Bourgeois decadence
JOHN BRAINE
Bech: A Book John Updike (Andre Deutsch 30s)
I can remember the time, discovering Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Farrell, O'Hara, when the chief feature of American fiction seemed to me its enormous vitality and enormous range. American writers were as much- at home with bootleggers as with bankers, with hoboes as with estate agents—they looked at the whole of society. And their prose derived from common speech, it was idiomatic without self-con- sciousness, they had voices rather than styles.
My impression now is of an increasing constriction and dryness, of a language which has gone further and further away from the spoken word, which is more and more derived from literature. I say 'a language' deliberately; the styles of the present generation of American writers are curiously uniform. I find it very difficult, for example, to distinguish between the prose of Peter de Vries, John Cheever, or John Updike—or, for that matter, their books. But who could get mixed up between John O'Hara, James - Farrell, and Scott Fitzgerald? Alongside this uniformity of style is uniformity of subject. Predominantly the main characters are liberal intellectuals. And as often as not they either write or want to write or earn their living in some way con- nected with writing or the arts. And even if the entire action of the novel isn't set upon the campus, the campus will enter into it at some point, if only in the shape of a student or faculty member.
There is of course no compulsion for the novelist to do any more than to describe a small section of the society in which he lives. If that means novels like Pictures from an Institution or The Middle of the Journey, what could be better? The fact remains that John 011ara's generation could enter into every sort of life, every sort of environment. One feels that their builders could actually build a house, their dentists fill teeth, their gangsters kill.
In Couples Mr John Updike made a brave attempt to create characters who weren't liberal intellectuals. Having failed, he has now returned, with almost perceptible relief, to his own territory. His latest novel, Bech: A Book, has as its hero a middle-aged writer. To give it credibility, there is a foreword by its subject, appendices, and a bibliography (though no index). And to remove the suspi- cion of autobiography he makes Henry Bech, the hero, a Jew.
This is rather daring, there being an unspoken agreement among American writers that only Jews write about Jews. It doesn't come off; at no point does Bech con- vince one that he is a Jew. I don't mean that
he should be portrayed as being self-con. sciously Jewish twenty-four hours a day. I do mean that under certain circumstances a Jew—particularly a writer—would react more powerfully than a Gentile.
`Bech knew little about Rumania . . . dur- ing World War II its anti-semitism had been the most ferocious in Europe . The ferocity especially interested him, since of the many human conditions it was his business to imagine, murderousness was the most difficult He was a Jew. Though he could be irritable and even vengeful, obstinate savagery was excluded from his budget of emotions.' In Rumania the Iron Guard stopped boys and men in the streets and killed those who were circumcised. They hung up Jewish bodies in the butchers' shops. That is what any Jew would remember in Rumania. He might push it im- mediately to the back of his mind, but it would be the first thing in it. He wouldn't just be 'interested'.
There isn't much of a story. Bech visits Russia and Rumania and Bulgaria as a participant in the cultural exchange (perhaps the most naive and useless of all the concepts engendered by the spirit of Camp David). He visits London as the guest of his publisher and has an affair with a gossip columnist named Merissa, whose refrigerator holds nothing but yoghurt and champagne. In America he exchanges one mistress for another, tries pot and doesn't like it, lectures to a girls' college, and finally is honoured by some official body which Mr Updike doesn't name but which presumably is the equivalent of the Acaddmie Francaise. His mother accompanies him and there's a ' flashback into his adolescence, just to show that Mr Updike can manage the warm salty flavoursome Yiddisher . Mamma dialogue with the best of them.
And he realises that he's- finished as a writer. '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 . . 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 . . . And the life that touched and brushed other people, that played across them like a roving breeze, could not break through the crust to him .. . '
The good old writer's block, in short. Which Mr Updike doesn't suffer from, hav- ing at the age of thirty-eight published nine books of fiction, three books of poetry, a col- lection of essays, and four children's books. It's hardly necessary to add that Bech is un- married and only just gets by, chiefly by lec- turing. The paperback rights of his only suc- cess have been sold outright for two thousand dollars. The time has long passed when even the most unworldly and needy of writers would allow his publisher to do this, but as with virtually every detail of his life its purpose isn't to make Bech more credible as a human being but further to establish the fact that he- isn't Mr Updike who is—again it's hardly necessary to add—married and, thanks to the success of Couples, as pros- perous as any professional writer ever is. Perhaps this is what's wrong with the novel—that it's so resolutely non- autobiographical that Mr Updike has absolutely refused to bring himself into the picture. I only know that wherever I can measure it against my own experience it totally falls to convince. Russia isn't like that, being short of money isn't like that and., above all, drying up isn't like that. There's something missing from this novel, as there is from the novels of all—yes, all—Mr
Updike's contemporaries. Horror, pity, passion—it's difficult to put a name to it, but something essential has leaked out of the American novel. Competence is there, but not the will to live. Pravda would sum it up as a typical example of bourgeois decadence. And what worries me is that Pravda would be dead right.
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