“By daylight, the chauffeur was a short man the color of ashes — white ash for the face, gray cigarette ash for his close-trimmed smudge of a mustache, and the darker residue of a tougher substance for his eyes and hair.”
Fiction writers have colonized Mars and the center of the Earth; they have proven themselves capable of comprehending serial killers and emperors. But they have never satisfactorily mapped the territory that lies closer even than their keyboards: the human face.
How many memorably well-described faces have you come across in literature? Two? Three? How can it be that the object in the universe in which we are most interested — the one whose subtleties we can best read, the one whose beauties or horrors most excite or repel us — so resists being captured in words? And yet: witness the litany of sorrowful eyes and sensitive mouths and ever-so-slightly upturned noses that fail, nearly always, to add up to vivid human presences. The linearity with which we take in prose (this and then this and then this) seems somehow fundamentally at odds with the instantaneousness with which we take in faces. I couldn’t honestly tell you whether my wife’s face is oval or heart-shaped, but I could tell you, from across the room, whether that text message she’s reading is something stressful or a reminder to put the compost out. Before the mysterious non-verbal articulacy of faces even our greatest wordsmiths must humbly surrender.
Except John Updike. Who, in matters verbal, is never humble, and doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender. (I’m kidding: he not only knows the meaning of the word surrender; he knows the etymology and the spelling of the nearest Icelandic equivalent). Updike recognizes — and in Bech: A Book demonstrates — that most writers go about the task of facial description all wrong.
But first: a few general words about Updike, who I’m obliged, as a card-carrying millennial (barely!), to regard with distaste. And it’s true — I don’t much like him. His books, despite their freakish eloquence, mostly leave me cold. If he were a student in a class of mine I’d give him an A and pray that he transferred.
It may just be a matter of inborn incompatibility. Fans of Updike and Roth can, I have a theory, be sorted according to their organ of affinity. Updike is an author of the eye — quite possibly the best pure seer since Nabokov. Roth is an author of the ear — a running tape recorder set on the family dinner table. I, an ear-man, have never strayed from Team Roth.
Except when it comes to the Bech books, which are less revered than his Rabbit books but funnier, truer — and, cumulatively, about a thousand (!) pages shorter. On some days I would even take them, as a portrait of a Jewish fiction writer in crisis, over the acid-splashed mirror that is Zuckerman Bound.
The first Bech book is Bech: A Book (no way to write that without sounding Dr. Seussian) and it opens in Eastern Europe, where Bech finds himself on a junket in the name of cultural exchange. He banters with his accommodating, inscrutable translator. He visits local museums displaying peasant costumes. He buys souvenir furs with unfamiliar currency (“a stack of ruble notes, pink and lilac Lenin and powder blue Spasskaya Tower.”)
And, in Romania, he stews in the mixture of terror and outrage provoked by his inept chauffeur.
“When they went through a village, the driver would speed up and intensify the mutter of his honking; clusters of peasants and geese exploded in disbelief, and Bech felt as if gears, the gears that regulate and engage the mind, were clashing. As they ascended into the mountains, the driver demonstrated his technique with curves: he approached each like an enemy, accelerating, and at the last moment stepped on the brake as if crushing a snake underfoot.”
This driver, whose name we never learn, is my favorite character in the book, and Bech’s mounting hatred for him (“‘Seriously, do you not feel the insanity in this man?’”) makes me laugh every time I think of it. He is, like strangely many of the best characters in books, essentially a walk-on — but look how Updike walks him on:
“By daylight, the chauffeur was a short man the color of ashes — white ash for the face, gray cigarette ash for his close-trimmed smudge of a mustache, and the darker residue of a tougher substance for his eyes and hair.”
The man is a medley in the key of ash, an ash flight. He is the colorless landscape, the grim and threatening Romanian state, made flesh. But he’s no mere metaphor! His cigarette-ash-colored mustache gives us more of his character than it seems to — it informs us, subliminally, that the chauffeur smokes; suddenly we see him standing by his car, waiting for yet another spoiled and fretful Westerner, enjoying one of the few comforts of his day. The dark residue that is his eyes and hair gives us not just a physical sense but an emotional one — he is hard, harsh, silent; he will not be accompanying Bech into the hotel lobby.
And so, in a single sentence, without so much as a nose or a chin, Updike gives us a face as expressive, as singular, and as spiritually complete as the faces we know in life. The reader is not, Updike knows, a police sketch artist; she doesn’t read with calipers in hand. What she sees of a face when she reads (and when she lives) is half-perception and half-creation, a blur of impressions and associations given form by feeling. We process faces in a realm so private as to make the face — that hanging slab of knobs and hollows — seem positively public, a portico on a house. Updike, ordinarily the most visually voracious of writers, writes faces as they should be written — with his eyes shut.
John Updike, Bech: A Book
I hear that. Haven't loved meeting him though I respect some of what he writes -- like that ashy guy. Perfection.
Once again, you translate my gut reactions into words. Updike's left me cold, too, because he is so cold and unsympathetic toward his characters, so bitter, so sour. It seems that he's often nursing some teeny seed of hate so that it can grow into something larger. This piece makes me think about faces -- much appreciated!