John Updike - The Complete Henry Bech (Everymans Library)

THE COMPLETE HENRYBECH BECH: A BOOK BECH IS BACK BECH IN CZECH JOHN UPDIKE PENGUIN BOOKS
Bech: A Book firstpublished in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1970 First published inGreat Britain by Andre Deutsch 1970 Published in Penguin Books1972 Bech is Back firstpublished in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1982 First published inGreat Britain by Andre Deutsch 1983 Published in PenguinBooks 1983 Published together asThe Complete Henry Bech in Penguin Books 1992 Seven of these storiesfirst appeared in the New Yorker: `The Bulgarian Poetess', `Bech in Rumania',`Bech Takes Pot Luck', `Richin Russia' (without appendix), `Bech Swings', `Three Illuminations in the Lifeof an American Author' and`Bech in Czech'. `Australia and Canada', `Bech Third-Worlds It' and `The Holy Land' originallyappeared in Playboy magazine.

The Czech in `Bech inCzech' is taken from the translation of `Bech Panics' by Antonin P!idat inMilenci a man*el (Odeon;Prague) Copyright JohnUpdike 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1975, 1979, 1982
Bech: A Book (1970)
Foreword Dear John, Well, if you must commit the artisticindecency of writing about a writer, better I suppose about me thanabout 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, thinningcurly hair), I sound like some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that London glimpse ofsilver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow, the King of the Leprechauns, than ofstolid old homely yours truly. My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and myancestral past out of I. B. Singer: I get a whiff of Malamud in your city breezes, and am Iparanoid 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 whodisembarks from an aeroplane, mouths words he doesn't quitemean, has vaguely to do with some woman, and gets back on the aeroplane, iscertainly one Henry Bech. Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary hasconcerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby Americareduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage. Envied like Negroes, disbelieved in likeangels, we veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writingdesk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Hallowe'en priests' robes a-rustle witheconomy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Cunt-of-the-MonthClub, amid a standing crowd of rueful, Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degeneratingin the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers, our formal designs crumbling like sandcastles under the feet of beach bullies, we nevertheless and incredibly support with ourdesperate efforts (just now, I had to look up `desperate' in the dictionary for the ninety-ninthtime, forgetting again if it is spelled with two `a's or three `e's) a flourishing culture ofpublishers, agents, editors, tutors, Timeniks, media personnel in all shades of suavity,chic, and sexual gusto.

When I think of the matings, the moaning, jubilant fornicationsbetween ectomorphic oversexed junior editors and svelte hot-from-Wellesleymajored-in-English-minored-in-philosophy female coffee-fetchers and receptionists thathave 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 Elmer's glue as a masturbator'sbedsheet; the office boys use them for tea-trays), I could mutilate myself like sainted Origen, Icould keen like Jeremiah. Thank Jahweh these bordellos in the sky can soon dispense with theexcuse of us entirely; already the contents of a book count as little as the contents of abreakfast cereal box. It is all a matter of the premium, and the shelf site, and the amountof air between the corn flakes. Never you mind. I'm sure that when with that blithegoyische brass I will never cease to grovel at you approached me for a `word or two by way ofpreface', you were bargaining for a benediction, not a curse. Here it is, then.

My blessing. I like some ofthe things in these accounts very much. The Communists are allgood good people. There is a moment by the sea, I've lost the page, that rang true. Hereand 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 yougave me, and a few of the jokes. By the way, I never unlike
retired light-versewriters make puns. But if you [here followed a list of suggested deletions, falsifications,suppressions, and rewordings, all of which have been scrupulously incorporated ED.], Idon't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm. Henry Bech Manhattan, 4-12 Dec. 1969
Rich in Russia Students (not unlike yourselves) compelledto 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 someessay 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.

Thepaperback rights to Travel Light were sold by his publisher outright for two thousand dollars,of which the publisher kept one thousand and Bech's agent one hundred (10 per centof 50 per cent). To be fair, the publisher had had to remainder a third of the modesthard-cover printing and, when Travel Light was enjoying its vogue as the post-Goldingpre-Tolkien fad of college undergraduates, would amusingly tell on himself the story of Bech'sgiven-away rights, at sales meetings upstairs in `21'. As to anthologies the averagepermissions fee, when it arrives at Bech's mailbox, has been eroded to $64.73, or some suchsuspiciously odd sum, which barely covers the cost of a restaurant meal with his mistressand a medium wine. Though Bech, and his too numerous interviewers, havemade a quixotic virtue of his continuing to live for twenty years in a grim if roomyRiverside Drive apartment building (the mailbox, students should know, where his pitifullynibbled cheques arrive has been well scarred by floating urban wrath, and his last name hasbeen so often ballpointed by playful lobby-loiterers into a somewhat assonant verb thatBech has left the name plate space blank and depends upon the clairvoyance ofmailmen), he in truth lives there because he cannot afford to leave. He was rich just once in hislife, and that was in Russia, in 1964, a thaw or so ago. Russia, in those days, like everywhereelse, was a slightly more innocent place.

Khruschev, freshlydeposed, had left an atmosphere, almost comical, of warmth, of a certain fitfulopenness, of inscrutable experiment and oblique possibility. There seemed no overweening reason whyRussia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globeso big and blue; there certainly seemed no reason why Henry Bech, the recherch butamiable novelist, artistically blocked but socially fluent, should not be flown into Moscow atthe expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activitytermed `cultural exchange'. Entering the Aeroflot plane at Le Bourget, Bech thought itsmelled like his uncles' backrooms in Williamsburg, of swaddled body heat and proximatepotatoes boiling*. The impression lingered all month; Russia seemed Jewish to him, and ofcourse he seemed Jewish to Russia. He never knew how much of the tenderness andhospitality he met related to his race. His contact man at the American Embassy a prissy,doleful ex-basketball-player from Wisconsin, with the all-star name of `Skip' Reynolds assured him that two out of every three Soviet intellectuals had suppressed a Jew intheir ancestry; and once Bech did find himself in a Moscow apartment whose bookcases werelined with photographs (of Kafka, Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein) pointedly evoking theglory of pre-Hitlerian Judenkultur.