Perennial Promises Kept

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contemporary man of letters.

Updike has managed this old-fashioned literary career in an era obsessed with the new. In the past, writers in the U.S. could expect to be left pretty much alone by their fellow citizens. They could blame such neglect on Philistinism or the no-nonsense approach of youthful capitalism. They might, like Melville, produce superb work and still decline into seedy obscurity. But the only one trying to keep them from writing was the wolf at the door. Even during the early decades of this century, a young William Faulkner could learn his trade unheralded and in peace.

All that changed dramatically at the end of World War II. A vast cultural apparatus began heaving itself into place across the land. Writers, even raw beginners, found themselves suddenly in great demand. Colleges and universities beckoned with speaking engagements, reading tours and adjunct professorships in creative writing. Symposiums, panels and conferences proliferated, all unable to get along without the presence of a well-known author or two. Foundations and government at every level began making money available to artists and writers; much colorful and highly imaginative prose was funneled away from fiction and into grant applications. And television, with its voracious appetite for talk-show guests, started to employ non-mumbling authors as classy filling between starlets and commercials.

By the '60s writers were being encouraged, often paid substantial wages, to do everything but write. Updike lived through and withstood such pressures on his private labors. He withstood, too, the more chronic depredations on an American writer's productivity: drink, the extremes of isolation or cliquishness, and, above all, early burnout. All too often, as Updike once noted in a speech at an Australian arts festival, a writer uses up his youthful material and finds himself, though empty, still posed in his role. "It is then that he dies as a writer and becomes an intercultural object merely," said Updike, "or is born again, by resubmitting his ego, as it were, to fresh drafts of experience and refined operations of his mind." Updike seems to have put himself through a succession of such regenerations and, in the process, has not only sustained his professional standing but deepened and enriched his talent.

Partly his staying power comes from an almost religious dedication to craft. Christian symbols and ethics hover around much of his work; it was no accident that in Atlantic Brief Lives, a biographical compendium, he chose to write about Søren Kierkegaard. The existentialist, Updike noted, works "with flirtatious ambiguities, elaborate deceits and impersonations, fascinating oscillations of emphasis, all sorts of erotic 'display.' "

They are methods familiar to Updike, and never more apparent than in his newest work.

Bech Is Back concerns an obverse, almost perverse antiself. Henry Bech is Jewish; John Updike is Wasp. Bech suffers from a 13-year-old writer's block. Updike averages a book a year. Bech is an unathletic urbanite. Updike is an enthusiastic sportsman and a countryman. Once these disparities have been marked, the author is free to play with words, with personae, even with whole nations.

Does Updike withdraw to his study to write three pages every weekday? Bech instead takes up the literary