Bech (15 page)

B
ECH ARRIVED
in London with the daffodils; he knew that he must fall in love. It was not his body that demanded it, but his art. His first novel,
Travel Light
, had become a minor classic of the Fifties, along with
Picnic, The Search for Bridey Murphy
, and the sayings of John Foster Dulles. His second novel, a lyrical gesture of disgust, novella-length, called
Brother Pig
, did his reputation no harm and cleared his brain, he thought, for a frontal assault on the wonder of life. The assault, surprisingly, consumed five years, in which his mind and work habits developed in circles, or loops, increasingly leisurely and whimsical; when he sat down at his desk, for instance, his younger self, the somehow fictitious author of his earlier fictions, seemed to be not quite displaced, so that he became an uneasy, blurred composite, like the image left on film by too slow an exposure. The final fruit of his distracted struggles,
The Chosen
, was universally judged a failure—one of those “honorable” failures, however, that rather endear a writer to the race of critics, who would rather be reassured of art’s
noble difficulty than cope with a potent creative verve. Bech felt himself rise from the rubble of bad reviews bigger than ever, better known and in greater demand. Just as the id, according to Freud, fails to distinguish between a wish-image and a real external object, so does publicity, another voracious idiot, dismiss all qualitative distinctions and feast off good and bad alike. Now five—no, six—years had passed, and Bech had done little but pose as himself, and scribble reviews and “impressionistic” journalism for
Commentary
and
Esquire
, and design a series of repellent rubber stamps:

By appropriately stamping the letters he received and returning them to the sender, Bech simplified his correspondence. But six years had passed, and his third stamp pad had gone dry, and the age of fifty was in sight, and it was high time to write something to justify his sense of himself as a precious and useful recluse. A stimulus seemed needed.

Love? Travel? As to love, he had been recently processed by a pair of sisters, first the one, and then the other; the one was neurotic and angular and harsh and glamorous and childless and exhausting, and the other had been sane and soft and
plain and maternal and exhausting. Both had wanted husbands. Both had mundane, utilitarian conceptions of themselves that Bech could not bring himself to corroborate. It was his charm and delusion to see women as deities—idols whose jewel was set not in the center of their foreheads but between their legs, with another between their lips, and pairs more sprinkled up and down, from ankles to eyes, the length of their adorable, alien forms. His transactions with these supernatural creatures imbued him, more keenly each time, with his own mortality. His life seemed increasingly like that sinister fairy story in which each granted wish diminishes a magic pelt that is in fact the wisher’s life. But perhaps, Bech thought, one more woman, one more leap would bring him safe into that high calm pool of immortality where Proust and Hawthorne and Catullus float, glassy-eyed and belly up. One more wasting love would release his genius from the bondage of his sagging flesh.

As to travel: his English publisher, J. J. Goldschmidt, Ltd., who had sidestepped Bech’s collected essays (published in the United States and Canada as
When the Saints
) and had remaindered
Brother Pig
with the haste usually reserved for bishops’ memoirs and albums of Pharaonic art, now, possibly embarrassed by the little novel’s creeping success in its Penguin edition, and guilty over the minuscule advances and scrimped printings with which he had bound Bech’s thriving name, decided to bring out a thirty-shilling anthology called, all too inevitably,
The Best of Bech
. To support this enterprise he asked the author to come to London for the week before publication and permit himself to “be lionized.” The phrase snaked in less time than an eyeblink along three thousand miles of underwater cable.

“I’d rather be lambified,” Bech answered.

“What, Henry? Sorry, I can hardly hear you.”

“Forget it, Goldy. It was a hard word.”

“You heard what?”

“Nothing. This is a very wet connection.”

“Dead?”

“Not yet, but let’s kill it. I’ll come.” He arrived with the daffodils. The VC-10 banked over Hampton Court, and the tinge of their yellow was visible from the air. In Hyde Park beside the Serpentine, along Birdcage Walk in St. James’s, in Grosvenor Square beneath the statue of Roosevelt and in Russell Square beneath the statue of Gandhi, in all the fenced squares from Fitzroy to Pembroke, the daffodils made a million golden curtseys to those tourists who, like our hero, wandered dazed by jet-lag and lonely as a cloud.
A poet could not but be gay
, Bech recalled,
In such a jocund company
. And the people in the streets, it seemed to him, whether milling along Oxford Street or sauntering from lion to lion in Trafalgar Square, formed another golden host, beautiful in the antique cold-faced way of Blake’s pastel throngs, pale Dionysiacs, bare thighs and gaudy cloth, lank hair and bell-bottoms,
Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way
. And, the next morning, watching Merissa move nude to the window and to her closet, he felt her perfections—the parallel tendons at the backs of her knees, the kisslike leaps of shadow among the muscles of her shoulders—flow outdoors and merge with the lacy gauze of the gray British air. A VC-10 hung in silent descent above the treetops of Regent’s Park. He rose and saw that this park too had its pools of gold, its wandering beds of daffodils, and that under the sunless noon sky lovers, their heads androgynous masses of hair, had come to lie entwined on the cold greening grass.
Cold greening grass
, Bech heard. The echo disturbed and distracted him. The papery
daytime world, cluttered with books he had not written, cut into the substantial dreams of drunkenness and love.

Jorgen Josiah Goldschmidt, a bustling small anxious man with an ambitiously large head and the pendulous profile of a Florentine banker, had arranged a party for Bech the very evening of his arrival. “But, Goldy, by your time I’ve been awake since two this morning.”

They had met several times in New York. Goldschmidt had evidently sized up Bech as a clowner to be chuckled and shushed into line. In turn Bech had sized up Goldschmidt as one of those self-made men who have paid the price (for not letting God make them) of minor defects like inner deafness and constant neuralgia. Goldschmidt’s was a success story. A Danish Jew, he had arrived in England in the late Thirties. In twenty years, he had gone from the Ministry of Information to the B.B.C. to an editorship in a venerable publishing house to the founding, in the mid-Fifties, of one of his own, specializing in foreign avant-garde writers no one else wanted and dainty anthologies of poetic matter lapsed from copyright. A lucky recipe book (health food soups) and a compendium of Prayers for Humanists staved off bankruptcy. Now he was prosperous, thanks mostly to his powers of persuading his lawyers and printers to let him publish increasingly obscene American authors. Though devoid of any personal taste for obscenity, he had found a wave and was riding it. His accent and dress were impeccably British. In tune with the times he had sprouted bushy sideburns. His face was always edged with the gray of nagging pain. He said, his brown eyes (in repose, they revealed lovely amber depths, lit by the fire of his brain, but were rarely in repose) flicking past Bech’s shoulder
toward the next problem, “Henry, you must come. Everyone is dying to meet you. I’ve invited just the very dearest nicest people. Ted Heath might drop in later, and Princess Margaret was so sorry she must be in Ceylon. You can have a nice nap in your hotel. If the room is too noisy, we can change it. I thought from your books you would enjoy a view of the traffic. Your interview isn’t until five, a terribly nice intelligent boy, a compatriot of yours. If you don’t like him, just give him a half hour of the usual and he’ll be on his way.”

Bech protested, “I have no usual,” but the other man said deafly, “Bless you,” and left.

Too excited by the new city, and by having survived another airplane flight, Bech instead of sleeping walked miles looking at the daffodils, at the Georgian rows plastered with demolition notices and peace slogans, at the ruffled shirts and Unisex pants in the shop windows, at the bobbies resembling humorless male models, at the dingy band of hippies sharing Eros’s black island in Piccadilly Circus with pigeons the color of exhaust fumes. On Great Russell Street, down from the British Museum, past a Hindu luncheonette, a plaque marked the site of a Dickens novel as if the characters had occupied the same time-space in which Bech walked. Back in his hotel lobby, he was offended by the American voices, the pseudo-Edwardian decor, the illustrated chart of acceptable credit cards. A typical Goldschmidt snap decision, to stuff him into a tourist trap. A pale young man, plainly American from his round-headed haircut and his clever hangdog way of sidling forward, came up to Bech. “My name is Tuttle, Mr. Bech. I guess I’m going to interview you.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Bech said.

The boy tipped his head slightly, like a radar dish, as if to decipher the something acerb in Bech’s tone, and said, “I
don’t generally do this sort of thing, actually I have as low an opinion of interviews as you do—”

“How do you know I have a low opinion?” Jet-lag was getting to Bech; irritability was droning in his ears.

“You’ve said so”—the boy smiled shyly, cleverly—“in your other interviews.” He went on hastily, pursuing his advantage: “But this wouldn’t be like your others. It would be all you, I have no ax to grind, no ax at all. A friend of mine on the staff of the Sunday
Observer
begged me to do it; actually I’m in London researching a thesis on eighteenth-century printers. It would be a sort of full spread to go with
The Best of Bech
. Let me frankly confess, it seemed a unique opportunity. I’ve written you letters in the past, in the States, but I suppose you’ve forgotten.”

“Did I answer them?”

“You hit them with a rubber stamp and sent them back.” Tuttle waited, perhaps for an apology, then went on. “What I have in mind now is a chance for you to explain yourself, to say everything you want to say.
You
want to say. Your
name
is known over here, Mr. Bech, but they don’t really know
you
. ”

“Well, that’s their privilege.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, I think it’s their loss.”

Bech felt himself slippingly, helplessly relenting. “Let’s sit over here,” he said. To take the young man up to his room would, he thought groggily, simulate pederasty and risk the fate of Wilde.

They sat in facing lobby chairs; Tuttle perched on the edge of his as if he had been called into the principal’s office. “I’ve read every word you’ve written five or six times. Frankly, I think you’re
it
.” This sounded to Bech like the safest praise he had ever heard; one appetite that had not diminished with the years was for unambiguous, blood-raw superlatives.

He reached over and tagged the boy. “Now you’re it,” he said.

Tuttle blushed. “I mean to say, what other people
say
they’re doing, you really
do
.” An echo troubled Bech; he had heard this before, but not applied to himself. Still, the droning had ceased. The blush had testified to some inner conflict, and Bech could maintain his defenses only in the face of a perfectly simple, resolute attack. Any sign of embarrassment or self-doubt he confused with surrender.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said.

“Thank you, no.”

“You mean you’re on duty?”

“No, I just don’t ever drink.”

“Never?”

“No.”

Bech thought, They’ve sent me a Christer. That’s what Tuttle’s pallor, his sidling severity, his embarrassed insistence reminded Bech of: the Pentecostal fanatic who comes to the door. “Well, let me frankly confess, I sometimes do. Drink.”

“Oh, I know. Your drinking is famous.”

“Like Hitler’s vegetarianism.”

In his haste to put Bech at ease, Tuttle neglected to laugh. “Please go ahead,” the boy insisted. “If you become incoherent, I’ll just stop taking notes, and we can resume another day.”

Poor Henry Bech, to whom innocence, in its galoshes of rudeness and wet raincoat of presumption, must always appear as possibly an angel to be sheltered and fed. He ordered a drink (“Do you know what a whiskey sour is?” he asked the waiter, who said “Absolutely, sir” and brought him a whiskey-and-soda) and tried for one more degrading time to dig into the rubbish of his “career” and come up with lost baubles of
wisdom. Encouraged by the fanatic way the boy covered page after page of his notebook with wildly oscillating lines, Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of successive images locked and then one more image arrived and, as it were, superlocked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g., the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action, or the implosion of subatomic mathematics consuming the heart of a star. And the down-grinding thing is the realization that no one, not critics or readers, ever notices these tight moments but instead prattles, in praise or blame, with an altogether insolent looseness. That it is necessary to begin by believing in an ideal reader and that slowly he is proved not to exist. He is not the daily reviewer skimming a plastic-bound set of raggedy advance proofs, nor the bulk-loving housewife who buys a shiny new novel between the grocer’s and the hairdresser’s, nor the diligent graduate student with his heap of index cards and grant applications, nor the plump-scripted young ballpointer who sends a mash note via
Who’s Who
, nor, in the weary end, even oneself. In short, one loses heart in the discovery that one is not being read. That the ability to read, and therefore to write, is being lost, along with the abilities to listen, to see, to smell, and to breathe. That all the windows of the spirit are being nailed shut. Here Bech gasped for air, to dramatize his point. He said, then, that he was sustained, insofar as he was sustained, by the memory of laughter, the specifically Jewish, sufficiently desperate, not quite belly laughter of his father and his father’s brothers, his beloved Brooklyn uncles; that the American Jews had kept the secret of this embattled laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their
present domination of American lit; and that in the world today only the Russians still had it, the Peruvians possibly, and Mao Tse-tung but not any of the rest of the Chinese. In his, Bech’s, considered judgment.