Perennial Promises Kept

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life: "The author [Bech] in these thin times supported himself by appearing at colleges. There, he was hauled from the creative-writing class to the faculty cocktail party to the John D. Benefactor Memorial Auditorium and thence, baffled applause still ringing in his ears, back to the Holiday Inn." Did Updike, invited by the Franklin Library, once agree to sign 20,000 volumes of Rabbit Run on the island of St. Thomas? Bech is lured by Su-perbooks, a subsidiary of the Superoil Corp., to autograph 28,500 sheets, at $1.50 each (Updike was paid a bit more), to be bound in pigskin into a special limited edition of his novella Brother Pig. The assignment carries with it an all-expenses-paid two-week working holiday in the Caribbean with the companion of Bech's choice, who will pull each sheet from under his busy pen. Bech brings along Norma, the reliable mistress whom he will never marry; the two of them have settled into "a limbo of heterosexual palship haunted by silently howling abandoned hopes." As the tense sojourn drags toward its close, Bech finds his signature harder and harder to complete. Finally he lifts his pen. "All was poised, and the expectant blankness of the paper seemed an utter bliss to the author, as he gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name."

Attention, autograph hounds. Mr. Updike claims that some misadventure in his past has made it difficult for him to sign his own name. He says that he can handle John quite competently, and that the U, p and d of his surname present no insurmountable obstacles. But he protests that he clutches on the i and consequently botches the k and e.

In extremis, Bech becomes a wandering minstrel for the U.S. State Department. He junkets to Venezuela, Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, shamefacedly giving a speech on...

We are being delayed by the pampered geese that live on the pond and claim the road as their own. While we are stalled here, it may be worth mentioning that Mr. Updike has occasionally traveled abroad. For example, he visited a number of so-called Third World nations speaking on. . .

. . . "The Cultural Situation of the American Writer." Bech is not, as a rule, well received. South American students noisily circulate leaflets to the audience during one of his talks. Bech glimpses a copy: "It showed himself, huge-nosed, as a vulture with striped and starred wings, perched on a tangle of multicolored little bodies; beneath the caricature ran the capitalized words INTELECTUAL REACCIONARIO, IMPERIALISTA, ENEMIGO DE LOS PUEBLOS." In Africa, Bech the imperialist discovers that the rate of cultural exchange is being alarmingly devalued: "The students found decadent and uninteresting Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Sartre, Hemingway—Hemingway, who had so enjoyed coming to Tanganyika and killing its kudu and sitting by its campfires getting drunk and pontifical—and Henry James. Who, then, Bech painfully asked, did measure up to the exacting standards that African socialism had set for literature?" The Orient brings Bech confused mash notes from South Korean schoolgirls and a beaming local poet who writes poems about "flogs." How many poems about frogs? Bech the good-will ambassador wonders through the translator: "No question