by John Updike
II
OCT. 23. Met Sobaka, head of Writers’ U. Building Tolstoy’s old manse, dining room baronial oak. Litterateurs live like aristocrats. Sobaka has lipless mouth, wild bark, must have strangled men with bare hands. Tells me long story of love of his poetry expressed by coalminers in the Urals. Skip translating: “… then, here in … the deepest part of the mine … by only the light of, uh, carbon lights in the miners’ caps … for three hours I recited … from the works of my youth, lyrics of the fields and forests of Byelorussia. Never have I known such enthusiasm. Never have I possessed such inspiration, such, ah, powers of memory. At the end … they wept to see me depart … these simple miners … their coal-blackened faces streaked, ah, veined with the silver of tears.”
“Fantastic,” I say.
“Fantastichni,” Skip translates.
Sobaka makes Skip ask me if I like the image, their faces of coal veined with silver.
“It’s good,” say I.
“Korosho,” says Skip.
“The earth weeps precious metal,” I say. “The world’s working people weep at the tyranny of capital.”
Skip guffaws but translates, and Sobaka reaches under table and seizes my thigh in murderous pinch of conspiracy.
NOV. 12. Back in Moscow, lunch at W.U. Sobaka in fine form, must have chopped off somebody’s index finger this morning. Says trip to Irkutsk hazardous, airport might get snowed in. Hee hee hee. Suggests Kazakhstan instead, I say why not?—nichyvo. Eyeball to eyeball. He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed. His mouth engulfs the glass and crunches. I think of what my dentist would say, my beautiful gold caps.…
NOV. 19.… I ask Kate where Sobaka is, she pretends not to hear. Skip tells me later he was friend of Khrush., hung on for while, now non-person. I miss him. My strange weakness for cops and assassins: their sense of craftsmanship?
III
NOV. 1. Off to Caucasus with Skip, Mrs. R., Kate. Fog, no planes for twenty-four hours. Airport crammed with hordes of sleeping. Soldiers, peasants, an epic patience. Sleeping on clothy heaps of each other, no noise of complaint. Many types of soldier uniform, long coats. Kate after twelve hours bullies way onto plane, pointing to me as Guest of the State, fierce performance. Engines screaming, officials screaming, she screaming. Get on plane at 2 A.M., amid bundles, chickens, gypsies, sit opposite pair of plump fortune tellers who groan and (very discreetly) throw up all the way to Tbilisi. Ears ache in descent; no pressurization. Birds in airport, in and out, remind me of San Juan. Happy, sleepless. Sun on hills, flowers like oleanders. Hotel as in Florida Keys in Bogart movies, sour early morning service, a bracing sense of the sinister. Great fist-shaking Lenin statue in traffic circle. Flies buzz in room.
NOV. 2. Slept till noon. Reynolds wakes with phone call. He and Mrs. caught later plane. Cowboys and Indians, even my escorts have escorts. We go in two cars to Pantheon on hill, Georgian escort lantern-jawed professor of aesthetics. Cemetery full of funny alphabet, big stone he says with almost tear in eye called simply “Mother.” Reynolds clues me sotto voce it’s Stalin’s mother. Had been statue of S. here so big it killed two workmen when they pulled it down. Supper with many Georgian poets, toasts in white wine, my own toasts keep calling them “Russians” which Kate corrects in translation to “Georgians.” Author of epic infatuated with Mrs. R., strawberry blonde from Wisconsin. Puts hands on thighs, kisses throat, Skip grins sheepishly, what he’s here for, to improve relations. Cable car down the mountain, Tbilisi a-spangle under us, all drunk, singing done in pit of throat, many vibrations, hillbilly mournfulness, back to bed. Same flies buzz.
NOV. 3. Car ride to Muxtyeta, oldest church in Christendom, professor of aesthetics ridicules God, chastity, everybody winces. Scaldingly clear blue sky, church a ruddy octagonal ruin with something ancient and pagan in the center. Went to lunch with snowy-haired painter of breasts. These painters of a sleazy ethnic softness, of flesh like pastel landscapes, landscapes like pastel flesh. Where are the real artists, the cartoonists who fill Krokodil with fanged bankers and cadaverous Adenauers, the anonymous Chardins of industrial detail? Hidden from me, like missile sites and working ports. Of the Russian cake they give me only frosting. By train to Armenia. We all share a four-bunk sleeper. Ladies undress below me, see Kate’s hand dislodge beige buttoned canvasy thing, see circlet of lace flick past Ellen Reynolds’s pale round knee. Closeted with female flesh and Skip’s supercilious snore expect to stay awake, but fall asleep in top bunk like child among nurses. Yerevan station at dawn. The women, puffy-eyed and mussed, claim night of total insomnia. Difficulty of women sleeping on trains, boats, where men are soothed. Distrust of machinery? Sexual stimulation, Claire saying she used to come just from sitting on vibrating subway seat, never the IRT, only the IND. Took at least five stops.
NOV. 4. Svartz-Notz. Armenian cathedral. Old bones in gold bands. Our escort has withered arm, war record, dear smile, writing long novel about 1905 uprising. New city pink and mauve stone, old one Asiatic heaped rubble. Ruins of Alexander’s palace, passed through on way to India. Gorgeous gorge.
NOV. 5. Lake Sevan, grim gray sulphuric beach, lowered lake six feet to irrigate land. Land dry and rosy. Back at hotel, man stopped in lobby, recognized me, here from Fresno visiting relatives, said he couldn’t finish The Chosen, asked for autograph. Dinner with Armenian science fiction writers, Kate in her element, they want to know if I know Ray Bradbury, Marshall McLuhan, Vance Packard, Mitchell Wilson. I don’t. Oh. I say I know Norman Podhoretz and they ask if he wrote Naked and Dead.
NOV. 6. Long drive to “working” monastery. Two monks live in it. Chapel carved from solid rock, bushes full of little strips of cloth, people make a wish. Kate borrows my handkerchief, tears off strip, ties to bush, make a wish. Blushes when I express surprise. Ground littered with sacrificial bones. In courtyard band of farmers having ceremonial cookout honoring birth of son. Insist we join them, Reynoldses tickled pink, hard for American diplomats to get to clambake like this, real people. Priest scruffy sly fellow with gold fangs in beard. Armenians all wearing sneakers, look like Saroyan characters. Flies in wine, gobbets of warm lamb, blessings, toasts heavily directed toward our giggling round-kneed strawberry-blonde Ellen R. As we leave we glimpse real monk, walking along tumbledown parapet. Unexpectedly young. Pale, expressionless, very remote. A spy? Dry lands make best saints. Reynoldses both sick from effects of people’s feast, confined to hotel while Kate and I, hardened sinners, iron stomachs, go to dinner with white-haired artist, painter of winsome faces, sloe eyes, humanoid fruit, etc.
NOV. 7. Woke to band music; today Revolution Day. Should be in Red Square, but Kate talked me out of it. Smaller similar parade here, in square outside hotel. Overlook while eating breakfast of blini and caviar parade of soldiers, red flags, equipment enlarging phallically up to rockets, then athletes in different colors like gumdrops, swarm at end of children, people, citizens, red dresses conspicuous. Kate kept clucking tongue and saying she hates war. Reynoldses still rocky, hardly eat. Ellen admires my digestive toughness, I indifferent to her praise. Am I falling in love with Kate? Feel insecure away from her side, listen to her clear throat and toss in hotel room next to me. We walk in sun, I jostle to get between her and withered arm, jealous when they talk in Rooski, remember her blush when she tied half my torn hanky to that supernatural bush. What was her wish? Time to leave romantic Armenia. Back to Moscow by ten, ears ache fearfully in descent. Bitter cold, dusting of snow. Napoleon trembles.
IV
This sample letter, never sent, was found enclosed in the journal. “Claire” appears to have been the predecessor, in Bech’s affections, of Miss Norma Latchett. Reprinted by permission, all rights © Henry Bech.
DEAR CLAIRE:
I am back in Moscow, after three days in Leningrad, an Italian opera set begrimed by years in an arctic warehouse and populated by a million out-of-work baritone villains. Today, the American Ambassador gave me
a dinner to which no Russians came, because of something they think we did in the Congo, and I spent the whole time discussing shoes with Mrs. Ambassador, who hails originally, as she put it, from Charleston. She even took her shoe off so I could hold it—it was strange, warm, small. How are you? Can you feel my obsolete ardor? Can you taste the brandy? I live luxuriously, in the hotel where visiting plenipotentiaries from the Emperor of China are lodged, and Arabs in white robes leave oil trails down the hall. There may be an entire floor of English homosexual defectors, made over on the model of Cambridge digs. Lord, it’s lonely, and bits of you—the silken depression beside each anklebone, the downy rhomboidal small of your back—pester me at night as I lie in exiled majesty, my laborious breathing being taped by threescore OGPU rookies. You were so beautiful. What happened? Was it all me, my fearful professional gloom, my Flaubertian syphilitic impotence? Or was it your shopgirl go-go brass, that held like a pornographic novel in a bureau (your left nipple was the drawer pull) a Quaker A-student from Darien? We turned each other inside out, it seemed to me, and made all those steak restaurants in the East Fifties light up like seraglios under bombardment. I will never be so young again. I am transported around here like a brittle curio; plug me into the nearest socket and I spout red, white, and blue. The Soviets like me because I am redolent of the oppressive Thirties. I like them for the same reason. You, on the other hand, were all Sixties, a bath of sequins and glowing pubic tendrils. Forgive my unconscionable distance, our preposterous prideful parting, the way our miraculously synchronized climaxes came to nothing, like novae. Oh, I send you such airmail lost love, Claire, from this very imaginary place, the letter may beat the plane home, and jump into your refrigerator, and nestle against the illuminated parsley as if we had never said unforgivable things.
H.
Folded into the letter, as a kind of postscript, a picture postcard. On the obverse, in bad color, a picture of an iron statue, male. On the reverse, this message:
Dear Claire: What I meant to
say in my unsent letter was that
you were so good to me, good for
me, there was a goodness in me you
brought to birth. Virtue is so rare,
I thank you forever. The man on the
other side is Mayakovsky, who shot
himself and thereby won Stalin’s un-
dying love. Henry
Gay with Sputnik stamps, the card passed through the mails uncensored and was waiting for him when he at last returned from his travels and turned the key of his stifling, airless, unchanged apartment. It had been strenuously canceled. The lack of any accompanying note was eloquent. He and Claire never communicated again, though for a time Bech would open the telephone directory to the page where her number was encircled and hold it on his lap.—ED.
APPENDIX B
Bibliography
1. Books by Henry Bech (b. 1923, d. 19—)
Travel Light, novel. New York: The Vellum Press, 1955. London: J. J. Goldschmidt, 1957.
Brother Pig, novella. New York: The Vellum Press, 1957. London: J. J. Goldschmidt, 1958.
When the Saints, miscellany. [Contents: “Uncles and Dybbuks,” “Subway Gum,” “A Vote For Social Unconsciousness,” “Soft-Boiled Sergeants,” “The Vanishing Wisecrack,” “Graffiti,” “Sunsets Over Jersey,” “The Arabian Nights at Your Own Pace,” “Orthodoxy and Orthodontics,” “Rag Bag” (collection of book reviews), “Displeased in the Dark” (collection of cinema reviews), forty-three untitled paragraphs under the head of “Tumblers Clicking.”] New York: The Vellum Press, 1958.
The Chosen, novel. New York: The Vellum Press, 1963. London: J. J. Goldschmidt, 1963.
The Best of Bech, anthology. London: J. J. Goldschmidt, 1968. [Contains Brother Pig and selected essays from When the Saints.]
Think Big, novel. [In progress.]
2. Uncollected Articles and Short Stories
“Stee-raight’n Yo’ Shoulduhs, Boy!”, Liberty, XXXIV.33 (August 21, 1943) 62–63.
“Home for Hannukah,” Saturday Evening Post, CCXVII.2 (January 8, 1944) 45–46, 129–133.
“Kosher Konsiderations,” Yank, IV.4 (January 26, 1944) 6.
“Rough Crossing,” Collier’s, XLIV (February 22, 1944) 23–25.
“London Under Buzzbombs,” New Leader, XXVII. 11 (March 11, 1944) 9.
“The Cockney Girl,” Story, XIV.3 (May–June, 1944) 68–75.
“V-Mail from Brooklyn,” Saturday Evening Post, CCXVII.25 (June 30, 1944) 28–29, 133–137.
“Letter from Normandy,” New Leader, XXVII.29 (July 15, 1944) 6.
“Hey, Yank!,” Liberty, XXXV.40 (September 17, 1944) 48–49.
“Letter from the Bulge,” New Leader, XXVIII.1 (January 3, 1945) 6.
“Letter from the Reichstag,” New Leader, XXVIII.23 (June 9, 1945) 4.
“Fräulein, kommen Sie hier, bitte,” The Partisan Review, XII (October, 1945), 413–431.
“Rubble” [poem], Tomorrow, IV.7 (December, 1945) 45.
“Soap” [poem], The Nation, CLXII (June 22, 1946) 751.
“Ivan in Berlin,” Commentary, I.5 (August, 1946) 68–77.
“Jig-a-de-Jig,” Liberty, XXVII.47 (October 15, 1946) 38–39.
“Novels from the Wreckage,” New York Times Book Review, LII (January 19, 1947) 6.
The bulk of Bech’s reviews, articles, essays, and prose-poems 1947–58 were reprinted in When the Saints (see above). Only exceptions are listed below.
“My Favorite Reading in 1953,” New York Times Book Review, LXVII (December 25, 1953) 2.
“Smokestacks” [poem], Poetry, LXXXIV.5 (August, 1954) 249–50.
“Larmes d’huile” [poem], Accent, XV.4 (Autumn, 1955) 101.
“Why I Will Vote for Adlai Stevenson Again” [part of paid political advertisement printed in various newspapers], October, 1956.
“My Favorite Salad,” McCall’s, XXXIV.4 (April, 1957) 88.
“Nihilistic? Me?” [interview with Lewis Nichols], New York Times Book Review, LXI (October 12, 1957) 17–18, 43.
“Rain King for a Day,” New Republic, CXL.3 (January 19, 1959) 22–23.
“The Eisenhower Years: Instant Nostalgia,” Esquire, LIV.8 (August, 1960) 54–61.
“Lay Off, Norman,” The New Republic, CXLI.22 (May 14, 1960) 19–20.
“Bogie: The Tic That Told All,” Esquire, LV.10 (October, 1960) 44–45, 108–111.
“The Landscape of Orgasm,” House and Garden, XXI.3 (December, 1960) 136–141.
“The Moth on the Pin,” Commentary, XXXI (March, 1961) 223–224.
“Iris and Muriel and Atropos,” New Republic, CXLIV.20 (May 15, 1961) 16–17.
“Superscrew,” Big Table, II.3 (Summer, 1961), 64–79.
“M-G-M and the U.S.A.,” Commentary, XXXII (October, 1961) 305–316.
“My Favorite Christmas Carol,” Playboy, VIII. 12 (December, 1961) 289.
“The Importance of Beginning with a B: Barth, Borges, and Others,” Commentary, XXXIII (February, 1962) 136–142.
“Down in Dallas” [poem], New Republic, CXLVI.49 (December 2, 1963) 28.
“My Favorite Three Books of 1963,” New York Times Book Review, LXVII (December 19, 1963) 2.
“Daniel Fuchs: An Appreciation,” Commentary, XLI.2 (February, 1964) 39–45.
“Silence,” The Hudson Review, XVII (Summer, 1964) 258–275.
“Rough Notes from Tsardom,” Commentary, XLI.2 (February, 1965) 39–47.
“Frightened Under Kindly Skies” [poem], Prairie Schooner, XXXIX.2 (Summer, 1965) 134.
“The Eternal Feminine As It Hits Me” [contribution to a symposium], Rogue, III.2 (February, 1966) 69.
“What Ever Happened to Jason Honeygale?” Esquire, LXI.9 (September, 1966) 70–73, 194–198.
“The Romantic Agony Under Truman: A Reminiscence,” New American Review, III (April, 1968) 59–81.
“My Three Least Favorite Books of 1968,” Book World, VI (December 20, 1968) 13.
3. Critical Articles Concerning (
Selected List)
Prescott, Orville, “More Dirt,” New York Times, October 12, 1955.
Weeks, Edward, “Travel Light Heavy Reading,” Atlantic Monthly, CCI.10 (October, 1955) 131–132.
Kirkus Service, Virginia, “Search for Meaning in Speed,” XXIV (October 11, 1955).
Time, “V-v-vrooom!,” LXXII.17 (October 12, 1955) 98.