Bech at Bay by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

nominalism and the bubonic plague (
Occam’s Razor
, 1954). The analogies to McCarthyism, atomic fallout, and gray-suited conformity scarcely needed to be underlined, but the reviews underlined them nevertheless, and perhaps political awareness went to Izzy’s head, which was stocked with not just highbrow erudition but low mercantile cunning.
    During the succeeding decades the two writers met at handsomely financed cultural symposiums in Aspen and Geneva, on quasi-ambassadorial forays to Communist countries, at sickeningly sweet prize-bestowing ceremonies, and, as the Sixties took hold, in the midst of protest marches and rallies. Izzy blossomed, in bell-bottoms and love beads, while his hair simultaneously thinned and lengthened, into a guru of the young. His double-column travesty of the Bible,
The LB-Bull
, setting forth with gory detail and unmistakable analogic resonance the anti-Mexican atrocities of the nineteenth-century war that followed upon the American annexation of Texas, all in a twangy slang that plainly aped the accents of the current President, became a sacred text to college youth, an impressively erudite encouragement to indignation and revelry. For Bech, the Sixties were a somewhat recessive time; a lungful of the mildest marijuana made him sick, and draftevasion disgusted him, whether a war was “good” or not. This veteran of the Bulge and the Rhine crossing found it hard to cheer the American flag’s being burned. His magnum opus of domestic, frankly Jewish (at last) fiction, published in late November 1963, was buried under the decade’s unravelling consensus. His ironical title,
The Chosen
, turned out to be ill-chosen, since Chaim Potok wrote a thumping best-seller with the same title, used unironically, in 1967, and within a few years the novel’s sauciest, most Freudian bits were made to seem tame by the more furious revelations of Philip Roth and Erica Jong.
    In the Seventies, however, it was Izzy’s star that dimmed. His massive
Nixoniad
, written in intricately “rhymed” couplets of prose chapters, came out, even with a rushed printer, six months after its subject, apotheosized as a stumble-tongued Lord of Misrule, had resigned and dragged his shame into the shadows of San Clemente. Nixon-bashing had gone out of fashion, and students, in an economy hungover from its own binge, were more concerned about getting jobs than with exploring the pleasures of an archly erudite anti-establishment romp weighing in at half a million words. When, as the decade ended, Bech startled himself and the world by outflanking a writer’s block and publishing a commercially successful novel for television-heads called
Think Big
, Thornbush’s sour grapes spilled over into print, in a
Commentary
review (“Le Penseur en Petit”) whose acid content was left undiluted by his alligator tears of professed prior admiration.
    Not that Bech had ever liked Izzy’s stuff. In fact, at bottom, he didn’t like any of his contemporaries’ work. It would have been unnatural to: they were all on the same sinking raft, competing for dwindling review space anddemographic attention. Those that didn’t appear, like John Irving and John Fowles, garrulously, Dickensianly reactionary in method seemed, like John Hawkes and John Barth, smugly, hermetically experimental. O’Hara, Hersey, Cheever, Updike—suburbanites all living safe while art’s inner city disintegrated. And that was just the Johns. Bech would not have minded if all other writers vanished, leaving him alone on a desert planet with a billion English-language readers. Being thus unique was not a prospect that daunted him, as he sat warming his cold inspirations, like a chicken brooding glass eggs, in the lonely loft, off lower Broadway, to which he had moved when his suburban marriage to his longtime mistress’ sister had been finally dissolved. Solipsism was the writerly condition; why not make it statistical? Certainly the evaporation of Izzy Thornbush