As a high school and college student I attended some memorable readings of work by writers whose work I admired. I am thinking, for example, of the late John Berryman, whom I saw read from his Dream Songs at the University of Minnesota when I was in my senior year of high school.
Berryman was a member of the university’s English faculty whose 77 Dream Songs had won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “Henry” is the tortured soul who serves as Berryman’s alter ego in the Dream Songs. Berryman himself jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River on campus in 1972. One can see a premonition of his death in his elegy to William Carlos Williams in Dream Song 324.
I also think of Robert Bly, who read from his own poetry as well that of of others he had translated. The quality of Bly’s recitation may have exceeded the quality of his writing (which is not to deprecate his poetry). He was a native Minnesotan who became prominent in the ’60s for his opposition to the Vietnam War and later for his support of a “men’s movement.” However, he was a gifted poet and riveting reader whose work was recognized with the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal in 2012.
The year before I went to law school I taught at St. Paul Academy. I recall that we covered Bly’s appearance at the school in the Rubicon, the school newspaper that the journalism class I taught put out. I plucked Bly’s poem “Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River” from Silence in the Snowy Fields for publication along with our story on his visit. In law school, studying copyright law, I learned that we probably should have asked for his permission to publish it or considered whether our publication of the poem fell within the doctrine of fair use.
In college I saw the poet Richard Eberhart read from his work several times. Professor Eberhart was a member of Dartmouth’s English faculty and, coincidentally, a native of Austin, Minnesota. When I first met him in his office on the third floor of Sanborn House, he told me (with a smile) that his father had worked at Hormel in Austin.
Professor Eberhart won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1966 for Selected Poems: 1930-1965. He was a wonderful reader of his own work. At his readings he never failed to recite “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” written in 1944 while he was serving as a Navy officer, teaching aerial free gunnery, and “On a Squirrel, Crossing the Road in Autumn, In New England.” The “Squirrel” makes a cameo appearance in Brooks Clark’s brief tribute to Eberhart’s prowess as a teacher of writing in “Poetry from the heart.”
In the summer of 1970, at the end of Harvard’s summer term, I saw John Updike read one of his short stories in a comfortable auditorium somewhere in Harvard Yard. It must have been Boylston Hall.
Updike read “Bech Takes Pot Luck” from Bech: A Book, which had just been published by Knopf. It is the first of Updike’s three collections of stories about his fictional Jewish alter ego, Henry Bech, and it is a funny story. The story elicited repeated laughter from the audience. Updike laughed at his own jokes along with us. He was an utterly delightful reader of his own work.
I bought and read all three Bech books as they were published. The stories put Updike’s literary gifts vividly on display.
Several of his Bech stories — “Rich In Russia,” “Bech In Rumania,” and “The Bulgarian Poetess” — derive from his travels to eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on cultural exchange programs sponsored by the United States government. Among other things, Updike was a serious man, an anti-Communist, and an American patriot. See, for example, “On Not Being a Dove” in his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.
The third of the Bech collections is Bech At Bay. It starts off with another story deriving from his travels to eastern Europe, “Bech in Czech.” Bech is sent to Czechoslovakia in 1986, while the country is still Communist. There he attends a party of dissident writers, one of whom had been imprisoned. Bech reflects:
Jail! One of the guests at the party had spent nearly ten years in prison. He was dapper, like the cafe habitues in George Grosz drawings, with a scarred, small face and shining black eyes. He spoke so softly Bech could hardly hear him, though he bent his ear close. The man’s hands twisted under Bech’s eyes, as if in the throes of torture. Bech noticed that the fingers had in fact bent, broken. How would he, the American author asked himself, stand up to having his fingernails pulled? He could think of nothing he had ever written that he would not eagerly recant.
That paragraph, buried in the middle of the story, was the product of a deeply humane sensibility. I can think of one or two other American men of letters who might have written it in the course of a story devoted to the ghosts of modern history, but there it is in Updike.
All of Updike’s Bech stories are now collected in The Complete Henry Bech. I highly recommend him (Updike) and it (the book) and them (the Bech stories).
