[“Bech Enters Heaven” was never published in magazine form. It first appeared in Bech: A Book, and again in The Complete Henry Bech.]

In 1964, John Updike was elected, at the mere age of 32, to the 250-member National Institute of Arts and Letters on West 155th Street in Manhattan, and 12 years later elevated to the 50-member Academy of Arts and Letters, as close as America has to a French Academy of immortals. Updike recreates the 1964 election in “Bech Enters Heaven” by injecting it warmly into Bech’s past and wrapping it in his memories of one day being forced by his mother to play hooky: she’d gotten tickets to the induction ceremony at the unnamed pantheon on the Upper West Side. It’s a quick glimpse into Bech’s youth, his early independence, fierce disavowals of his mother, and his ambition.

Bech is immediately taken by the scene at the pantheon. “Each face, even at the distance of the balcony, displayed the stamp of extra precision that devout attention and frequent photography etch upon a visage; each had suffered the crystallization of fame. Young Henry saw that there were other types of Heaven, less agitated and more elevated than the school, more compact and less tragic than Yankee Stadium, where the scattered players, fragile in white, seemed about to be devoured by the dragon-shaped crowd.” He also feels the chasm separating him from the famous, feels being part of “the anonymous, perishable crowd on the other side of the veil.” From where he wants out. That had been his mother’s intention, bringing him there. To give him a push toward heaven. It worked, as “she sensed, in the abstracted way he clung to her side, neither welcoming nor cringing from her touch when she reached to reassure him in the crowd, that his attention had been successfully turned. His ears were red, showing that an inner flame had been lit.”

The story moves up three decades (Bech is a decade older than Updike when inducted, but still young). He receives an invitation in the mail, he goes, he observes. That part of the story is pure autobiography, with the names changed, because most of the writers he’s referring to are still alive–John Cheever, who’d sponsored his election and been a member since 1957, John Dos Passos, Ogden Nash, Thornton Wilder, Harry Levin, who’d been his English professor, Saul Bellow, William Maxwell, and Bernard Malamud, elected the same year as Udike and, according to Adam Begley, “one of the models for Henry Bech.” The names are changed to Eustace Chubb, Josh Glazer, Anatole Husac, Kingsgrant Forbes, Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues, Torquemada Langguth. You get the sense that the names are inside puns, inside Updike’s head, too Finneganny to be deciphered. The whole scene has the feel of an inside joke, or at least an inside job, the author (Bech or Updike) inviting us to witness his apotheosis, and Updike happy to take advantage of a device to create a story that celebrates his accession.

Fictional authors are mentioned only to be denigrated, and there, too, you wonder if Updike isn’t scoring his pot shots at only he and his victims know who, a juvenile device of college magazines that may, who knows, have caused a wince or two and kept The New Yorker, in whose pages many of these writers were still appearing, from accepting the story. Josh Glazer “was deaf, his hair was dyed black, and his teeth were false too, for his blasts of breath carried with them a fetid smell of trapped alcohol and of a terrible organic something that suggested to Bech—touching a peculiar fastidiousness that was all that remained of his ancestors’ orthodoxy— the stench of decayed shellfish.” Anatole Husac “was sweating out a drug high, his hands twitching like suffocating fish.” Old Fenella Anne Collins wore “the startled facial expression of the blind.”

The segment could have but doesn’t soar like the opening pages, or the final page, when he conjures up his childhood and mother again, in that very moment when he rises to accept his nomination: “When he stood, he had expected to rear into a man’s height, and instead rose no taller than a child.” It’s not only an accurate representation of how small one feels at moments so grand, but also a superb way of evoking the past–Bech’s, and the story’s, as we slowly are led back in Bech’s mind to that day with his mother. He thinks he sees her in the front row, though she’s been dead years. It’s a wonderful recall of his trip as a truant with his mother, a posthumous homage to her even after the woman turns out to be someone unrecognizable, maybe someone with a young boy next to her. His eyes water. “He had made it, he was here, in Heaven. Now what?”

–P.T.

John Updike: The Complete Stories (Click on Links for Summaries and Analyses)