The voice on the phone was usually that of Meri [sic] Jo Zwengler, Vellum Press’s leather-clad chief of publicity. “But I don’t want to go on ‘Oprah,’ ” he would tell her. “I hate that hooting audience of Corn Belt feminists she has.”
Meri Jo would sigh. “It’s expected, Henry. It would be considered an insult to two-thirds of America if you don’t deign to appear.”
“Yeah, the illiterate two-thirds. Where were they when Going South sold less than twenty thousand copies?”
Meri Jo was stagily patient with him. “You’re a Laureate now, Henry. You’re not free to pull that Henry Bech reclusive don’t-bother-me-I’m-having-a-writer’s-block act.”
“Bech, whodat?” he quoted.
“Nobody’s asking that any more. You’re hot, Henry. I’m sorry. But the spike in sales should put your little girl through college, if you help nurse it along. We’re thinking of even bringing When the Saints back into print.”
“Why did you let it go out of print?”
“Don’t be difficult, Henry. Warehousing costs have been skyrocketing. We have a big overhead in our new quarters.”
Meri Jo’s annual salary, he estimated, would loom above a year’s worth of his royalties like a sequoia above a bonsai cherry tree. “Did I ask you,” he asked her, “to build yourselves a skyscraper, just because McGraw-Hill had one?”
“Hon, please be an angel and stop giving me a hard time,” she said. He imagined he could hear the squeak of leather and the click of studs on metal as she shifted her heft in her personally molded swivel chair. “You were wonderful on ‘Charlie Rose.’ ”
“Charlie was wonderful,” Bech protested. “I hardly said a word.” The interviewer’s long face, tinted the color of a salmon, loomed in memory; Rose had leaned forward ominously close, like an Avedon portrait of himself, and urged, “Tell me honestly, Henry, aren’t you embarrassed, to have won this Prize when so many other writers haven’t?” And the culture-purveyor’s eyes protruded toward him inquisitorially, so that he resembled Dick Van Dyke in Disney animation.
These professional personalities operated at an energy level that stretched Bech’s brain like chewing gum on the shoe of a man trying to walk away. Terry Gross, in her beguilingly adolescent and faintly stammery voice, had put it to him more brutally yet: “How can you explain it? It must feel like a weird sort of miracle, I mean, when Henry James and Theodore Dreiser and Robert Frost and Nabokov didn’t …”
“I’m not a Swedish mind-reader,” was all Bech could manage by way of apology. “I’m not even a Swedish mind.”
This seemed to him a pretty good quip, which he had prepared in the reveries of insomnia, but which, on its occasion for utterance, lacked the lilt of spontaneity. The short, short-haired interviewer’s giggle was perfunctory, and then like a dingo worrying the throat of a lamed kangaroo she went back to the attack: “No, but seriously …”
This was on a radio swing down through Megalopolis, from Christopher Lydon in a dismal stretch beyond Boston University to Leonard Lopate in the dingy corridors of New York City Hall to Philadelphia’s “Fresh Air” in a canister-lined chamber of WHYY and on to Diane Rehm’s WAMU aerie on Brandywine Street, in the bosky midst of American University in Washington, D.C. She had fascinatingly blued hair and a crystalline, beckoning voice—as if from another room she were calling some sorority girls to dinner—and in this particular chain of interviewers put Bech least on the defensive. Why, of course, she seemed to be saying, Mr. Bech has won the Nobel Prize for Liter-a-ture. Who better? Listeners, you tell us.
The very first caller-in, whose sugary Southern accent buzzed in Bech’s earphones like tinnitus, wanted to know if it was true, as she had read in the National Enquirer, that Mr. Bech had recently fathered a baby out of a young lady a third of his age?
“I suppose it’s not untrue,” Bech grudged into the microphone. Robin had blackmailed him into it, he resisted explaining. It was become a father or an accused serial killer.
“Mah questi-yun is, sir, do you think that such behavior is fay-yer to either the young lady or that little helpless baby, when, begging your pardon, you might drop daid any taahm?”
“Fair?” It was a concept he hadn’t encountered lately. As a child he would protest to his playmates that something wasn’t fair, but as the inexorable decades had washed over him, his indignation had been slowly leached away.
“And thet million dollars you’ve gone and won—do you intend to do any goood with it?”
He had repeatedly explained to interviewers and crasser talk-show hosts that by the time his taxes were paid to state, city, and nation it wouldn’t be anything like a million. It would be less than half a million. Counting the hours of his time and ergs of his energy the Prize had taken, and the universal consensus that he now owed the world something, he had come to figure it as a net financial loss. And, anyway, what does half a million dollars get you in New York City these days? A Jeff Koons statuette, or a closet in a Fifth Avenue co-op. He began to explain all this, but the caller, who had come to inhabit Bech’s head like an incurable parasite, steadily maintained her investigative line: “And is it true, suh, as I have read in several reputable sources, that, whaal travelling in the Communist world under the sponsorship of our U.S. government, you did enjoy a lee-ay-son with a certain famous Bulgarian poet and had a child by that lady whom you have never officially acknowledged? A child brought up under strict Communist doctrines until he was a grown man, never knowing who his father was, while you enjoyed a capitalist laaf-staahl?”
The strange images and lies were coming so fast, and so winsomely, he could scarcely speak, though he had been speaking steadily since the Prize had been announced. His mouth opened, two inches from the sponge-muffled mike—like a miniature boxing glove, or a fist in a Keith Haring silhouette—but only a scraping noise emerged. Hating even a half-second of dead air, Diane Rehm melodiously enunciated, “Perhaps our guest does not care to answer?”
The voice in Bech’s head burrowed deeper, working its jaws faster and showing a rough underbelly of Christian resentment. “Well now Diane, if this man doesn’t care to answer, what’s he doin sittin’ on your show? If he’s gone to just clam up, maybe he should not have accepted the Praahz.”
“I have never been a father before,” Bech brought out. “Just like I have never won the Nobel Prize before.”
“Well, if you’ve never been a father before,” the voice said, “from all that I’ve read you should be teachin’ these black teenagers birth control.”
“Thank you for your call, Maureen,” Diane Rehm said firmly, and pressed a switch that eliminated Maureen from the airways. “Next,” she announced to the nation, “Betty Jean, from Greensboro, North Carolina.”
But Betty Jean was no better. She said, “Speaking of black teenagers, I don’t think all you celebrities’ having babies out of wedlock is setting any kind of example, now is it?”
“But,” Bech said, at bay, “I wasn’t a celebrity until I won the Prize. I was just a writer, off in a corner. Anyway, I’d be delighted to marry the mother of my child, but she’s still mulling my offer over. She’s very modern.”
“If you ask me,” said Betty Jean, in the instant before her electronic execution, “all you Yankees are too damn modern.”
Bech in his heart agreed. Moral insufficiency. Lying awake in his loft, while Rothkoesque rectangles of incidental city light vibrated around him on the walls, he listened for his baby to peep and reflected back upon his life and work, his daily, ever briefer earthly existence. A few countries, a few women. There were many countries he would never visit, some even now being born, younger than Golda, from the wrecks of shabby old empires. The women—he supposed they had been the point of it all, the biologically ordained goal of male existence, nearing and looming and then receding. They had been sufficient in number. He could not count them up or recall all their names, though he could always get at least a face, a glimmer of pallor in a darkened room, an uncertain, fetchi
ng smile and eye-pits of warm, wild shadow. Still, it had been a frightfully curtailed minority of all the appropriate-aged women that had been available, globally. Likewise, his works, the seven volumes* (not counting the British anthology, The Best of Bech, long out of print), seemed remarkably few, considering the possibilities, and as mysteriously contingent as the major turnings of his life. Seven stages, seven branches on the menorah, seven white keys on the piano. He had never quite understood why the black keys, the half-tones, had those two gaps within an octave. It enabled the pianist to find his way, he supposed. Bech’s seven books glimmered in his back ward glance like fading trail-marks in a dark wood, una selva oscura, the tangled wilderness where his consciousness intersected with the universe. He rarely looked into their pale pages, his books seemed to have so perilous a connection with the giant truth of the matter: his arbitrary identity arisen, like the universe, out of darkness and silence. First, the slimy preconscious miracle, in velvety uterine darkness, of repeated prenatal mitosis, keyed to viable complexity by unfathomable signals among the chromosomes and proteins. Then, the harsh eruption into the icy hospital light and the fragrant, noisy Freudian triangle, with its oppressive yet nurturing atmospheres of kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Then, the long monitored stairways of schooling, class after class, teacher after teacher, and his abrupt graduation, in the year of Pearl Harbor, into war and the inconclusive trials of adulthood, of which his present sardonic, Prize-bothered decrepitude was the latest if not quite the last. And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.
Golda whimpered in her crib, which they had placed just outside their flimsily partitioned-off bedroom. In the day, they moved her crib into its shelter of two-by-fours and wallboard, a box within the loft—a kind of jewelbox when Golda was napping within it. Robin would be off at Computer Crossroads, on Third Avenue; Bech would scribble softly, writing and scratching out, while Leontyne tiptoed through the breakfast dishes and the laundry. Two adults, he marvelled, held in thrall by eighteen pounds of guileless ego. When baby awoke, the cocoa-colored au pair, cooing in Caribbean, would feed her fragments of toast and chicken, gleefully chewed though Golda still had fewer teeth than fingers. What teeth she had were big and hard-earned, having given her much grief pushing up through the gums. Then a bottle was administered on the sofa, Golda blindly sucking while Leontyne’s eyes lapped up “Days of Our Lives.” At two, the sitter switched channels to “One Life to Live,” and Bech, if the pesky demands of the Prize allowed him, indulged her addiction and himself pushed the stroller to a playground. There was a sad, bare little one at Spring and Mulberry, and one even more exiguous on Mercer above Houston, beside an NYU recreation building. When feeling ambitious, he would push Golda all the way across the Bowery to the several in the long park named after Roosevelt’s overprotective mother, Sara. The ginkgoes and sycamores were dully turning and dead leaves were blossoming underfoot. Bech trussed his wriggling daughter in one of those black rubber diapers that do for swing-seats now and pushed her back and forth until the gravity-teasing wonder of it wore thin. She was still too young to dare alone the heights and swinging walkways of the plastic castle at the playground’s rubber-paved center, but he entrusted her sometimes to the spiral slide, allowing her, a slippery missile in her padded play-suit, to swoop out of his hands for a swerve or two, before he grabbed her at the bottom. And he let her crawl up the slide stairs, mounting upward on her own motor drives, his hands hovering inches behind her back in case she toppled when she unsteadily turned to share with him her pride of ascension. He saw a father’s role, while he was here to enact it, as empowering her to skirt danger more closely than either Robin or Leontyne would have allowed—to introduce into her life an element of male love of risk.
On the level loft floor, Golda was a muscular, unstoppable crawler, moving across toys, adult feet, scattered books, and slippery sheaves of the Sunday Times in her tanklike progress. At night, though, when her whimper brought Bech to hover over her crib, her muscularity had been shed with her playsuit and she seemed all spirit, a well of inarticulate need he strained to peer into, as they both sought the source of her unease. In the first six months, he would simply lift her up and take her in to his soundly sleeping young mate, who would drowsily fumble a stunningly large, green-veined white breast into the little mouth and stifle its discontent. But Robin, wearying of milk stains on the trim bodices of her work outfits, and of this tyrannical physical tie to another’s innards, had weaned Golda, so that Bech, lifting the whimpering little body into his arms, had the option of changing her diaper or warming up a bottle, or both. These fumbling communions with his infant daughter at ungodly hours, while yet some traffic—gangster limousines from Little Italy, yellow cabs to and from SoHo’s dance-to-dawn clubs—trickled by on Crosby Street, were unlike any other of the fleeting relationships life had brought him: he was clearly, by virtue of his size, dominant, and yet tenderness and an atavistic animal protectiveness tilted the balance in favor of the helpless one.
On the edge of language—she could say “Hi,” and wave bye-bye—Golda communicated with what the King James Bible called her bowels, not just the spicily fragrant movements but the interior mysteries, the thirst or pain or bad dream or existential loneliness that had driven her soul out of sleep into the teeming world in search of consolation. He tried to provide it; some nights Robin awoke and with a mother’s primal body and heart swamped the infant’s irritation. Beside them on the bed, elderly Bech enjoyed the wash of warmth as the two young female bodies softly collided. Bech felt relieved when Robin intervened, but also cheated, of perhaps his last opportunity to satisfy another—to find the biological key that turned a lock outside of himself, in this case that of an ego implausibly extended from his own, like a stick thrust into water and apparently bent. “You are my prize,” he would murmur into her ear as, waiting the sixty seconds for the bottle to warm in the microwave, he held her by the window, both of them gazing down upon the yellow top of a single cab as it hurtled rumbling over the rough cobblestones toward some dubious haven of mirrors, drugs, strobe lights, and spastic dancing. “You are good, good, good,” Bech told Golda, her appraising eyes attracted to his face by the desperate hoarseness of his whisper. “You are a truly outstanding person.”
They were two of a kind—irregular sleepers, stubborn crawlers. “Oh, you are your daddy’s girl,” Leontyne would coo to the child in the daytime, so Bech at his desk could hear. “You have his frisky looks and his stand-up hair.”
“Leontyne,” he would ask, “do you think this is a terrible mistake? My having a child at my age?”
“Babies are the gifts of God,” she said, in that gently rocking voice of hers. “They come when He wants them to come. The mommy and the daddy may think not yet, not yet, but He knows when a blessing due. You loves that little girl so much I can’t stand some time to watch. And the mommy, too, you loves for sure, but you two have your settled ways, your paths in the world. My parents the same way, my daddy come and go. Nine children they manage to make, when he coming and going. I was the second youngest. My little brother come when Mother forty-two. She used to joke when he got born she had to put on eyeglasses to be seeing him.”
Leontyne’s confident acceptance of the world as a divine cradle in which they were all rocking soothed Bech during the day, but unsettled him at night, when it appeared so clearly a delusion. In his wakefulness he was alone on a pillar, a saint torn from the cozy quotidian. His winning the Prize had unleashed a deluge of letters that battered him like hostile winds. You would think now they could give it to some American who wasn’t a kike or a coon or an immigrant who can’t even speak English right … I have been struggling to complete my novel while holding down two jobs to pay for my wife’s prohibitive chemo treatments plus the child care and just one percent of the enormous amount you have so deservedly in my opinion won would enable me … you have probably forgotten me but I sat in the row behind you at P.S. 87 over on 77th and Amsterdam
and though you never paid me any attention I always knew that some day you … celebrity auction even the tiniest personal item last year we had remarkable good success with Mariah Carey’s toenail clippings and a used paper towel from Julia Child’s kitchen … well Hank I guess you got them all fooled now except me I still have your number jewboy and it isn’t number one or even one thousand and one … Temple Emmanuel our reading circle can offer not even a modest honorarium but your cab fare would be covered and there are home-prepared refreshments beforehand … my son is going to be two this December and a friendly note from you on your personal letterhead copying out a favorite passage from your own work or that of another great writer and dated month and date and year … you seemed uneasy with Charlie Rose but you have nothing to be ashamed of or do you? … I enclose my own privately printed book setting out in irrefutable detail the means whereby God will bring about His kingdom first in the Middle East and then on the other continents in rapid succession … help a signed photograph help a one-page statement to one in need in the battle to win young minds back to reading a modest check a quotation we could use in our promotion no automated signatures please … happy to come and share with you our professional investment advice and expertise in estate planning … I try to get on top of my fury but after forty years of writing rings around you in not just my own opinion but that of most critics who aren’t total shmucks I can’t internalize what seems to me a savage and pointed rejection of me, me, I know it’s absurd dear Henry I know life to you is and always has been just a bowl of cherries … Envy and resentment poured toward him out of the American vastness, from every state including Hawaii and Alaska, like a kind of lateral sleet rattling on the tin roof of his rickety privacy. He tried to utilize his insomnia by composing the lecture which Nobel laureates were obliged to give. He had received wads of information from Sweden, much of it on those long European sheets of paper impossible to fit into American folders. His speech was to be three days before the ceremony, at the Swedish Academy. Who would attend? He couldn’t imagine. Your Royal Highnesses, Mr. Lord Mayor of Stockholm, Members of the Academy, distinguished guests both foreign and domestic: The Nobel Prize has become so big, so rich and famous, such a celebrity of a prize, that no one is worthy to win it, and the embarrassed winner can shelter his unworthiness behind the unworthiness of everyone else. It lifts us up, this Prize, to a terrible height, a moment of global attention, and tempts one to pontificate. Looking down upon our planet, I see a growing gap between those who ride airplanes and those who do not; those who have taken wing into the cyberspace of the information age and those who are left behind on the surface of the earth, to till the soil, fish the seas, and perform the necessary tasks that once formed the honored substance of all lives but a few. No. What did he know of any lives but his eremitic own and the smattering of others he had tangled with? His point about airplanes was obsolete. He could remember when getting on a plane was an adventure for the elite, dressed in suits and cocktail dresses, the chic of it intensified by the air of danger as they bounced around among silvery, Art-Deco thunderheads, an air to which free champagne and duck or steak dinners served on real china added a Titanicesque elegance. But now the sort of people swarmed aboard who used to go by bus. They wore shorts and blue jeans and even what appeared to be their pajamas, a scrum of sweaty bodies taking a thousand-mile hop as casually as a drive to the 7-Eleven. Flight was no more a miracle to them than their daily bread. They crammed their duffel bags and scuffed laptops into the overhead bins and didn’t even bother to look out the windows, from six death-defying miles up. So capitalism, our creed triumphant, was right: the masses are brought along, pulled in their millions up the ladder of prosperity built by enterprise and technology. The telephone and radio, cinema and television, internal combustion and jet propulsion—mankind has absorbed them as readily as Native Americans took to guns, horses, and firewater. As it happened in Ohio and the valley of the Ruhr, so it will happen in Malaysia and Mali—everybody rich, civilized, and discontented. No. Avoid economic geopolitics. Who could say whither the wonderful world in all its multitudinous adaptations? Strike a personal note, as Ōe and Heaney had done. West Side/Brooklyn boyhood. The experience of war. GI Bill, NYU. Village in the Forties, 99th Street in the Fifties and thereafter. Books, to me when young, were rectangular objects seen in department stores, stationery shops, and, without their shiny jackets, in the public library. There, their dusty spines, decimally numbered in white ink, seemed feathers on a dark and protective wing; their smell of dried glue mingled with the decaying wistful smells of old men, called “bums” in my youth and “the homeless” in these more enlightened times. What did these books mean? Who made them? Well, men in tweed jackets, smoking pipes, who lived in Connecticut, made them. And women only a shade less glamorous than movie stars, draped in chiffon or else, like Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn, dressed like men, and even like men in battle dress. No. The Swedes and the world don’t want to hear of these virtually forgotten authors who once were stars in Bech’s eyes. He must speak instead of the timeless bliss when pencil point touches paper and makes a mark. But isn’t this atomic moment much too small to mention, in so vast an auditorium of attention? In a world of suffering, of famine and massacre, wasn’t aesthetic bliss obscene? And now? he must ask aloud. The printed word? The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddled espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates operated by glacially cold bean-counters in Geneva. And meanwhile language, the human languages we all must use, no longer degraded by the barking murderous coinages of Goebbels and the numskull doublespeak of bureaucratic Communism, is becoming the mellifluous happy-talk of Microsoft and Honda, corporate conspiracies that would turn the world into one big pinball game for child-brained consumers. Is the gorgeous, fork-tongued, edgy English of Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow becoming the binary code for a gray-suited empire directed by men walking along the streets of Manhattan and Hong Kong jabbering into cell phones? Who is going to stop the world from evolving? Poets? Dilettantes like yours truly? Don’t make me laugh, Your Highnesses and assorted dignitaries. As a dear old friend of mine kindly informed the American press recently, your Prize is a prank.