by John Updike
“To exist, simply. A city on a hill, sort of. A mountain seen from the plain. This woman, Lucinda Baines, left her dandy townhouse and a lot of ill-gotten gains for a kind of French Academy, though we have none of their responsibilities. They keep working away at a French dictionary, for one thing, and have braided uniforms.”
The long-dead Lucinda, he realized, had become one of his love objects, and little efficient Edna another. His imagination bred a needy flock he lived to serve and placate—ewes who gave him an identity as shepherd. He was an old-fashioned gallant, Henry Bech; in all the women of his life he was seeking truth and goodness. A great reservoir of both must lie, he reasoned, with an entity able to take his sexual agitation and turn it into a limpid, postcoital peace. Martina moved around the carpeted island, set in a sea of boards splintered by vanished industrial machinery, on solid bare feet, in a white terrycloth robe that an inamorata of Bech’s, the volatile Claire Hoagland, had stolen long ago from their room in the Plaza, in one of her caprices. There was little capriciousness in Martina; she took literary giants seriously, even in their underwear.
“I wonder,” she mused, “if it wasn’t a dead idea even then. I mean, old guys sitting around drinking port and smoking cigars and telling each other what fine fellows they are—how William Dean Howells can you get?”
“Poor Howells,” Bech said. “Everybody thinks of him as a toastmaster. In fact, the older he got, the more radical he became. I can’t say the same for myself. You should have seen Edna’s face when I defended the Forty so stoutly—her jaw dropped nearly back to Alice Springs.”
It was charming when Martina laughed, the cautious dimpling and half-smothered eruption, her Socialist conscience checking her acquired American freedom to mock. “It is unlike you,” she said. “You usually scoff at pomp and pretension.”
“But the Forty is not pompous, it’s touching. Almost nobody comes. Those that do are deaf or senile. The place has paintings on the wall we can’t afford the insurance on. Everything inside is so exquisite and Grecian—high sculpted plaster ceilings and no two fireplaces carved alike—and across the street squats this huge uncaring flank of some building where dozens of trailer trucks seem to live.”
“New York is full of uncaring buildings,” she solemnly said. “What does your friend Isaiah Thornbush think about this Forty?”
“Who knows? He got me into the presidency, and then at the spring meeting he hardly spoke up. At one point he announced he agreed with MacDeane about something, but it could have been about dying, preventing extraordinary measures. We got onto that somehow. The discussion rambled.”
“Why do you like presiding?”
Martina had spent the night, and so was there to greet the mid-morning sun as it threw golden rhomboids of warmth into the loft. She had curled her body in one of them, on a sofa opposite Bech’s beanbag, across his glass coffee table and striped Peruvian rug. Bea, Bech’s nicely domestic ex-wife, had covered a cracked old leather sofa of his with nubbly beige wool; nestled upon it, with her bare feet palely protruding from her robe, Martina suggested a big blintz—the terrycloth the enfolding crepe, her flesh the pure soft cheese. Her sunstruck toes wiggled in idle pleasure, and her hair swirled in a loose tangle all about her broad face, its brows, usually thick and straight and stern, interrogatively arched.
How good it was of women, Bech thought, not for the first time, to allow you intimacy with them, sharing their pleasure in the simplest elements of life. You can, through chinks in the male armor, feel a fraction of the bliss that must tumble in upon them all day long. “I suppose I like having the attention,” he answered, “even as a formality, of men and women whose accomplishments I respect. Old poops now, it may be, they once put their minds and hearts on the line and tried to make something decent. Think of all that MacDeane knows about Millard Fillmore. Think of how he’s made himself care about Calhoun. Even Von Klappenemner—all the Beethoven he’s passed through his head and his arms, he’s earned the right to call one of the symphonies piffling. I find that moving.”
“I find it rather shocking,” Martina said, “and likewise that you’re so impressed. You saw the Writers’ Unions perform their thuggery in Communist countries—why isn’t the Forty more of the same?”
“Well, those were closed shops, and the politicians were pulling the strings. We’re above politicians, or beneath their notice. Mailer a couple of years ago had George Shultz, when he was Reagan’s Secretary of State, address a PEN conference, and everybody jumped all over him.”
“And you didn’t like that?”
“I didn’t like the jumping, no. Free speech ought to be Shultz’s right too. He gave a rather nice speech, but nobody listened. All that mob of intelligentsia cared about was hissing Reagan and the contras.”
Martina slowly uncurled, pressing her feet into the cushion against the sofa’s far arm. “Wasn’t that clever of Izzy,” she purred, “to know that you were presidential timber? Under that curly head of hair, behind those rumpled eyes, such a true-blue conservative.”
“Oh, Izzy,” he said, offended by her familiar use of the old phony’s name. “He gives intelligence a bad name.” Was she, he wondered in his most paranoid moments, a tool of Izzy’s Stasi? His fingerprints were all over her.
She put her feet down, so for a moment they were viewed by Bech as if in a glass case, through the coffee-table top, their yellow heels and pink toes and blue instep veins mounted on red-and-black Peruvian stripes, and then she sidestepped languidly around the coffee table, her hands on the loose knot of her terrycloth robe. “Henry, I think it’s so darling, that you have all these traditional sentiments. What did people used to say? Corny. It’s a real turn-on.” She lightly undid the belt. From within the parted folds of her robe, her naked body, displayed inches from his face, emitted the warmth and scent of food, a towering spread of it, doughy-pliant yet firm, lustrous, with visible mouthable details, tits pussy hips navel armpits, each with its flavor, its glaze, its tang of overwhelming goodness. Martina fucked administeringly, amused from a small distance and then the distance diminishing until she was lost in its absence. The Forty and its dainty mansion could not hold a candle to this.
The fall meeting was better attended than the spring’s had been. Of the faithful, little Aaron Fisch had died; there would be no more nominations for Arshile Gorky. Seidensticker, MacDeane, Jamison, Von Klappenemner, Izzy, and Amy deLessups were there, along with six or seven more, not all of whom Bech knew. There were: Jason Marr, one of the two African-Americans among the Forty, a pale and suave preacher’s son whose essays, long-lined poems, and surrealistic fictions were unremittingly full of rage and dire prophecy; X. I. Fong, a refugee from Mao’s China whose large pale pencilled abstractions thrillingly approched invisibility; Isabella Úrsula “Lulu” Buendía Fleming, a Venezuelan diplomat’s daughter whose many years as a girl and then young woman in Washington had led to fluent English, an American marriage, and a remarkable graft of magic realism upon the humdrum substance of suburban Maryland; and three or four others in the back row, probably composers, wearing dark suits. Edna read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved. How could Edna’s meticulous handiwork ever be disapproved? Several special repair requests—the copper flashing on the slate roof over the front portal had buckled in last summer’s heat wave, and a bronze sundial, in the shape of a rampant griffin, donated by the late Paul Manship to stand in the ivy bed in the rear garden, had been bent and spray-painted by vandals—were passed. A tribute to Aaron Fisch was read, surprisingly, by Lulu Fleming; that was why, Bech realized, she had made the trip up from Bethesda. She found in Fisch’s work a worthy Lower East Side equivalent of the idealistic mural art of Rivera and Siqueiros, with something of Salvador Dalí’s hallucinatory high finish, itself derived from the ardent literalism of Catholic altar painting; it was in this broad and bloody stream of anonymous popular style that our deceased friend and colleague Aaron Fisch, she asserted, ultimately stood.
The
report on election results was discouraging. None of the four candidates duly nominated and seconded over the course of the summer received a majority of the votes cast by mail ballot or the ten-vote minimum established by the by-laws. Oral nominations to fill the now seven new vacancies came sluggishly and begrudgingly. The name of William Gaddis, put forward by Thornbush, was batted aside with the phrase “Joycean gibberish” by J. Edward Jamison, and that of Jasper Johns met unenthusiasm in Seidensticker’s summation of “Pop tricks and neo-figurative doodles—he had an abstract phase, but it turned out to be insincere.” When MacDeane mentioned Susan Sontag, Amy pertly shot out her chin and said, “Sonntagskind ist Montags Mutter,” which made several of the shadows in the back—polyglot composers—laugh out loud.
Bech announced, rather desperately, “If we don’t ever manage to elect anybody, the institution will dwindle to nothing.”
The venerable MacDeane, his distinguished hangdog face tinged by the lingering tan of a Nantucket summer, pronounced in faint and quavery syllables, “As I took the liberty of suggesting at our last meeting, Mr. President, would that be an entirely unfortunate development? Perhaps our institutional body is trying to tell us something—that the moment for gloire is by. War ceased, in the trenches of 1914–1918, to be a path to gloire that any civilized man could condone, and now I wonder, with the passing of the Cold War, if gloire by even peaceful means is not an idle hope, a misbegotten vision based upon dissolved intellectual conventions. I raise this possibility quite without joy; but it is often a historian’s duty to describe that which gives him—or her, of course—no joy.”
Glwaar, Bech thought to himself, trying to wrap his mind around the juxtaposed consonants. Had it been to glwaar that he had been enslaved, denying himself a paying job, a spread of progeny, a life that was more than an excuse for those few minutes of each day when he was secreting words that might, possibly, harden to become, if not imperishable diamond, translucent amber, holding in it a captured moment like an extinct bug? An abyss of wasted minutes opened beneath Bech and Edna, Edna his sterile partner in immortality management, Edna his presidential bride, here at the great dark desk whose satinwood-rimmed top stretched toward the horizon like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. In her neat but jagged hand, relentless as a cardiograph, Edna was etching notes on yellow legal paper, while the tape recorder at her angular elbow purred. Beneath its top the desk had a portly bowed shape, as if its sides were bending outward under invisible pressure from above.
A shadowy man in the back row half-stood, waving his hands like a conductor during an allegro movement. “There are no more composers!” he called. “There is only electronic tapes! That is all the young musicians care about! To elect one of them would be to elect a machine!”
Seidensticker growled in agreement, “Painting now is all crap—victim art with stick figures. Ever since Kiefer and Kienholz hit it big, atrocities are all you get—the Holocaust, the slave trade, rape, ecology, blah blah. Everything is a protest poster. Always excepting my distinguished colleague here.” X. I. Fong, who never spoke at meetings, managed a beaming little kowtow without leaving his seat. Seidensticker went on, trying now to be gracious to the dead, “At least Aaron had the excuse of when he was born, back in those American Scene dark ages—the kids now have no excuse, and they know it. It’s all gallery politics, and gallery customers are all New York liberals soaking up guilt, or else Japanese and Arabs wanting some soft porn for their dens.”
“Shit,” announced Eric Von Klappenemner, six months further gone into the de-inhibitions of dementia. “What they call art now is shit, smeared on the wall, smeared into your ears. Where is beauty? Trashed underfoot. Where is grace, discipline, self-denial? All gone up the boob tube. My young friends say, Watch TV, it’s American meditation. But I say it’s shit, I don’t mince my words. They don’t either. They tell me, You are a fucking old fool.”
“Klappy, why do you have such rude young friends?” Amy deLessups asked, rolling her eyes roguishly at the composer, who was staring above her head to one side of Bech’s head, where the tricolor (maroon, gold, and indigo) flag of the Forty hung limp on its standard, next to a portrait of Clarence Edmund Stedman, its first president, a Wall Street broker and a poet with a fleecy, trapezoidal beard. Not even Yahweh had had a whiter beard.
Bech, perched in Stedman’s seat like a rat on a throne, surveyed the leather arc of immortals, looking for a friend. “We’ve heard from an artist, a composer, and a historian; how do the poets and novelists among us feel?”
“How do you feel, Bech?” J. Edward Jamison asked in peppery rejoinder. “Can you read any of these kids? I mean, the ones under sixty?”
“There is no magic,” Lulu Fleming volunteered, with her enchanting small trace of Spanish singsong. “There are these facts, this happened and then that happened, all told in this killingly clean prose. They have advanced degrees in creative writing; they go to these workshops and criticize each other, there is nothing left to criticize, but something is missing, I don’t know what it is—a love of the world, some hope beyond the world.”
“I read these younger women poets,” Amy deLessups said, “and it seems they’ve slept with the same men I did, or the same women, but they came to it ironically, wrapped in irony for protection, and knew ahead of time it wouldn’t work. Perhaps,” she admitted, her little round face seductively dimpling, “they had read my poems.”
“I confess, ladies and gentlemen,” Bech told the chairs, “that new fiction makes me tired. All that life that isn’t mine. All that clamoring ‘Look at me!’ But I thought the fault might be mine, the effect of age. Izzy, what do you think? You still read everything, you have the digestion of an ox. When and where these days is fiction not weary?” Izzy attended these meetings in a kind of watchful sulk, ever since Bech had become president; he deserved being put on the spot.
Slumped in the second row, Thornbush roused, and pronounced, “If you’d asked me in the Seventies, I would have said Latin America; in the Eighties, Eastern Europe. Now, with the Nineties, the whole globe seems on hold. Maybe the great stuff is all on the Internet and we don’t know how to access it yet. Mr. President, I’d like to propose a moratorium on new members until after the millennium clears the air.”
“Second,” said one of the composers in the back row.
There were a number of other seconds.
“Motion made and seconded,” Bech had to say, though he knew it was all mischief. “Discussion?”
Edna cleared her throat beside him and said, in her thrilling Anglo-Australian twang, “If I may make a point. The by-laws are very clear about our electing new members. It’s our main responsibility, virtually our only responsibility. I’m not sure we wouldn’t be forfeiting our charter, and the endowment with it, if such a motion passed.” Her white hair, cut in Prince Valiant fashion, trembled at the thought. Discreetly she bent her gaze back to her yellow pad, where she noted her own remarks. Bech fought an urge to pat her sleek head comfortingly.
“But we can’t seem to find anybody,” Amy sang out sweetly, “as wonderful as ourselves.”
“We must try,” Bech said, in his most severe presidential voice. “We must think back, to when we were on the outside, looking in. Suppose the then members had been as fastidious as we seem to be now?”
“Times are different,” Seidensticker said. “Money and the media hadn’t hopelessly corrupted everything at that point. You heard Eric say it—it’s all shit.”
“Please,” the president said primly.
X. I. Fong spoke up, smiling. “Lim, Lim, not that bad. Like always—some O.K., some not O.K. Things go in seasons. Change, never change.”
Izzy Thornbush’s stentorian voice cut across these melodic formulations. “Mr. President, there is a motion on the floor.”
“We’re discussing it, aren’t we?”
“I move the question.”
Bech was taken aback. He had forgotten the motion. Seeing this, Thornbush said, “The qu
estion is, Shall we declare a moratorium on new members until the millennium?”
“A lot can happen between here and the millennium,” Bech observed. “It’s eight years away. We could all be dead.”
“The question, the question!” the dark suits in the back row insisted. Bech had always had a slight fear of composers. He couldn’t understand what was in their heads—those key changes, those dominants and progressions and intervals, what did it all mean? They were men from outer space, and yet worldly, allied with money-men, artistic lawyers of a sort, so much of what they offered as created really mere boilerplate, the repeat sign saying Here we go again.…
“Our directress says we might forfeit our charter and the endowment,” he pointed out to the membership.
“Ayyye,” Izzy thundered, and the back row chorused, and Seidensticker that puritanical prick also, and Von Klappenemner in his dementia, so Bech had to say, “The question has been moved. All those in favor of the moratorium raise your hands.” Three from the back row, and Izzy and Seidensticker, but Von Klappenemner perhaps thought he had already voted. MacDeane, Bech was sorry to see, after a moment’s thought raised his hand, perhaps acting on an old Cold Warrior’s instinct that time gained is a victory, and any moratorium is a good one. That made six for. “Those opposed?” Bech asked, and his own hand went up. The writers, bless them, stuck with him—Jamison, Amy, Lulu, and Marr, who Bech might have thought would welcome damage inflicted on such a white man’s club. But his brown hand was in the air, and so was the delicate yellow hand of X. I. Fong, master of pencil on paint. That made six against. In his confusion as to what was being decided, or perhaps captivated by a bygone ecstasy, Von Klappenemner made a flowery conductor’s gesture, and Bech counted him in. “The motion fails,” he announced, “seven to six. Membership in the Forty is still open.”