Bech at Bay

by John Updike

  “A MORDANTLY COMIC LOOK AT

  LITERARY LIFE.”

  —Time

  “Playfully malicious, eloquent, trenchant and funny, Bech at Bay is a true delight, another glorious creation from a writer whose body of work is without parallel in late 20th century American letters. Updike’s writing is never less than a celebration of life, and in reading certain passages one feels grateful simply to watch this master craftsman perform.”

  —Raleigh News & Observer

  “Fans will find what they’ve come to expect from this author, a remarkable ability to satirize and sympathize with ruthless clarity. No other author can have so much fun pampering and skewering himself. It’s delightful to see Bech back, again.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Bech at Bay is wise and funny, charming and pointed. The effervescent clarity of Updike’s prose remains, as ever, a testament to the abiding value of literature itself. In his respect for the grace of the language, in the high shine of his brilliance, prolific John Updike continues to do this culture an enormous service, one not to be taken lightly or for granted.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “[Updike’s] splendid new book makes exciting revelations, provides crackling good fun, and charts the renewability of life by developing, in supple, resonant prose, the character of an old poop who seems unworthy of his scrutiny.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Bech at Bay brings readers amusingly up to date on the life and times of Bech, a neurotic Jewish novelist.… The writing still shows his famous descriptive luxuriance.”

  —The Economist

  “HENRY BECH [IS], HANDS DOWN, UPDIKE’S

  HAPPIEST INVENTION.…

  Updike unbound—at his most frolicsome and funniest.

  His best novel in years.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “As imaginative territory, literary Manhattan has proved irresistible to Updike the satirist, and he has done it full justice and then some in his volumes of stories concerning the doings of New York novelist Henry Bech.”

  —The New Criterion

  “A sophisticated novel that contains some of Updike’s best writing.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Whether he’s silencing critics with extreme prejudice or romancing a new, infinitely younger sidekick, Updike’s favorite mensch retains his ample charms.”

  —Amazon.com

  “Bech is Updike’s alter ego, a mouthpiece for Updike’s often sarcastic, even caustic insight into writers and the writing life.… [His] style is never more jubilantly elaborate than in a Bech book, and his intelligence never more provocatively displayed.”

  —Booklist

  “Updike is writing with undiminished energy and a bellyful of chuckles.… An insightful and amusing look at the American literary scene.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random

  House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

  by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  “Bech in Czech” and part of “Bech Noir” first appeared in

  The New Yorker. Another part appeared in New York Stories.

  The Czech at the end of “Bech in Czech” is taken from the translation

  of “Bech Panics” by Antonin Přidal in Milenci a manželé (Prague:

  Odeon, 1984). “Poem on Trust in the Heart” by Seng Ts’an (third

  Ch’an patriarch in China, circa 600 A.D.) quoted in “Bech Noir”

  is found in Buddhist Texts: Through the Ages, translated and edited

  by Edward Conze in collaboration with I. B. Horner, David Snellgrove,

  and Arthur Waley (New York: The Philosophical Library; and Oxford,

  England: Oneworld Publications, 1995). For the last chapter, Rich

  and Jean Roberts kindly shared their Swedish expertise.

  Ballantine is a registered trademark and the Ballantine colophon

  is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90166

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48206-8

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  BECH IN CZECH

  BECH PRESIDES

  BECH PLEADS GUILTY

  BECH NOIR

  BECH AND THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Something of the unreal is necessary to fecundate the real.

  —WALLACE STEVENS, in his preface

  to William Carlos Williams’

  Collected Poems 1921–1931 (1934)

  Bech in Czech

  The American Ambassador’s Residence in Prague has been called the last palace built in Europe. It was built in the early 1930s by a rich Jewish banker, Otto Petschek, whose family, within a decade of its construction, had to flee Hitler. The Americans had acquired the building and its grounds after the war, before Czechoslovakia went quite so Communist. The whole building gently curves—that is, it was built along the length of an arc, and a walk down its long corridors produces a shifting perspective wherein paintings, silk panels, marble-topped hall tables, great metalicized oaken doors all slowly come into view, much as islands appear above the horizon to a ship at sea and then slowly sink behind it, beyond the majestic, roiling, paleturquoise wake.

  Henry Bech, the semi-obscure American author, who had turned sixty-three in this year of 1986, felt majestic and becalmed in the great Residence, where, at one end, he had been given a suite for the week of his cultural visit to this restive outpost of the Soviet empire. As a Jew himself, he was conscious of the former owners, those vanished plutocrats, no doubt very elegant and multilingual, who with such pathetic trust, amid the tremors of the Diaspora’s Middle-European golden age (not to be confused with the golden age in Saracen Spain, or the good times under the Polish princes), had built their palace on the edge of an abyss. For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all—up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides. In the center of old Prague the clock of the Jewish Town Hall—which, with the adjacent synagogues, Hitler intended to preserve as the relic of an exterminated race—still runs backwards, to the amusement of tourists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The cemetery there, with its four centuries of dead crowded into mounds by the pressures of the ghetto, and the tombstones jumbled together like giant cards in a deck being shuffled, moved Bech less than the newer Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town, where the Ambassador felt that the visiting author should see Kafka’s grave.

  The Ambassador was an exceptionally short and peppy man with sandy thin hair raked across a freckled skull; he was an Akron industrialist and a Republican fund-raiser who had believed in Reagan when most bigwig insiders still laughed at the notion of a movie actor in the White House. For his loyalty and prescience the Ambassador had been rewarded with this post, and there was an additional logic to it, for he was Czech by ancestry; his grandparents had come to Pittsburgh from the coalfields of Moravia, and the language had been spoken in his childhood home. “They love it when I talk,” he told Bech with his disarming urchin grin. “
I sound so damn old-fashioned. It would be as if in English somebody talked like the King James Bible.” Bech fancied he saw flit across the Ambassador’s square face the worry that Jews didn’t have much to do with the King James Bible. The little man quickly added, for absolute clarity, “I guess I sound quaint as hell.”

  Bech had noticed that the Czechs tended to smile when the Ambassador talked to them in their language. It was all the more noticeable because Czechs, once a wry and humorous race, found rather little to smile about. The Ambassador made Bech smile, too. Having spent most of his life in the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence, he was charmed by the breezy and carefree ways of an authentic power-broker, this cheerful representative of the triumphant right wing. In entrepreneurial style, the Ambassador was a quick study, quick to pounce and quick to move on. He must have skimmed a fact sheet concerning his cultural guest, and it was on the basis of this information that he took Bech—freshly landed that morning, jet throb still ringing in his ears—to Kafka’s grave. “It’s the kind of thing that’ll appeal to you.” He was right.

  The official limousine, with its morosely silent and sleepy-eyed chauffeur, wheeled along steep cobblestoned streets, past the old parapets and trolley tracks of Prague, and came, in what had once been outskirts, to a long ornate iron fence. The tall gate was locked and chained. The Ambassador rattled at the chains and called, but there was no answer. “Try the flag, honey,” said the Ambassador’s wife, a leggy blonde considerably younger than he.

  Bech, who had travelled in Africa and Latin America and seen the Stars and Stripes attract rocks and spittle, winced as the Ambassador plucked the little American flag from the limousine’s front fender and began to wave it through the gate, shouting incomprehensibly. He noticed Bech’s wince and said in quick aside, “Relax. They love us here. They love our flag.” And indeed, two young men wearing plaster-splattered overalls shyly emerged, at the patriotic commotion, from within a cement-block shed. The Ambassador talked to them in Czech. Smiling at his accent, they came forward a few steps and spoke words that meant the cemetery was closed. The flag was given a few more flutters, but the boys continued, bemusedly, to shake their heads and pronounce the soft word ne. The Ambassador, with a playful and shameless aggressiveness that Bech had to admire even as he blushed for it, wielded a new inspiration; in his next spate of words Bech heard his own name, distinct in the rippling, Stygian flow of the opaque language.

  The politely denying smiles on the faces of the young men gave way to open-eyed interest. They looked away from the Ambassador to the American author on the other side of the bars.

  “Travel Light,” the taller one said in halting English, naming Bech’s first novel.

  “Big Idea,” said the other, trying to name his last.

  “Think Big,” Bech corrected, his blush deepening; he wouldn’t have guessed he had left in him so much spare blood as was making his cheeks burn, his palms tingle. This was absolutely, he vowed, his last appearance as a cultural icon.

  “Ahhhh!” the two boys uttered in unison, enraptured by the authentic correction, out of the author’s mouth. With cries of jubilation from both sides, the locks and chains were undone and the three Americans were welcomed to the Strašnice cemetery.

  It was an eerie, well-kept place. Impressive and stolid black tombstones stood amid tall trees, plane and ash and evergreen, and flourishing ivy. The vistas seemed endless, lit by the filtered sunlight of the woods, and silent with the held breath of many hundreds of ended lives. Most of the inhabitants had been shrewd enough to die before 1939, in their beds or in hospitals, one by one, before the Germans arrived and death became a mass production. The visitors’ party walked along straight weeded paths between grand marble slabs lettered in gold with predominantly Germanic names, the same names—Strauss, Steiner, Loeb, Goldberg—whose live ranks still march through the New York City telephone directories. The Ambassador and the two young workmen led the way, conversing in Czech—rather loudly, Bech thought. To judge from the Ambassador’s expansive gestures, he could be extolling the merits of the free-enterprise system or diagramming the perfidy of Gorbachev’s latest arms-reduction proposal.

  “I find this very embarrassing,” Bech told the Ambassador’s wife, who walked beside him in silence along the lightly crunching path.

  “I used to too,” she said, in her pleasantly scratchy Midwestern voice. “But, then, after a couple of years with Dick, nothing embarrasses me; he’s just very outgoing. Very frontal. It’s his way, and people here respond to it. It’s how they think Americans ought to act. Free.”

  “These young men—mightn’t they lose their jobs for letting us in?”

  She shrugged and gave a nervous little toss of her long blond hair. It was an affecting, lustreless shade, as if it had been washed too often. Her lips were dry and thoughtful, with flaking lipstick. “Maybe they don’t even have jobs. This is a strange system.” Her eyes were that translucent blue that Bech thought uncanny, having seen it, through his youth, mostly in toy polar bears and mannequins on display in Fifth Avenue Christmas windows.

  “How well,” Bech said, looking around at the elegant and silent black stones, “these people all thought of themselves.”

  “There was a lot of money here,” the Ambassador’s wife said. “People forget that about Bohemia. Before the Communists put an end to all that.”

  “After the Germans put an end to all this,” Bech said, gesturing toward the Jewish population at rest around them. There were, curiously, a few death dates, in fresh gold, later than 1945—Jews who had escaped the Holocaust, he supposed, and then asked to be brought back here to be buried, beneath the tall straight planes with their mottled trunks, and the shiny green ivy spread everywhere like a tousled bedspread. Lots, records, permits—these things persisted.

  “Here he is, your pal,” the Ambassador loudly announced. Bech had seen photographs of this tombstone—a white stone, relatively modest in size, wider at the top than at the bottom, and bearing three names, and inscriptions in Hebrew that Bech could not read. The three names were those of Dr. Franz Kafka; his father, Hermann; and his mother, Julie. In his last, disease-wracked year, Kafka had escaped his parents and lived with Dora Dymant in Berlin, but then had been returned here, and now lay next to his overpowering father forever. A smaller marker at the foot bore the names of his three sisters—Elli, Valli, Ottla—who had vanished into concentration camps. It all struck Bech as dumbfoundingly blunt and enigmatic, banal and moving. Such blankness, such stony and peaceable reification, waits for us at the bottom of things. No more insomnia for poor hypersensitive Dr. Franz.

  Bech thought he should try a few words with their young hosts, who had shown some knowledge of English. “Very great Czech,” he said, pointing to the grave.

  The broader-shouldered young man, who had wielded the key that let them in, smiled and said, “Not Czech. Žid. Jude.”

  It was a simple clarification, nothing unpleasant. “Like me,” Bech said.

  “You”—the other boy, more willowy, with plaster even in his hair, pointed straight at him—“wonderful!”

  The other, his eyes merry at the thought of talking to an internationally famous writer, made a sound, “R-r-r-r-rum, rrroom,” which Bech recognized as an allusion to the famous rubber-faced motorcyclists of Travel Light, with its backseat rapes and its desolate roadside cafés on their vast gravel parking lots—Bech’s homage, as a young Manhattanite, to the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson. “Very americký, amerikanisch,” the young man said.

  “Un peu,” Bech said and shrugged, out of courtesy abandoning English, as his conversational companions had abandoned Czech.

  “And Big Thinking,” the shorter boy said, emboldened by all this pidgin language to go for an extended utterance, “we love very much. It makes much to laugh: TV, skyscrapes.” He laughed, for absolute clarity.

  “Skyscrapers,” Bech couldn�
�t help correcting.

  “I loved Olive in that novel,” the Ambassador’s wife said huskily at his side.

  This, Bech felt, was a very sexy remark: Olive and the entire television crew, under the lights; Olive and her lesbian lover Thelma, in the West Side apartment as the tawny sun from New Jersey entered horizontally, like bars of music.…

  “Kafka more Schmerz,” his Czech fan was going on, as if the buried writer, with his dark suit and quizzical smile, were standing right there beside the still-erect one, for comparison. “You more Herz. More—” He broke down into Czech, turning to face the Ambassador.

  “More primitive energy,” the Ambassador translated. “More raw love of life.”

  Bech in fact had felt quite tired of life ever since completing his last—his final, as he thought of it—and surprisingly successful novel, whose publication coincided with the collapse of his one and only marriage. That was why, he supposed, you travelled to places like this: to encounter fictional selves, the refreshing false ideas of you that strangers hold in their minds.

  In Czechoslovakia he felt desperately unworthy; the unlucky country seemed to see in him an emblem of hope. Not only had his first and last novels been translated here (Lekhá cesta, Velká myšlenka) but a selection of essays and short fiction culled from When the Saints (Když svatí). All three volumes carried opposite the title page the same photo of the author, one taken when he was thirty, before his face had bulked to catch up to his nose and before his wiry hair had turned gray; his hair sat on his head then like a tall turban pulled low on his forehead. The rigors of Socialist photogravure made this faded image look as if it came not from the 1950s but from the time before World War I, when Proust was posing in a wing collar and Kafka in a bowler hat. Bech had ample opportunity to examine the photo, for endless lines formed when, at a Prague bookstore and then a few days later at the American Embassy, book-signing sessions were scheduled, and these Czech versions of his books were presented to him over and over again, open to the title page. His presence here had squeezed these tattered volumes—all out of print, since Communist editions are not replenished—up from the private libraries of Prague. Flattered, flustered, Bech tried to focus for a moment on each face, each pair of hands, as it materialized before him, and to inscribe the difficult names, spelled letter by letter. There were many young people, clear-eyed and shy, with a simple smooth glow of youth rather rarely seen in New York. To these fresh-faced innocents, he supposed, he was an American celebrity—not, of course, a rock star, smashing guitars and sobbing out his guts as the violet and magenta strobes pulsed and the stadium hissed and waved like a huge jellyfish, but with a touch of that same diabolic glamour. Or perhaps they were students, American-lit majors, and he something copied from a textbook, and his signature a passing mark. But there were older citizens, too—plump women with shopping bags, and men with pale faces and a pinched, pedantic air. Clerks? Professors? And a few persons virtually infirm, ancient enough to remember the regime of Tomáš Masaryk, hobbled forward with a kindly, faltering expression like that of a childhood sweetheart whom we cannot at first quite recognize. Most of the people said at least “Thank you”; many pressed a number of correctly shaped, highly complimentary English sentences upon him.