Bech: A Book

by John Updike

  “When you were writing The Chosen,” Tuttle asked, “did you deliberately set out to create a more flowery style?” This time he had brought a tape recorder. They were in Bech’s hotel rooms, an extensive corner suite with a fake fireplace and a bed that hadn’t been slept in. The fireplace was not entirely fake; it held a kind of crinkly plastic sculpture of a coal fire that glowed when plugged in and even gave off an imitation of heat.

  “I never think about style, about creating one,” Bech dictated into the baby microphone of the tape recorder. “My style is always as simple as the subject matter permits. As you grow older, though, you find that few things are simple.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, changing a tire. I’m sorry, your question seems inane to me. This interview seems inane.”

  “Let me try another approach,” Tuttle said, as maddeningly patient as a child psychiatrist. “In Brother Pig, were you conscious of inserting the political resonances?”

  Bech blinked. “I’m sorry, when you say ‘resonances’ all I see is dried grapes. Brother Pig was about what its words said it was about. It was not a mask for something else. I do not write in code. I depend upon my reader for a knowledge of the English language and some acquired vocabulary of human experience. My books, I hope, would be unintelligible to baboons or squid. My books are human transactions—flirtations, quarrels.”

  “You’re tired,” Tuttle told him.

  He was right. Last night, Merissa had taken him to a restaurant along Fulham Road and then to Revolution, where big posters of Ho and Mao and Engels and Lenin watched from the walls as young people dressed in sequins and bell-bottoms jogged up and down within a dense, throbbing, coruscating fudge of noise. Bech knew something was happening here, a spiritual upthrusting like Christianity among the slaves of Rome or cabalism among the peasant Jews of stagnant Slavic Europe, but his old-fashioned particularizing vision kept dissolving the mob into its components: working girls resigned to a groggy tomorrow at their typewriters; neutered young men in fashion or photography to whom coming here was work; the truly idle, the rich and the black, escaping from the empty-eye-socket stare of spooked hours; the would-be young like himself, ancient lecherous curly-haired Yanks whose willy-nilly charm and backwards success had prevented their learning ever to come in out of the rain; enigmatic tarty birds like Merissa, whose flat, he had discovered, held a room full of electric toys and teddy bears, with a bed where a child slept, her child, she confessed, a son, eight years old, born in America, when Merissa was nineteen, a child sent off to boarding school and even on vacations, Bech suspected, mostly taken to the park and the zoo by Isabella, Merissa’s Spanish maid, an old round woman who peeked at Bech through doorways and then quickly, quietly shut the door. It was confusing. Revolution was the cave of a new religion but everyone had come, Bech saw, for reasons disappointingly reasonable and opportunistic. To make out. To be seen. To secure advancement. To be improved. That girl in the chain-link tunic and nothing else was working off her Yorkshire accent. That man flicking his arm like a dervish under the blue battering of the strobe lights was swinging a real-estate deal in his head. Bech doubted that the men on the wall approved what they saw. They were simple failed librarians like himself, schooled in the pre-Freudian verities. Hunger and pain are bad. Work is good. Men were made for the daylight. Orgasms are private affairs. Down in Loo-siana/Where the alligators swim so mean … Opposite him Merissa, who had a way of suddenly looking tall, though her smallness was what enchanted him, twinkled through the holes of her dress and moved her limbs and turned to him a shuddering profile, eyes shut as if better to feel the beat between her legs, that fluttering elusive beat: What we are witnessing, Bech announced inside his own head, in his role of college circuit-rider, is the triumph of the clitoral, after three thousand years of phallic hegemony. She called over to him, through the flashing din, “It gets to be rather same-y, doesn’t it?” And he felt then his heart make the motion he had been waiting for, of love for her; like the jaws of a clam when the muscle is sliced, his heart opened. He tasted it, the sugary nip of impossibility. For he was best at loving what he could never have.

  “Lord, you’re lovely,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  She accused him: “You don’t love London, only me.”

  His conversations with Merissa did have a way of breaking into two-liners. For example,

  MERISSA: “I’m terribly tired of being white.”

  BECH: “But you’re so good at it.”

  Or:

  BECH: “I’ve never understood what sex is like for a woman.”

  MERISSA (thinking hard): “It’s like—fog.”

  The phone rang at nine the next morning. It was Tuttle. Goldschmidt had given him Merissa’s number. Bech thought of expostulating but since the boy never drank he would have no idea how Bech’s head felt. With some dim idea of appeasing those forces of daylight and righteous wrath that he had seen mocked on the walls of Revolution last night, he consented to meet Tuttle at his hotel at ten. Perhaps this stab at self-abnegation did him good, for, on his way to the West End in the lurching, swaying upstairs of a 74 bus, nauseated by the motion, having breakfasted on unbuttered toast and reheated tea (Merissa had observed his departure by sighing and rolling over onto her stomach, and her refrigerator held nothing but yogurt and champagne), gazing down upon the foreshortened shoppers in Baker Street—shimmering saris, polka-dot umbrellas—Bech was visited by inspiration. The title of his new novel abruptly came to him: Think Big. It balanced the title of his first, Travel Light. It held in the girders of its consonants, braced by those two stark “i”s, America’s promise, pathos, crassness, grandeur. As Travel Light had been about a young man, so Think Big must be about a young woman, about openness and confusion, coruscation and the loss of the breeding function. Merissa could be the heroine. But she was British. Transposing her into an American would meet resistance at a hundred points, as for instance when she undressed, and was as white as an Artemis of marble, whereas any American girl that age carries all winter the comical ghost of last summer’s bikini, emphasizing her erogenous zones like a diagram. And Merissa’s enchanting smallness, the manner in which her perfection seemed carried out on an elfin scale, so that Bech could study by lamplight the bones of an ankle and foot as he would study an ivory miniature, a smallness excitingly violated when her mouth swam into the dimensions of the normal—this too was un-American. Your typical Bennington girl wore a 9½ sneaker and carried her sex as in a knapsack, to be unpacked at night. A rugged Boy/Girl Scout was the evolutionary direction, not the perfumed, faintly treacherous femininity Merissa exuded from each dear pore. Still, Bech reasoned while the bus maneuvered into Oxford Street and the shoppers danced in psychedelic foreshortening, she was not quite convincing as she was (what did she do? for instance, to warrant that expensive flat, and Isabella, and a dinner invitation from Goldy, and the closets full of swinging clothes, not to mention riding chaps and mud-crusted golf shoes), and Bech was sure he could fill in her gaps with bits of American women, could indeed re-create her from almost nothing, needing less than a rib, needing only the living germ of his infatuation, of his love. Already small things from here and there, kept alive by some kink in his forgetting mechanism, had begun to fly together and fit. A dance hall he had once walked upstairs to, off of war-darkened Broadway. A rabid but deft Trotskyite barber his father had patronized. The way New York’s side streets seek the sunset, and the way on Fifth Avenue hard-shinned women in sunglasses hurry past languorous mannequins in gilded robes, black-velvet cases of jewels wired to burglar alarms, shopwindows crying out ignored. But what would be the action of the book? It was a big book, he saw, with a blue jacket of coated stock and his unsmiling photo full on the back, bled top and bottom. What were its conflict, its issue, its outcome? The answer, like the title, came from so deep within him that it seemed a message from beyond: Suicide. His heroine must kill herself. Think big. His heart trembled in excitement, at the enormity of
his crime.

  “You’re tired,” Tuttle said, and went on, “I’ve seen the point raised about your work, that the kind of ethnic loyalty you display, loyalty to a narrow individualistic past, is divisive, and encourages war, and helps account for your reluctance to join the peace movement and the social revolution. How would you rebut this?”

  “Where did you see this point raised, did you say?”

  “Some review.”

  “What review? Are you sure you just didn’t make it up? I’ve seen some dumb things written about me, but never anything quite that vapid and doctrinaire.”

  “My attempt, Mr. Bech, is to elicit from you your opinions. If you find this an unfruitful area, let’s move on. Maybe I should stop the machine while you collect your thoughts. We’re wasting tape.”

  “Not to mention my lifeblood.” But Bech groggily tried to satisfy the boy; he described his melancholy feelings in the go-go place last night, his intuition that self-aggrandizement and entrepreneurial energy were what made the world go and that slogans and movements to the contrary were evil dreams, evil in that they distracted people from particular, concrete realities, whence all goodness and effectiveness derive. He was an Aristotelian and not a Platonist. Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He thought intelligence a function of the individual and that groups of persons were intelligent in inverse proportion to their size. Nations had the brains of an amoeba whereas a committee approached the condition of a trainable moron. He believed, if this tape recorder must know, in the goodness of something vs. nothing, in the dignity of the inanimate, the intricacy of the animate, the beauty of the average woman, and the common sense of the average man. The tape spun out its reel and ran flapping.

  Tuttle said, “That’s great stuff, Mr. Bech. One more session, and we should have it.”

  “Never, never, never, never,” Bech said. Something in his face drove Tuttle out the door. Bech fell asleep on his bed in his clothes. He awoke and found that Think Big had died. It had become a ghost of a book, an empty space beside the four faded spines that he had already brought to exist. Think Big had no content but wonder, which was a blankness. He thought back through his life—so many dreams and wakings, so many faces encountered and stoplights obeyed and streets crossed, and there was nothing solid. He had rushed through his life as through a badly chewed meal, leaving an ache of indigestion. In the beginning, the fresh flame of his spirit had burned everything clean—the entire gray city, stone and soot and stoops. Miles of cracked pavement had not been too much. He had gone to sleep on the sound of sirens and woken to the cries of fruit carts. There had been around him a sheltering ring of warm old tall bodies whose droning appeared to be wisdom, whose crooning and laughter seemed to be sifted down from the Great I Am presiding above the smoldering city’s lights. There had been classrooms smelling of eraser crumbs, and male pals from whom to learn loyalty and stoicism, and the first dizzying drag on a cigarette, and the first girl who let his hands linger, and the first joys of fabrication, of invention and completion.

  Then unreality had swept in. It was his fault; he had wanted to be noticed, to be praised. He had wanted to be a man in the world, a “writer.” For his punishment they had made from the sticks and mud of his words a coarse large doll to question and torment, which would not have mattered except that he was trapped inside the doll, shared a name and bank account with it. And the life that touched and brushed other people, that played across them like a saving breeze, could not break through the crust to him. He was, with all his brave talk to Tuttle of individual intelligence and the foolishness of groups, too alone.

  He telephoned Goldschmidt, Ltd., and was told Goldy was out to lunch. He called Merissa but her number did not answer. He went downstairs and tried to talk to the hotel doorman about the weather. “Well, sir, weather is weather, I find to be the case generally. Some days is fine, and others a bit dim. This sky today you’ll find is about what we generally have this time of the year. It’ll all average out when we’re in the grave, isn’t that the truth of it, sir?” Bech disliked being humored, and the gravedigger scene had never been one of his favorites. He went walking beneath the dispirited, homogenized sky, featureless but for some downward wisps of nimbus promising rain that never arrived. Where were the famous English clouds, the clouds of Constable and Shelley? He tried to transplant the daffodils to Riverside Park, for his novel, but couldn’t see them there, among those littered thickets hollowed by teen-aged layabouts bloodless with heroin, these British bulbs laid out in their loamy bed by ancient bowed men, the great-grandchildren of feudalism, who swept the paths where Bech walked with brooms, yes, and this was cheering, with brooms fashioned of twigs honestly bound together with twine. It began to rain.

  Bech became a docile tourist and interviewee. He bantered on the B.B.C. Third Programme with a ripe-voiced young Welshman. He read from his works to bearded youths at the London School of Economics, between strikes. He submitted to a cocktail party at the U.S. Embassy. He participated in a television discussion on the Collapse of the American Dream with an edgy homosexual historian whose toupee kept slipping; a mug-shaped small man who thirty years ago had invented a donnish verse form resembling the limerick; a preposterously rude young radical with puffed-out lips and a dominating stammer; and, chairing their discussion, a tall B.B.C. girl whose elongated hands kept arresting Bech in mid-sentence—she had pop eyes and a wild way of summing up, as if all the while she had been attending to angel-voices entirely her own. Bech let Merissa drive him, in her beige Fiat, to Stonehenge and Canterbury. At Canterbury she got into a fight with a verger about exactly where Becket had been stabbed. She took Bech to a concert in the Albert Hall, whose cavernous interior Bech drowsily confused with Victoria’s womb, and where he fell asleep. Afterward they went to a club with gaming rooms where Merissa, playing two blackjack hands simultaneously, lost sixty quid in twenty minutes. There was a professional fierceness about the way she sat at the green felt table that requickened his curiosity as to what she did. He was sure she did something. Her flat held a swept-off desk, and a bookcase shelf solid with reference works. Bech would have snooped, but he felt Isabella always watching him, and the daylight hours he spent here were few. Merissa told him her last name—Merrill, the name of her American husband—but fended off his other inquiries with the protest that he was being “writery” and the disarming request that he consider her as simply his “London episode.” But how did she live? She and her son and her maid. “Oh,” Merissa told him, “my father owns things. Don’t ask me what things. He keeps buying different ones.”

  He had not quite given up the idea of making her the heroine of his masterpiece. He must understand what it is like to be young now. “The other men you sleep with—what do you feel toward them?”

  “They seem nice at the time.”

  “At the time; and then afterward not so nice?”

  The suggestion startled her; from the way her eyes widened, she felt he was trying to insert evil into her world. “Oh yes, then too. They’re so grateful. Men are. They’re so grateful if you just make them a cup of tea in the morning.”

  “But where is it all going? Do you think about marrying again?”

  “Not much. That first go was pretty draggy. He kept saying things like, ‘Pick up your underwear,’ and, ‘In Asia they live on ninety dollars a year.’ ” Merissa laughed.

  Her hair was a miracle, spread out on the pillow in the morning light, a lustrous mass, every filament the same lucid black, a black that held red light within it as matter holds heat—whereas even of the hairs on his toes some had turned white. Gold names on an honor roll. As a character, Merissa would become a redhead, with that vulnerable freckled pallor redheads have and overlarge, uneven, earnest front teeth. Merissa’s te
eth were so perfectly spaced they seemed machined. Like her eyelashes. Stars with a talent for squad-drill. As she laughed, divulging the slippery grotto beyond her palate, Bech felt abhorrence rising in his throat. He looked toward the window; an airplane was descending from a ceiling of gray. He asked, “Do you take drugs?”