Henry Bech, a writer whose first book was his best, whose reputation had grown while his powers declined. As he felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism, as his search for plain truth carried him further and further into treacherous realms of fantasy and, lately, of silence, he was more and more thickly hounded by homage, by flat-footed exegetes, by arrogantly worshipful undergraduates who had hitchhiked a thousand miles to touch his hand, by querulous translators, by election to honorary societies, by invitations to lecture, to ‘speak,’ to ‘read,’ to participate in symposia trumped up by ambitious girlie magazines in shameless conjunction with venerable universities. His very government, in airily unstamped envelopes from Washington, invited him to travel, as an ambassador of the arts, to the other half of the world, the hostile,mysterious half. Rather automatically, but with some faint hope of shaking himself loose from the burden of himself, he consented…
Through Updike’s masterful prose, I know the tiredness of constant travel, the shallowness of the communist charade of seeking mutual understanding and respect, the futility of failed diplomacy, as well as, knowing the sickening feeling that ones best work has passed and only mediocrity remains. As if the author had not mystified and entertained me enough, he then proceeds, with brilliant nuance, to introduce a moving story of unrequited love. Deftly, subtly, Bech’s feelings for the poetess become clear and I feel sorry for him.
I love this story.
