Bech at Bay by John Updike Read Free Book Online

a suitable commemoration of this significant milestone, came up with the idea of a Festschrift volume, in a boxed limited edition, with marbleized endpapers and a striped linen headband, to be made available only to his inner circle of friends and disciples. Our enthusiasm for this project is matched and heartily seconded by our parent firm, Grigson-Kawabata Corporation Ltd., and by Mr. Thornbush’s longtime literary agent Larry “Ace” Laser, and by those of his seven children whom we have been able to trace and contact. Two of his three exwives have even agreed to write brief memoirs and to “vet” the text overall for accuracy!
    We very much hope you will supply a contribution. Almost anything will do—a reminiscence, a poem, a photograph in which the two of you appear, a shared perception as to where Isaiah Thornbush’s sterling example has been most helpful in your own artistic or personal development. Your considerable stylistic debt to him has been often remarked by critics and, though you did not mention him by name, was plainly hinted at in one of your wonderful autobiographical essays. (Exactly which one escaped all of us here at Aesop, though we spent hours this morning racking our brains!)
    But anything, Mr. Bech, even the most informal sort of salute, will be gratefully received—the more “unbuttoned” the better, up to a point of course. Contributors will be invited to a festive occasion at the Thornbush Manhattan residence, hosted by his lovely wife Pamela, this fall, and we know you wouldn’t want to be a missing face there. We eagerly await hearing from you.
    Sincerely yours,
Martina O’Reilly
Associate Editor
Trade Division, Aesop Press
    Like an irritatingly detailed fleck in the vitreous humor, Izzy Thornbush’s all-too-familiar face floated in Bech’s inner eye as he read: the lewdly bald head with its thrusting wings of white gossamer, the bulbous little nose decorated by a sprinkle of blackheaded pores, the wide fleshy mouth that ambitious dental work of recent years had pushed forward into an eerie simulacrum of George Washington’s invincible half-grimace. He was two years older than Bech, and ever since the late Forties the two had been espying each other around Manhattan, two would-be lions in too populous a Serengeti. In his younger days Izzy had sported a Harpoesque mop of curly strawberry-blond hair; always he was brain-vain. He tried to write books with his head—heavy, creaking historical allegories, with Aristotle and William of Occam and Queen Nefertiti as historical characters, debating in a fictional auditorium surrealistically furnished with modern appliances. It all seemed rather lumbering to Bech—giant watchworks hacked out of wood—and quite lacking in what he, stylistically, prized: the fuzzy texture of daily life, that gray felt compacted of a thousand fibers, that elusive drabness containing countless minute scintillae. Bech’s own tremulous, curvaceous early prose, kept supple by a reverent and perhaps cowardly close attentiveness to the subjective present tense, was at the opposite aesthetic pole from Thornbush’s dense and angular blocks of intellectual history; yet both appeared in the short-lived literary journal
Displeasure
(1947–1953), and they could not help meeting at those Village cocktail parties and Long Island cookouts with which the post-war intelligentsia hoped to restore, after the austerities of the duration, the bootlegged gemütlichkeit of the Twenties.
    America’s imperium, having strangled two snakes, was still a burly infant in those years. As the Forties shed their honest khaki for the peacock synthetics of Fifties populuxe, Bech and Thornbush oozed upward into eminence—Bech’s breakthrough being the Kerowacky novel
Travel Light
(1955), and Izzy’s his bawdy thousand-page saga, in mock-Chaucerian English, on the vicissitudes of philosophical realism in the Middle Ages, culminating in its destruction by the centripetal forces of