Updike by Adam Begley

Author:Adam Begley [Begley, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780061896453
Google: sfdNAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0061896454
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2014-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

VII.

Updike Abroad

In the era of jet planes and electronic communication, a writer in gathering truth should set foot on as much of the globe as he can.

—Self-Selected Stories of John Updike (1996)

In a rented house near Chilmark Pond on Martha’s Vineyard, in August 1968, just a month before he and his family embarked on a year abroad in London, Updike finished the longest, most ambitious poem of his career. “Midpoint” is a searching look back over his thirty-six years, a summing-up after a prolific decade as a professional author, and an excavation of his identity as a son, a lover, a husband, a father. Capping this wide-ranging retrospective, and reinforcing the blithely optimistic notion that after this “midpoint” a second act would unfold, the poet makes a startling resolution: “henceforth, if I can, / I must impersonate a serious man.” The very last line of a difficult, five-canto, forty-page poem replete with formal tricks, far-flung allusion, incidental pornography, and typographical high jinks, it’s both a tease and a blunt declaration of intent. The hint of paradox—would a serious man embrace impersonation?—shouldn’t deter us from taking him, well, seriously. He’s proposing that he become what his career has made him: a public figure—as Yeats would say, a “smiling public man”—a literary celebrity. (He considered capitalizing “Serious Man” to emphasize the theatrical aspect, the role-playing.) That particular kind of impersonation was much on his mind. One reason he hatched the plan to spend a year in England was to dodge the publicity Couples was sure to generate; he and Mary started thinking about leaving town immediately after he’d finished the novel. (The publicity, however, proved hard to avoid; he permitted himself to be fêted by literary London and, with the novel lodged comfortably atop British bestseller lists, freely granted interviews to Fleet Street hacks.) Also on his mind was the kind of impersonation he did on the page: the making of fictional characters in general, and Henry Bech in particular.

The idea of giving Bech his own book first occurred to him when he wrote the second of the stories, “Bech in Rumania,” in April 1966; a couple of years later, as he was working on “Midpoint” and looking forward to the London adventure, he wrote Bech’s Russian journal and dreamed up a full bibliography, both eventually published as appendixes to Bech: A Book (1970). On the way to England he savored his latest story in The New Yorker (“Bech Takes Pot Luck,” in the September 7 issue), reporting back to Maxwell with alliterative satisfaction, “It was good to read about Bech on the boat.” Going abroad and burrowing deeper into Bech are related activities. Leaving home and living in the skin of an invented character are ways of escaping from oneself, and in both cases the distance achieved is instructive; impersonation teaches us something about who we are—as does travel, which uncovers, as Updike wrote, a “deeper, less comfortable self.”

Bech is sometimes self-consciously aware of being a character created by John Updike

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