The Lion That Squeaked

BECH: A BOOK by John Updike. 206 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Now that John Updike's Bech stories from The New Yorker have been federated between hard covers, it is easier to see them for what they are: the funniest, most elegantly written and intelligently sympathetic renditions available about what happens when a writer stops being a writer and becomes a culture object.

Updike has ingeniously and elaborately invented Bech and his entire literary career. Verisimilitude is heightened by various Nabokovian cartouches, including an appendix containing Henry Bech's "Russian journal" and an introductory letter to Updike from Bech that shrewdly stops short of being a seal of approval: "I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm."

It is the voice of a man who has already suffered the worst that his abundant society and his own easily seducible character have to offer. It is not the natural voice of John Updike, of course, though Bech experienced early fame like Updike and some of their travels have been the same. The basic Bech is a gently satiric caricature of a Jewish literary heavyweight. His qualities are drawn from the congregation of Eastern Liberal intellectuals whose ranks, incidentally, have sheltered some of Updike's more ferocious critics.

Updike's elfin revenge includes a six-page bibliography of Bech's works as well as criticism of them. Travel Light, Bech's highly praised first novel, seems to carry strains of Kerouac's On the Road and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Brother Pig, a novella, hints ever so slightly of Mailer's stylishly oblique and politically muddled Barbary Shore ("Puzzling Porky" is Updike's title for the TIME review). When the Saints, a collection of essays and sketches of the kind that often get published from the sheer momentum of a downsliding career, contains such elegies of West Side New York as "Sunsets over New Jersey" and such Commen-tariana as "Orthodoxy and Orthodontics." Bech has also succumbed to the siren song of journalism with such artides as "The Landscape of Orgasm" (House and Garden) and "My Favorite Christmas Carol" (Playboy).

Lately Bech's fiction has taken a 180-degree turn for the worse, but his life at least continues to be buoyed by his awareness of the irony of his situation: the quantity of his material rewards is inversely proportional to the quality of his production.

At 46, Bech looks like a "mob-controlled congressman from Queens hoping to be taken for a Southern Senator." Fat lecture invitations are as available as women anxious to add a famous notch to their bedposts. In the three funniest adventures, Bech is sent by the State Department on a cultural-exchange junket behind the Iron Curtain. The tableaux of culturecrats in opulent neo-czarist settings undoubtedly come from Updike's memories of his own U.S.-sponsored tour of Russia in 1964. For Bech. the trip proves to be a sort of thinking man's "Mission: Impossible," in which Bech must make his way through the claustrophobic air ducts of Communist literary life.

In Russia, where he endures the blatant irony of having a huge salad of royalty rubles thrust on him, Bech and the head of the Soviet Writers' Union joust with vodka glasses: "He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." Elsewhere, Bech vainly attempts to charm Yevtushenko by describing his own position in America not as a literary lion but as a "graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a firetrap about to be demolished anyway."

In Rumania, where he comes to think of himself as "a sort of low-flying U-2," Bech attends an underground cabaret that features an endless number of variety acts, including an East German girl in a cowboy outfit singing Dip in the Hot of Texas. Humor at the expense of literal or imprecise translation is rampant. An admirer slathering to translate Bech into Bulgarian asks, "You are not a wet writer, no. You are a dry writer, yes?"

No and yes. As a dried-out writer, Bech loses some sustaining irony as he gets closer to home. In London, an aggressive young scholar browbeats Bech into explaining his work. A rich young cutie looks up from her pillow and smugly suggests that he "learn to replace ardor with art." Back home, a former student gives him pot and he vomits.

Yet Bech is never really pathetic. He never loses sight of his ludicrous position. Somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. Bech observes that "shallowness can be a kind of honesty." It is a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde. It is unlikely, however, that Wilde--who never lost the knack of drawing life from the surface of things--would have fudged with "kind of."

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