Ethnic Joke
Bech: A Book.
by John Updike.
Knopf. 206 pp. $5.95.
When some time ago in these pages Alfred Chester flicked Updike off as a magician of surfaces, I wrote in my head the imaginary counter-review: Updike as Late Church Father. For years I sniffed after an opportunity to think in print about the sacral Updike, and now that the chance is palpably here, it turns out to be not Pigeon Feathers, or Rabbit, Run, or The Centaur, or Of the Farm, not even Couples: those fictions of salvationism and eucharistic radiance. Instead, oif tsulokhes (the phrase of regret Bech’s Williamsburg uncles would use and toward which Bech is amnesiac), here is Henry Bech, Jew, rising, like Shylock and Bloom, out of a Christian brain.
Updike, whose small-town stories in particular have suggested him as our most “American” writer, is considerably less American, it seems to me, than, say, George P. Elliott or R. V. Cassill, secularists in a post-Christian neuterland. It is not especially American to be possessed by theology, and Updike is above all the Origen of the novel. The epigraph for The Poorhouse Fair is from Luke, Couples is emblazoned with Tillich, Rabbit, Run quotes Pascal concerning “the motions of Grace.” In Couples, as in St. Theresa, love’s arrows and Christ’s thorns fuse: “he thinks we’ve made a church of each other,” someone says of one of the couples at the start, and in the last chapter fellatio becomes the Sacrament of the Eucharist: “. . . when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred.” Further rich proofs and allusions will contribute nothing: it is already well-known that John Updike is a crypto-Christian, a reverse Marrano celebrating the Body of Jesus while hidden inside a bathing suit. (Vide “Lifeguard,” Pigeon Feathers .) Even Bech, a character, as they say, “pre-processed”—even Bech, who doesn’t know much, knows that. In a letter which constitutes the Foreword to Bech: A Book, Bech tells Updike: “Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical . . . derives, my wild surmise is, from you.” The original Marranos, in Spain, were probably the first group in history to attempt large-scale passing. As everyone knows (except possibly Bech), they ended at the stake. So much for Jews posing. What, then, of Christian posing as Jew? What would he have to take on, much less shuck off?
In the case of Updike’s habitation of Bech, nothing. For Bech-as-Jew has no existence, is not there, because he has not been imagined. Bech-as-Jew is a switch on a library computer. What passes for Bech-as-Jew is an Appropriate Reference Machine, cranked on whenever Updike reminds himself that he is obligated to produce a sociological symptom: crank, gnash, and out flies an inverted sentence. Not from Bech’s impeccably acculturated lips, of course, but out of the vulgar mouth (“Mother, don’t be vulgar,” Bech says in boyhood) of a tough Jewish mother lifted, still in her original wrap, straight out of A Mother’s Kisses. The Foreword—which, like all Forewords, is afterthought and alibi—tries to account for this failure of invention by a theory of the comic: it is, you see, all a parody: ironically humorous novelist addresses ironically humorous novelist Updike and coolly kids him about putting Bech together out of Mailer, Bellow, Singer, Malamud, Fuchs, Salinger, the two Roths. The Appropriate Reference Machine is thereby acknowledged as the very center of the joke; the laugh is at the expense of the citation. In search of a Jewish sociology, Updike has very properly gone to the, as Bech would say, soi-disant Jewish novel. And found:
Category: Vocabulary
1. Adjective: zoftig
2. Nouns
a. shikse
b. putz
3. Ejaculation: aiCategory: Family
1. Beloved uncles in Williams
burg
a. backrooms
b. potatoes boiling, “swad-
dled body heat”
2. Father (mentioned twice in
passing)
a. uxorious, a laugher
b. no occupation given
3 . Mother
a. buys Bech English chil-
dren’s books at the Fifth
Avenue Scribners
b. takes young Bech to
awards meeting of fac-
simile of Academy of
Arts and LettersCategory: Historical References
1. “the peasant Jews of stagnant
Slavic Europe”
2. Russian “quality of life”
“reminiscent of his neglected
Jewish past”
3 . HanukkahCategory: Nose
Bech’s: Jewish big
(Forgive this. An in-joke. Up-
dike’s, goyish big, earns him
the right.)Category: Hair
Bech’s: Jewish dark curly
(Cf. reviewer’s)Category: Sex
1. Sleeps willingly with Gentile
women; like Mailer (though
a bachelor) tries out whole
spectrum of possible shikse
types
2. But invited to sleep with
zoftig Ruth Eisenbraun, is
less willing; unclear if he
does or doesn’t
All right. No quarrel with most of these attributes. If the only Yiddish Bech knows is shikse, putz, and zoftig, he is about even with most indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelists of his generation. And I suppose there are Jewish novelists who, despite the variety in the gene pool, have both big noses and kinky hair: one (affectionate?) stereotype doesn’t make an anti-Dreyfusard. And if, on a State Department-sponsored visit, Bech associates the more comfortable tones of Russia—“impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular”—with his “neglected Jewish past,” his is, like that of other indifferent disaffected de-Judaized Jewish novelists, a case not so much of neglect as of auto-lobotomy. Emancipated Jewish writers like Bech (I know one myself) have gone through Russia without once suspecting the landscape of old pogroms, without once smelling out another Jew. But because Bech has no Jewish memory, he emerges with less than a fourth-grade grasp of where he is. His phrase “peasant Jews” among the Slavs is an imbecilic contradiction—peasants work the land, Jews were kept from working it; but again Bech, a man who is witty in French, who in youth gave himself over to Eliot, Valéry, Joyce, who has invented a comic theory of the intelligence of groups, who thinks of himself as an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist—this same Bech is a historical cretin. If there had been “peasant Jews” there might have been no Zionism, no State of Israel, no worrisome Russians in the Middle East . . . ah Bech! In your uncles’ backrooms in Williamsburg you learned zero: despite your Jewish nose and hair, you are—as Jew—an imbecile to the core. Pardon: I see, thanks to the power of Yuletide, you’ve heard of Hanukkah.
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So much for the American Jewish novelist as sociological source. As a subject for social parody, it is fairly on a par with a comic novel about how slavery cretinized the black man. All those illiterate darkies! Bech as cretin is even funnier: they didn’t bring him in chains, he did it to himself under the illusion he was getting civilized.
Nevertheless a few strokes seem not to be derivative and may be Updike’s alone: one, the whimsical notion that a woman who speaks sentences like “Mister Touch-Me-Not, so ashamed of his mother he wants all his blue-eyed shikses to think he came out from under a rock” would venture past Gimbels to any Fifth Avenue store, much less to Scribners for English (English!) children’s books. Having adequately researched P.S. 87, Updike might have inquired at the neighborhood branch library for Bech’s sweaty-fingered, much-stamped ancient card (“Do Not Turn Down the Leaves”). Updike’s second wholly original misapprehension is a masterpiece of the inane imagination. Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible. That this same woman would by some means, some “pull,” gain entry to a ceremony in a hall of WASP Depression Hochkultur is less mad than the supposition that she would ever have gotten wind of such doings. What rotogravure section carried them? Bech’s mother’s culture-drive stops at the public-library door; Bech goes in without her, and if he ends up reading Hawthorne in Bulgaria, the credit belongs to P.S. 87. Bech’s grandfather’s mind came equally unfurnished: what produces a Bech is a grandfather just like him, with no conscious freight of history, no scholarliness, and the sort of ignorant piety of rote that just sustains against poverty. Remove the poverty, slip in P.S. 87, and you have Bech. What Updike leaves out (and what Roth puts in) is the contempt of the new Bech for the old Bechs: the contempt of just appreciation. Updike writes, “[A]ll the furniture they had brought with them from Europe, the footstools and phylacteries, the copies of Tolstoy and Heine, the ambitiousness and defensiveness and love, belonged to the stuffy back room.” (For love’s duration in close family quarters, see Roth, supra) Footstools in steerage? From out of the cemeteries on Staten Island ten thousand guffaws fly up. The beds left in Minsk still harbored the next wave to come. The phylacteries they threw away at the first sight of a paycheck for pants-pressing. And those who read Tolstoy or Heine alighted not in New York but in Berlin. Or stayed behind to make the Revolution. A Jew who came to New York with some Gemara in his brain was absolved from spawning Bech. Bech is a stupid intellectual. I know him well.
I am not asking Updike to be critical of Bech—it is not his responsibility: it is mine and Bech’s. Besides, Updike loves Bech too much, especially where (and this is the greater part of the book) he is thoroughly de-Beched. Updike can be as funny as Dickens and as celestial as bits of Anna Karenina, and in this book he is, now and then, in glimpses, both. This happens when he is forgetting to remember about Bech-as-Jew; luckily, the crunch of the Appropriate Reference Machine is sometimes silenced. Updike loves Bech best when Bech is most openly, most shrewdly, most strategically, most lyrically Updike. Bech’s failure—he is a celebrated writer suffering from Block—is rumor and theory, but the exact flavor of Bech’s success is the stuff of Updike’s virtu. Who else but Updike could take fame so for granted as to endow it with exhaustion? The exhaustion is examined with Updike’s accustomed theological finesse: Bech’s Block is to be taken somewhat like the modern definition of the Christian hell—no fire and brimstone in a fixed nether location; instead a sense of irreparable loss, a feeling of eternal separation from God, a stony absence of Grace. In the presence of his Block Bech becomes christologized. In the wilderness of his London hotel lobby he is even subjected to Satanic wiles: the devil is a young journalist named Tuttle into whose notebook Bech spills his spiritual seed:
. . . Bech talked of fiction as an equivalent of reality, and described how the point of it, the justification, seemed to lie in those moments when a set of successive images locked and then one more image arrived and, as it were, super locked, creating a tightness perhaps equivalent to the terribly tight knit of reality, e.g., the lightning ladder of chemical changes in the body cell that translates fear into action or, say, the implosion of mathematics consuming the heart of a star.
Imagine the Body of Christ describing its transubstantiation from bread. What could the devil do but flee that holiness? But then, coming ever closer, there approaches the ghostly clank of the A.R. Machine, and the eucharistic Bech folds flat and begins to flap like the leaf of an ethnic survey-analysis study:
He said, then, that he was sustained, in so far as he was sustained, by the memory of laughter, the specifically Jewish, embattled, religious, sufficiently desperate, not quite belly laughter of his father and his father’s brothers, his beloved Brooklyn uncles; that the American Jews had kept the secret of this laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles, hence their present domination of the literary world; that unless the Negroes learned to write there was nowhere else it could come from; and that in the world today only the Russians still had it, the Peruvians possibly, and Mao Tse-tung but not any of the rest of the Chinese. In his, Bech’s, considered opinion.
Here Updike, annoyed at the Machine’s perpetual intrusions, allows it to grind itself into giggling berserkdom. The Machine is amusing itself; it is providing its own ethnic jokes. (The inopportune demands of Bech’s Jewishness on his author should serve as sufficient warning to other novelists begging to be absorbed uninterruptedly by epiphanies: beware of any character requiring more sociology than imagination.) Bech, confronted at last by the journalist’s printed report of their encounter, guesses the devil’s spiritual triumph over matter: “He [Bech] had become a character by Henry Bech.” Which is to say a folk-character out of Jewish vaudeville, not quite Groucho Marx, not yet Gimpel the Fool. Nevertheless unsaved. But while none of Updike’s people has ever attained salvation, salvation is the grail they moon over. Bech’s grail is cut in half, like his name, which is half a kiddush-cup: becher. Over the broken brim the Jew-in Bech spills out; Updike, an un-circumcised Bashevis Singer (as Mark Twain was the Gentile Sholem Aleichem), is heard in the wings, laughing imp-laughter.
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The center of Bech: A Book is a sustained sniff of this Christian hell: it is so to speak an inverted epiphany, a negative ecstasy. Bech lectures at a Southern girls’ college and experiences a Panic: “He felt dizzy, stunned. The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hung behind everything. . . .” He sees “the shifting sands of absurdity, nullity, death. His death gnawed inside him like a foul parasite. . . .” “All things have the same existence, share the same atoms, reshuffled: grass into manure, flesh into worms.” “. . . the grandeur of the theater in which Nature stages its imbecile cycle struck him afresh and enlarged the sore accretion of fear he carried inside of him as unlodgeably as an elastic young wife carries within her womb her first fruit.” The abyss swells and contracts, until finally it shrinks from Immense Void to empty becher and again becomes recognizable merely as Bech’s Block: “He tried to analyze himself. He reasoned that since the id cannot entertain the concept of death, which by being not-being is nothing to be afraid of, his fear must be of something narrower, more pointed and printed. He was afraid his critics were right. That his works were indeed flimsy, un-felt, flashy, and centrifugal. That the proper penance for his artistic sins was silence and reduction. . . .” It is typical of Updike that he even theologizes writing problems, though here he parodies his standard eschatology with an overlay of Freudian theodicy. The fact is Updike theologizes everything (in Rabbit, Run he theologized an ex-high-school basketball player); this is his saving power, this is precisely what saves him from being flashy and centrifugal. The stunning choice Updike has made—to be not simply an American but a Christian writer—distinguishes him: in this he is like a Jew (though not like Bech). America as neuter is not enough.
But he does not theologize the Jew in Bech. In seven chapters (really separate stories) he takes the mostly de-Beched Bech everywhere: from Russia to Rumania and Bulgaria, through scenes sweated with wistful wit and ironic love; from a worshipful pot-smoking ex-student through a shift of mistresses; from Virginia to stinging London to a sophomoric “Heaven” where the “Medal for Modern Fiction was being awarded to Kingsgrant Forbes” while “the sardonic hubbub waxed louder.” (This last section, by the way, need not be compared for satiric thrust with Jonathan Swift: I suspect because both the Jewish Appropriate Reference Machine and the Literary Politics A.R. Machine, in tandem, were working away like Mad .) Wherever Updike is at home in his own mind, the book runs true, with lyric ease: the jokes work, small calculations pay off, anti-climaxes are shot through with a kind of brainy radiance. Without Bech Bech might have been small but sharp, a picaresque travel-diary wryly inventing its own compunctions. But wherever the Jew obtrudes, there is clatter, clutter, a silliness less comic than foolish. Bech makes empty data. It is not that Updike has fallen into any large-scale gaucherie or perilous failures-of-tone. It is not that Updike’s American Jew is false. It is that he is not false enough.
By which I mean made up, imagined, mythically brought up into truthfulness.
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In the case of Bech—and only in the case of Bech—Updike does not find it worthwhile to be theological. In no other novel does he resist the itch of theology; everywhere he invests ordinary Gentile characters with mythic Christian or proto-Christian roles, adding to local American anthropology a kind of sacral sense. And when the sacral is missing sulphur drifts up from the Void. Updike is our chief Dante: America is his heaven and hell. He has no such sense of Bech. It is as if he cannot imagine what a sacral Jew might be. You might want to say he is not altogether to blame, after all: what would any accurate sociological eye see on the American landscape but Bech? Nevertheless Bech is deviation, perhaps transient deviation, from the historical Jew. Being historical cretin, Bech does not know this about himself: unable to inherit his past, he has no future to confer. He is very plausibly without progeny: though his writing Block is an Updikean Christian salvational crisis, his Jewish Block consists of being no longer able to make history. As Jew he is all sociology, which is to say all manners (acquired exilic manners); as Jew he is pathetically truncated, like his name. So Updike finds Bech and so he leaves him. He comes and goes as anthropologist, transmuting nothing. It is very queer—it is something to wonder at—that Updike, who is always so inquisitive about how divinity works through Gentiles, has no curiosity at all about how it might express itself, whether vestigially or even by its absence or even through its negation, in a Jew.
Being a Jew (like being a Christian) is something more than what is. Being a Jew is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky hair. Simply: to be a Jew is to be covenanted; or, if not committed so far, to be at least aware of the possibility of becoming covenanted; or, at the very minimum, to be aware of the Covenant itself. It is no trick, it is nothing at all, to do a genial novel about an uncovenanted barely nostalgic secular/neuter Bech: Bech himself, in all his multiple avatars, writes novels about Bech every day. It is beside the point for Updike and Bech together to proclaim Bech’s sociological thereness. Of course Bech is, in that sense, there. But what is there is nothing. In a work of imagination Bech-as-he-is is critically unjustifiable. It is not Bech-as-he-is that interests us (if you want only that, look around you), but Bech-as-he-might-become. If to be a Jew is to become covenanted, then to write of Jews without taking this into account is to miss the deepest point of all. Obviously this is not only Updike’s flaw, but essentially the flaw of the Jewish writers he is sporting with. It is no use objecting that Updike and others do not aim for the deepest point: concerning Jews, the deepest point is always most implicated when it is most omitted.
Descending, for the sake of the Jew alone, from the level of theological mythmaking to the level of social data, is Updike patronizing his Jew? One thinks, by contrast, of a Jew writing about a Gentile: I mean Henderson the Rain King. Meditating on the quintessential goy, Bellow makes up a holy culture to demonstrate him. The demonstration is not through what is, but through opposites: the goy is most revealed as not-Jew. It seems to me that a Christian writing of a Jew would profit from a similar route in showing the quintessential Jew as not-Gentile. Whereas Bech has no inner nature of his own, and only passes. Or I think of a short story, not altogether seamless but divinely driven, by George P. Elliott, in his collection An Hour of Last Things: a Jewish woman fevered by the beauty of a cathedral is made to waver between revulsion for Christian history and the lustful leap into the idolatry of Art. Here a secularized post-Christian WASP writer explores the most metaphorical depths of Commandment.
Two questions, then, remain to puzzle. Why, for Bech, does Updike withhold his imagination from the creation of Bech as Jew? And second: what motive, what need, what organic novelistic gains, emerge from the turn to Bech? As some say Mailer taunted Updike into the sexual adventurism of Couples, so now, it is declared, a similar competitiveness with Jewish “domination of the literary world” (Bech’s self-sneering Gaullist phrase) compels him to a Jewish character. I reject the competitive motive: it seems plain that Updike experiments for himself, not for other writers, and pits himself against values, not persons. But while Couples turned out to be a Christian novel, Bech is a neuter. It may be that Updike’s experiment this time lies precisely in this: to attempt a novel about no-values, about a neuter man. To find the archetypical neuter man, man separated from culture, Updike as theologian reverts to Origen and Ambrose, to centuries of Christian doctrine, and in such ancient terms defines his Jew. If the only kind of Jew Updike can see, among all these cities and hearts, is Bech, that is not solely because Bech is in the majority, or most typical; it is because for him Bech—the Jew as neuter man; the Jew as a theological negative—is most real.
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But seen from the perspective of the Jewish vision (and what other perspective shall we apply to a Jew?), Bech has no reality at all: he is a false Jew, a poured-out becher, one who has departed from Jewish reality. For Updike to falsify the false—i.e., to lend the Jew in America the Grace of his imagination—would have been to get beyond data to something like historical truth. And he might have written a novel instead of a silliness. But that, I suppose, would have required him to do what Vatican II fought against doing: forgive the Jew for having been real to himself all those centuries, and even now. And for that he would have had to renounce the darker part of the Christian imagination and confound his own theology.
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