by David Lodge
Another instance is the scene at Matcham, the country seat of Lord and Lady Castledean, when Charlotte coolly informs Fanny Assingham that she and Amerigo, in spite of the absence of their respective spouses, are going to stay on together at the house party for an extra day. Fanny stares her disapproval, and the Prince has to face down her barbed civilities. What we don’t get—what we can’t possibly get—is the tumult of emotion he is brilliantly described as feeling in the corresponding passage in the novel, his admiration for the social beauty of Charlotte’s perfectly judged tone and his intuition of “some still other and still greater beauty” that it promises for them both:
She had answered Mrs Assingham quite adequately; she had not spoiled it by a reason a scrap larger than the smallest that would serve, and she had, above all, thrown off for his stretched but covered attention, an image that flashed like a mirror played at the face of the sun. The measure of everything to all his sense, at these moments, was in it—the measure especially of the thought that had been growing with him a positive obsession and that began to throb as never yet under this brush of her having, by perfect parity of imagination, the match for it. His whole consciousness had by this time begun almost to ache with a truth of an exquisite order, at the glow of which she too had, so unmistakably then, been warming herself—the truth that the occasion constituted by the last few days couldn’t possibly, save by some poverty of their own, refuse them some still other and still greater beauty. (chapter 21)
This is a good example of how James’s late style achieves a kind of slow-motion representation of consciousness, enabling us to follow and relish every nuance in a complex interweaving of thought and feeling that occupies only a few fleeting seconds in real time.
The few hours which the lovers spend together at an inn in Gloucester on the following day, on the pretext of visiting the cathedral before returning home, is the pivot on which the action turns. It is not only the moment at which the Prince yields to temptation (for all along it is Charlotte who is doing the seducing); it is also the point from which the Princess at last begins to suspect there is something not quite right or normal about the relationship between her husband and her father’s wife. Part Two of the novel begins with Amerigo’s somewhat embarrassed late return from Gloucester, as registered by Maggie’s troubled, but typically generous and self-critical consciousness. Even when the scales finally fall from her eyes—when she discovers that the golden bowl she has bought for her father was considered years earlier by Charlotte as a wedding gift, but rejected on the advice of the Prince because it was flawed, thus revealing that they were intimate before her marriage—even then Maggie refuses the role of the righteously vengeful betrayed wife. Instead she fights to preserve her marriage, and her father’s happiness, by lying. That is the novel’s remarkable assertion, which the filmmakers have fully understood: that deception, which is the basis of adultery, can also be used to neutralise its destructive effects. Maggie lies when Charlotte asks her if she has done anything to offend her, and she lies to her father to keep him ignorant of her own unhappiness. But when he proposes to take Charlotte back to American City, to build a museum to house his collection, Maggie realises that he too has been feigning innocence and ignorance, and that he is sacrificing their precious father-daughter relationship to preserve both marriages. When Charlotte then claims that it is she who is taking Adam back to America, to remove him from Maggie’s dominating presence, Maggie nobly accepts the lie, and the insult. Everybody is lying to everybody else most of the time, out of good motives or bad, and as long as the lies are not exposed the fabric of civilized society is precariously preserved. It is much to the credit of writer, director, and actors that the film manages to dramatise this endemic prevarication without dissolving into confusion or unintentional comedy.
Charlotte’s increasingly desperate efforts to discover how much Maggie really knows about her relationship with the Prince is a kind of punishment, as Maggie recognizes, vividly figuring her rival and former friend as a bird in “a suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself” (chapter 35). But whereas Maggie emerges very clearly as the triumphant moral heroine of the novel, in the film our interest and sympathy are drawn steadily towards the tormented Charlotte, aghast at the prospect of parting from her lover and banishment to the social and cultural desert of American City. In a moving scene (not in the book), Charlotte relieves her grief and anger in a paroxysm of sobbing, then allows herself to be cradled like a child in the arms of her patient, paternal husband. It is all the more effective because she is lying on her bed in déshabillé that recalls the scene (also, needless to say, absent from the novel) of her abandonment to sexual pleasure with Amerigo. In the closing sequence, which deftly splices old newsreel footage with the fictional narrative, we see Charlotte accepting her role as Mrs. Verver in the New World with good grace and a certain regal dignity. If the final emphasis of the novel is on the reconciliation of the Prince and Princess, the film ends by affirming the solidarity of Adam and Charlotte Verver, but James’s imaginative vision is not thereby betrayed. The Master would not be displeased by this thoughtful and carefully crafted film.
chapter eight
BYE-BYE BECH?
WHEN WRITERS DECIDE to write works of fiction about writers and writing they brace themselves, nervously or defiantly, for an adverse response from friends, colleagues, publishers, and, in due course, reviewers. They expect to be told that such a project is incestuous, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and of no interest to anyone but themselves. But when these fears have been overcome, and the work begins, a sense of unwonted ease and enjoyment is apt to ensue. The writer is focused on a subject he really knows intimately, and about which he really cares—more perhaps than he cares about any other: the business of writing, in every sense of the word “business.” There is no need tediously to research, or strenuously to imagine, the lives of non-writers—dealers or dentists or down-and-outs. The material is all there in his head, just waiting to be accessed.
Few writers have earned the right to such an occasional easy ride as fully as John Updike, whose oeuvre is remarkable for the scrupulous verisimilitude of its rendering of a variety of occupations, métiers, and avocations, in a wide range of social, historical, and geographical settings. For over thirty years—for most, in fact, of his long and prolific literary career—he has also been writing stories about the adventures of a fictitious Jewish American novelist called Henry Bech. The paradox is that the first two collections of Bech stories, Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982), slim volumes whose jauntily alliterative titles frankly confess their metafictional jokiness, not to say in-jokiness, have been among the most popular of Updike’s productions, more warmly received than some of his “serious” novels. Which is not to imply that the Bech books are not in their own way serious, or that Updike’s novels lack wit and humour. But the former are arguably Updike’s most overtly comic works, and this no doubt accounts for their popularity. It is all part of the holiday mood in which one intuits they were written: the author’s (comparatively) effortless enjoyment of his task communicates itself to the reading experience. The latest installment of Bech’s biography, Bech at Bay (1998), especially its last two stories, or chapters, suggest an author who is taking a wicked delight in his own invention.
For the benefit of new readers: Henry Bech was born in 1923, and enjoyed a fashionable success in the 1950s with his first novel, Travel Light, and a novella, Brother Pig; he then produced a long novel called The Chosen in 1963 which was intended to be his masterpiece but which was so badly received that Henry succumbed to a chronic writer’s block—a condition he relieved by impersonating himself on various American campuses, and in various foreign countries, as a representative of contemporary American fiction. These adventures, which invariably involved Bech in sexual encounters with various female minders, meeters, greeters, and fans, were chronicle
d in Bech, one of the first books to register the fact that writers can now have quite interesting and economically sustainable careers without actually writing anything. It is merely necessary to have written something in the past, on the strength of which one can peddle oneself as a personality, a platform presence, a cultural envoy, or a dissertation subject.
In Bech Is Back, after further peregrinations of the same kind, the writer was jolted by a surprising marriage to his mistress’s sister into rapidly finishing the work-in-progress he had been ineffectually tinkering with for fifteen years. On the last occasion when Bech submitted a book to his publishers they simply took it, printed it, and paid him a royalty. The finely comic rendering of Bech’s bewildered initiation into the world of corporate, market-oriented, and publicity-driven modern publishing was another indication of Updike’s sure finger on the pulse of cultural change. Entitled Think Big, Bech’s new book received ambivalent reviews (for example: “The squalid book we all deserve”—Alfred Kazin; “Not quite as vieux chapeau as I had every reason to fear”—Gore Vidal) but became a best-seller on the strength of its saucy sexual content.
Both Bech and Bech Is Back are classified as short stories on the crowded preliminary page of Bech at Bay that tabulates John Updike’s prodigious output, but the new book itself is subtitled “A Quasi-Novel,” creating an unnecessary puzzle for future bibliographers. The format of all these books (for which Nabokov’s Pnin is perhaps the model) is the same: a collection of self-contained stories unified by their common protagonist. In Bech at Bay there are five. One is the now-it-can-be-told story of a libel case in which Bech was involved back in 1972. The actions of the others date from 1986 to 1999. The book mainly covers, in other words, the hero’s old age, to which his self-assessment in Bech: A Book still applies: “His reputation had grown while his powers declined.” Bech has published nothing significant since Think Big, and shows no signs of doing so, but under the benign providence of his creator he ends up, in his seventies, more famous than ever—and still sexually active. So there is hope for us all.
The first story, however, “Bech in Czech,” finds the novelist in a sombre mood, his morale at a low ebb. Once again he is on the road as a government-sponsored cultural envoy. He is staying in Prague as the cosseted guest of the American Ambassador, but he feels uneasy in the residence, a palace built by a Jewish banker whose family had to flee Hitler. “For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all—up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides.” And nowhere more pervasively than in Prague. It is felt in the old Jewish cemetery where the gravestones of centuries are crowded together at crazy angles like cards being shuffled, and in the newer one on the outskirts of the city where Bech, at the Ambassador’s tactful suggestion, makes a pious visit to Kafka’s grave. “The vistas seemed endless . . . silent with the held breath of many hundreds of ended lives.”
As for the present, it is 1986, and the Velvet Revolution is still three years in the future, unimagined and unimaginable. Life in Czechoslovakia outside the luxurious precincts of the embassy is drab, depressed, deprived. Bech, uncharacteristically, feels unworthy of the respect accorded to him. All his books are translated and in print, but they “were petty and self-indulgent, it seemed to Bech as he repeatedly signed them, like so many checks that would bounce.” A specimen samizdat volume shown to him at a gathering of dissident writers gives him, by contrast, “some archetypal sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand.” The Ambassador has a theory that the heroic age of Czech intellectual resistance came to an end in 1968, and Bech can see an element of truth in this: the dissident writers he meets have a somewhat weary, middle-aged air, as if resigned to the permanence of their plight. But some of them have suffered terribly for their principles. Imagining himself faced with the threat of torture, Bech “could think of nothing he had ever written that he would not eagerly recant.” It is moments of ruthless honesty like this that make him, for all his faults, a rather endearing fellow.
Out of loyalty to the dissident writers, Bech is determined to despise the apparatchiks who run the state publishing network, but this consolation is denied him, for they turn out to be disconcertingly young, hip, and very well acquainted with Bech’s work and its place in contemporary American writing. Altogether, Prague is an unhappy place of passage for Bech, equally alienated as he is from its historical past and its political present. Even his sexual appetite seems to be fading. He fancies the Ambassador’s wife but lacks the energy or the gumption to make a pass at her until it is too late. Henry Bech, in short, is having a recurrence of the mid-life crisis from which he resurrected himself by marriage and the completion of Think Big.
More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, he felt cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop . . . As his sixties settled round him, as heavily as an astronaut’s suit, he felt boredom from above dragging at him.
After his lecture, bloated with undeserved praise and embassy white wine, Bech “lay in bed sleepless, beset by panic.” The text then segues into passages extracted (a note on the copyright page informs us) from the Czech translation of the story “Panic,” in Bech Is Back, which set up the final epiphany: “His panic . . . revealed a certain shape. That shape was the fear that, once he left . . . the Ambassador’s Residence, he would—up in smoke—cease to exist.”
I am not sure about the passages in Czech. They are manifestly inserted by Updike into Bech’s consciousness, since Bech doesn’t speak or read more than a few words of the language. As a device to express the character’s alienation and disorientation it seems less effective and less justifiable than Tom Stoppard’s use of Czech dialogue in his BBC television play of 1978, Professional Foul, which makes the audience share the English protagonist’s helpless incomprehension of a secret police raid on a dissident’s home. However, with that reservation, “Bech in Czech” is a very satisfying story. Nothing much happens—but that is in a sense the point; and our attention is held by the delicacy and precision of the prose, always Updike’s enviable strength.
Most modern short stories end with either an epiphany or a twist. “Bech Presides” belongs to the latter type, and the fact that you can see the twist coming from miles away doesn’t diminish the pleasure of the text, again because of the sentence-to-sentence quality of the writing. The year is 1990 and Bech, back in the Manhattan he loves and loathes, is sixty-nine. He is persuaded by a young editor intriguingly called Martina O’Reilly to contribute a tribute to the seventieth-birthday Festschrift of his old literary acquaintance and rival, Izzy Thornbush. The two writers’ reputations have seesawed over the years, but perhaps at this juncture Izzy, the author of great sprawling flawed epics, has a slightly higher profile than Henry, whose most characteristic work aspires to the exquisite condensation of a haiku—or so Izzy’s dishy wife Pamela tells Bech, not entirely to his pleasure, while he is looking covetously down the front of her dress.
At a party to launch the Festschrift, Izzy urges Bech to accept the presidency of a privately endowed academy called the Forty to which they both belong, and in his anxiety to leave the party at precisely the same moment as Martina O’Reilly and lure her to his loft apartment in SoHo (a tactic which succeeds), Bech hurriedly agrees to the proposal. Founded to enshrine “the dignity, the integrity, the saintly devotion that had once attached to the concept of the arts in the American republic,” and housed in one of the last neoclassical brick-fronted mansions in midtown Manhattan, the Forty has become something of a dodo in the brutal, restless climate of postmodern culture. Its aging members meet at long intervals to consume a dinner, deplore the corruption of modern taste, and elect new members, as
old ones die off, to make up the statutory total of forty. But even this task seems increasingly beyond them, so reluctant are they to acknowledge any merit in artists younger than themselves.
Bech rather enjoys the majesty of office, sitting at a desk as big as the deck of an aircraft carrier under the glass dome of the solarium, with a devoted secretariat of civilized, celibate ladies at his command, but he becomes increasingly exasperated at the members’ inability to nominate any new members even though the society’s continuing existence is in jeopardy. Updike takes liberties with real people, some of them living, in his amusing account of these discussions. “The name of William Gaddis, put forward by Thornbush, was batted aside with the phrase ‘high-brow gibberish’ . . . and that of Jasper Johns met unenthusiasm in Seidensticker’s summation of ‘Pop tricks and figurative doodles.’” Toni Morrison may be surprised and not altogether enchanted to read here that her nomination was withdrawn because the proposer forgot she was already a member.
Izzy springs a surprise motion to wind up the organization and distribute its assets among the members, which is passed by a narrow majority. Since the Forty occupies a prime mid-Manhattan site, quickly snapped up by a buyer, the spoils are considerable, but are immediately contested by the family legatees of the founder. It seems that most of the proceeds will probably be swallowed up in legal fees, and the members’ greed justly punished thereby; but Izzy proves to have an indirect interest in the deal. Bech belatedly realises that he has been used, but is consoled by the prospect of receiving a cut himself, glimpsed in a final improvised haiku: “After a lifetime / of dwelling among fine shades / a payoff at last”.
