Perennial Promises Kept

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was too inane, here in this temple, to receive an answer. The poet himself intervened to speak the answer, in proud English. 'One hunnert twelve.' "

Updike devotes the longest story in the book to an unfamiliar Bechian agony: against all expectations, the aging author writes a bestseller. He does so in his new wife's home: a spacious suburban house in Ossining, N.Y., the town, not incidentally, of Updike's friend and mentor, the late John Cheever. (Bech does not meet the real-life author, but a number of Cheever characters are mentioned by name.) The long-stalled novel Think Big unfurls rapidly after he changes its intimidating title to Easy Money, which proves to be prophetic. "Bech is IN," announces Vogue. The author is interviewed, lionized, beseeched for autographs, invited to the best parties and most chic restaurants. He muses: "The world, by one of those economic balancings whereby it steers, had at the same time given him success and taken from him the writer's chief asset, his privacy." Bech's marriage cannot stand the strain. He winds up back in Manhattan, living alone, but in a better apartment. Bech is rich.

"I feel some sort of relief when my characters become well off," says Updike. It is a generous and sensible impulse. If Rabbit and Bech have helped make their creator comfortable (a six-figure annual income from royalties), why not enrich them in return? Updike's 14-room house radiates financial wellbeing. It sits, mammoth and gleaming white in the autumn sunshine, on a hill overlooking the Atlantic. Originally put up as a summer place back in 1905, it now resembles a real estate agent's fantasy: ample downstairs rooms invite the outdoors in, curtains covering ceiling-to-floor windows billow in the offshore breeze, light dances, the whole structure seems to coast on air and sea spray. "I would have settled for something semi-idyllic," Updike says.

Upstairs, the north end of the house has been turned into a warren of creativity. Updike has not one study but four, each leading off a narrow central hall. One room, dominated by a large chair and ottoman, is set aside for reading: books of all sorts for reviews, scientific studies for relaxation. The other three have been fitted out with desks or tables for writing. A sturdy, aging manual typewriter sits in one room; a pile of manuscript written in pencil on the backs of old typed pages is stacking up in another. Updike sometimes keeps different projects going in different locations: a novel here, a review there and correspondence over yonder. His idea, unlike Bech's, is to keep busy: "It's always a push to get up the stairs, to sit down and go to work. You'd rather do almost anything, read the paper again, write some letters, play with your old dust jackets, any number of things you'd rather do than tackle that empty page, because what you do on the page is you, your ticket to all the good luck you've enjoyed."

He turns his first drafts into typescript, revising as he goes along, and is likely to make extensive changes before publication. He cannot remember any extended period when he could not write. Still, he concedes: "I have begun a number of novels which I abandoned. That's sort of a failure, isn't it, a false run at a book? The sense of being pretty near the bottom