Bech by John Updike

First published: 1970

Type of work: Short-story sequence

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of plot: 1960’s

Locale: Russia; Romania; Bulgaria; Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; Virginia; London; New York City

Principal characters

• Henry Bech, a middle-aged Jewish writer suffering from writer’s block
• Ekaterina “Kate” Ryleyeva, Russian translator-guide
• Athanase Petrescu, Rumanian literary translator
• Vera Glavanakova, Bulgarian poet
• Wendell Morrison, Bech’s former student
• Norma Latchett, Bech’s mistress
• Bea Cook, Norma’s sister and Bech’s subsequent mistress
• Ruth Eisenbraun, college English professor
• Tuttle, British interviewer
• Merissa, British gossip columnist
• Bech’s mother,

The Work:

John Updike’s Bech: A Book is composed of loosely related stories featuring Updike’s fictional literary alter ego Henry Bech, a Jewish novelist from Manhattan who diverges from his creator in numerous significant ways, chief among them his religion and persistent writer’s block. Bech first appeared in “The Bulgarian Poetess” and subsequently became the vehicle through which Updike wrote about his literary travels and satirized the publishing industry. Although the stories were originally published separately, Updike arranged them in a loose picaresque series and added other unpublished material to create a short-story sequence similar to his Olinger Stories (1964) and Too Far to Go (1979). Updike’s assignment of the subtitle “a book” indicates the volume’s intermediate status between a novel and a miscellaneous story collection.

The volume begins with a foreword purportedly written as a letter by Bech to Updike. Bech parses his own literary resemblance to other famous living Jewish writers, as well as to Updike himself, praises Updike for treating the oppression of writers by the publishing industry, criticizes him for his prose, and ultimately bestows his blessing on Updike’s representation of him. This device hints slyly at the volume’s overall themes, establishes its pervasive satirical tone, and provides an ironic critique of Updike’s portrait of the artist while establishing the main character’s voice. Through Bech’s analysis, Updike anticipates some of the critical reviews of his work and introduces the volume’s thematic focus on the writer as self-created character whose life becomes a consumable public fiction that consumes his literary talent.

The picaresque chronicle of Henry Bech’s literary travels opens with three stories that take place in Eastern Europe, returns to the United States for two stories, and then moves back across the Atlantic to England before returning Bech home to Manhattan. The book concludes with two appendixes: excerpts from Bech’s Russian journal and a fictional bibliography of literary criticism on Bech. Bech is a blocked writer who seeks to escape his creative problems by embracing literary celebrity, repeatedly reinforcing and sometimes exacerbating his situation. Updike’s use of the short-story sequence is therefore apt, as each individual story repeats Bech’s dilemma and the overall form depicts a discontinuous life rather than advancing a novelistic plot.

The book’s opening story, “Rich in Russia,” recounts Bech’s ambivalent acquisition of a large sum of rubles, showered on him by the Soviet government as royalties for recent translations of his work. The behavior of the Soviets stands in contrast to that of the American publishing industry, which has taken advantage of Bech’s poor business sense to keep most of the profits from his best-selling novel Travel Light. Experiencing feelings of guilt about taking money from the proletariat, Bech determines to spend the money in Russia, enlisting the aid of Kate, his devoted guide and translator, who is eager to spend time with him.

Obsessed with spending, Bech fails to recognize Kate’s feelings for him until her moist farewell kiss at the airport alerts him to the missed opportunity. As he rushes to his plane, his suitcase bursts open on the runway; though he recovers his purchases—furs and now-cracked watches—he is forced to leave behind copies of his translated books. These lost books represent the excess baggage of a cumbersome literary reputation, and they help Bech understand that he leaves Russia without having experienced it fully. The story’s narrative frame, a college professor relating this episode while lecturing on Bech, provides commentary on Bech’s subject position and highlights the role of literary biography in constructing a character, paralleling Bech’s self-conscious creation of a literary persona.

The next story, “Bech in Rumania,” opens with Bech wearing an astrakhan hat purchased in Russia, alerting readers to the stories’ progressive, interrelated nature. This story also concerns missed connections, signaled by the American Embassy personnel’s failure to recognize Bech at the airport and by the Rumanian Writers’ Union’s attempt to keep him away from the Rumanian literati, who the Americans hope will be stirred up by his presence. Bech accidentally meets one of these writers—a friend of Petrescu, the admiring guide whose devotion to reading and writing causes Bech to realize that his own passion has waned. However, little meaningful exchange occurs between the mutually disinterested writers. They are unable to find common ground, since the Rumanian writes about peasants while Bech’s work portrays the bourgeoisie. While Bech fails to understand the country through his muddled experiences, he nonetheless discovers some glimmer of truth about himself through an encounter with a reticent Rumanian chauffer who embodies the country’s enigma. His reckless driving evokes Bech’s memories of fearing a childhood tormenter and triggers Bech’s epiphany that—unlike his literary hero Melville—he fails to face fear with courageous diffidence and has squandered his talent.

Vera Glavanakova, the title character of the 1965 O. Henry First Prize-winning story “The Bulgarian Poetess,” has a much more profound effect on Bech than his previous guides. Arriving in Bulgaria in the midst of anti-American turmoil, Bech retreats to his hotel room and reads Nathaniel Hawthorne for comfort. Instead, Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1846) sets off a mild panic attack akin to one that Bech experiences in a later story, as Malvin’s solitary death seems parallel to Bech’s feeling of being cut off behind the Iron Curtain. Bech nonetheless begins to emerge from the pose of ironic weariness that masks his inner emptiness when he encounters Vera, whose beauty and devotion to her art reawaken him emotionally and intellectually.

On a trip with Vera to the Rilke monastery, Bech understands the extent to which she has stirred his spirit when his dormant writerly eye recognizes beauty in simplicity. While Bech perceives Vera as his soul mate, their brief liaison consists of three short meetings and an exchange of inscribed books, illustrating to him that “actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility”—a theme that resonates through much of Updike’s work. After Vera and Bech separate reluctantly at the airport, he studies her inscription and concludes that a word that looks like “leave” must be “love”—ironically linking the two and connecting with the reiterated Updike theme that love’s strength and purity often grow from separation, mystery, and unfulfilled longing.

“Bech Takes Pot Luck” is set in Martha’s Vineyard, where the restless writer hopes to rub elbows with fashionable celebrities and to find female adulation. Traveling with his mistress Norma, her sister Bea, and Bea’s three children, Bech meets Wendell Morrison, a former student from a creative writing course at Columbia, who joins the group uninvited. When Wendell shares marijuana with them, the results are comic and somewhat disastrous: Norma greedily partakes and belittles Bech; Bea sees threatening shapes outside the window as guilt about her divorce emerges; and Bech becomes increasingly pompous as he gets higher, although he does experience a fleeting moment of clarity before succumbing to nausea and vomiting. As he subsequently becomes disconsolate about his failure to emulate past literary greats, Bea comforts him by praising his work, and they begin the affair that will eventually end Bech’s relationship with Norma.

“Bech Panics,” composed as a bridge between the previous story and the next, is the volume’s most serious story, climaxing with Bech’s severe existential dread. The narrative voice, reminiscent of that in “Rich in Russia,” presents the action as a speculative commentary on a series of slides—a form that parallels the book’s separate stories—highlighting the fiction-making process and the conjecture necessary to fill in gaps within a loosely connected sequence. The roots of Bech’s panic derive from his anxiety about his developing relationship with Bea, especially the domestic life he fears being drawn into and her challenges to his literary stagnation.

Fleeing the domestication that seems to him inevitable, Bech impulsively accepts a telephone invitation to speak at a Virginia women’s college, tempted by the speaker’s fee and fantasizing about adulation by nubile Southern girls. Playing the role of visiting author, he maintains surface composure but is haunted by the hollowness of his performance and by visions of an abyss of meaninglessness. At the height of his panic, during a forest walk, Bech throws himself on the damp ground and prays. This epiphanic moment is undercut when ants bite him, but the small surge of faith Bech experiences serves as a prelude to the fuller respite from panic that he achieves when he sleeps with Ruth Eisenbraun, the Jewish literature professor from New York behind his invitation. With his panic at an ebb, Bech judges a poetry contest before leaving, finding some consolation in the winning poem’s brave and gracious acceptance of life’s frailty. He returns to Bea spiritually enervated but temporarily purged of his anxieties.

“Bech Swings?” finds Bech promoting a British collection of his works. Arriving in London as daffodils bloom, he hopes for a corresponding renewal of his ebbing creativity. After a brief fling with Merissa—who he later discovers is a gossip columnist—his dormant artistic spirit is briefly awakened: Bech sees Merissa as a potential prototype for a character in an ambitious new novel, aptly titled Think Big. At his publisher’s behest, he undergoes a grueling three-day interview conducted by Tuttle, an American graduate student, who ultimately uses few of his actual words. The interview, however, saps Bech of the energy to launch his new novel and to continue his sexual exploits with Merissa, who—like the Bulgarian poet Vera—tries to provide him with advice that will help him understand how to replace ardor with art and who portrays him with gentle fondness in her gossip column.

“Bech Enters Heaven,” written specifically to round out the volume, begins with a flashback to Bech’s trip to a Manhattan honorary literary society with his mother, who serves in a capacity similar to the other stories’ female guides as she tries to inspire and reorient her precocious son. Although the young Bech observes that fame has crystallized the writers enshrined there, he idealizes this haven of art and years later returns to the literary society to be admitted as a member. His induction, however, proves disillusioning when the ceremony degenerates into contentious posturing and his fellow inductees—youthful literary idols—seem seedy and inattentive. When Bech believes he sees his deceased mother in the audience, he perceives a metaphoric connection between the induction ceremony and death. What should be a milestone in his career thus provides the same ambivalent satisfaction as his travels had in the preceding stories.

While Updike may not have been hinting at a sequel in the book’s purposefully anticlimactic words—“Now what?”—Bech’s literary and amorous misadventures continued in subsequent short fiction and were gathered in similarly structured volumes of integrated stories: Bech Is Back (1982) and Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). The Complete Henry Bech(2001) united the stories from all three books, together with a subsequent Bech story, “His Oeuvre.”

Bibliography

Bech, Henry [John Updike]. “Henry Bech Redux.” The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1971, p. 3. A self-interview by Updike, indulging in mild self-satire in the voice of Henry Bech critiquing and interrogating his creator.

Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1984. Analyzes Bech: A Book in the context of Updike’s overall canon, noting its unique comedy and overall themes while explicating individual stories in a chapter titled “The Protestant as Jew.”

Greiner, Donald. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. Places Bech in the context of Updike’s remarks on the American writer’s situation and provides analysis of Bech’s artistic plight and Updike’s satiric stance.

Hamilton, Alice, and Kenneth Hamilton. “Metamorphosis Through Art: John Updike’s Bech: A Book.” Queen’s Quarterly 77 (1970): 624-636. Early study of the volume’s themes, emphasizing Bech’s plight as a struggling artist.

Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Focuses on the volume as a short-story sequence, emphasizing the overall themes and the stories’ interrelatedness in a chapter titled “Blocked Art and Bygone Ardor: Bech’s Burden.”

Ozick, Cynthia. “Bech, Passing.” In Art and Ardor: Essays. New York: Knopf, 1983. Notes shortcomings of Updike’s depiction of a Jewish protagonist who mostly resembles the author but is surrounded by ethnic trappings.

Pinsker, Sanford. “Updike, Ethnicity, and Jewish-American Drag.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, edited by Stacey Olster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Analyzes how Updike’s portrayal of Bech as a Jewish writer evolved during Updike’s career, specifically within the context of Jewish American literature.

Siegel, Lee. “Updike’s Bech.” In Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination. New York: Basic Books, 2006. This chapter in a larger study of the literary imagination focuses on Updike’s act of imagining himself as a (Jewish) other in the person of Henry Bech.

Taylor, Larry E. Pastoral and Anti-pastoral Patterns in John Updike’s Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Remarks on Bech’s appearance as a different direction for Updike, with special attention to tying the stories’ pastoral themes to Updike’s other fiction.