by John Updike
“To live a week with Henry Bech,” she began, “is to fall in love with him.”
Really? he thought. Why tell me now?
She went on quite brightly, leaning her scratchy voice into the mike and tripping into spurts of Czech that drew oohs and ahs from the attentive audience; but to Bech, as he sat beside her watching her elegant high-heeled legs nervously kick in the shadow behind the lectern, came the heavy, dreary thought that she was doing her job, that being attractive and vivacious and irrepressibly American was one of the chores of being an American ambassador’s wife. He stood blearily erect in the warm wash of applause that followed her gracious introduction. The audience, lit by chandeliers here in the palace ballroom, was all white faces and shirtfronts. He recognized, in a row, the young board of the publishing house for translations, and most of the crowd had a well-groomed, establishment air. Communists, opportunists, quislings.
But afterwards it was the dissidents, in checked shirts and slouchy thrift-shop dresses, who came up to him like favored children. The scarred man, his shiny black eyes mounted upon the curve of his face like insect eyes, shook Bech’s hand, clinging, and said, apropos of the speech, “You are naughty. There is no optimism.”
“Oh, but there is, there is!” Bech protested. “Underneath the pessimism.”
The gypsy was there, too, in another loose blouse, with her hair freshly kinked, so her sallow triangular face was nested as in a wide pillow, and only half-circles of her great gold earrings showed. “I like you,” she said, “when you talk about books.”
“And I you,” he answered. “That was such a lovely book you showed me the other night. The delicate thin paper, the hand-done binding. It nearly made me cry.”
“It makes many to cry,” she said, much as she had solemnly said, “We are not monks. We do not enjoy to suffer.”
And a blond dissident, with plump lips and round cheeks, who looked much like the blonde at the publishing house except that she was older, and wiser, with little creased comet’s tails of wisdom trailing from the corners of her eyes, explained, “Václav sends the regrets he could not come hear your excellent talk. He must be giving at this same hour an interview, to very sympathetic West German newspaperman.”
Syzygy, dark-suited and sweating as profusely as a voodoo priest possessed by his deity, could not bear to look at Bech. “Not since the premiere of Don Giovanni has there been such a performance in Prague,” he began but, unable out of sheer wonder to continue, shudderingly closed his eyes behind the phantom pince-nez.
At last Bech was alone in his room, feeling bloated by the white wine and extravagant compliments. This was his last night in the last palace built in Europe. Tomorrow, Brno, and then the free world. The moon was out, drenching in silver, like the back of a mirror, the great oval park—its pale path, its bushes with their shadows like heaps of ash, the rectilinear unused tennis courts, as ominous as a De Chirico. Where had the moon been all week? Behind the castle. Behind Hradčany. Bech moved back from the window and got into his king-size bed. From afar he heard doors slam, and a woman’s voice cry out in ecstasy: the Ambassador returning to his bride, having settled Waldheim’s hash. Bech read a little in Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik, but even this very tedious national classic did not soothe him or allay his creeping terror.
He lay in bed sleepless, beset by panic. Jako by byl nemocen, zjistil, že může ležet jen v jedné poloze, na zádech. Obrátit se na druhý bok znamenalo nachýlit se nad okraj propasti, převrátit se na břicho znamenalo riskovat, že utone ve vodách věčného zapomnění, jež bublaly ve tmě zahřívané jeho tělem. A single late last trolley car squealed somewhere off in the labyrinth of Prague. The female cry greeting the Ambassador had long died down. But the city, even under its blanket of political oppression, faintly rustled, beyond the heavily guarded walls, with footsteps and small explosions of combustion, as a fire supposedly extinguished continues to crackle and settle. Zkoušel se na tyto zvuky soustředit, vymačkat z nich pouhou silou pozornosti balzám jejich nepopiratelnosti, nevinnost, která byla hlavním rysem jejich prosté existence, nezávisle na jejich dalších vlastnostech. Všechny věci mají tutéž existenci, děli se o tytéž atomy, přeskupují se: tráva v hnůj, maso v červy. Temnota za touto myšlenkou jako sklo, z něhož se stírá námraza. Zkoušel si příjemně oživit svůj vecěrní triumf, předčítání odměněné tak vřelým potleskem. He thought of the gypsy, Ila, Ila with her breasts loose in her loose blouse, who had come to his lecture and reception, braving the inscrutable Kafkaesque authorities, and tried to imagine her undressed and in a posture of sexual reception; his creator, however, was too bored with him to grant his aging body an erection and by this primordial method release his terror, there in the Ambassador’s great guest bed, its clean sheets smelling faintly of damp plaster.
Becha to neuspalo. Jeho panika, jako bolest, která sílí, když se jí obíráme, když jí rozněcujeme úpornou pozorností, se bez hojivého potlesku jitřila; nicméně jako rána, zkusmo definovaná protiinfekčním a odmítavým vzepřením těla, začala nabírit jistou podobu. His panic felt pasty and stiff and revealed a certain shape. That shape was the fear that, once he left his end of the gentle arc of the Ambassador’s Residence, he would—up in smoke—cease to exist.
Bech Presides
Henry Bech had reached that advanced stage of authorship when his writing consisted mostly, it seemed, of contributions to Festschrifts—slim volumes of tributes, often accompanied by old photographs and an uneasy banquet at the Century Club or Lutèce or Michael’s Pub, in honor of this or that ancient companion in literature’s heady battles. These battles, even for their most enthusiastic veterans, took the form of a swift advance achieved in the dawn dimness of youthful ignorance, the planting of a bright brave flag in some momentary salient of the avantgarde’s wavering front line, and then a sluggish retreat back through the mud of a clinging fame, sporadically lit by flares of academic exegesis. Such an honorable retreat could go on virtually forever, thanks to modern medicine, which keeps reputations breathing right through brain death.
Dear Mr. Bech:
As you doubtless are aware, Isaiah Thornbush will turn seventy in 1991. We of the Aesop Press, casting about for a suitable commemoration of this significant milestone, came up with the idea of a Festschrift volume, in a boxed limited edition, with marbleized endpapers and a striped linen headband, to be made available only to his inner circle of friends and disciples. Our enthusiasm for this project is matched and heartily seconded by our parent firm, Grigson-Kawabata Corporation Ltd., and by Mr. Thornbush’s longtime literary agent Larry “Ace” Laser, and by those of his seven children whom we have been able to trace and contact. Two of his three exwives have even agreed to write brief memoirs and to “vet” the text overall for accuracy!
We very much hope you will supply a contribution. Almost anything will do—a reminiscence, a poem, a photograph in which the two of you appear, a shared perception as to where Isaiah Thornbush’s sterling example has been most helpful in your own artistic or personal development. Your considerable stylistic debt to him has been often remarked by critics and, though you did not mention him by name, was plainly hinted at in one of your wonderful autobiographical essays. (Exactly which one escaped all of us here at Aesop, though we spent hours this morning racking our brains!)
But anything, Mr. Bech, even the most informal sort of salute, will be gratefully received—the more “unbuttoned” the better, up to a point of course. Contributors will be invited to a festive occasion at the Thornbush Manhattan residence, hosted by his lovely wife Pamela, this fall, and we know you wouldn’t want to be a missing face there. We eagerly await hearing from you.
Sincerely yours,
Martina O’Reilly
Associate Editor
Trade Division, Aesop Press
Like an irritatingly detailed fleck in the vitreous humor, Izzy Thornbush’s all-too-familiar face floated in Bech’s inner eye as he read: the lewdly bald head w
ith its thrusting wings of white gossamer, the bulbous little nose decorated by a sprinkle of blackheaded pores, the wide fleshy mouth that ambitious dental work of recent years had pushed forward into an eerie simulacrum of George Washington’s invincible half-grimace. He was two years older than Bech, and ever since the late Forties the two had been espying each other around Manhattan, two would-be lions in too populous a Serengeti. In his younger days Izzy had sported a Harpoesque mop of curly strawberry-blond hair; always he was brain-vain. He tried to write books with his head—heavy, creaking historical allegories, with Aristotle and William of Occam and Queen Nefertiti as historical characters, debating in a fictional auditorium surrealistically furnished with modern appliances. It all seemed rather lumbering to Bech—giant watchworks hacked out of wood—and quite lacking in what he, stylistically, prized: the fuzzy texture of daily life, that gray felt compacted of a thousand fibers, that elusive drabness containing countless minute scintillae. Bech’s own tremulous, curvaceous early prose, kept supple by a reverent and perhaps cowardly close attentiveness to the subjective present tense, was at the opposite aesthetic pole from Thornbush’s dense and angular blocks of intellectual history; yet both appeared in the short-lived literary journal Displeasure (1947–1953), and they could not help meeting at those Village cocktail parties and Long Island cookouts with which the post-war intelligentsia hoped to restore, after the austerities of the duration, the bootlegged gemütlichkeit of the Twenties.
America’s imperium, having strangled two snakes, was still a burly infant in those years. As the Forties shed their honest khaki for the peacock synthetics of Fifties populuxe, Bech and Thornbush oozed upward into eminence—Bech’s breakthrough being the Kerowacky novel Travel Light (1955), and Izzy’s his bawdy thousand-page saga, in mock-Chaucerian English, on the vicissitudes of philosophical realism in the Middle Ages, culminating in its destruction by the centripetal forces of nominalism and the bubonic plague (Occam’s Razor, 1954). The analogies to McCarthyism, atomic fallout, and gray-suited conformity scarcely needed to be underlined, but the reviews underlined them nevertheless, and perhaps political awareness went to Izzy’s head, which was stocked with not just highbrow erudition but low mercantile cunning.
During the succeeding decades the two writers met at handsomely financed cultural symposiums in Aspen and Geneva, on quasi-ambassadorial forays to Communist countries, at sickeningly sweet prize-bestowing ceremonies, and, as the Sixties took hold, in the midst of protest marches and rallies. Izzy blossomed, in bell-bottoms and love beads, while his hair simultaneously thinned and lengthened, into a guru of the young. His double-column travesty of the Bible, The LB-Bull, setting forth with gory detail and unmistakable analogic resonance the anti-Mexican atrocities of the nineteenth-century war that followed upon the American annexation of Texas, all in a twangy slang that plainly aped the accents of the current President, became a sacred text to college youth, an impressively erudite encouragement to indignation and revelry. For Bech, the Sixties were a somewhat recessive time; a lungful of the mildest marijuana made him sick, and draft evasion disgusted him, whether a war was “good” or not. This veteran of the Bulge and the Rhine crossing found it hard to cheer the American flag’s being burned. His magnum opus of domestic, frankly Jewish (at last) fiction, published in late November 1963, was buried under the decade’s unravelling consensus. His ironical title, The Chosen, turned out to be ill-chosen, since Chaim Potok wrote a thumping best-seller with the same title, used unironically, in 1967, and within a few years the novel’s sauciest, most Freudian bits were made to seem tame by the more furious revelations of Philip Roth and Erica Jong.
In the Seventies, however, it was Izzy’s star that dimmed. His massive Nixoniad, written in intricately “rhymed” couplets of prose chapters, came out, even with a rushed printer, six months after its subject, apotheosized as a stumble-tongued Lord of Misrule, had resigned and dragged his shame into the shadows of San Clemente. Nixon-bashing had gone out of fashion, and students, in an economy hungover from its own binge, were more concerned about getting jobs than with exploring the pleasures of an archly erudite anti-establishment romp weighing in at half a million words. When, as the decade ended, Bech startled himself and the world by outflanking a writer’s block and publishing a commercially successful novel for television-heads called Think Big, Thornbush’s sour grapes spilled over into print, in a Commentary review (“Le Penseur en Petit”) whose acid content was left undiluted by his alligator tears of professed prior admiration.
Not that Bech had ever liked Izzy’s stuff. In fact, at bottom, he didn’t like any of his contemporaries’ work. It would have been unnatural to: they were all on the same sinking raft, competing for dwindling review space and demographic attention. Those that didn’t appear, like John Irving and John Fowles, garrulously, Dickensianly reactionary in method seemed, like John Hawkes and John Barth, smugly, hermetically experimental. O’Hara, Hersey, Cheever, Updike—suburbanites all living safe while art’s inner city disintegrated. And that was just the Johns. Bech would not have minded if all other writers vanished, leaving him alone on a desert planet with a billion English-language readers. Being thus unique was not a prospect that daunted him, as he sat warming his cold inspirations, like a chicken brooding glass eggs, in the lonely loft, off lower Broadway, to which he had moved when his suburban marriage to his longtime mistress’ sister had been finally dissolved. Solipsism was the writerly condition; why not make it statistical? Certainly the evaporation of Izzy Thornbush was a pleasing fancy. Those protruding eyes and hair-wings; those oversize, over-white capped teeth; that protruding intellect, like the outthrust boneless body of a poisoned mollusc whose shell has fatally relaxed—pffft! Bech’s disrespect had intensified when, in the flat wake of the miscalculated Nixoniad, Thornbush, whose three previous wives had been muscular, humorous, informal women of Jewish ancestry and bohemian tastes, had bolstered his ego by capturing the hand of a shiksa heiress—apple-cheeked, culturally ambitious Pamela Towers, whose father, the infamous Zeke Towers, a New Jersey cement mixer, had made good on his family name by becoming, as vertical plate-glass replaced stepped-back brick in the skyline, one of Manhattan’s real-estate magnates. In the luxury of Park Avenue, Palm Beach, and East Hampton residences Izzy, the former artificer, maker of mazy verbal Pyramids, need build no more; a magnificently kept man, he need oversee only the elaborate buttressing of his crumbling reputation. Nevertheless:
Dear Ms. O’Reilly:
The voice of praise, rising in my throat to do justice to my dear old friend Isaiah Thornbush, is roughened by the salty abrasions of affection and nostalgia. How different the map of post-war American fiction would be without the sprawling, pennanted castles of his massive, scholastically rigorous opuses—intellectual opera indeed! “Here be dragons” was the formula with which the old cartographers would mark a space fearsomely unknown, and my own fear is that, in this age of the pre-masticated sound-bite and the King-sized gross-out, the vaulted food court where Thornbush’s delicacies are served is too little patronized—the demands that they, pickled in history’s brine and spiced with cosmology’s hot stardust, would make upon the McDonaldized palate of the reader, to whom, were he or she ideal, every linguistic nuance and canonical allusion would be mentally available, have become, literally (how else?), unthinkable. Not that my delicious old friend Izzy ever betrays by any slackening of his dizzying pace the slightest suspicion of being cast by fate in the role of a wizard whose tricks are beyond his audience’s comprehension, or, like those of a magician on doctored film, too easily accounted for. Au, as the well-worn phrase runs, contraire: he continues to bustle—there is no other word—hither and yon on errands of literary enterprise, judging, speaking, instructing, introducing, afterwording, suffering himself to be impanelled and honored to the point where we shyer, less galvanic of his colleagues vicariously sag under the weight of his medals and well-weighed kudos. Soldier on, comrade, though the plain where ignorant armies clash is more darkling
than ever; sail on, Izzy, and remind all those who glimpse your bellying spinnaker upon the horizon that there was once such a thing as Literature!
Ms. Reilly, the above is for publication and oral recitation—what follows is for your eyes and no doubt dainty ears only. You may not think it unbuttoned enough. If you deign to use it, don’t, I repeat DO NOT, change my punctuation or break up the continuous rhapsodic exhalation of my paragraph. By the way, Aesop is good to undertake this; the commercial houses are conspicuously sitting on their hands in the case of serious writers like Thornbush. I understand his last romp through the stacks (Middle Kingdom, pre-Marco Polo, right?) saw seven publishers before the eighth, who printed it only with extensive cuts and elimination of all passages not in Roman typeface and the English language. Also by the way, how did a maiden called Martina meet a man called O’Reilly? Or are you the product of a tempestuous mating between a Communist expat and an IRA gunrunner?
Your nosy pal,
Henry Bech
The Festschrift party was held in the Thornbush penthouse, the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of a chaff-colored brick building on Park in the Sixties. Sharp-edged minimalist statuary was dangerously scattered about on veneered French antiques. Moonlighting young actresses and actors in all-black unisex outfits passed, with the eerie schooled grace and white-faced expressionlessness of mimes, slippery hors d’oeuvres besprinkled with scallion snips. High on the two-story wall of the duplex, above a circular spiralling glass stairway, a huge Tibetan banner, a thang-ka, suspended above the heads of the living a tree, a tshog shing, of rigid, chalk-colored, but basically approachable deities. In the vast living room that yet was too small for this gabbling assemblage, cigarette smoke, that murderous ghost of the past, was briefly thick again. Bech saw around him dozens of half-forgotten faces, faces of editors and agents and publicists and publishers who had moved on (fired and rehired, sold out to a German conglomerate, compelled to scribble news briefs for a Stamford cable station) yet remained eerily visible within the gabby industrial backwater of New York publishing. And there were painters—hawk-nosed, necktieless, hairy, gay—because Izzy was among his other accomplishments a reviewer for ARTnews and an expert on Persian miniatures, Quaker furniture, misericords, and so on. And there were composers—smooth, barrel-chested party animals in double-breasted suits, their social skills brought to a high polish by lives of fine-tuning students and buttering up patrons—because Izzy was himself an accomplished amateur violinist who, had not his big brain dragged him away from his finger exercises, might have had a concert career and who, it was said, contributed not just the words but the melody line of several crowd-pleasing songs in the musical comedy, Occam!, based upon his first novel, as well as several of the numbers in the bawdy review, Nefertiti Below the Neck, loosely derived from his second. And there were history professors Izzy had befriended in the course of his researches, including the famously tall one and the famously short one, who insisted on huddling tête-à-tête, like the letter “f” ligatured to the letter “i,” and, finally, there were writers—in a single glance Bech spotted Lucy Ebright with her shining owl eyes and swanlike neck, and Seth Zimmerman with his self-infatuated giggle, and Vernon Klegg in his alcoholic daze. But it was Pamela Thornbush, Lady Festschrift herself, who came up to Bech, her rosy cheeks echoed by the freckled pink breasts more than half exposed by the velvet plunge of her plum-colored Prada. She had another woman in tow, a firm-bodied young woman dressed in mousy gray, with the dull skin and militant, faintly angry bearing that Bech associated with the beauties of Eastern Europe, those formerly Communist hussies whose attractions were at the service of the Stasi, the ÁVÓ, the KGB. “Dear Henry,” Pamela said, though they had not met many times previously, “Izzy was just touched to tears by what you wrote about him; I never have seen him so moved, honestly. And this is our beautiful Martina, who pulled the whole project together. She still blushes when she talks about your fresh letter.”