Updike’s Jew

Bech: Updike’s Jewish alter ego.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

In the crush of words written about John Updike since his death last month, one of his great creations has received short shrift. Henry Bech, Updike’s Jewish alter ego, still lurks in each eulogized shadow of the author’s most famed protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. This is understandable. Even if Bech inhabited three full-length books, it was still one short of Updike’s magnum opus, the Rabbit tetralogy.

And more to the point: Rabbit was Updike’s most serious creation, a washed-up basketball star who had become a middling car salesman with a wife and kid, stuck somewhere in the suburbs. Through him, Updike explored postwar unease, the richness and the longings of a sex-crazed, God-fearing America.

Bech was more for fun. First appearing

in the 1964 short story “The Bulgarian Poetess,” Updike created the New York Jewish writer so he could take a few satiric jabs at the literary world — its pettiness, banality, its much too grand view of itself. Bech couldn’t be more different from Updike, as he later told an interviewer: “I made Bech as unlike myself as I could. ... Instead of being married with four children, he’s a bachelor; instead of being gentile, he’s a Jew.”

Updike’s novel “Rabbit, Run,” the first in that nonpareil series, appeared four years prior to “Poetess,” as ‘50s-era conformity came to a close. Rabbit’s story presciently depicted the undoing of America’s values, mainly family and religion, and in the process rocketed its author to stardom. But fame came at just the wrong time: Jewish writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer had become much more in vogue. A white, Christian, Harvard-educated wunderkind, Updike was walking literary success’ fine line: he was in, but dare trample on the prevailing multicultural ethos, and he’d be out.

Indeed, as Updike’s fictitious world expanded, critics often pounced on characters that were not a close verisimilitude to the author himself. “The Witches of Eastwick,” about suburban housewives, got him clocked for being a misogynist. So did “S.” And as the Rabbit series rolled on into the early-‘90s, even if two picked up Pulitzers, they were increasingly critiqued for being out-of-touch.

Not Bech’s world, though, with Updike’s astonishing eye for detail poetically manifest on each and every page. What had begun as a quintessential wry New Yorker short story, “Poetess” launched a comically cynical character, Bech, who chased Rabbit for 30-odd years: the first collection of short stories, “Bech: A Book,” appeared in 1970, followed by “Bech is Back” in 1982 and finished off with “Bech at Bay” in 1998.

All of them were published together by Everyman’s Library in 2001 as “The Complete Henry Bech,” with one extra story. But, alas, it might be just that talent for the keenly observed, artfully wrought detail that did the Bech project in. Or nearly did.

In a devastating critique published just after the first two Bech collections came out, Cynthia Ozick took Updike to task. The problem, she argued, wasn’t that Bech was a false stereotype (“Bech is a stupid Jewish intellectual. I know him well.”). It was that Updike failed to explore the essential core of his otherwise accurate stereotype: the Jew’s relationship to God and history.

Updike “does not theologize the Jew in Bech,” Ozick wrote in her 1983 essay “Bech, Passing,” still discussed a generation later. Updike nailed every external quality of the New York Jewish intellectual — his Yiddishisms, his pessimism towards religion, his angst-riddled writer’s block, his avidity for sex with goyim.

But by creating such a real character without exploring how he got that way, Updike’s Bech was merely “passing” as a Jew. Ozick called the character an “Appropriate Reference Machine,” “a caricature” and then hit lower: “Despite your Jewish nose and hair, you are — as Jew — an imbecile to the core,” she wrote, continuing in her own parody of a review: “As a subject of social parody, it is fairly on 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 of getting civilized.”

Updike took Ozick’s critique to heart. In an interview given when his last set of Bech stories came out, in 1998, he said that “with Cynthia’s admonitions in mind, I’ve tried in subsequent episodes to give him more ... Jewishness.” That was opaque enough an answer to give Updike some breathing room: “I’m on thin ice here,” he said next, after forgetting some of the details of Bech’s past.

But Updike switched gears quickly, and went on to make a point that sounded more like a riposte than contrition. Jews, like Christians he supposed, came in many different varieties, with some more deeply informed about their religion and history than others. Unlike Ozick, a committed, learned Jew, there were plenty of Jews Updike knew who “didn’t have a truck with all that, and I expect Bech is of the latter sort.”

He went on: “I don’t feel obliged to make him a rabbi’s son just because he’s a Jew. He’s a Jewish American who, like many Jewish Americans, has left it pretty far behind.”

Turns out that Bech would stay the same irreligious, cynical, conflicted Jew he always was. And perhaps the Bech stories are better off for it. Their original mission was to satirize the literary world — not the Jewish one. That was for Singer, Roth and Bellow to do. Even then, Updike’s portrayal of the Jewish Bech remains so richly drawn — emotionally alive, psychology conflicted, morally flawed — that the reader, like the writer, can’t help but empathize with him.

To take an example, look at one vignette in the last collection of Bech stories, “Bech at Bay.” Now in his 70s, with seven novels under his belt, Bech is awarded the Nobel Prize. Critics are up in arms, though, and Updike’s story opens with a mock New York Times editorial lambasting the decision. It calls Bech “this passé exponent of fancy penmanship, whose skimpy oeuvre fails even to achieve J.D. Salinger’s majestic total abstention from publication.” With a wink, it cries foul for skipping over Ozick, too.

When Bech’s literary agent calls him to ask if he’ll sit for an interview on “Oprah,” he balks. “I hate that hooting audience of Corn Belt feminists she has,” he rues to his agent, Meri Jo. After she pleads with him to reconsider, saying it would be “an insult to two-thirds of America if you don’t deign to appear,” Bech doesn’t skip a beat: “Yeah, the illiterate two-thirds. Where were they when ‘Going South’ sold less than two thousand copies?”

Bech’s hallmarks are still intact, 26 years after Ozick’s critique. And most important is the humor. That’s worth noting, particularly since Updike will always be remembered first for his serious novels: the Rabbit quartet, “The Centaur,” “Couples.” Bech opened a vast new space for Updike to explore comedy, where it could take center stage and not just be peripheral relief for his more serious work, poetry and criticism included.

Here’s the wit again, when Updike inhabits the mind of Bech just after he marries Beatrice Latchett Cook, an Episcopalian divorcee: “His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in” — she takes Bech to Israel for their honeymoon — “a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on earth where, for Jews, there was no safety.”

Naturally, they divorce. But how many Jewish writers could pull that off?

Or how about Updike’s take on Jewish guilt, from a story where Bech gets sued for libel and starts to empathize with the plaintiff? Bech’s lawyer counsels him: “That’s a luxury you are allowing yourself ... some kind of Jewish thing, identifying with people trying to destroy you. A way of making yourself superior to the fight.”

Even Freud would take notes.

To be fair, Updike’s satirical style made it difficult to distinguish his views from Bech’s. It allowed him a degree of authorial ambiguity, which may be part of the reason Updike chose to write them that way, but it lent itself to legitimate criticism, too. Particularly, that parody was a cop-out for things Updike otherwise wouldn’t say.

In fact, he did sometimes overcompensate for Bech’s flaws — patronize, Ozick called it — by dishing out tongue-in-cheek theories of Jewish superiority. Lest the bigotry card be pulled, Updike always wrote them in jest. Parody permits it.

But the notions fly anyway. In an early story in “Bech: A Book,” for instance, Bech wittingly contrives a distinctly Jewish source for his wry sense of humor. It arises from the Jews’ tragic view of history, Bech tells a reporter, trying to appease him with something fittingly grandiose. “American Jews had kept the secret of this embattled laughter a generation longer than the Gentiles,” Bech says, “hence their present domination of American lit.”

Updike wants Bech to look like a comic fool. But Updike is — was — far too smart a writer, far too compassionate a human being, to let criticism obstruct his larger project. Alfred Kazin, the quintessential New York Jew, once argued in an essay praising Updike that his characters, Rabbit and Bech chief among them, were the new pillars entrusted to uphold society’s values. At a time when the traditional institutions that ballast faith and love — that is, church and marriage — were crumbling, it was liberating to have such complex characters circuitously fight for these threatened causes. Perhaps this was even Updike’s most subtle victory: a cry for freedom, that other American value that critics said his traditionalism naturally opposed.

When we get to “His Oeuvre,” Updike’s final coda for Bech, written in 1999, we glimpse most of this. Back in America after receiving the Nobel, Bech hits the book-touring circuit, cashing in on his fame. He is a bachelor again, though now with a baby girl, and he ends up having an affair with a married woman in the audience. That’s just how Bech’s always been, as Updike ends it: “These women who showed up at his readings did it, it seemed clear, to mock his books — clever, twisted, false books, empty of almost everything that mattered, these women he had slept with were saying. We, we are your masterpieces.”

Flawed but free, Bech discovers love, even if he can’t have it. Still no God, but two out of three ain’t bad.

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