Bech at Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

officials, the board of the publishing house that dealt with foreign translations. Out of loyalty to the dissidents he had met earlier in his visit, he expected to be scornful of these apparatchiks, who would no doubt be old, with hairy ears and broad Soviet neckties. But in truth they were a young group, younger by a generation than the weary dissidents. The boy who seemed to be chairman of the board had been to UCLA and spoke with an oddly super-American accent, like that of a British actor playing O’Neill, and his associates, mostly female, stared at Bech with brighter eyes and smiles more avidly amused than any that had greeted him among the dissidents—to whom he had been, perhaps, as curious in his insignificant freedom as they to him in their accustomed state of danger and melancholy indignation. These young agents of the establishment, contrariwise, were experts in foreign literature and knew him and his context well. They boasted to him of American writers they had translated and published—Bellow, Kerouac, Styron, Vidal—and showed him glossy copies, with trendy covers.
    “Burroughs, too, and John Barth,” a young woman proudly told him; she had a mischievous and long-toothed smile and might, it seemed to Bech, have gypsy blood. “We like very much the experiment, the experimental. William Gaddis, Joan Didion, the abrupt harsh texture. In English can you say that? ‘Abrupt texture?’ ”
    “Sure,” said Bech. “In English, almost anything goes.” It embarrassed him that for these young Czechs American writing, its square dance of lame old names, should appear such a lively gavotte, prancing carefree into the future.
    “Pray tell us,” another, pudgier, flaxen-haired young woman said, “of whom we should be especially conscious among the newer wave.”
    “I’m not sure there is a new wave,” Bech admitted. “Just more and more backwash. The younger writers I meet look pretty old to me. You know about the minimalists?”
    “And how,” the chairman of the board said. “Abish, Beattie, Carver—we’re doin’ ’em all.”
    “Well,” Bech sighed, “you’re way ahead of me. Newer wave than that, you’ll have to dig right down into the fiction workshops. There are thousands of them, all across the country; it’s the easiest way to get through college.”
    “
Less Than Zero
,” the blonde pronounced, “was evidently composed in one such class of instruction.”
    The chairman laughed. “Like, really. He does a fantastic job on that sick scene.”
    “Good title,” Bech admitted. “After the minimalists, what can there be but blank paper? It’ll be a relief, won’t it?”
    The long-toothed woman laughed, sexily. “You talk the cynic, as Mortimer Zenith in
Velká myšlenka.
Perhaps, we think here, this novel, with its ironical title
Think Big
, departs your accustomed method. Is your first attempt at post-literary literature, the literature of exhaustion.”
    “It seemed that bad to you?” Bech asked.
    “That
good
, man,” interposed the chairman of the board.
    “Whereas
Travel Light
was your experiment in the Beatnik school,” pursued the mischievous dark woman, “and
Brother Pig
your magic realism.”
    “Speaking of
Brother Pig
—”
    “Is ready to print!” she interrupted gaily. “We have fixed the pub date—that is the expression?—for this autumn that is coming.”
    Bech continued, “I’ve met a man, a translator—”
    The next interruption came from a slightly older man, nearly bald and so thin-skinned as to appear translucent, at the far end of the table. Bech had not hitherto noticed him. “We know and value the work,” he smoothly said, “of your friend Comrade Syzygy.”
    Bech took this to mean that they were using Syzygy’s labor-of-love translation, and the Pragspring lambs were lying down with the Husák lions, and the levels of this mysterious fractured society were melding and healing beneath his own beneficent influence. With so pleasant a sensation