John Updike - Rich in Russia

JOHN UPDIKE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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Selected from Bech: A Book, first published in 1970 and republished as part of The Complete Henry Bech in Penguin Classics 1992

This edition published in Penguin Classics 2011

Copyright John Updike, 1970

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN : 978-0-14-197123-0

JOHN UPDIKE

Born 18 March 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania

Died 27 January 2009, Danvers, Massachusetts

Foreword, Rich in Russia, Bech in Rumania, Appendix A and Appendix B first appeared in book form in Bech: A Book in 1970.

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There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past

Dear John,

Well, if you must commit the artistic indecency of writing about a writer, better I suppose about me than about you. Except, reading along in these, I wonder if it is me, enough me, purely me. At first blush, for example, in Bulgaria (eclectic sexuality, bravura narcissism, thinning curly hair), I sound like some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that London glimpse of silver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow, the King of the Leprechauns, than of stolid old homely yours truly. My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and my ancestral past out of I. B. Singer. I get a whiff of Malamud in your city breezes, and am I paranoid to feel my block an ignoble version of the more or less noble renunciations of H. Roth, D. Fuchs, and J. Salinger? Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you.

Yet you are right. This monotonous hero who disembarks from an aeroplane, mouths words he doesnt quite mean, has vaguely to do with some woman, and gets back on the aeroplane, is certainly one Henry Bech. Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage. Envied like Negroes, disbelieved in like angels, we veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Halloween priests robes a-rustle with economy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Cunt-of-the-Month Club, amid a standing crowd of rueful, Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degenerating in the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers, our formal designs crumbling like sand castles under the feet of beach bullies, we nevertheless and incredibly support with our desperate efforts (just now, I had to look up desperate in the dictionary for the ninety-ninth time, forgetting again if it is spelled with two as or three es) a flourishing culture of publishers, agents, editors, tutors, Timeniks, media personnel in all shades of suavity, chic, and sexual gusto. When I think of the matings, the moaning, jubilant fornications between ectomorphic oversexed junior editors and svelte hot-from-Wellesley majored-in-English-minored-in-philosophy female coffee-fetchers and receptionists that have been engineered with the lever of some of my poor scratched-up and pasted-over pages (they arrive in the editorial offices as stiff with Elmers glue as a masturbators bedsheet; the office boys use them for tea-trays), I could mutilate myself like sainted Origen, I could keen like Jeremiah. Thank Jahweh these bordellos in the sky can soon dispense with the excuse of us entirely; already the contents of a book count as little as the contents of a breakfast cereal box. It is all a matter of the premium, and the shelf site, and the amount of air between the corn flakes. Never you mind. Im sure that when with that blithe goyische brass I will never cease to grovel at you approached me for a word or two by way of preface, you were bargaining for a benediction, not a curse.

Here it is, then. My blessing. I like some of the things in these accounts very much. The Communists are all good good people. There is a moment by the sea, Ive lost the page, that rang true. Here and there passages seem overedited, constipated: you prune yourself too hard. With prose, there is no way to get it out, I have found, but to let it run. I liked some of the women you gave me, and a few of the jokes. By the way, I never unlike retired light-verse writers make puns. But if you [here followed a list of suggested deletions, falsifications, suppressions, and rewordings, all of which have been scrupulously incorporated ED. ], I dont suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm.

Henry Bech

Manhattan,

412 Dec. 1969

Students (not unlike yourselves) compelled to buy paperback copies of his novels notably the first, Travel Light, though there has lately been some academic interest in his more surreal and existential and perhaps even anarchist second novel, Brother Pig or encountering some essay from When the Saints in a shiny heavy anthology of mid-century literature costing $12.50, imagine that Henry Bech, like thousands less famous than he, is rich. He is not. The paperback rights to Travel Light were sold by his publisher outright for two thousand dollars, of which the publisher kept one thousand and Bechs agent one hundred (10 per cent of 50 per cent). To be fair, the publisher had had to remainder a third of the modest hard-cover printing and, when