Authors: Adam Begley
The first draft of
Of the Farm
was finished less than a month before Updike set off on his six-week trip to Russia and other Communist Bloc countries. The State Department invitation to act as an ambassador of the arts was flattering but also unsettling. Unnerved by the prospect of a journey behind the Iron Curtain, he wrote to Maxwell, declaring his intention to draw up his last will and testament—and to name Maxwell as his literary executor (proof, if any were needed, of the unshakeable trust he placed in his editor). Updike promised to do his best not to inconvenience anyone by actually dying. On the eve of his departure, clearly more nervous than his giddy tone implied, he reminded Maxwell that he’d named him executor and mused with mock horror on the “puniness” of his legacy: “Maybe in Russia,” he wrote, “I’ll learn to think big.” He mentioned the two unpublished novels in safe-deposit boxes at the local bank (
Home
and
Marry Me
). They were, he declared, “unreadable”—he had no idea what could be done with them in the “unthinkable” event that something were to happen to him. He instructed Maxwell to release all the stories on the shadow-bank—but again, only if the unthinkable were to occur.
He flew down to Washington in mid-October to receive his marching orders from Foggy Bottom; by the end of the month he and Mary were in Moscow. (Mary eagerly accepted the invitation to accompany her husband, even though the Updikes had to pay for her plane ticket.) William Luers, second secretary at the American embassy, was waiting at the airport to greet them. Luers looked after Updike for most of the trip, offering a corrective counterweight to the omnipresent Soviet “interpreters” assigned to Western visitors. Having done the same for John Steinbeck and Edward Albee, Luers was struck by the conscientious effort Updike made to establish meaningful contact with his Communist hosts. “He was so good about it,” said Luers, “so intent on giving what he thought at the moment was the answer to the question. He felt duty-bound to do the best job he could. He was a patriot, a believer in America and its role in the world.” But his patriotism was only half of the equation; he also felt obliged “to be a good guest of the Soviet state.”
An author on exhibit—“wearing abroad,” as he put it, “my country’s colors”—he met with writers and artists and students, gave speeches, and signed books. Whisked from here to there in black ZiL limousines, he toured literary monuments; attended readings and operas and ballets; endured formal, two-hour banquets; and consumed quantities of vodka. “There I was everything I’m not here,” he told
Life
magazine, “a public figure toasting this and that.” The role-playing left its mark. Overcoming an aversion (instilled by
The New Yorker
) to “the artistic indecency of writing about a writer,” he conceived of a character who was a successful author, a paid-up member of the literary establishment—“a vehicle,” as he put it, “for impressions that only a writer could have collected.” He returned to Ipswich in the first week of December outwardly intact but harboring within this new identity—which he unburdened in a story, “The Bulgarian Poetess,” about an American novelist touring Communist countries at the behest of the State Department. Thus was born Henry Bech. A Lutheran family man from Pennsylvania had given birth to a Jewish bachelor from New York—it proved in time a wonderfully fruitful reconfiguration of Updike’s essential self. Bech is a comic character—sometimes merely a figure of fun, sometimes an excuse to make fun of others—but he also represents a crucial part of his creator’s personality and experience. Harry Angstrom is Updike’s middle American, his Everyman; Bech is a more rarefied, less wholesome creature, his natural habitat the literary world centered in Manhattan, a landscape utterly alien to Rabbit. Harry is a version of what Updike might have been had he never left Pennsylvania; Bech is a version of what Updike might have been had he started out in New York and stubbornly stood his ground.
The first Bech story catches up with our hero in Sofia, after a stint in Moscow and briefer visits to Prague, Bucharest, Kiev, and other more remote capitals. (“I am transported around here like a brittle curio,” writes Bech in his Russian journal; “plug me into the nearest socket and I spout red, white, and blue.”) Just days before his scheduled return to America, he meets and instantly falls in love with Vera Glavanakova, a blond Bulgarian poetess modeled on Blaga Dimitrova (1922–2003), whom Updike met in Sofia. Knowing it will be his last glimpse of Vera, Bech inscribes for her a copy of one of his novels: “It is a matter of earnest regret for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world.” Updike inscribed a copy of
The Centaur
for Blaga: “It is a great sadness for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world. You have been lovely.” He emended the last sentence to “You are lovely.” Dimitrova was a strikingly good-looking woman, and Updike’s expression of romantic yearning clearly heartfelt—Bech’s, too. Updike and Dimitrova corresponded briefly; her tender, wistful letters suggest that his inscription struck a chord.
*
“The Bulgarian Poetess” offers only a glimmer of Bech’s comic potential. In fact, the exotic setting (as Updike noted, Bulgaria in 1964 was, for Americans, “almost the dark side of the moon”) and the snippets of serious literary discussion are almost more conspicuous than the personality of the protagonist, “this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and his melancholy Jewish nose.” Like Rabbit, Bech evolved; his versatility as an alter ego dawned on Updike only gradually.
In “The Bulgarian Poetess,” Bech is a solitary ambassador of the arts passed from one embassy secretary to the next as he makes his way around Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia. As for Updike, he started out on his excursion with plenty of company: Mary was with him for the first two weeks, and for the first ten days the Updikes saw a good deal of John Cheever, who was also staying at Moscow’s Hotel Ukraine. In Moscow and Leningrad the two authors appeared at official functions as a double bill. Cheever flew home in early November, and Mary followed several days later; Updike stayed on for another month, spending two weeks in Russia, then flying south for a whirlwind tour of Eastern Bloc countries: four days each in Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.
Updike and Cheever had met fleetingly at literary events, such as the National Book Award ceremony on March 10, 1964, at the Grand Ballroom of the New York Hilton, where Updike accepted the prize for
The Centaur
. Cheever served on the panel of judges, and boasted of having steered the award toward Updike’s novel (at the expense of Thomas Pynchon’s
V
). This was a larger, more glittery crowd than any Updike had ever faced. A lively record of the occasion survives in paragraphs penned by Tom Wolfe, then a young reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
:
No sensitive artist in America will ever have to duck the spotlight again. John Updike, the Ipswich, Mass., novelist, did it for them all last night, for all time. Up on the stage . . . to receive the most glamorous of the five National Book Awards, the one for fiction, came John Updike . . . in a pair of 19-month-old loafers. Halfway to the podium, the spotlight from the balcony hit him, and he could not have ducked better if there had been a man behind it with a rubber truncheon.
First he squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses. Then he ducked his head and his great thatchy medieval haircut toward his right shoulder. Then he threw up his left shoulder and his left elbow. Then he bent forward at the waist. And then, before the shirred draperies of the Grand Ballroom and an audience of 1,000 culturati, he went into his Sherwin-Williams blush.
Peeping past Wolfe’s trademark hyperbole, we catch a precious glimpse of a rumpled Updike—he’d taken the train down from Boston with Mary just that morning—on the cusp of celebrity, still most comfortable with his aw-shucks pose. His short, earnest acceptance speech offered a contrast in style: slick and mellifluous, he extolled in spit-shined sentences the virtue of accuracy; invoked Proust, Joyce, and Cézanne; and left no one in doubt as to the scale of his ambition.
Cheever had also nominated Updike for membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. These gestures of goodwill helped make their Moscow meeting, eight months after the ceremony in the Grand Ballroom, a jolly occasion. But the camaraderie masked ambivalence on Cheever’s side, a hidden animosity that flared when Updike’s back was turned. As his biographer noted, Cheever was of two minds about Updike even before meeting him. A Knopf executive had sent Cheever an advance copy of
The Poorhouse Fair
, hoping for a blurb; he refused to provide one, explaining that Updike was an “unusually gifted young man . . . but perhaps not a novelist. His eloquence seems to me to retard the movement of the book and to damage his control.” Having sent off this reply, he felt compelled to write again, saying that though he hadn’t changed his mind about the blurb, he wanted to stress that Updike was indeed “unusually brilliant.” In his journal he wrote, “Sometimes I like the thought of [Updike] and just as often he seems to me an oversensitive changling [
sic
] who allows himself to be photographed in arty poses.” Complicating matters was the fact that the pair of them were close friends with Bill Maxwell, who edited their stories and acted on occasion as mentor to both—there was in Cheever’s attitude toward Updike a hint of sibling rivalry.
For his part, Updike felt toward Cheever, who was born in 1912, none of the competitive aggression that sometimes gripped him when he was confronted with promising youngsters. He was grateful to Cheever for having provided the “crystallizing spark” for “Friends from Philadelphia,” and he and Mary read each new Cheever story with avid pleasure (“John Cheever was a golden name to me”). The twenty-year age gap meant that for Updike, the older man belonged to a different generation of writers; as he put it, “Aspiring, we assume that those already in possession of eminence will feel no squeeze as we rise.” Cheever was possibly only dimly aware of the difference in their ages, and was in any case unsuited to an avuncular role, though for the purposes of their adventure, the diminutive Cheever was “Big John” and Updike, who was at least a head taller, “Little John.”
Big John had arrived in Russia a few weeks before the Updikes, and so acted like a genial host, full of charm and contagious enthusiasm. The two Johns joked about being the last non-Jewish writers in America. Cheever invented stories about the glum Soviet literary officials they encountered, turning them, Updike remembered, into “a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters”—that is, into Cheever characters. Fueled by vodka and brandy, champagne and caviar, the proceedings took on a giddy carnival air. Cheever was courtly to Mary, who was thrilled to be in such lively company; “during that excursion,” Updike wrote, she was transformed into “a kind of Russian beauty, with a friendly dimple and a sturdy capacity for vodka.”
The Updikes assumed that Cheever was enjoying himself as much as they were. Perhaps he was—but an unfortunate and somewhat bewildering antagonism toward Little John creeps into Big John’s journal entries. After one of their events at the University of Leningrad, he groused about how Updike “hogged the lecture platform.” A high school dropout, Cheever may have been intimidated by Updike’s intellect, but that doesn’t quite explain why he chose to remember their interaction as continual “back-biting.” In a sequence of letters to Frederick Exley in June 1965, he launched into a rant about Updike—“I think his magnanimity specious and his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart”—then dramatized his complaints with a born storyteller’s flair:
Our troubles began at the Embassy in Moscow when he came on exclaiming:
“What are you looking so great about? I thought you’d be dead.” He then began distributing paper-back copies of the Centaur while I distributed hard-cover copies of The Brigadier. The score was eight to six, my favor. When we went to Spasso [
sic
] House [the U.S. ambassador’s residence] the next day he forgot to bring any books and I dumped six. On the train up to Leningrad he tried to throw my books out of the window but his lovely wife Mary intervened. She not only saved the books; she read one. She had to hide it under her bedpillow and claim to be sick. She said he would kill her if he knew. At the University of Leningrad he tried to upstage me by reciting some of his nonsense verse but I set fire to the contents of an ashtray and upset the water carafe.
This fantasy, obviously concocted for Exley’s amusement, came to light only in 1988 with the publication of Cheever’s letters. Updike didn’t deign to deny the story (though Mary did, strenuously); the malice behind it surprised and saddened him, and opened his eyes to the ubiquity of the competitive reflex in writers. “[T]he literary scene,” he wrote by way of explanation, “is a kind of
Medusa
’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to stamp on his fingers.” Cheever died in 1982, six years before the correspondence was published. If Updike was tempted to retaliate by speaking ill of the dead, he showed no sign of it. He did tell the dismal story of Cheever’s last bender, but with sympathy rather than rancor.
T
HE LITERARY SCENE,
with its minute calibration of rising and falling reputations, was taking up more and more of Updike’s time. His election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (as secure a purchase on
Medusa
’s raft as one is likely to achieve) meant that he was mingling with such eminent American authors as John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, Ogden Nash, and Thornton Wilder. His former English professor Harry Levin was a member, as was Archibald MacLeish. Cheever had been elected in 1957, Saul Bellow in 1958, and William Maxwell in 1963, and Bernard Malamud (one of the models for Henry Bech) came in with Updike in 1964. Of all these, Updike was by far the youngest—in fact, at the tender age of thirty-two, he was the youngest writer elected to the institute for nearly half a century. Newly inducted and called upon to speak at a dinner meeting in the library of the splendid Beaux Arts headquarters on West 155th Street, a grand landmark building designed by McKim, Mead and White, he prefaced his remarks with a charming acknowledgment of the yawning generation gap: “I feel in this company like hiding behind the dictum that children should be seen and not heard.”