Bech: A Book

by John Updike

  A ceremony was already in progress. Their discussions with the guards had consumed time. The bright stage far below them supported a magical tableau. On a curved dais composed of six or seven rows a hundred persons, mostly men, were seated. Though some of the men could be seen to move—one turned his head, another scratched his knee—their appearance in sum had an iron unity; they looked engraved. Each face, even at the distance of the balcony, displayed the stamp of extra precision that devout attention and frequent photography etch upon a visage; each had suffered the crystallization of fame. Young Henry saw that there were other types of Heaven, less agitated and more elevated than the school, more compact and less tragic than Yankee Stadium, where the scattered players, fragile in white, seemed about to be devoured by the dragon-shaped crowd. He knew, even before his mother, with the aid of a diagram provided on her program, began to name names, that under his eyes was assembled the flower of the arts in America, its rabbis and chieftains, souls who while still breathing enjoyed their immortality.

  The surface of their collective glory undulated as one or another would stand, shuffle outward from his row, seize the glowing lectern, and speak. Some rose to award prizes; others rose to accept them. They applauded one another with a polite rustle eagerly echoed and thunderously amplified by the anonymous, perishable crowd on the other side of the veil, a docile cloudy multitude stretching backwards from front rows of corsaged loved ones into the dim regions of the balcony where mere spectators sat, where little Bech stared dazzled while his mother busily bent above the identifying diagram. She located, and pointed out to him, with that ardor for navigational detail that had delayed their arrival here, Emil Nordquist, the Bard of the Prairie, the beetle-browed celebrant in irresistible vers libre of shocked corn and Swedish dairymaids; John Kingsgrant Forbes, New England’s dapper novelist of manners; Fenella Anne Collins, the wispy, mystical poet of impacted passion from Alabama, the most piquant voice in American verse since the passing of the Amherst recluse; the massive Jason Honeygale, Tennessee’s fabled word-torrent; hawk-eyed Torquemada Langguth, lover and singer of California’s sheer cliffs and sere unpopulated places; and Manhattan’s own Josh Glazer, Broadway wit, comedy-wright, lyricist, and Romeo. And there were squat bald sculptors with great curved thumbs; red-bearded painters like bespattered prophets; petite, gleaming philosophers who piped Greek catchwords into the microphone; stooped and drawling historians from the border states; avowed Communists with faces as dry as paper and black ribbons dangling from their pinces-nez; atonal composers delicately exchanging awards and reminiscences of Paris, the phrases in French nasally cutting across their speech like accented trombones; sibylline old women with bronze faces—all of them unified, in the eyes of the boy Bech, by not only the clothy dark mass of their clothes and the brilliance of the stage but by their transcendence of time: they had attained the fixity of lasting accomplishment and exempted themselves from the nagging nuisance of growth and its twin (which he precociously felt in himself even then, especially in his teeth), decay. He childishly assumed that, though unveiled every May, they sat like this eternally, in the same iron arrangement, beneath this domed ceiling of scrolls and stars.

  At last the final congratulation was offered, and the final modest acceptance enunciated. Bech and his mother turned to re-navigate the maze of staircases. They were both shy of speaking, but she sensed, in the abstracted way he clung to her side, neither welcoming nor cringing from her touch when she reached to reassure him in the crowd, that his attention had been successfully turned. His ears were red, showing that an inner flame had been lit. She had set him on a track, a track that must be—Abigail Bech ignored a sudden qualm, like a rude jostling from behind—the right one.

  Bech never dared hope to join that pantheon. Those faces of the Thirties, like the books he began to read, putting aside baseball statistics forever, formed a world impossibly high and apart, an immutable text graven on the stone brow—his confused impression was—of Manhattan. In middle age, it would startle him to realize that Louis Bromfield, say, was no longer considered a sage, that van Vechten, Cabell, and John Erskine had become as obscure as the famous gangsters of the same period, and that an entire generation had grown to wisdom without once chuckling over a verse by Arthur Guiterman or Franklin P. Adams. When Bech received, in an envelope not so unlike those containing solicitations to join the Erotica Book Club or the Associated Friends of Apache Education, notice of his election to a society whose title suggested that of a merged church, with an invitation to its May ceremonial, he did not connect the honor with his truant afternoon of over three decades ago. He accepted, because in his fallow middle years he hesitated to decline any invitation, whether it was to travel to Communist Europe or to smoke marijuana. His working day was brief, his living day was long, and there always lurked the hope that around the corner of some impromptu acquiescence he would encounter, in a flurry of apologies and excitedly mis-aimed kisses, his long-lost mistress, Inspiration. He took a taxi north on the appointed day. By chance he was let off at a side entrance in no way reminiscent of the august frontal approach he had once ventured within the shadow of his mother. Inside the bronze door, Bech was greeted by a mini-skirted administrative assistant who, licking her lips and perhaps unintentionally bringing her pelvis to within an inch of his, pinned his name in plastic to his lapel and, as a tantalizing afterthought (the tip of her tongue exposed in playful concentration), adjusted the knot of his necktie. Other such considerate houris were supervising arrivals, separating antique belle-lettrists from their overcoats with philatelic care, steering querulously nodding poetesses toward the elevator, administering the distribution of gaudy heaps of name tags, admission cards, and coded numerals.

  Bech asked his assistant, “Am I supposed to do anything?”

  She said, “When your name is announced, stand.”

  “Do I take the elevator?”

  She patted his shoulders and tugged one of his earlobes. “I think you’re a young enough body,” she judged, “to use the stairs.”

  He obediently ascended a thronged marble stairway and found himself amid a cloud of murmuring presences; a few of the faces were familiar—Tory Ingersoll, a tireless old huckster, his androgynous features rigid in their carapace of orangish foundation, who had in recent years plugged himself into hipsterism and become a copious puffist and anthologist for the “new” poetry, whether concrete, non-associative, neogita, or plain protest; Irving Stern, a swarthy, ruminative critic of Bech’s age and background, who for all his strenuous protests of McLuhanite openness had never stopped squinting through the dour goggles of Leninist aesthetics, and whose own prose style tasted like aspirin tablets being chewed; Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues, her name as polyglot as her marriages, her weight-lifter’s shoulders and generous slash of a wise whore’s mouth perversely dwindled in print to a trickle of elliptic dimeters; Char Ecktin, the revolutionary young dramatist whose foolish smile and high-pitched chortle consorted oddly with the facile bitterness of his dénouements—but many more were half-familiar, faces dimly known, like those of bit actors in B movies, or like those faces which emerge from obscurity to cap a surprisingly enthusiastic obituary, or those names which figure small on title pages, as translator, co-editor, or “as told to,” faces whose air of recognizability might have been a matter of ghostly family resemblance, or of a cocktail party ten years ago, or a P.E.N. meeting, or of a moment in a bookstore, an inside flap hastily examined and then resealed into the tight bright row of the unpurchased. In this throng Bech heard his name softly called, and felt his sleeve lightly plucked. But he did not lift his eyes for fear of shattering the spell, of disturbing the penumbral decorum and rustle around him. They came to the end of their labyrinthine climb, and were ushered down a dubiously narrow corridor. Bech hesitated, as even the dullest steer hesitates in the slaughterer’s chute, but the pressure behind moved him on, outward, into a spotlit tangle of groping men and scraping chairs. He was on a stage. Chairs were arranged
in curved tiers. Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues waved an alabaster, muscular arm: “Yoo-hoo, Henry, over here. Come be a B with me.” She even spoke now—so thoroughly does art corrupt the artist—in dimeters. Willingly he made his way upwards toward her. Always, in his life, no matter how underfurnished in other respects, there had been a woman to shelter beside. The chair beside her bore his name. On the seat of the chair was a folded program. On the back of the program was a diagram. The diagram fitted a memory, and looking outward, into the populated darkness that reached backwards into a balcony, beneath a ceiling dimly decorated with toylike protrusions of plaster, Bech suspected, at last, where he was. With the instincts of a literary man he turned to printed matter for confirmation; he bent over the diagram and, yes, found his name, his number, his chair. He was here. He had joined that luminous, immutable tableau. He had crossed to the other side.

  Now that forgotten expedition with his mother returned to him, and their climb through those ramifications of marble, a climb that mirrored, but profanely, the one he had just taken within sacred precincts; and he deduced that this building was vast twice over, an arch-like interior meeting in this domed auditorium where the mortal and the immortal could behold one another, through a veil that blurred and darkened the one and gave to the other a supernatural visibility, the glow and precision of Platonic forms. He studied his left hand—his partner in numerous humble crimes, his delegate in many furtive investigations—and saw it partaking, behind the flame-blue radiance of his cuff, joint by joint, to the quicks of his fingernails, in the fine articulation found less in reality than in the Promethean anatomical studies of Leonardo and Raphael.

  Bech looked around; the stage was filling. He seemed to see, down front, where the stage light was most intense, the oft-photographed (by Steichen, by Karsh, by Cartier-Bresson) profile and vivid cornsilk hair of—it couldn’t be—Emil Nordquist. The Bard of the Prairie still lived! He must be a hundred. No, well, if in the mid-Thirties he was in his mid-forties, he would be only eighty now. While Bech, that pre-adolescent, was approaching fifty: time had treated him far more cruelly.

  And now, through the other wing of the stage, from the elevator side, moving with the agonized shuffle-step of a semiparalytic but still sartorially formidable in double-breasted chalkstripes and a high starched collar, entered John Kingsgrant Forbes, whose last perceptive and urbane examination of Beacon Hill mores had appeared in World War II, during the paper shortage. Had Bech merely imagined his obituary?

  “Arriveth our queen,” Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues sardonically murmured on his left, with that ambiguous trace of a foreign accent, the silted residue of her several husbands. And to Bech’s astonishment in came, supported on the courtly arm of Jason Honeygale, whose epic bulk had shriveled to folds of veined hide draped over stegosaurian bones, the tiny tottering figure of Fenella Anne Collins, wearing the startled facial expression of the blind. She was led down front, where the gaunt figure of Torquemada Langguth, his spine bent nearly double, his falconine crest now white as an egret’s, rose to greet her and feebly to adjust her chair.

  Bech murmured leftwards, “I thought they were all dead.”

  Mildred airily answered, “We find it better, not to die.”

  A shadow plumped brusquely down in the chair on Bech’s right; it was—O, monstrous!—Josh Glazer. His proximity seemed to be a patron’s, for he told Bech windily, “Jesus Christ, Bech, I’ve been plugging you for years up here, but the bastards always said, ‘Let’s wait until he writes another book, that last one was such a flop.’ Finally I say to them, ‘Look. The son of a bitch, he’s never going to write another book,’ so they say, ‘O.K., let’s let him the hell in.’ Welcome aboard, Bech. Christ I’ve been a raving fan of yours since the Year One. When’re you gonna try a comedy, Broadway’s dead on its feet.” He was deaf, his hair was dyed black, and his teeth were false too, for his blasts of breath carried with them a fetid smell of trapped alcohol and of a terrible organic something that suggested to Bech—touching a peculiar fastidiousness that was all that remained of his ancestors’ orthodoxy—the stench of decayed shellfish. Bech looked away and saw everywhere on this stage dissolution and riot. The furrowed skulls of philosophers lolled in a Bacchic stupor. Wicked smirks flickered back and forth among faces enshrined in textbooks. Eustace Chubb, America’s poetic conscience throughout the Cold War, had holes in his socks and mechanically chafed a purple sore on his shin. Anatole Husac, the Father of Neo-Figurism, was sweating out a drug high, his hands twitching like suffocating fish. As the ceremony proceeded, not a classroom of trade-school dropouts could have been more impudently inattentive. Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues persistently tickled the hairs on Bech’s wrist with the edge of her program; Josh Glazer offered him a sip from a silver flask signed by the Gershwin brothers. The leonine head—that of a great lexicographer—directly in front of Bech drifted sideways and emitted illegible snores. The Medal for Modern Fiction was being awarded to Kingsgrant Forbes; the cello-shaped presenter (best known for his scrupulous editorship of the six volumes of Hamlin Garland’s correspondence) began his speech, “In these sorry days of so-called Black Humor, of the fictional apotheosis of the underdeveloped,” and a tall black man in the middle of Bech’s row stood, spoke a single expletive, and, with much scraping of chairs, made his way from the stage. A series of grants was bestowed. One of the recipients, a tiptoeing fellow in a mauve jump suit, hurled paper streamers toward the audience and bared his chest to reveal painted there a psychedelic pig labeled Milhaus; at this, several old men, an Arizona naturalist and a New Deal muralist, stamped off, and for a long time could be heard buzzing for the elevator. The sardonic hubbub waxed louder. Impatience set in. “Goddammit,” Josh Glazer breathed to Bech, “I’m paying a limousine by the hour downstairs, and I’ve got a helluva cute little fox waiting for me at the Plaza.”

  At last the time came to introduce the new members. The citations were read by a farsighted landscape painter who had trouble bringing his papers, the lectern light, and his reading glasses into mutual adjustment at such short focus. “Henry Bech,” he read, pronouncing it “Betch,” and Bech obediently stood. The spotlights dazzled him; he had the sensation of being microscopically examined, and of being strangely small. When he stood, he had expected to rear into a man’s height, and instead rose no taller than a child.

  “A native New Yorker,” the citation began, “who has chosen to sing of the continental distances—”

  Bech wondered why writers in official positions were always supposed to “sing”; he couldn’t remember the last time he had even hummed.

  “—a son of Israel loyal to Melville’s romanticism—”

  He went around telling interviewers Melville was his favorite author, but he hadn’t gotten a third of the way through Pierre.

  “—a poet in prose whose polish precludes pre- —pro- —pardon me, these are new bifocals—”

  Laughter from the audience. Who was out there in that audience?

  “—let me try again: whose polish precludes prolificacy—”

  His mother was out there in that audience!

  “—a magician of metaphor—”

  She was there, right down front, basking in the reflected stagelight, an orchid corsage pinned to her bosom.

  “—and a friend of the human heart.”

  But she had died after the war, in Brooklyn’s Interfaith Medical Center. As the applause washed in, Bech saw that the old lady with the corsage was applauding only politely, she was not his mother but somebody else’s, maybe of the boy with the pig on his stomach, though for a moment, a trick of the light, something determined and expectant in the tilt of her head, something hopeful … The light in his eyes turned to warm water. His applause ebbed away. He sat down. Mildred nudged him. Josh Glazer shook his hand, too violently. Bech tried to clear his vision by contemplating the backs of the heads. They were blank: blank shabby backs of a cardboard tableau lent substance only by the credulous, by hopeful mothers
and their children. His knees trembled, as if after an arduous climb. He had made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what?

  APPENDICES

  APPENDIX A

  We are grateful for permission to reprint corroborating excerpts from the unpublished Russian journal of Henry Bech. The journal, physically, is a faded red Expenses diary, measuring 7⅜″ by 4¼″, stained by Moscow brandy and warped by Caucasian dew. The entries, of which the latter are kept in red ballpoint pen, run from October 20, 1964, to December 6, 1964. The earliest are the fullest.

  I

  OCT. 20. Flight from NY at midnight, no sleep, Pan Am kept feeding me. Beating against the sun, soon dawn. Paris strange passing through by bus, tattered tired sepia sets of second-rate opera being wheeled through, false cheer of café awnings, waiting for chorus of lamplighters. Orly to Le Bourget. Moscow plane a new world. Men in dark coats waiting bunched. Solemn as gangsters. Overhead first understood Russian word, Americanski, pronounced with wink toward me by snaggle-toothed gent putting bulky black coat in overhead rack. Rack netted cord, inside ribs of plane show, no capitalist plastic. Stewardesses not our smoothly extruded tarts but hefty flesh; served us real potatoes, beef sausage, borsch. Aeroflot a feast afloat. Crowded happy stable smell, animal heat in cold stable, five miles up. Uncles’ back rooms in Wmsburg. Babble around me, foreign languages strangely soothing, at home in Babel. Fell asleep on bosom of void, grateful to be alive, home. Woke in dark again. Earth’s revolution full in my face. Moscow dim on ocean of blackness, delicate torn veil, shy of electricity, not New York, that rude splash. Premonition: no one will meet. Author Disappears Behind Iron Curtain. Bech Best Remembered for Early Work. A delegation with roses waiting for me on other side of glass pen, wait for hours, on verge of Russia, decompressing. Time different here, steppes of time, long dully lit terminal, empty of ads. Limousine driven by voiceless back of head, sleigh driver in Tolstoy, long haul to Moscow, a wealth of darkness, gray birches, slim, young, far from gnarled American woods. In hotel spelled out waiting for elevator, French hidden beneath the Cyrillic. Everywhere, secrets.