Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  Bech: A Book carried a mock Foreword in the form of a letter from Henry Bech to John Updike which deftly pre-empted the first interpretative question which is bound to be asked about the whole Bech saga: to what extent is it a serial roman à clef? “Dear John,” it began, “Well, if you must commit the artistic indecency of writing about a writer, better I suppose about me than about you. Except, reading along in these, I wonder if it is me, enough me, purely me.” After drawing attention to resemblances between Updike’s portrait of Bech and various well-known Jewish American writers (Mailer’s sexuality, Bellow’s silver hair, Philip Roth’s boyhood, Salinger’s writer’s block, and so on), Henry Bech perceives also “something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you.”

  By scrambling so many clues drawn from so many sources, Updike has made it impossible for us to identify Bech with any one writer. By making him Jewish, he presumably aimed to establish an ironic distance between his authorial self and material that (as the Foreword concedes) was drawn in part from his own professional life and character. It was a risky strategy: how could a Gentile writer presume to represent the subjectivity of an American Jew in competition with so many brilliant real Jewish writers? Though I can hardly speak with any authority, it seems to me that Updike has risen admirably to the challenge, with the possible exception, oddly enough, of Bech’s prose style. Here for instance is an extract from Bech’s tribute to Thornbush:

  “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 patronised—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 . . .

  And so on, for several more lines before the sentence is wrapped up. Even allowing for the insincerity of the writer in this instance, both syntax and diction strike me as being too precious, too Jamesian, too Nabokovian, too Updikey in fact, to be a plausible pastiche of Jewish American writing. It is just as well, then, that Updike shrewdly abstains from giving us any specimens of the fiction on which Bech’s reputation rests—only teasing critical characterizations: “Early Post-Modern . . . Post-Realist . . . Pre-Minimalist.” But Bech’s speech, especially his wry, laconic one-liners, and his thoughts rendered in free indirect style, would not, it seems to me, look incongruous in the pages of one of Updike’s Jewish peers.

  In Bech at Bay the story that tells us most about Bech’s ethnic and social background is perhaps “Bech Pleads Guilty” Back in the early 1970s, it appears, he wrote an article for a new magazine about post-studio Hollywood in which he rashly described an agent called Morris Ohrbach as “an arch-gouger” who for “greedy reasons of his own rake-off” had “widened the prevailing tragic rift between the literary and cinematic arts.” This is known to be true by everybody in the business, but it is defamatory, and not easy to prove. The magazine quickly goes out of business. Ohrbach sues Bech for ten million dollars. It is the writer’s nightmare that turns out to be waking reality.

  Bech’s queasy involvement in the legal process, his anxious observation of the court proceedings in Los Angeles, his sense of being a pawn in a kind of game played out by two teams of lawyers with priorities of their own, are acutely and comically observed. But a curious thing happens: when the villainous Ohrbach finally appears in court, Bech begins to feel sorry for him because he reminds him of his father, a salesman in the diamond district of Manhattan who died on the subway in rush hour. Some old Oedipal wound has been opened. Bech wins the case but feels obscurely guilty. Afterwards, in post-coital conversation with a member of his legal team called Rita, he relates:

  “When my father died . . . we found in his bureau drawers these black elastic stockings I had bought him, so his legs wouldn’t hurt so much. He had never worn them. They still had the cardboard in them. Pieces of cardboard shaped like feet.”

  “Sweetheart, O.K. I see it. The cardboard feet. Dying down in the subway. Life is rough. But that other judío was trying to eat you. Which would you rather?”

  “Baby, I don’t know,” the defendant responded, touching two fingers to the erectile tip—the color of a sun-darkened, un-sulphur-treated apricot—of her nearer breast. “Neither seems ideal.”

  As Bech says in another story, “Without guilt, there is no literature.” Certainly no Jewish literature.

  Like the Woody Allen character in Woody Allen’s movies, Henry Bech has been endowed by his creator with an apparently ageless ability to attract young sexual partners. And whereas in the average man, with advancing age, lust is increasingly supplanted by gluttony, Bech enjoys both in the virtual reality of metaphor—vide the apricot nipple above, or Martina O’Reilly naked under Bech’s bathrobe: “Martina suggested a big blintz—the terry-cloth the enfolding crepe, her flesh the pure soft cheese.” As a concession to realism, these consorts have become slightly less ravishing in looks as time goes by, but no older. In “Bech Noir” he is living with a new secretarial assistant, Robin Teagarten, “twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the short and solid kind . . . He was seventy-four, but they worked with that.” The story takes other, more daring gambles with credibility: Bech becomes a serial killer.

  As often happens with writers, the older he gets, the more obsessed Bech becomes with his reputation, the more he suffers from a sense of neglected merit, and the more resentful he becomes, retrospectively, about the critical reception of his work. The ministrations of Robin cannot entirely soothe away this persistent discontent. But one day, reading the Times over breakfast, Bech comes across the obituary of a critic who had panned The Chosen. The gourmet rhetoric takes a new and sinister turn: “A creamy satisfaction—the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by the toasty warmth—thickly covered his heart.” More bluntly: “Mishner dead put another inch on his prick.”

  A week later Bech finds himself on a crowded subway platform three rows back from the edge where he spots, in a vulnerable position, Raymond Featherwaite, the snotty English expat academic and critic who called Think Big “prolix and voulu” in the “ravingly Anglophile New York Review of Books.” He is irresistibly tempted to repeat the satisfaction of Mishner’s death. A well-timed push as the train rushes from its tunnel creates a domino effect that sends Featherwaite under the wheels. “It was an instant’s event . . . Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed, malodorous mob.” Bech slips away, trembling but unobserved, and the death is reported in the next morning’s paper as a presumed suicide. Featherwaite’s colleagues at CUNY are quick to supply possible motives (and after all, who in the modern world doesn’t harbour them?). Having got away with murder once, Bech cannot resist trying again. This time his victim is an elderly lady professor and writer of children’s books who long ago wrote dismissive reviews of Brother Pig and Think Big. He sends her forged juvenile fan letters enclosing stamped addressed envelopes whose gum he spikes with poison.

  When Robin figures out what Bech is doing, she is appalled but also fascinated and attracted, to the point of colluding with him. In this way she enacts the response of the reader. We ought to be repelled by Bech’s deeds, but in an awful way we enjoy them. We ought to find them incredible, but we suspend our disbelief for the sheer delicious black comedy of the conceit—an old writer’s revenge for old insults taking such a literally murderous form. How Updike resolves this tension between morals and aesthetics in narrative terms I will leave the reader to discover, mindful of Bech’s resentment of the “cheerfully ham-handed divulgence of all his plot’s nicely calculated and hoarded twists” by reviewers of Travel Light.

  I feel no such constraint about the final story, since its content is given away in the publisher’s blurb, and probably by its title, “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden.” Yes, Henry Bech wins the Nobel Prize. This is of co
urse even more incredible, given his literary track record, than his murders, and yet again we go along with it for the pleasure of the ride, which has to it an edge of danger, like being on a roller-coaster or a runaway train. There is a kind of exhilarating recklessness about these late stories in the liberties they take with decorum, in the ordinary as well as the literary sense of the word. Updike, unlike Bech, is clearly past caring what reviewers say about him, and indifferent to how his fellow-writers may feel about having their names promiscuously dropped in the Bech chronicles. His account of “the Forty” seems to be a mischievous travesty of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he himself is a member, and whose centennial Festschrift, A Century of Arts and Letters (1998), he edited. He is apparently ready to jeopardise his own chances of winning the Nobel Prize (which cannot be negligible) for the sake of having some fictional fun with it. The main narrative question in “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden” is what kind of acceptance speech Bech will give. That I won’t divulge. Suffice it to say that it is the first Nobel speech given by a recipient holding a baby, and that the last word of the story is “bye-bye.” Bye-Bye Bech might have been a better title for this book. It is hard to imagine that there could be a sequel—but with Updike you never know.

  chapter nine

  SICK WITH DESIRE: PHILIP ROTH’S LIBERTINE PROFESSOR

  PHILIP ROTH’S OUTPUT of fiction in the seventh decade of his life has been astonishing for both quality and quantity. It has been to critics and fellow-novelists a spectacle to marvel at, an awe-inspiring display of energy, like the sustained eruption of a volcano that many observers supposed to be—not extinct, certainly, but perhaps past the peak of its active life. One might indeed have been forgiven for thinking that Sabbath’s Theater (1995) was the final explosive discharge of the author’s imaginative obsessions, sex and death—specifically, the affirmation of sexual experiment and transgression as an existential defiance of death, all the more authentic for being ultimately doomed to failure. Micky Sabbath, who boasts of having fitted in the rest of his life around fucking while most men do the reverse, was a kind of demonic Portnoy—amoral, shameless and gross in his polymorphously perverse appetites, inconsolable at the death of the one woman who was capable of satisfying them, and startlingly explicit in chronicling them. Even Martin Amis admitted to being shocked. Surely, one thought, Roth could go no further. Surely this was the apocalyptic, pyrotechnic finale of his career, after which anything else could only be an anticlimax.

  How wrong we were. What followed, with breathtaking rapidity, were three long novels, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), a fictional project more ambitious than anything Roth had attempted before, and a triumphantly successful one. In these books he adopted something like the model of the classic realist novel, in which individual fortunes are traced across a panorama of social change and historical events, the individual and the social illuminating and borrowing significance from each other in the process. Sex is still vitally important to the characters, but not all-important. Their lives are also affected by and illustrative of profound convulsions, conflicts, and crises in American social and political life over the past half-century: racial tension, terrorism, the Vietnam War, the collapse of traditional industries, and with them whole communities such as the Newark in which Roth himself grew up, recalled in several places with remarkable vividness and unsentimental affection. The trilogy is a kind of elegy for the death of the American Dream as it seemed to present itself in the innocent and hopeful 1950s, and these novels have been widely and deservedly acclaimed.

  Having achieved so much in such a short space of time, Roth might have been expected to take a well-earned rest from literary composition, but only a year after publishing The Human Stain he produced yet another novel, The Dying Animal. It is a short one, and thematically it reverts to Roth’s old preoccupation with the sexual life, especially the sexual lives of men; but in form it is another new departure for this resourceful novelist. If it lacks the broad social vision of the novels that came before, it is nevertheless a tour de force of considerable power, not least the power to challenge (and in some cases probably offend) its readers.

  The title comes from Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium”:

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  It knows not what it is . . .

  These lines are quoted by the protagonist and narrator of the novel as he describes resorting to a masturbatory fantasy to assuage his longing for the heroine of the tale, subsequent to the breakup of their relationship. The lines would apply equally well to other aging male characters in Roth’s late work, tormented by lust, fearful of impotence, disease, and death. The poem itself, however, proposes an escape from this plight which Roth’s narrator passes over in silence. The poet is apostrophising the “sages” of an imaginary and idealised Byzantium: “O sages standing in God’s holy fire . . . gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” Neither Roth nor his heroes (or antiheroes) have any time for, or faith in, the artifice of eternity. “Artifice” in Yeats stands for the impersonality of art, the poetics of Symbolism and Formalism, ideas that Roth has frequently attacked and satirised in his fiction, not least in his allusions to academic literary criticism. And “eternity” denotes a religious idea of transcendence that for Roth’s characters is so impossible that they don’t even bother to challenge it.

  Yeats himself, it should be said, was not unequivocally committed to the message of “Sailing to Byzantium.” In “News for the Delphic Oracle,” for instance, he mocks the desexualised Platonic notion of heaven with a sensual description of the partying that actually goes on there:

  Down the mountain walls

  Intolerable music falls.

  Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,

  Belly, shoulder, bum,

  Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs

  Copulate in the foam.

  Crazy Jane is a kindred spirit to Micky Sabbath:

  “Fair and foul are near of kin,

  And fair needs foul,” I cried . . .

  “A woman can be proud and stiff

  When on love intent;

  But Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement . . .

  The remarkable energy of Yeats’s late poetry is to a large extent fuelled by his resentment and despair at declining sexual power. He would have agreed with an observation in The Dying Animal: “as far as I can tell, nothing, nothing, is put to rest, however old a man may be.”

  The narrator and central character of The Dying Animal is David Kepesh, who performed the same dual role in two much earlier works by Roth, The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Breast (1972, revised in 1980). There is a puzzle about the continuity between these books which I shall come to in a moment. The latest one begins like this:

  I knew her eight years ago. She was in my class. I don’t teach full-time any more, strictly speaking don’t teach literature at all—for years now just the one class, a big senior seminar in critical writing called Practical Criticism.

  At first Kepesh’s voice seems to be addressed straight to the reader, like that of Roth’s favourite narrator and authorial surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman. But it soon becomes clear that there is an audience inside the text, a narratee as structuralist critics call it, someone who is listening to Kepesh’s discourse and occasionally interjecting comments and questions—which are implied by Kepesh’s responses, not rendered directly, until the very last page. The identity of this listener is never revealed, though we might infer from various clues that he is a young or youngish man. In short, the story is a dramatic monologue, a form well suited to the presentation of eloquently persuasive but morally subversive individuals, like the speaker of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or any number of Browning’s characters.

  The story, then, is being told on a single occasion, which we eventually discover is late one night towards the end
of January in the year 2000, in Kepesh’s apartment. He is seventy years old at this time, so he was sixty-two, and already feeling his age, when Consuela Castillo enrolled in his class, a beautiful young woman of twenty-four, the beloved and loving daughter of rich Cuban exiles. He was immediately in thrall to her beauty (“I’m very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know”), and his story is essentially about his infatuation with her, their passionate affair, which lasts about a year and a half, his three years of depression and frustration after she breaks it off, and her dramatic re-entry into his life on New Year’s Eve, 1999. But the time-scheme of the book is very complex, for it operates on two planes simultaneously, which converge only on the penultimate page. There is the time of the main story, which is not unrolled in a straightforward linear fashion, but cut up and rearranged according to the prompting of memories and associations in Kepesh’s consciousness, and frequently interrupted and suspended by digressions about his personal history, other women he has known, and his views on life and death in general. Then there is the “real time” of the narration itself, Kepesh’s long speech act that constitutes the text, interrupted only when he has to leave the room twice to answer the telephone. This plane is communicated in the present tense, but Kepesh sometimes uses the rhetorical device of the “historic present” on the other plane to give special immediacy to some evocation of the past, such as Consuela’s first apparition in his classroom: