by John Updike
His fear, like a fever or deep humiliation, bared the beauty veiled by things. His dead eyes, cleansed of healthy egotism, discovered a startled tenderness, like a virgin’s whisper, in every twig, cloud, brick, pebble, shoe, ankle, window mullion, and bottle-glass tint of distant hill. Bech had moved, in this compressed religious evolution of his, from the morning’s raw animism to an afternoon of natural romanticism, of pantheistic pangs. Between lunch (creamed asparagus, French fries, and meatloaf) and the poetry contest he was free; he took a long solitary walk around the edges of the campus, inhaling the strenuous odors, being witness to myriad thrusts of new growth through the woodland’s floor of mulching leaves. Life chasing its own tail. Bech lifted his eyes to the ridges receding from green to blue, and 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. He felt increasingly hopeless; he could never be delivered of this. In a secluded, sloping patch of oaks, he threw himself with a grunt of decision onto the damp earth, and begged Someone, Something, for mercy. He had created God. And now the silence of the created universe acquired for Bech a miraculous quality of willed reserve, of divine tact that would let him abjectly pray on a patch of mud and make no answer but the familiar ones of rustle, of whisper, of invisible growth like a net sinking slowly deeper into the sea of the sky; of gradual realization that the earth is populated infinitely, that a slithering slug was slowly causing a dead oak leaf to lift and a research team of red ants were industriously testing a sudden morsel, Bech’s thumb, descended incarnate.
Eventually the author arose and tried to brush the dirt from his knees and elbows. To his fear, and shame, was added anger, anger at the universe for having extracted prayer from him. Yet his head felt lighter; he walked to Ruffin Hall in the mood of a condemned spy who, entering the courtyard where the firing squad waits, at least leaves behind his dank cell. When the girls read their poetry, each word hit him like a bullet. The girl with the small head and the long neck read:
Air, that transparent fire
our red earth burns
as we daily expire,
sing! As water in urns
whispers of rivers and wharves,
sing, life, within the jar
each warm soul carves
from this cold star.
There was more to this poem, about Nature, about fine-veined leaves and twigs sharp as bird feet, and more poems, concerning meadows and horses and Panlike apparitions that Bech took to be college boys with sticks of pot, and then more poets, a heavy mannish girl with an unfortunate way of rolling her lips after each long Roethkësque line, and a nun-pale child who indicted our bombing of thatched villages with clotted Lowellian tropes, and a budding Tallulah swayed equally by Allen Ginsburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay; but Bech’s ears closed, his scraped heart flinched. These youthful hearts, he saw, knew all that he knew, but as one knows the rules of a game there is no obligation to play; the sealed structure of naturalism was a school to them, a prison to him. In conclusion, a splendid, goggle-eyed beauty incanted some Lanier, from “The Marshes of Glynn,” the great hymn that begins
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
and goes on
And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea
Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:
and ends
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.
Something filmed Bech’s eyes, less full-formed tears than the blurry reaction pollen excites in the allergic.
After the poetry reading, there was supper at Madame President’s—you know her: hydrangea hair and sweeping manners and a listening smile as keen and neat as an ivory comb. And then there was a symposium, with three students and two members of the English faculty and Bech himself, on “The Destiny of the Novel in a Non-Linear Future.” And then a party at the home of the chairman of the department, a bluff old Chaucerian with a flesh-colored hearing aid tucked behind his ear like a wad of chewing gum. The guests came up and performed obeisances, jocular or grave, to Bech, their distinguished interloper, and then resumed seething among each other in the fraught patterns of rivalry and erotic attraction that prevail in English departments everywhere. Amid them Bech felt slow-witted and paunchy; writers are not scholars but athletes, who grow beerbellies after thirty. Miss Eisenbraun detached herself and walked him back across the campus. A pandering Southern moon rode above the magnolias and the cupolas.
“You were wonderful tonight,” she told him.
“Oh?” Bech said. “I found myself very lumpish.”
“You’re just marvelously kind to children and bores,” she pursued.
“Yes. Fascinating adults are where I fall down.”
A little pause, three footsteps’ worth, as if to measure the depth of the transaction they were contemplating. One, two, three: a moderate reading. Yet to lift them back over the sill of silence into conversation, a self-conscious effort, something kept in a felt-lined drawer, was needed. She pulled out French.
“Votre malaise—est-il passé?” The language of diplomacy.
“Il passe, mais très lentement,” Bech said. “It’s becoming part of me.”
“Maybe your room has depressed you. Their guest accommodations are terribly little-girly and sterile.”
“Exactly. Sterile. I feel I’m an infection. I’m the only germ in a porcelain universe.”
She laughed, uncertain. They had reached the glass doors of the dormitory where he slept. An owl hooted. The moon frosted with silver a distant ridge. He wondered if in his room his fear would make him pray again. A muffled radio somewhere played country rock.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “I’m not catching.”
Her laugh changed quality; it became an upwards offer of her throat, followed by her breasts, her body. She was not wearing the catsuit but a black cocktail dress with a square neckline, yet the effect was the same, of a loose slipperiness about her that invited a peeling. She was holding to her breasts a manilla envelope full of poems awaiting his verdict. “I think your room is underfurnished,” she told him.
“My rooms in New York are too.”
“You need something to sleep beside.”
“An oxygen tent?”
“Me.”
Bech said, “I don’t think we should,” and cried. He seemed to mean, to himself, that he was too hideous, too sick; yet also in his mind was the superstition that they must not defile the sleeping dormitory, this halcyon Lesbos, with copulation. Ruth Eisenbraun stared amazed, her hands tightening on the envelope of poems, at the moonlight making ice of Bech’s impotent tears. Her firm willing body, silhouetted against the dewy smell of sleeping grass, seemed to him another poem abysmal in its ignorance, deceitful in its desire to mitigate the universe. Poetry and love, twin attempts to make the best of a bad job. Impotent: yet in his stance, his refusal to embrace a hasty cure, we must admire a type of rigidity, an erect pride in his desolation, a determination to defend it as his territory. A craven pagan this morning, he had become by midnight a stern monk.
This is all speculation. Truly we are in the dark here. Knowing Bech on other, better lit occasions, we doubt that, given this importunate woman, the proximity of the glass doors, and the key in his pocket, he did not for all his infirmity take her inside to his sickbed and let her apply to his wound the humid poultice of her flesh. Also, on her side, Ruth was a professor of literature; she would not have misread the works so badly as to misjudge the man. Picture them then. Above Bech and Ruth hangs the black dome of their sepulchre; the nipples of her breasts also appear black, as they swing above him, teasing his mouth, his mouth blind as a baby’s, though his eyes, when he shuts them, see through the succule
nt padding to the calcium xylophone of her rib cage. His phallus a counterfeit bone, a phantasmal creature, like Man, on the borderline of substance and illusion, of death and life. They establish a rhythm. Her socket becomes a positive force, begins to suck, to pound. Enough. Like Bech, we reach a point where words seem horrible, maggots on the carcass of reality, feeding, proliferating; we seek peace in chaste silence.
Wait, wait. Here is another slide, a fifth, found hiding under a stack of gold domes from Russia. It shows Bech the next morning. Again, he has slept on his back, his head held high by two pillows, a china figurine through which dreams idly blow. The pillows having been piled one on top of the other prevent our knowing whether or not two heads lay down on the bed. He rises grudgingly, stiffly. Again, he is wonderfully productive of excrement. His wound feels scabbier, drier; he knows now he can get through a day with it, can live with it. He performs his toilet—washes, wipes, brushes, shaves. He sits down at the little pseudo-Sheraton desk and shuffles the sheaf of poems as if they are physically hot. He awards the first prize, a check for $25, to the girl with the small head and blue eyes on stalks, writing as his citation:
Miss Haynsworth’s poems strike me as technically accomplished, making their way as good loyal citizens under the tyranny of rhyme, and as precociously rich in those qualities we associate with poetesses from Sappho on—they are laconic, clear-eyed, gracious toward the world, and in their acceptance of our perishing frailty, downright brave.
Bech suspected that “poetess” wasn’t quite right any more, but arranged to have the envelope delivered to Miss Eisenbraun anyway—delivered by someone else. He was driven to the airport by a homely, tall, long-toothed woman whose voice, he realized, was the voice that beguiled him over the telephone. “Ah’m so sorreh, Misteh Bech, evrehbodeh saiys you were dahlin, but Ah had to attend mah sisteh’s weddin in Roanoke, it was one of those sudden affaihs, and jes got back this mawnin! Believe me, suh, Ah am mohtifahd!”
“Neveh you mind,” Bech told her, and touched his inside breast pocket to make sure his check was in it. The landscape, unwinding in reverse, seemed greener than when he arrived, and their speed less dangerous. Bea, who with much inconvenience had hired a babysitter so she could meet him at La Guardia, sensed, just seeing him emerge from the giant silver thorax and scuttle across the tarmac in the rain, that something had happened to him, that there wasn’t enough of him left for her to have any.
BECH SWINGS?
BECH ARRIVED in London with the daffodils; he knew that he must fall in love. It was not his body that demanded it, but his art. His first novel, Travel Light, had become a minor classic of the Fifties, along with Picnic, The Search for Bridey Murphy, and the sayings of John Foster Dulles. His second novel, a lyrical gesture of disgust, novella-length, called Brother Pig, did his reputation no harm and cleared his brain, he thought, for a frontal assault on the wonder of life. The assault, surprisingly, consumed five years, in which his mind and work habits developed in circles, or loops, increasingly leisurely and whimsical; when he sat down at his desk, for instance, his younger self, the somehow fictitious author of his earlier fictions, seemed to be not quite displaced, so that he became an uneasy, blurred composite, like the image left on film by too slow an exposure. The final fruit of his distracted struggles, The Chosen, was universally judged a failure—one of those “honorable” failures, however, that rather endear a writer to the race of critics, who would rather be reassured of art’s noble difficulty than cope with a potent creative verve. Bech felt himself rise from the rubble of bad reviews bigger than ever, better known and in greater demand. Just as the id, according to Freud, fails to distinguish between a wish-image and a real external object, so does publicity, another voracious idiot, dismiss all qualitative distinctions and feast off good and bad alike. Now five—no, six—years had passed, and Bech had done little but pose as himself, and scribble reviews and “impressionistic” journalism for Commentary and Esquire, and design a series of repellent rubber stamps:
HENRY BECH REGRETS THAT HE
DOES NOT SPEAK IN PUBLIC.
SORRY, PETITIONS
AREN’T MY METIER.
HENRY BECH IS TOO OLD AND ILL
AND DOUBTFUL TO SUBMIT TO
QUESTIONNAIRES AND INTERVIEWS.
IT’S YOUR PH.D. THESIS;
PLEASE WRITE IT YOURSELF.
By appropriately stamping the letters he received and returning them to the sender, Bech simplified his correspondence. But six years had passed, and his third stamp pad had gone dry, and the age of fifty was in sight, and it was high time to write something to justify his sense of himself as a precious and useful recluse. A stimulus seemed needed.
Love? Travel? As to love, he had been recently processed by a pair of sisters, first the one, and then the other; the one was neurotic and angular and harsh and glamorous and childless and exhausting, and the other had been sane and soft and plain and maternal and exhausting. Both had wanted husbands. Both had mundane, utilitarian conceptions of themselves that Bech could not bring himself to corroborate. It was his charm and delusion to see women as deities—idols whose jewel was set not in the center of their foreheads but between their legs, with another between their lips, and pairs more sprinkled up and down, from ankles to eyes, the length of their adorable, alien forms. His transactions with these supernatural creatures imbued him, more keenly each time, with his own mortality. His life seemed increasingly like that sinister fairy story in which each granted wish diminishes a magic pelt that is in fact the wisher’s life. But perhaps, Bech thought, one more woman, one more leap would bring him safe into that high calm pool of immortality where Proust and Hawthorne and Catullus float, glassy-eyed and belly up. One more wasting love would release his genius from the bondage of his sagging flesh.
As to travel: his English publisher, J. J. Goldschmidt, Ltd., who had sidestepped Bech’s collected essays (published in the United States and Canada as When the Saints) and had remaindered Brother Pig with the haste usually reserved for bishops’ memoirs and albums of Pharaonic art, now, possibly embarrassed by the little novel’s creeping success in its Penguin edition, and guilty over the minuscule advances and scrimped printings with which he had bound Bech’s thriving name, decided to bring out a thirty-shilling anthology called, all too inevitably, The Best of Bech. To support this enterprise he asked the author to come to London for the week before publication and permit himself to “be lionized.” The phrase snaked in less time than an eyeblink along three thousand miles of underwater cable.
“I’d rather be lambified,” Bech answered.
“What, Henry? Sorry, I can hardly hear you.”
“Forget it, Goldy. It was a hard word.”
“You heard what?”
“Nothing. This is a very wet connection.”
“Dead?”
“Not yet, but let’s kill it. I’ll come.” He arrived with the daffodils. The VC-10 banked over Hampton Court, and the tinge of their yellow was visible from the air. In Hyde Park beside the Serpentine, along Birdcage Walk in St. James’s, in Grosvenor Square beneath the statue of Roosevelt and in Russell Square beneath the statue of Gandhi, in all the fenced squares from Fitzroy to Pembroke, the daffodils made a million golden curtseys to those tourists who, like our hero, wandered dazed by jet-lag and lonely as a cloud. A poet could not but be gay, Bech recalled, In such a jocund company. And the people in the streets, it seemed to him, whether milling along Oxford Street or sauntering from lion to lion in Trafalgar Square, formed another golden host, beautiful in the antique cold-faced way of Blake’s pastel throngs, pale Dionysiacs, bare thighs and gaudy cloth, lank hair and bell-bottoms, Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way. And, the next morning, watching Merissa move nude to the window and to her closet, he felt her perfections—the parallel tendons at the backs of her knees, the kisslike leaps of shadow among the muscles of her shoulders—flow outdoors and merge with the lacy gauze of the gray British air. A VC-10 hung in silent d
escent above the treetops of Regent’s Park. He rose and saw that this park too had its pools of gold, its wandering beds of daffodils, and that under the sunless noon sky lovers, their heads androgynous masses of hair, had come to lie entwined on the cold greening grass. Cold greening grass, Bech heard. The echo disturbed and distracted him. The papery daytime world, cluttered with books he had not written, cut into the substantial dreams of drunkenness and love.
Jorgen Josiah Goldschmidt, a bustling small anxious man with an ambitiously large head and the pendulous profile of a Florentine banker, had arranged a party for Bech the very evening of his arrival. “But, Goldy, by your time I’ve been awake since two this morning.”
They had met several times in New York. Goldschmidt had evidently sized up Bech as a clowner to be chuckled and shushed into line. In turn Bech had sized up Goldschmidt as one of those self-made men who have paid the price (for not letting God make them) of minor defects like inner deafness and constant neuralgia. Goldschmidt’s was a success story. A Danish Jew, he had arrived in England in the late Thirties. In twenty years, he had gone from the Ministry of Information to the B.B.C. to an editorship in a venerable publishing house to the founding, in the mid-Fifties, of one of his own, specializing in foreign avant-garde writers no one else wanted and dainty anthologies of poetic matter lapsed from copyright. A lucky recipe book (health food soups) and a compendium of Prayers for Humanists staved off bankruptcy. Now he was prosperous, thanks mostly to his powers of persuading his lawyers and printers to let him publish increasingly obscene American authors. Though devoid of any personal taste for obscenity, he had found a wave and was riding it. His accent and dress were impeccably British. In tune with the times he had sprouted bushy sideburns. His face was always edged with the gray of nagging pain. He said, his brown eyes (in repose, they revealed lovely amber depths, lit by the fire of his brain, but were rarely in repose) flicking past Bech’s shoulder toward the next problem, “Henry, you must come. Everyone is dying to meet you. I’ve invited just the very dearest nicest people. Ted Heath might drop in later, and Princess Margaret was so sorry she must be in Ceylon. You can have a nice nap in your hotel. If the room is too noisy, we can change it. I thought from your books you would enjoy a view of the traffic. Your interview isn’t until five, a terribly nice intelligent boy, a compatriot of yours. If you don’t like him, just give him a half hour of the usual and he’ll be on his way.”