Bech: A Book [antikvár]

Foreword ' I : I I i • ii; 't' Dear John, Well, if you must commit the artistic indecency of writing about a writer, better I suppose about me than about you. Except, reading along in these, I wonder if it is me, enough me, purely me. At first blush, for example, in Bulgaria (eclectic sexuality, bravura narcissism, thinning curly hair), I sound like some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that London glimpse of silver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow, the King of the Leprechauns, than of stolid old homely yours truly. My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and my ancestral past out of I. B. Singer. I get a whiff of Malamud in your city breezes, and am I paranoid to feel my 'block' an ignoble version of the more or less noble renunciations of H. Roth, D. Fuchs, and J. Salinger? Withal, something Waspish, theological, scared, and insulatingly ironical that derives, my wild surmise is, from you. ij, Yet you are right. This monotonous hero who disembarks from an aeroplane, mouths words he doesn't quite mean, has ! vaguely to do with some woman, and gets back on the aeroplane, : i: is certainly one Henry Bech. Until your short yet still not un- . i longish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with . our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby America | ' reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage. Envied like |j' ' Negroes, disbelieved in like angels, we veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Hallowe'en priests' robes a-rustle with economy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Cunt-of-the-Month Club, amid a standing crowd of rueful, Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degenerating in the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers, our formal designs crumbling i, , I i' l;