Picked-Up Pieces Read Online Free

advance in post-Stalin Russia without some steel. Voznesensky, the gentlest of men until he stands to recite, becomes then a prophet, clangorous and stern; the reunion of Russian and modern poetry demands an ambitious campaign. To speak and write honestly in the Soviet Union is still a more difficult enterprise than an American can imagine.
Bech Meets Me

 
(
The New York Times Book Review
Persuades Henry Bech, Literary Man for All Thin Seasons, to Conduct an Interview: November 1971)
    U PDIKE ’ S OFFICE is concealed in a kind of false-bottomed drawer in the heart of downtown Ipswich (Mass.), but the drowsy locals, for a mere 30 pieces of silver, can be conned into betraying its location. A stuck-looking door is pulled open; an endless flight of stairs, lit by a team of dusty fireflies, is climbed. Within the sanctum, squalor reigns unchallenged. A lugubrious army-green metal desk rests in the center of a threadbare Oriental rug reticulate with mouse-paths; the walls are camouflaged in the kind of cardboard walnut panelling used in newly graduated lawyers’ offices or in those Los Angeles motels favored by the hand-held cameramen and quick-tongued
directeurs
of blue movies. On these sad walls hang pictures, mostly souvenirs of his childhood, artistic or otherwise. On the bookshelves, evidently stained by a leopard in the process of shedding his spots, rest repellent books—garish schoolboy anthologies secreting some decaying Updikean morsel, seven feet ofJames Buchanan’s bound works adumbrating the next opus, some daffodil-yellow building-trade manuals penumbrating
Couples;
and, most repellent of all, a jacketless row of the total
oeuvre
, spines naked as the chorus of
Hair
, revealing what only the more morbid have hitherto suspected, that since 1959 (
The Poorhouse Fair
, surely his masterpiece) Updike with Alfred A. Knopf’s connivance has been perpetrating a uniform edition of himself. Beclouding all, the stink of nickel cigarillos, which the shifty, tremulous, asthmatic author puffs to sting the muse’s eyes into watering ever since, at the Surgeon General’s behest, he excised cigarettes from his armory of crutches.
    Updike, at first sight, seems bigger than he is, perhaps because the dainty stitchwork of his prose style readies one for an apparition of elfin dimensions. An instant layer of cordial humorousness veneers a tough thickness of total opacity, which may in turn coat a center of heartfelt semi-liquid. Shamefacedly I confessed my errand—to fabricate an “interview” for one of those desperate publications that seek to make weekly “news” of remorselessly accumulating Gutenbergian silt. Shamefacedly, Updike submitted. Yet, throughout the interview that limped in the van of this consent, as the pumpkin-orange New England sun lowered above the chimney pots of a dry-cleaning establishment seen darkly through an unwashed window, Updike gave the impression of (and who wouldn’t?) wanting to be elsewhere. He kept interjecting his desire to go “home” and “shingle” his “barn”; it occurred to this interviewer (the Interviewer, as Mailer would say), that the uniform books, varied in tint and size as subtly as cedar shakes, were themselves shingles, with the which this shivering poor fellow hopes to keep his own skin dry in the soaking downpour of mortality.
    I observed, feinting for an opening, that he has stopped writing about Jews. He replied that the book about me had not so much been about a Jew as about a writer, who was a Jew with the same inevitability that a fictional rug-salesman would be an Armenian. I riposted that
he
was a writer, though a Wasp. With the languid shrug of the chronically pained, he bitterly inveighed against the term Wasp, which implies, he said, wealth where he had been poor, Calvinism where he had been Lutheran, and ethnic consciousness where he had had none. That his entire professional life had been spent among Jews and women, that his paternal grandmother had