Rich in Russia

by John Updike

  ‘There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life – impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular – reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past’

  JOHN UPDIKE

  Born 18 March 1932, Reading, Pennsylvania

  Died 27 January 2009, Danvers, Massachusetts

  ‘Foreword’, ‘Rich in Russia’, ‘Bech in Rumania’, ‘Appendix A’ and ‘Appendix B’ first appeared in book form in Bech: A Book in 1970.

  ALSO PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Poorhouse Fair • Rabbit, Run • The Centaur • Of the Farm • Couples • Rabbit Redux • A Month of Sundays • Marry Me • The Coup • Rabbit is Rich • The Witches of Eastwick • Roger’s Version • S.: A Novel • Rabbit at Rest • Memories of the Ford Administration • Brazil • In the Beauty of the Lilies • Toward the End of Time • The Complete Henry Bech . The Early Stories • Villages • Still Looking • Terrorist • Due Considerations • The Widows of Eastwick • Endpoint • My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

  JOHN UPDIKE

  Rich in Russia

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Selected from Bech: A Book, first published in 1970 and republished as part of The Complete Henry Bech in Penguin Classics 1992

  This edition published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © John Updike, 1970

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher‘s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-197123-0

  Contents

  Foreword

  Rich in Russia

  Bech in Rumania

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Foreword

  Dear John,

  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. At first blush, for example, in Bulgaria (eclectic sexuality, bravura narcissism, thinning curly hair), I sound like some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that London glimpse of silver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow, the King of the Leprechauns, than of stolid old homely yours truly. My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and my ancestral past out of I. B. Singer. I get a whiff of Malamud in your city breezes, and am I paranoid to feel my ‘block’ an ignoble version of the more or less noble renunciations of H. Roth, D. Fuchs, and J. Salinger? Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you.

  Yet you are right. This monotonous hero who disembarks from an aeroplane, mouths words he doesn’t quite mean, has vaguely to do with some woman, and gets back on the aeroplane, is certainly one Henry Bech. Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage. Envied like Negroes, disbelieved in like angels, we veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Hallowe’en priests’ robes a-rustle with economy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Cunt-of-the-Month Club, amid a standing crowd of rueful, Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degenerating in the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers, our formal designs crumbling like sand castles under the feet of beach bullies, we nevertheless and incredibly support with our desperate efforts (just now, I had to look up ‘desperate’ in the dictionary for the ninety-ninth time, forgetting again if it is spelled with two ‘a’s or three ‘e’s) a flourishing culture of publishers, agents, editors, tutors, Timeniks, media personnel in all shades of suavity, chic, and sexual gusto. When I think of the matings, the moaning, jubilant fornications between ectomorphic oversexed junior editors and svelte hot-from-Wellesley majored-in-English-minored-in-philosophy female coffee-fetchers and receptionists that have been engineered with the lever of some of my poor scratched-up and pasted-over pages (they arrive in the editorial offices as stiff with Elmer’s glue as a masturbator’s bedsheet; the office boys use them for tea-trays), I could mutilate myself like sainted Origen, I could keen like Jeremiah. Thank Jahweh these bordellos in the sky can soon dispense with the excuse of us entirely; already the contents of a book count as little as the contents of a breakfast cereal box. It is all a matter of the premium, and the shelf site, and the amount of air between the corn flakes. Never you mind. I’m sure that when with that blithe goyische brass I will never cease to grovel at you approached me for a ‘word or two by way of preface’, you were bargaining for a benediction, not a curse.

  Here it is, then. My blessing. I like some of the things in these accounts very much. The Communists are all good – good people. There is a moment by the sea, I’ve lost the page, that rang true. Here and there passages seem overedited, constipated: you prune yourself too hard. With prose, there is no way to get it out, I have found, but to let it run. I liked some of the women you gave me, and a few of the jokes. By the way, I never – unlike retired light-verse writers – make puns. But if you [here followed a list of suggested deletions, falsifications, suppressions, and rewordings, all of which have been scrupulously incorporated – ED.], I don’t suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm.

  Henry Bech

  Manhattan,

  4–12 Dec. 1969

  Rich in Russia

  Students (not unlike yourselves) compelled to buy paperback copies of his novels – notably the first, Travel Light, though there has lately been some academic interest in his more surreal and ‘existential’ and perhaps even ‘anarchist’ second novel, Brother Pig – or encountering some essay from When the Saints in a shiny heavy anthology of mid-century literature costing $12.50, imagine that Henry Bech, like thousands less famous than he, is rich. He is not. The paperback rights to Travel Light were sold by his publisher outright for two thousand dollars, of which the publisher kept one thousand and Bech’s agent one hundred (10 per cent of 50 per cent). To be fair, the publisher had had to remainder a third of the modest hard-cover printing and, when Travel Light was enjoying its vogue as the post-Golding pre-Tolkien fad of college undergraduates, would amusingly tell on himself the story of Bech’s given-away rights, at sales meetings upstairs in ‘21’. As to anthologies – the
average permissions fee, when it arrives at Bech’s mailbox, has been eroded to $64.73, or some such suspiciously odd sum, which barely covers the cost of a restaurant meal with his mistress and a medium wine. Though Bech, and his too numerous interviewers, have made a quixotic virtue of his continuing to live for twenty years in a grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment building (the mailbox, students should know, where his pitifully nibbled cheques arrive has been well scarred by floating urban wrath, and his last name has been so often ballpointed by playful lobby-loiterers into a somewhat assonant verb that Bech has left the name plate space blank and depends upon the clairvoyance of mailmen), he in truth lives there because he cannot afford to leave. He was rich just once in his life, and that was in Russia, in 1964, a thaw or so ago.

  Russia, in those days, like everywhere else, was a slightly more innocent place. Khruschev, freshly deposed, had left an atmosphere, almost comical, of warmth, of a certain fitful openness, of inscrutable experiment and oblique possibility. There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue; there certainly seemed no reason why Henry Bech, the recherché but amiable novelist, artistically blocked but socially fluent, should not be flown into Moscow at the expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activity termed ‘cultural exchange’. Entering the Aeroflot plane at Le Bourget, Bech thought it smelled like his uncles’ backrooms in Williamsburg, of swaddled body heat and proximate potatoes boiling.* The impression lingered all month; Russia seemed Jewish to him, and of course he Jewish to Russia. He never knew how much of the tenderness and hospitality he met related to his race. His contact man at the American Embassy – a prissy, doleful ex-basketball-player from Wisconsin, with the all-star name of ‘Skip’ Reynolds – assured him that two out of every three Soviet intellectuals had suppressed a Jew in their ancestry; and once Bech did find himself in a Moscow apartment whose bookcases were lined with photographs (of Kafka, Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein) pointedly evoking the glory of pre-Hitlerian Judenkultur. His hosts, both man and wife, were professional translators, and the apartment was bewilderingly full of kin, including a doe-eyed young hydraulics engineer and a grandmother who had been a dentist with the Red Army, and whose dental chair dominated the parlour. For a whole long toasty evening, Jewishness, perhaps also pointedly, was not mentioned. The subject was one Bech was happy to ignore. His own writing had sought to reach out from the ghetto of his heart towards the wider expanses across the Hudson; the artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the fifties but in the movies of the thirties, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience. The reservoir of faith, in 1964, was just going dry; through depression and world convulsion the country had been sustained by the arriviste patriotism of Louis B. Mayer and the brothers Warner. To Bech, it was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance between Jewish Hollywood and bohunk America, conducted almost entirely in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range; and his favourite Jewish writer was the one who turned his back on his three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day. This may be, except for graduate students, neither here nor there. There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life – impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular – reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past. Virtue, in Russia as in his childhood, seemed something that arose from men, like a comforting body odour, rather than something from above, that impaled the struggling soul like a moth on a pin. He stepped from the Aeroflot plane, with its notably hefty stewardesses, into an atmosphere of generosity. They met him with arms heaped with cold roses. On the first afternoon, the Writers’ Union gave him as expense money a stack of rouble notes, pink-and-lilac Lenin and powder-blue Spasskaya Tower. In the following month, in the guise of ‘royalties’ (in honour of his coming they had translated Travel Light, and several of his Commentary essays [‘M-G-M and the U.S.A.’; ‘The Moth on the Pin’; ‘Daniel Fuchs: An Appreciation’] had appeared in I Nostrannaya Literatura, but since no copyright agreements pertained the royalties were arbitrarily calculated, like showers of manna), more roubles were given to him, so that by the week of his departure Bech had accumulated over fourteen hundred roubles – by the official exchange rate, fifteen hundred and forty dollars. There was nothing to spend it on. All his hotels, his plane fares, his meals were paid for. He was a guest of the Soviet state. From morning to night he was never alone. That first afternoon, he had also been given, along with the roubles, a companion, a translator-escort: Ekaterina Alexandrovna Ryleyeva. She was a notably skinny red-headed woman with a flat chest and paper-coloured skin and a translucent wart above her left nostril. He grew to call her Kate.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, displaying his roubles in two fistfuls, letting some drift to the floor, ‘I have robbed the proletariat. What can I do with my filthy loot?’ He had developed, in this long time in which she was always with him, a clowning super-American manner that disguised all complaints as ‘acts’. In response, she had strengthened her original pose – of schoolteacherish patience, with ageless peasant roots. Her normal occupation was translating English-language science fiction into Ukrainian, and he imagined this month with him was relatively a holiday. She had a mother, and late at night, after accompanying him to a morning-brandy session with the editors of Yunost, to lunch at the Writers’ Union with its shark-mouthed chairman,* to Dostoevski’s childhood home (next to a madhouse, and enshrining some agonized crosshatched manuscripts and a pair of oval tin spectacles, tiny, as if fashioned for a dormouse), a museum of folk art, an endless restaurant meal, and a night of ballet, Ekaterina would bring Bech to his hotel lobby, put a babushka over her bushy orange hair, and head into a blizzard towards this ailing mother. Bech wondered about Kate’s sex life. Skip Reynolds solemnly told him that personal life in Russia was inscrutable. He also told Bech that Kate was undoubtedly a Party spy. Bech was touched, and wondered what in him would be worth spying out. From infancy on we all are spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. Ekaterina was perhaps as old as forty, which could just give her a lover killed in the war. Was this the secret of her vigil, the endless paper-coloured hours she spent by his side? She was always translating for him, and this added to her neutrality and transparence. He, too, had never been married, and imagined that this was what marriage was like.

  She answered, ‘Henry’ – she usually touched his arm, saying his name, and it never ceased to thrill him a little, the way the ‘H’ became a breathy guttural sound between ‘G’ and ‘K’ – ‘you must not joke. This is your money. You earned it by the sweat of your brain. All over Soviet Union committees of people sit in discussion over Travel Light, its wonderful qualities. The printing of one hundred thousand copies has gone poof! in the bookstores.’ The comic-strip colours of science fiction tinted her idiom unexpectedly.

  ‘Poof!’ Bech said, and scattered the money above his head; before the last bill stopped fluttering, they both stooped to retrieve the roubles from the rich red carpet. They were in his room at the Sovietskaya, the hotel for Party bigwigs and important visitors; all the suites were furnished in high tsarist style: chandeliers, wax fruit, and brass bears.

  ‘We have banks here,’ Kate said shyly, reaching under the satin sofa, ‘as in the capitalist countries. They pay interest, you could deposit your money in such a bank. It would be here, enlarged, when you returned. You would have a numbered bankbook.’

  ‘What?’ said Bech, ‘And help support the Socialist state? When you are already years ahead of us in the space race? I would be adding thrust to your rockets.’

  They s
tood up, both a little breathless from exertion, betraying their age. The tip of her nose was pink. She passed the remainder of his fortune into his hands; her silence seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Besides,’ Bech said, ‘when would I ever return?’

  She offered, ‘Perhaps in a space-warp?’

  Her shyness, her pink nose and carroty hair, her embarrassment were becoming oppressive. He brusquely waved his arms. ‘No, Kate, we must spend it! Spend, spend. It’s the Keynesian way. We will make Mother Russia a consumer society.’

  From the very still, slightly tipped way she was standing, Bech, bothered by ‘space-warp’, received a haunted impression – that she was locked into a colourless other dimension from which only the pink tip of her nose emerged. ‘Is not so simple,’ she ominously pronounced.

  For one thing, time was running out. Bobochka and Myshkin, the two Writers’ Union officials in charge of Bech’s itinerary, had crowded the end of his schedule with compulsory cultural events. Fortified by relatively leisured weeks in Kazakhstan and the Caucasus,* Bech was deemed fit to endure a marathon of war movies (the hero of one of them had lost his Communist Party member’s card, which was worse than losing your driver’s licence; and in another a young soldier hitched rides in a maze of trains only to turn around at the end [‘See, Henry,’ Kate whispered to him, ‘now he is home, that is his mother, what a good face, so much suffering, now they kiss, now he must leave, oh –’ and Kate was crying too much to translate further]) and museums and shrines and brandy with various writers who uniformly adored Gemingway. November was turning bitter, the Christmassy lights celebrating the Revolution had been taken down, Kate as they hurried from appointment to appointment had developed a sniffle. She constantly patted her nose with a handkerchief. Bech felt a guilty pang, sending her off into the cold towards her mother before he ascended to his luxurious hotel room, with its parqueted foyer stacked with gift books and its alabaster bathroom and its great brocaded double bed. He would drink from a gift bottle of Georgian brandy and stand by the window, looking down on the golden windows of an apartment building where young Russians were Twisting to Voice of America tapes. Chubby Checker’s chicken-plucker’s voice carried distinctly across the crevasse of sub-arctic night. In an adjoining window, a couple courteously granted isolation by the others was making love; he could see knees and hands and then a rhythmically kicking ankle. To relieve the pressure, Bech would sit down with his brandy and write to distant women boozy reminiscent letters that in the morning would be handed solemnly to the ex-basketball-player, to be sent out of Russia via diplomatic pouch.* Reynolds, himself something of a spy, was with them whenever Bech spoke to a group, as of translators (when asked who was America’s best living writer, Bech said Nabokov, and there was quite a silence before the next question) or of students (whom he assured that Yevtushenko’s Precocious Autobiography was a salubrious and patriotic work that instead of being banned should be distributed free to Soviet schoolchildren). ‘Did I put my foot in it?’ Bech would ask anxiously afterwards – another ‘act’.