as he had first painted it, though he often added dibs and dabs, touches of brush or palette knife on the dry forms. He had tried it every which way, with Momma alone, sitting or standing, with or without him; and with Bessie in or out, but never Poppa, that living ghost; and I’ve made her old and young, and sometimes resembling Annamaria Oliovino, or Teresa, the chambermaid in Milan; even a little like Susskind, when my memory gets mixed up, who was a man I met when I first came to Rome. Momma apart and him apart, and then trying to bring them together in the tightly woven paint so they would be eternally mother and son as well as unique forms on canvas. So beautifully complete the idea of them together that the viewer couldn’t help but think no one has to do it again because it’s been done by F and can’t be done better; in truth, a masterwork. He had painted her sad and happy, tall, short, realistic, expressionistic, cubistic, surrealistic, even in action splotches of violet and brown. Also in black and white, stark like Kline or Motherwell. Once he had molded a figure in clay from the old photo and tried to copy it, but that didn’t work either.

The faces were changed almost every day he painted, his as a young boy, hers as herself (long since departed); but now though for a year he had let the boy be, his face and all, he was still never satisfied with hers—something always missing—for very long after he had put it down; and he daily or nightly scraped it off (another lost face) with his rusty palette knife, and tried once again the next day; then scraped that face the same night or the day after; or let it harden in hope for two days and then frantically, before the paint stiffened, scraped that face off, too. All in all he

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