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

was a pleasing fancy. Those protruding eyes and hair-wings; those oversize, over-white capped teeth; that protruding intellect, like the outthrust boneless body of a poisoned mollusc whose shell has fatally relaxed—
pffft
! Bech’s disrespect had intensified when, in the flat wake of the miscalculated
Nixoniad
, Thornbush, whose three previous wives had been muscular, humorous, informal women of Jewish ancestry and bohemian tastes, had bolstered his ego by capturing the hand of a shiksa heiress—apple-cheeked, culturally ambitious Pamela Towers, whose father, the infamous Zeke Towers, a New Jersey cement mixer, had made good on his family name by becoming, as vertical plate-glass replaced stepped-back brick in the skyline, one of Manhattan’s real-estate magnates. In the luxury of Park Avenue, Palm Beach, and East Hampton residences Izzy, the former artificer, maker of mazy verbal Pyramids, need build no more; a magnificently kept man,he need oversee only the elaborate buttressing of his crumbling reputation. Nevertheless:
    Dear Ms. O’Reilly:
    The voice of praise, rising in my throat to do justice to my dear old friend Isaiah Thornbush, is roughened by the salty abrasions of affection and nostalgia. How different the map of post-war American fiction would be without the sprawling, pennanted castles of his massive, scholastically rigorous opuses—intellectual
opera
indeed! “Here be dragons” was the formula with which the old cartographers would mark a space fearsomely unknown, and my own fear is that, in this age of the pre-masticated sound-bite and the King-sized gross-out, the vaulted food court where Thornbush’s delicacies are served is too little patronized—the demands that they, pickled in history’s brine and spiced with cosmology’s hot stardust, would make upon the McDonaldized palate of the reader, to whom, were he or she ideal, every linguistic nuance and canonical allusion would be mentally available, have become, literally (how else?), unthinkable. Not that my delicious old friend Izzy ever betrays by any slackening of his dizzying pace the slightest suspicion of being cast by fate in the role of a wizard whose tricks are beyond his audience’s comprehension, or, like those of a magician on doctored film, too easily accounted for.
Au
, as the well-worn phrase runs,
contraire
: he continues to bustle—there is no other word—hither and yon on errands of literary enterprise, judging, speaking, instructing, introducing, afterwording, suffering himself to be impanelled and honored to the point where we shyer, less galvanic of his colleagues vicariously sag under the weight of his medals and well-weighed kudos. Soldier on, comrade, though the plain whereignorant armies clash is more darkling than ever; sail on, Izzy, and remind all those who glimpse your bellying spinnaker upon the horizon that there was once such a thing as Literature!
    Ms. Reilly, the above is for publication and oral recitation—what follows is for your eyes and no doubt dainty ears only. You may not think it unbuttoned enough. If you deign to use it, don’t, I repeat DO NOT, change my punctuation or break up the continuous rhapsodic exhalation of my paragraph. By the way, Aesop is good to undertake this; the commercial houses are conspicuously sitting on their hands in the case of serious writers like Thornbush. I understand his last romp through the stacks (Middle Kingdom, pre-Marco Polo, right?) saw seven publishers before the eighth, who printed it only with extensive cuts and elimination of all passages not in Roman typeface and the English language. Also by the way, how did a maiden called Martina meet a man called O’Reilly? Or are you the product of a tempestuous mating between a Communist expat and an IRA gunrunner?
    Your nosy pal,
Henry Bech
    The Festschrift party was held in the Thornbush penthouse, the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of a chaff-colored brick building on Park in the Sixties. Sharp-edged minimalist