Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  I am not asking Updike to be critical of Bech—it is not his responsibility: it is mine and Bech’s. Besides, Updike loves Bech too much, especially where (and this is the greater part of the book) he is thoroughly de-Beched. Updike can be as funny as Dickens and as celestial as bits of Anna Karenina, and in Bech: A Book he is, now and then, in glimpses, both. This happens when he is forgetting to remember about Bech-as-Jew; luckily, the crunch of the Appropriate Reference Machine is sometimes silenced. Updike loves Bech best when Bech is most openly, most shrewdly, most strategically, most lyrically Updike. Bech’s failure—he is a celebrated writer suffering from Block—is rumor and theory, but the exact flavor of Bech’s success is the stuff of Updike’s virtu. Who else but Updike could take fame so for granted as to endow it with exhaustion? The exhaustion is examined with Updike’s accustomed theological finesse: Bech’s Block is to be taken somewhat like the modern definition of the Christian hell—no fire and brimstone in a fixed nether location; instead a sense of irreparable loss, a feeling of eternal separation from God, a stony absence of Grace. In the presence of his Block, Bech becomes christologized. In the wilderness of his London hotel lobby he is even subjected to satanic wiles: the devil is a young journalist named Tuttle into whose notebook Bech spills his spiritual seed:

  . . . Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of successive images locked and then one more image arrived and, as it were, superlocked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g., the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action or, say, the implosion of mathematics consuming the heart of a star.

  Imagine the Body of Christ describing its transubstantiation from bread. What could the devil do but flee that holiness? But then, coming ever closer, there approaches the ghostly clank of the A. R. Machine, and the eucharistic Bech folds flat and begins to flap like the leaf of an ethnic survey-analysis study:

  He said, then, that he was sustained, insofar as he was sustained, by the memory of laughter, the specifically Jewish, embattled, religious, sufficiently desperate, not quite belly laughter of his father and his father’s brothers, his beloved Brooklyn uncles; that the American Jews had kept the secret of this laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world; that unless the Negroes learned to write there was nowhere else it could come from; and that in the world today only the Russians still had it, the Peruvians possibly, and Mao Tse-tung but not any of the rest of the Chinese. In his, Bech’s, considered judgment.

  Here Updike, annoyed at the Machine’s perpetual intrusions, allows it to grind itself into giggling berserkdom. The Machine is amusing itself; it is providing its own ethnic jokes. (The inopportune demands of Bech’s Jewishness on his author should serve as sufficient warning to other novelists begging to be absorbed uninterruptedly by epiphanies: beware of any character requiring more sociology than imagination.) Bech, confronted at last by the journalist’s printed report of their encounter, guesses the devil’s spiritual triumph over matter: “He [Bech] had become a character by Henry Bech.” Which is to say, a folk character out of Jewish vaudeville, not quite Groucho Marx, not yet Gimpel the Fool. Nevertheless unsaved. But while none of Updike’s people has ever attained salvation, salvation is the grail they moon over. Bech’s grail is cut in half, like his name, which is half a kiddush cup: becher. Over the broken brim the Jew in Bech spills out: Updike, an uncircumcised Bashevis Singer (as Mark Twain was the Gentile Sholem Aleichem), is heard in the wings, laughing imp-laughter.

  The center of Bech: A Book is a sustained sniff of this Christian hell: it is so to speak an inverted epiphany, a negative ecstasy. Bech lectures at a Southern girls’ college and experiences a Panic: “He felt dizzy, stunned. The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hung behind everything. . . .” He sees “the shifting sands of absurdity, nullity, death. His death gnawed inside him like a foul parasite. . . .” “All things have the same existence, share the same atoms, reshuffled: grass into manure, flesh into worms.” “. . . the grandeur of the theatre in which Nature stages its imbecile cycle struck him afresh and enlarged the sore accretion of fear he carried inside him as unlodgeably as an elastic young wife carries within her womb her first fruit.” The abyss swells and contracts, until finally it shrinks from Immense Void to empty becher and again becomes recognizable merely as Bech’s Block: “He tried to analyze himself. He reasoned that since the id cannot entertain the concept of death, which by being not-being is nothing to be afraid of, his fear must be of something narrower, more pointed and printed. He was afraid that his critics were right. That his works were indeed flimsy, unfelt, flashy, and centrifugal. That the proper penance for his artistic sins was silence and reduction . . .” It is typical of Updike that he even theologizes writing problems, though here he parodies his standard eschatology with an overlay of Freudian theodicy. The fact is Updike theologizes everything (in Rabbit, Run he theologized an ex-high-school basketball player); this is his saving power, this is precisely what saves him from being flashy and centrifugal. The stunning choice Updike has made—to be not simply an American but a Christian writer—distinguishes him: in this he is like a Jew (though not like Bech): America as neuter is not enough.

  But he does not theologize the Jew in Bech. In seven chapters (really separate stories) he takes the mostly de-Beched Bech everywhere: from Russia to Rumania and Bulgaria, through scenes sweated with wistful wit and ironic love; from a worshipful pot-smoking ex-student through a shift of mistresses; from Virginia to stinging London to a sophomoric “Heaven” where the “Medal for Modern Fiction was being awarded to Kingsgrant Forbes” while the “sardonic hubbub waxed louder.” (This last section, by the way, need not be compared for satiric force with Jonathan Swift: I suspect because both the Jewish Appropriate Reference Machine and the Literary Politics A. R. Machine, in tandem, were working away like Mad.) Wherever Updike is at home in his own mind, the book runs true, with lyric ease: the jokes work, small calculations pay off, anticlimaxes are shot through with a kind of brainy radiance. Without Bech, Bech might have been small but sharp, a picaresque travel-diary wryly inventing its own compunctions. But wherever the Jew obtrudes, there is clatter, clutter, a silliness sans comedy. Bech makes empty data. It is not that Updike has fallen into any large-scale gaucherie or perilous failures-of-tone. It is not that Updike’s American Jew is false. It is that he is not false enough.

  By which I mean made up, imagined, mythically brought up into truthfulness.

  In the case of Bech—and only in the case of Bech—Updike does not find it worthwhile to be theological. In no other novel does he resist the itch of theology; everywhere he invests ordinary Gentile characters with mythic Christian or proto-Christian roles, adding to local American anthropology a kind of sacral sense. And when the sacral is missing, sulphur drifts up from the Void. Updike is our chief Dante: America is his heaven and hell. He has no such sense of Bech. It is as if he cannot imagine what a sacral Jew might be.2 You might want to say he is not altogether to blame, after all: what would any accurate sociological eye see on the American landscape but Bech? Nevertheless Bech is deviation, perhaps transient deviation, from the historical Jew. Being historical cretin, Bech does not know this about himself: unable to inherit his past, he has no future to confer. He is very plausibly without progeny: though his writing Block is an Updikean Christian salvational crisis, his Jewish Block consists in being no longer able to make history. As Jew he is all sociology, which is to say all manners (acquired exilic manners); as Jew he is pathetically truncated, like his name. So Updike finds Bech and so he leaves him. Updike comes and goes as anthropologist, transmuting nothing.

  It is very queer—it is something to wonder at—that Updike, who is always so inquisitive about how divinity works through Gentiles, has no curiosity at all about how it might express itself, whether ves
tigially or even by its absence or even through its negation, in a Jew. Being a Jew (like being a Christian) is something more than what is. Being a Jew is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky hair. Simply: to be a Jew is to be covenanted; or, if not committed so far, to be at least aware of the possibility of becoming covenanted; or, at the very minimum, to be aware of the Covenant itself. It is no trick, it is nothing at all, to do a genial novel about an uncovenanted barely nostalgic secular/neuter Bech: Bech himself, in all his multiple avatars (shall I give you their names? no), writes novels about Bech every day. It is beside the point for Updike and Bech together to proclaim Bech’s sociological there-ness. Of course Bech is, in that sense, there. But what is there is nothing. In a work of imagination Bech-as-he-is is critically unjustifiable. It is not Bech-as-he-is that interests us (if you want only that, look around you), but Bech-as-he-might-become. If to be a Jew is to become covenanted, then to write of Jews without taking this into account is to miss the deepest point of all. Obviously this is not Updike’s flaw exclusively; it is, essentially, the flaw of the Jewish writers he is sporting with. It is no use objecting that Updike and others do not aim for the deepest point: concerning Jews, the deepest point is always most implicated when it is most omitted.

  Descending, for the sake of the Jew alone, from the level of theological mythmaking to the level of social data, is Updike patronizing his Jew? One thinks, by contrast, of a Jew writing about a Gentile: I mean Henderson the Rain King. Meditating on the quintessential goy, Bellow makes up a holy culture to demonstrate him. The demonstration is not through what is, but through opposites: the goy is most revealed as not-Jew. It seems to me that a Christian writing of a Jew would profit from a similar route in showing the quintessential Jew as not-Gentile. Whereas Bech has no inner nature of his own, and only passes. Or I think of a short story, not altogether seamless but divinely driven, by George P. Elliott, in his collection An Hour of Last Things: a Jewish woman fevered by the beauty of a cathedral is made to waver between revulsion for Christian history and the lustful leap into the idolatry of Art. Here a secularized post-Christian WASP writer explores the most awesome, most dangerous, most metaphorical depths of Commandment.

  Two questions, then, remain to puzzle. Why, for Bech, does Updike withhold his imagination from the creation of Bech as Jew? And second: what motive, what need, what organic novelistic gains, emerge from the turn to Bech? As some say Mailer taunted Updike into the sexual adventurism of Couples, so now, it is declared, a similar competitiveness with Jewish “domination of the literary world” (Bech’s self-sneering Gaullist phrase) compels him to a Jewish character. I reject the competitive motive: it seems plain that Updike experiments for himself, not for other writers, and pits himself against values, not persons. But while Couples turned out to be a Christian novel, Bech is a neuter. It may be that Updike’s experiment this time lies precisely in this: to attempt a novel about no-values, about a neuter man. To find the archetypical neuter man, man separated from culture, Updike as theologian reverts to Origen and Ambrose, to centuries of Christian doctrine, and in such ancient terms defines his Jew. If the only kind of Jew Updike can see, among all these cities and hearts, is Bech, that is not solely because Bech is in the majority, or most typical; it is because for him Bech—the Jew as neuter man; the Jew as theological negative and historical cipher—is most real.

  But seen from the perspective of the Jewish vision, or call it Jewish immanence (and what other perspective shall we apply to a Jew?), the Jewish Bech has no reality at all, especially not to himself: he is a false Jew, a poured-out becher, one who has departed from Jewish presence. For Updike to falsify the false—i.e., to lend the Jew in America the Grace of his imagination—would have been to get beyond data to something like historical presence, and a living Bech. But that, I suppose, would have required him to do what Vatican II fought against doing: forgive the Jew for having been real to himself all those centuries, and even now. And for that he would have had to renounce the darker part of the Christian imagination and confound his own theology.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Bech: A Book is followed, a dozen years later, by Bech Is Back. The tone of the sequel is greatly refined; for one thing, Updike has junked the Appropriate Reference Machine. Bech, left to himself, ethnic banners banned, sociology damned, vestigial Yiddish reduced to two unspoken grunts (alas, they are the words for “whore” and “unclean”), elegantly comic mind almost everywhere beautifully conflated with Updike’s own—Bech lives. In Bech Is Back, Bech is, by and large, no more a Jewish character than I am a WASP. This satisfies him; if his newest success—a bestseller called Thinking Big—allows him the time, I hope he will write Updike a thank-you letter, especially since, as it turns out, there is only one bad patch for the ethnic Bech to get through: a visit to what the chapter-title, in wall-map Sunday-school language, terms “The Holy Land.” This pilgrimage is undertaken in the company of Bea, Bech’s Episcopalian wife, all pure responsive essence, whose name (even if accidentally) is metaphysically interesting in context. In Israel, only Bea can rapturously, serenely, supremely, Be; Bech cannot. He moves in this consecrated landscape as a skeptic and an antagonist; and here, to be sure, Updike has precisely nailed the post-Enlightenment intellectual Jewish scoffer epitomized by surly Bech—for whom, after the Nazi depredations, after the Arab wars, “events in Palestine had passed as one more mop-up scuffle, though involving a team with whom he identified as effortlessly as with the Yankees.” Only the last part of this judgment rings false; Bech is non-, perhaps anti-, Zionist, and always was.

  The “Holy Land” section opens in Jerusalem not, as one would expect, with a trip to the lost Temple’s Western Wall, sighed after for two thousand years of teary Exile, but with a walk, led by a Jesuit guide, along the Via Dolorosa. Still, Bech must not be credited with making a beeline for the very spot that stands, in every Passion Play, and annually at Eastertide, for the historic revilement of “perfidious” Jews; it is Updike’s walking tour he is taking, not his own. The controversial lands west of the Jordan River are designated, tendentiously, as “occupied territory” (whether in Bech’s or Updike’s head, or both, it is difficult to tell), a characterization by no means linguistically immaculate or politically neutral. (Perhaps Bech, when he gets back home, will write an attack on the Begin government’s settlement policy for The New York Times Magazine.) The Western Wall itself appears as the Wailing Wall, an antiquated christological insult. Bech and Bea are put up at a lavish government guest house for distinguished visitors, “echoing,” thinks Bech, “like the plasterboard corridors of a Cecil B. DeMille temple,” where he is tempted to cavort like Bojangles on the wide stairs. The “tragic, eroded hills of Jerusalem” just beyond those corridors, and the brilliant Valley of Gehenna a breath’s space below, do not draw Bech’s eyes or his hardened heart. The holiness of the Holy Land leaves Bech cold; only his Gentile wife catches its heat. In deference to Bea’s touching ardor—the ardor both of the romantic tourist and of the industrious Christian pilgrim—Bech visits the City of David dig, the two shining mosques atop the Temple Mount, and, among squabbling sectarians, the arena of Bea’s generous surrender to spirit, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Bech’s raised anti-Israel consciousness is not disappointed at a dinner with Israeli writers “in a restaurant staffed by Arabs. Arabs, Bech perceived, are the blacks of Israel.” Finally, when Bea, honoring Bech’s Jewishness, proposes moving to Israel to live, Bech retorts: “Jesus, no. It’s depressing. To me, it’s just a ghetto with farms. I know these people. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from them, trying to think bigger.” Later he will visit the land of Bea’s forebears, and find “happiness in Scotland.” He will defend the High-landers against their historic oppressors. He will be amazed and amused, edified and electrified, in Ghana, Korea, Venezuela, Kenya, Canada, Australia. Only in Israel is he depressed.

  Thus, slippery, satirized, satirical Bech. Does Updike mean Bech to mean what Bech say
s? Does Bech say what Updike means? In his second coming, returned briefly to Jewish scenes, Bech is, as Jew, not really Redux. As Jew he merely momentarily recurs, as reduced—as reductive—as before. Nothing can transform him; he will not be elevated, even by the holy heights of Jerusalem. His secular skepticism will not be contradicted by any whiff of the transcendental; he is the only major character in Updike’s fiction wholly untouched by the transcendental. He remains man sans spirit, no different from that medieval Jew whom Christendom deemed hollow, unable to be hallowed: theological negative in Jerusalem, historic cipher in Zion, carper in the precincts of Ariel. As scoffer and Jewish neuter, Bech is, yes, “real,” “actual,” “lifelike,” abundantly “there.” Updike’s curled irony has not ironed him out; I recognize him. “I know these people,” as Bech would say. As a symptom of a segment of Jewish reality, Bech is well and truly made.

  Charles Dickens sold his house—it was called Tavistock House, and you will see how I am not changing the subject—to a certain Mr. J. P. Davis, a Jew. According to Edgar Johnson, Dickens’s biographer, Davis’s wife Eliza

  wrote Dickens a letter telling him that Jews regarded his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist as “a great wrong” to their people. If Jews thought him unjust to them, he replied, they were “a far less sensible, a far less just, and a far less good-tempered people than I have always thought them to be.” Fagin, he pointed out, was the only Jew in the story (he had forgotten the insignificant figure of Barney) and “all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians.” Fagin had been described as a Jew, he explained, “because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew. . . . I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one,” Dickens concluded his letter.