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Frederick Buechner:
The Novelist As Theologian
By James Woelfel
"'If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.'"
FREDERICK BUECHNER has been a well-regarded American novelist for over thirty years now, and in more recent years has also become a widely respected theological writer. A Presbyterian minister, he has written ten strikingly varied novels and nine short theological works, all marked by creative imagination, literary craft, and theological insight.1 In the present essay I shall attempt to characterize the development of his thought and art, beginning first with their sources in his early life and then sketching the periods of his literary and theological productivity. This biographical and chronological approach seeks to take seriously Buechner's conviction that most theology and most fiction are "at … heart autobiography"2 and expresses my own increasingly "incarnational" perspective on the theological art.
Consistent with his belief that both theology and fiction are essentially personal modes of expression, three of Buechner's theological works are spiritual autobiographies. In the 1969 William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard, published as The Alphabet of Grace (1970), his theological reflections took the form of taking his hearers and readers through a single ordinary day in his life at that time; but he also included
James Woelfel is Professor of Philosophy
and Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. A graduate of the University
of St. Andrews, he is the author of Bonhoeffer's Theology (1970), Borderland
Christianity (1973), Camus: A Theological Perspective (1975), and
Augustinian Humanism (1979). A previous article by Dr. Woelfel, "Religious
Studies and Life Stories," appeared in THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1982.
1 A chronological bibliography of Buechner's works
appears following the footnotes. The bibliography includes the abbreviations
by which quoted works are cited.
2 AG 7.
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a number of reminiscences of his earlier life. In The Sacred Journey (1982), Buechner looks from the standpoint of his religious awakening at the whole of his life up to the time of his matriculation at Union Theological Seminary in 1955; its recently published sequel, Now and Then (1983), continues his story down to the present.3 These theological autobiographies in turn reveal that his fiction is replete with indirect autobiographical material in the form of characters, incidents, and experiences from his life.
I
Frederick Buechner was born in New York City in 1926. There were money, tradition, and upper-class connections in both of Buechner's parents' families, and his first novels-perhaps predictably-are about an Eastern seaboard and Ivy League world of leisured wealth. But his immediate family seems never to have been more than modestly well situated. His perpetually anxious and self-denigrating father, a Princeton graduate and "minor executive," moved from job to job and place to place on the East Coast during the Depression years, always trying to do a little better for his wife and two sons. Buechner recalls: "Virtually every year of my life until I was fourteen, I lived in a different place, had different people to take care of me, went to a different school."4
The dominant adults in the young Buechner's life were his father and his two grandmothers. His father dominated not by his presence but by the trauma of his sudden absence and its short- and long-range consequences. When Buechner was ten, his harried father committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning; the boy and his younger brother James saw the dead body in the driveway from their bedroom window as their mother and grandmother tried to revive him. It took years for Buechner to admit to others, and to deal with, the circumstances of his father's death. Reflecting much later on his adolescent and early adult years, he has acknowledged the father-substitutes he sought and sometimes found along the way and the plausibility (albeit insufficiency) of a Freudian account of his search for God.
Relationships between parents and children are important in all of Buechner's novels, but the father-son relationship is clearly dominant in The Return of Ansel Gibbs, The Final Beast, and The Entrance to Porlock. Buechner's father's personality, adult life, and death were, he has said, the model for Rudy Tripp, the father of one of the central characters in Ansel Gibbs. Tip Ringkoping in Porlock, whose father is very much alive but no kind of a father to him, resembles the young Buechner. Theodore Nicolet, the young minister in The Final Beast, feels guilty over his neglect of his father and through difficulties in his
3 Now
and Then was published after the original typescript of this essay was written.
I found that it usefully illuminated material I had already presented but did
not demand major revision. I have tried simply to incorporate it in such a way
as to retain the format and the "flow" of my original text.
4 SJ 20.
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own life comes to be bound more closely to him. There are father-surrogates, too, chief among them Leo Bebb, who in his own unusual way becomes for Antonio Parr, the narrator of The Book of Bebb, the father he never had as a child.
Buechner's father's personal tragedy was later repeated by his father's younger brother. For a time the young Buechner brooded over the two suicides, naturally wondering whether there was some sort of fatal flaw or curse at least among the males in his family to which he might somehow fall heir. Suicides recur in several of Buechner's novels--contemplated and carried out, "on-stage" and "off-stage," in the past and in the present. A monkey accidentally slits his throat in a grotesque and symbolic parody of his devoted master's feigned suicide in A Long Day's Dying. The death of Julie McMoon's husband by his own hand is a minor element in the background to the events narrated in The Seasons' Difference. As I have noted, Rudy Tripp plays out Buechner's father's tragedy in Ansel Gibbs. Among the things old Peter Ringkoping "sees" in looking at and beneath the faces of a community of retarded adults in The Entrance to Porlock is precisely the scene the ten-year-old Buechner actually saw from his bedroom window when his mother and grandmother were frantically trying to revive his father by pumping his legs. In one of the Bebb books, Open Heart, Lucille Bebb, having earlier in her adult life attempted suicide, finally succeeds at it as she bleeds quietly to death in the dark after asking her unsuspecting friend Brownie to read to her from the Bible "about Jesus." As we might expect from his own experience, Buechner describes suicides with great compassion and empathy and, in the later fiction, from the perspective of a faith that trusts in the reality and unexpectedness of grace amid the dark riddles and agonies of human existence.
II
Buechner's two grandmothers were the dominant presences in his childhood. Grandma Buechner, whose German immigrant forebears were freethinkers and radicals, was a strong, stoic, unsentimental woman who survived not only the death of her husband but also the suicides of two of her sons. She had nothing to do with organized religion, and referred to God half-ironically as le bon Dieu. Grandma Buechner loomed large in the young Buechner's life, whether presiding over things from her chair by the window in her New York apartment or freely and bluntly offering advice to her widowed daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
But "of all the giants who held up my world," Buechner writes, "Naya was perhaps chief."5 "Naya" was his pet name for his maternal grandmother Kuhn. She was elegant, eccentric, and altogether fascinating to the young boy. During his early teens Buechner and his mother and brother lived with Naya and Grandpa- Kuhn in the small town of
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Tryon, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although "a fairly free-wheeling Unitarian"6 and non-churchgoer, Naya would from time to time take the young Freddy to services at the local Episcopal church for something to do. At one point be and his brother and a cousin decided to have themselves baptized there---"less from any religious motive, I think, than from simply a sense that like getting your inoculations and going to school, it was something you did."7
It was in Naya's and Grandpa Kuhn's house in Tryon that Buechner fell in love with human faces in art, through a large collection of colored reproductions of paintings, and for some time he seriously wanted to become a painter of faces. The depth of his affection for and indebtedness to his maternal grandmother is evident in his first novel. Not only is it dedicated "To Naya with love and wonder"; she is also lovingly reproduced in the matriarchal character of Maroo. Twenty years later, when he delivered his Noble Lectures, Naya was central to his autobiographical reminiscences as he imagined delightfully witty dialogues with his dead grandmother.8
III
The casual, somewhat ironic, non-churchgoing "faith" of Buechner's grandmothers was joined by his parents' complete lack of involvement in religion to produce an almost wholly secular family environment throughout his childhood years. But "the bookish, rain-loving, inwardlooking child"9 had both his imagination and (intimately connected with it) his incipient religiousness nourished by a private world of children's fantasy stories-above all by Frank Baum's Oz books. As a young boy Buechner spent the better part of a year ill with a combination of serious respiratory diseases, and that seems to have been the beginning.
During the period that I was in bed, I lived, as much as I could be said to live anywhere, not in the United States of America but in the Land of Oz. One Oz book after another I read or had read to me until the world where animals can speak, and magic is common as grass, and no one dies, was so much more real to me than the world of my own room that if I had had occasion to be homesick then, it would have been Oz, not home, that I would have been homesick for as in a way I am homesick for it still.10
Here and in other autobiographical passages, Buechner's account of his awakening Sehnsucht, his longing for "home" aroused by the world of faerie, is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis's recollections of his childhood in Surprised by Joy.11 Buechner's most explicit fictional tribute to the Land of Oz is his 1970 novel The Entrance to Porlock, whose main characters are subtle but unmistakable mid-twentieth-century adult
6 SJ 62.
7 SJ 62-63.
8 AG 15, 24-25, 59-60.
9 SJ 29,
10 SJ 14-15.
11 London: Coffins, 1955; see especially Chap. 1.
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versions of Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Wizard.
But the Oz character who left the deepest and most lasting impression on Buechner was King Rinkitink, a fat, "foolish man in many ways who laughed too much and talked too much and at moments of stress was apt to burst into unkingly tears; but beneath all that, he gave the impression of remarkable strength and resilience and courage even, a good man to have around when the chips were down."12 The character of Rinkitink, Buechner says, has haunted him throughout his life, showing up in many different guises as his reading broadened over the years: as Samuel Pickwick, the Emperor Claudius, the mysterious Sunday in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and the whiskey priest in Graham Green's The Power and the Glory. According to Buechner, in the whiskey priest Greene has powerfully shown through literary art that "the power and glory of God are so overwhelming that they can shine forth into the world through even such a one as this seedy, alcoholic failure of a man who thus, less by any virtue of his own than by the sheer power of grace within him, becomes a kind of saint at the end, just as Rinkitink the plump and absurd ends up vanquishing all the dark powers mustered against him."13
The mystery of the divine grace working through the unlikely human material of "peculiar treasures" becomes a central theme in all of Buechner's works beginning in the 'sixties. The fullest embodiment of the Rinkitink-archetype in his fiction is undoubtedly Leo Bebb. In an interview, Buechner remarked, "I sometimes think my whole literary life has been an effort to rewrite The Power and the Glory in a way of my own. Part of what I was about in the Bebb books was to create a kind of whiskey priest."14
In The Alphabet of Grace Buechner describes the connections among his childhood love of fantasy, the loss of his father, and the development of his personal religion:
Fatherless at ten, I may simply have dreamed some kind of father into some kind of life somewhere else. I have always loved fairy tales and to this day read E. Nesbit and the Oz books, Andrew Lang and the Narnia books and Tolkien with more intensity than I read almost anything else. And I believe in magic or want to. I want flying saucers to be true, and I want life to exist on Mars, and I dream of a heaven where old friends meet and old enemies embrace one another and weep. And just at dawn in an eighteenth-century castle built of rose-colored stone in Dumfriesshire, I have reason to think I saw a ghost. All of which is to say I am a congenital believer, a helpless hungerer after the marvelous as solace and adventure and escape. I am also a fabricator, and I am willing to believe that the whole business of God in my life may be something I have fabricated out of my need for solace and adventure if not for
12 SJ 16.
13 SJ 17-18.
14 Shirley and Rudy Nelson, "Buechner: Novelist
to 'Cultural Despisers,'" interview with Buechner, Christianity Today,
25:10, May 29,1981, 44.
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escape because religion has never seemed escape to me. Escape would be for me to get out of religion-with all its demands and promises.15
For Buechner, the mature believer, all this "hungering after the marvelous" is both fulfilled and critiqued in the biblical story and the Christian faith, with their affirmations of the mysterious sovereignty and initiative and the miraculously incarnate love of God. In the novels of the 'sixties and 'seventies, his intense preoccupation in the earlier fiction with the hidden and labyrinthine complexities, the coincidences, and the might-have-beens of human behavior and relationships is enlarged and embraced within a wondering and finally comic vision of the elusive strangeness of both the self and the world.
Buechner's mature religious vision is characterized by what has been called the "higher naivete," in which his. lifelong love of fantasy is allowed free play in his fiction and his artist's sense of reality revels in the narrative and metaphorical character of the biblical literature. Again, it is in the Bebb books that he achieves this most fully and uninhibitedly on the plane of fiction. There we find such marvels as men from outer space ("golds" and "silvers"), a Native American grandmother who can fly, a remarkable vision of another Native American's journey beyond death, communication with the dead, the raising of a man from the dead, and the world of UFOs-all presented in such a way that these alleged events can be explained away naturalistically but might also inhabit a kind of "twilight zone" between the empirical world and larger dimensions of reality. Whatever else they are, these miraculous and fantastic happenings are also clearly powerful influences in shaping and reshaping the lives of those who believe them. As Buechner observes: "Reality is what is, I suppose, is whatever there is that seems real; and since what seems real to one need not seem real to anotherlike color to the blind, like hope to the hopeless-we all create our own realities as we go along." 16
IV
It was at the Lawrenceville School, a prep school near Princeton, N.J., that the young Buechner gave up in frustration his desire to be a painter but discovered a taste and talent for writing. There, too, among his teachers he found a few caring father-substitutes, and be made his first real friends. Upon his graduation in 1943, Buechner knew that he was searching for something, both vocationally and existentially, but knew that he had not begun to find it. "What I had not found, I could not name and, for the most part, knew of only through my sense of its precious and puzzling and haunting absence. And maybe we can never name it by its final, true, and holy name, and maybe it is largely through its absence that, this side of Paradise, we will ever know it."17
15 AG 41-42.
16 SJ 53.
17 SJ 75.
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Buechner's Princeton University years were interrupted by his twoyear service in the Army during World War II, which he spent in the U.S. At Princeton he continued to develop as a writer, with the noted critic R. P. Blackmur as one of his mentors. He also discovered the great prose writers of the seventeenth century-Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, John Donne, Thomas Traherne-and has spoken of their considerable influence on him in more than literary ways: "It was primarily their language that carried me away … but I could not entirely overlook the fact that what they were using their extraordinary language to describe was again and again their experience of the Extraordinary itself, and that this was the source as well as the subject of their unparalleled eloquence."18
During his senior year at Princeton, Buechner began work on his first novel, A Long Day's Dying. He has remarked more than once on the intimate relationship between his becoming a novelist and his religious awakening: "What I developed through the writing of … [novels] was a sense of plot and, beyond that, a sense that perhaps life itself has a plot-that the events of our lives, random and witless as they generally seem, have a shape and direction of their own, are seeking to show us something, lead us somewhere."19 A Long Day's Dying was completed and published when Buechner was back at Lawrenceville as an English teacher following his graduation from Princeton. To the complete surprise of both the young novelist and his publisher (Knopf), the book was an immediate commercial and critical success. Buechner suddenly found himself lionized by the literary public; his photo appeared in Time, Life, and Newsweek; he received mail from strangers. He has reflected that the one mark the experience left on him was a feeling of being someone special-which bad both its positive and its negative sides. "From that day to this I have been driven as a writer, and to a degree as a human being too, to write something, do something, be something to justify the fluke of that early and for the most part undeserved success."20
Buechner's second novel, The Seasons' Difference, followed two years later and was about as unsuccessful as A Long Day's Dying was successful. Although their themes and plots are quite different, the two novels share the same physical and spiritual atmosphere. Each is preoccupied with a small group of wealthy friends and relations on the East Coast who occupy a kind of tiny enclave into which the larger world never intrudes. Each book portrays how a dramatic incident sets up a temporary but fateful disturbance in their lives and relationships. In both novels most of the main characters occupy a typically modern-affluent spiritual and moral vacuum, "measuring out their lives with coffee spoons" and beneath their genteel pleasantries and polite deceptions
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deeply isolated from one another. The disturbing incident in A Long Day's Dying is a wealthy widow's sexual indiscretion with her son's college English instructor and the impact on those closest to her of the damaging lie she tells to cover up for it. In The Seasons' Difference, it is the awkward and embarrassing effect on a close-knit group of adults and children of a young teacher's visionary religious experience.
In these first two novels Buechner was clearly preoccupied with religious issues. Although their settings and most of their characters are entirely "worldly," religious themes and symbolism abound. The main character of A Long Day's Dying is a fat man whom Buechner calls "a lineal descendant … of King Rinkitink,"21 with the incredible and obviously symbolic name Tristram Bone. From the first page onwards Bone is described in priestly images; he is a religious and conscientious person but his spirituality and conscience are vague, inarticulate, and painfully ineffective. Peter Cowley, the young teacher in The Seasons' Difference who has a visionary experience on a summer hillside of his cousin's country estate, is even more inarticulate and little more effective. In both novels there are glimpses of a higher view of reality in the light of which the sterility and isolation of most of their characters' lives are accentuated; but they are only glimpses, and the positive representatives of faith are incoherent, impotent, and finally absurd figures whom in an important sense the others need not take seriously. If Tristram Bone is a King Rinkitink, he is a notably unsuccessful one. It is only with Leo Bebb that Buechner achieves his aim of fully incarnating the Rinkitink figure in his fiction.
Buechner has rightly observed of A Long Day's Dying that "it was very dense, static, psychological, and written in such a mannered, involuted style … that it seems outrageous when I look at it now." He calls the novel "the residue of my romance with the seventeenth century."22 It is filled with long, complex sentences; the dialogue is for the most part stilted and maddeningly elusive; plot movement is excruciatingly slow and elaborate psychological speculation on one's own and others' motives dominates; humor is almost entirely absent. The Seasons' Difference marks an advance stylistically, but remains very largely within the same sort of atmosphere. At the same time, both novels display considerable lyrical power, literary inventiveness, and Buechner's characteristic punctuating of his plots with sudden and surprising turns. A Long Day's Dying has an explicitly mythic dimension, as a contrived and subtle retelling of the Greek myth of King Tereus' rape of his sister-in-law Philomela and her and her sister Procne's subsequent revenge. A few of the later novels likewise embody
21 SJ 94.
22 SJ 98. Although many reviewers of A Long Day's
Dying saw in its style and preoccupations the strong influence of Henry
James, Buechner has said in correspondence with me that that was not the case;
that he had not really read James very much. The real influence was the seventeenth-century
English writers he had discovered as an undergraduate.
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mythic themes, along with elements of fantasy, but with greater artistic ease and naturalness.
V
Having written two novels and becoming something of a literary "name," Buechner left Lawrenceville in 1953 to try his hand at "being a writer" in New York. The two-year experiment was notably unsuccessful; he relates that he could not write a thing, and even looked into such alternative forms of employment as advertising and the CIA. But while living in New York, Buechner started attending regularly the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, whose pastor was the celebrated preacher George A. Buttrick. At the age of twenty-seven, hearing Buttrick preach around the time of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, Buechner had a kind of conversion experience:
He said that unlike Elizabeth's coronation in the Abbey, this coronation of Jesus in the believer's heart took place among confession-and I thought, yes, yes, confession-and tears, he said-and I thought tears, yes, perfectly plausible that the coronation of Jesus in the believing heart should take place among confession and tears. And then with his head bobbing up and down so that his glasses glittered, he said in his odd, sandy voice, the voice of an old nurse, that the coronation of Jesus took place among confession and tears and then, as God was and is my witness, great laughter, he said. Jesus is crowned among confession and tears and great laughter, and at the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.23
Over the years since then, Buechner has in his writings come more and more to sound the audacious Christian theme that beneath the dark and ambivalent appearances human life and the cosmos are actors in a divine comedy; that at the heart of reality is a wild, ineffable Joy; that faith in its self-transcendence is very close to humor, and our fumbling efforts at living lives of faith are repeatedly startled by the comic incongruities of the "crazy, holy grace"24 which against all expectation wells up to sustain, challenge, and renew our lives.
The week following the sermon, Buechner talked with Buttrick about going to theological seminary. Buttrick personally drove him over to Union Theological Seminary, where he entered as a student the following fall (1954). It was Union's "golden age," and among Buechner's teachers were Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Samuel Terrien, James Muilenberg, John Knox, Wilhelm Pauck, and Robert McAfee Brown.
Having gone to seminary on a Rockefeller Fellowship to "test his vocation" to the ministry, Buechner decided to take the academic year 1955-56 off to work on another novel. During that time he fell in love with and, in the spring of 1956, married Judith Friedrike Merck. They spent four months in Europe and returned to New York for the opening
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of the fall term at Union. Buechner finished his third novel, The Return of Ansel Gibbs, dedicating it to Judith, and it was published in 1958, the year he graduated from Union.
On the face of it Ansel Gibbs marked a new departure in Buechner's fiction. This story about a former statesman called out of retirement to be nominated for a Cabinet post is superficially an au courant late 1950's novel about the political world, knowledgeably moving back and forth between New York and Washington, involving us in a human environment that includes senators, television personalities, and a minister working in the slums of Harlem (where Buechner himself did field work as a seminarian). But Buechner in Ansel Gibbs is a far cry from Allen Drury. The focus again is really on a small group of people whose past and present lives are woven together with Gibbs's and one another's, and on Gibbs's wrestling with his decision about the cabinet post in relation to those people and his past. The religious theme of vocation as involvement in versus withdrawal from the rough-and-tumble of a thoroughly ambiguous world-and what both choices really mean-is central. As an undergraduate, Gibbs was involved in biblical studies and considered entering the ministry. His Harvard Old Testament professor who is now the Harlem minister, Kuykendall, is a marvellously eccentric figure modelled closely upon Buechner's most admired teacher at Union, James Muilenberg (to whom he also dedicated his first collection of sermons, The Magnificent Defeat). Thus Gibbs's vocational struggle is played in broadly theological terms and in dialogue with his old teacher and friend.
Ansel Gibbs is dominated by Buechner's characteristic preoccupation with the complexity and nuances of people's motives and relationships, but the situation and characters are intrinsically more interesting than in the first two novels, and the style shows increasing sureness and clarity in his handling of description and dialogue. The genuinely new departure marked by Ansel Gibbs is that from this point on Buechner is a consciously Christian writer who sees his writing as the exercise of ministry. As he describes it:
Since my ordination I have written consciously as a Christian, as an evangelist, or apologist, even. That does not mean that I preach in my novels, which would make for neither good novels nor good preaching. On the contrary, I lean over backwards not to. I choose as my characters … men and women whose feet are as much of clay as mine are because they are the only people I can begin to understand. As a novelist no less than as a teacher, I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics-woe to him who tries to make it look simple and easy-but because to do it any other way would be to be less than true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no Jess than in others. I am a Christian novelist in the same sense that somebody from Boston or Chicago is an American novelist. I must be as true to my experience as a Christian as black writers are to their experience as blacks or women writers to their experience as women. 25
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With Ansel Gibbs, Buechner's fiction begins to move beyond the atmosphere of spiritual-moral sterility and impotence in the first novels to a soberly positive and later even a comic world-a world in which, in and through the inevitable ambiguities and distortions of life, the main characters wrestle creatively with moral choices and spiritual meanings and are capable of taking action.
VI
Following his ordination, Buechner was invited to develop a department of religion at Phillips Exeter Academy. He stayed there nine years as teacher and school minister, with one year off as a leave. The Buechners' three daughters, Katherine, Dinah, and Sharman, were all born during that time. The Exeter period is marked by the appearance of Buechner's first theological publication, The Magnificent Defeat, in 1966. What becomes interesting from this period to the present is that we can study Buechner simultaneously as "indirect" and "direct" theological communicator. (The implied analogy with Kierkegaard here is deliberate, although it must not be stretched very far.) He comes increasingly to spell out the theology that underlies the fiction, and in close stylistic and substantive relationship to the fiction's themes.
Significantly, Buechner's theological efforts are never systematic treatises but instead short, highly literary productions in most of which he draws explicit links with fiction-writing generally and his own fiction in particular. His first two theological books, The Magnificent Defeat and The Hungering Dark (1969), are collections of beautifully crafted school sermons on biblical texts. Buechner's 1969 Noble Lectures at Harvard, published in 1970 as The Alphabet of Grace, comprise a slender volume which is one of his most important and revealing works. Here the intimate relationship Buechner sees among fiction, theology, and autobiography is first made clear and fully embodied; and the book itself is a thoroughly lyrical piece. Buechner uses a very ordinary day in his own life as a profound and perceptive vehicle of theological reflection. Explaining his title and theme, he writes: "If there is a God who speaks anywhere, surely he speaks here: through waking up and working, through going away and coming back again, through people you read and books you meet, through falling asleep in the dark…. The language of God seems mostly metaphor…. There is no image too far-fetched, no combination of sounds too harsh, no spelling too irregular, no allusion too obscure or outrageous."26
The two Buechner novels of the 1960's, The Final Beast (1965) and The Entrance to Porlock (copyright 1969; published 1970), are fascinating to study alongside the theological works. Buechner characteristically incorporates passages from both into The Alphabet of Grace, and shares with us a one-day slice of the process of writing Porlock.
Buechner wrote The Final Beast during his year's leave from Exeter.
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In this novel, he relates, "the part of the Christian experience that I particularly tried to make real was the one I found so conspicuously absent in most of the books I searched through for readings to assign my Exeter classes, and that was the experience of salvation as grace, as the now-and-thenness and here-and-thereness of the New Being."27 It is tempting to see in The Final Beast echoes of The Scarlet Letter; but if so, they are very ironic and contemporary echoes, marked by that trenchant grasp of the ambiguities of human behavior which we have by now come to expect of Buechner. The Reverend Theodore Nicolet, a young minister in a small New England town and a widower with two small daughters, is no Dimmesdale. To be sure, be is a guilt-ridden man who is very unsure of himself; but he is at the same time an incorrigibly clownish, playful figure with a marvellously grace-full sense of the divine "dance" at the heart of the heart of our darkness. There is definitely a strong attraction between Nicolet and Rooney Vail, a married parishioner who has been trying desperately for years to conceive a child and has lately resorted to a faith healer (modelled after a woman from whom Buechner learned much about prayer)-but no adultery. The adultery has happened earlier, once, in a blind moment of loneliness, between Rooney and the local newspaper editor Will Poteat. The moment was paradise tasted and immediately lost for Poteat, whose bachelor existence has been an unspeakably barren one sublimated only by his love of words. Bent now on revenge, he tries to create a scandal by journalistic insinuations about Theodore and Rooney. In the climactic scene, Nicolet, ready to unburden himself before his congregation on Sunday morning, is upstaged by his housekeeper Irma Reinwasser, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who in her own way has loved him and betrayed him. Out of the dramatic events that follow, there emerges genuine healing, reconciliation, and renewal for the principals, in those modest and never-finished ways that are the gracious stuff of our finite lives.
VII
In the spring of 1967, the Buechner family left Exeter to take up permanent residence in their summer house on a mountain near Rupert, Vermont. Buechner tells of how lonely and difficult that first year away from Exeter was as he faced the prospect of spending the rest of his days, and exercising his ministry, solely and entirely as a writer. The product of this experience of being thrown completely back upon himself was The Entrance to Porlock. Of it Buechner has written:
Like all novels, I suppose, and like all dreams, it is symbolic autobiography, a strange, dense, slow-paced book, the labor of writing which was so painful that I find it hard, even now, to see beyond my memory of the pain to whatever merit it may have. But I remember still the feeling that I had written myself into a blank wall .28
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Porlock, as already noted, is Buechner's tribute to the Land of Oz which played so large a role in forming his early imagination. It is a retelling of the most familiar of the Oz books, The Wizard of Oz. The day after his eightieth birthday, Peter Ringkoping sets out on a journey with his two very different sons Tommy and Nels and his grandson Tip to visit a very unusual community for mentally and emotionally disturbed adults run by an old friend, Hans Strasser, who is something of a shaman. Subtly but explicitly it becomes clear as the journey progresses that it is a yellow-brick-road quest for each of them: the patriarch Peter, always caught up in his vivid world of imagination and books to the neglect of intimacy with his family, searching for a heart; Nels the stern prep school dean secretly longing for the courage to live he has never had; Tommy the everlasting child, the practical joker, needing brains in the form of a maturity his son Tip can respect; and Tip the college sophomore (the young Buechner) who is longing for a sense of "home" he feels he has never had.
Appropriate to its background in children's fantasy, The Entrance to Porlock contains material in which Buechner gives free rein to his considerable powers of imagination. His descriptions of the scenes at the wizard Strasser's community, Pilgrim Village, are little less than surrealistic. In Porlock as in the earlier novels, Buechner paints on a small canvas, exploring the personal hungerings for meaning and love and the complex and fragile relationships among a small group of people bound together by ties of family and friendship. And as in The Final Beast, there is grace, too, at the end for each of the protagonists through their visit to Strasser's community-but again as a "now and then" of healing and renewal in the midst of life's complexities.
It was a phrase in the letter of invitation to deliver the Noble Lectures at Harvard which set in motion a train of self-exploration that helped lead Buechner out of the impasse he had reached with the writing of Porlock.
In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. What I started trying to do as a writer and as a preacher was more and more to draw on my own experience not just as a source of plot, character, illustration, but as a source of truth .29
VIII
In the wake of such insight, the 1970s saw the full flowering of Buechner's art with the Leo Bebb tetralogy of novels-Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt-which in 1979 were published together as The Book of Bebb. At least until the writing of
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Godric, they were his own favorites among his fictional works. In the Introduction to The Book of Bebb, Buechner describes these four novels as "literarily speaking, the great romance of my life," as "love-letters."30 He relates how not only Leo Bebb, the consummate Rinkitink, but the whole cast of characters took on a life of their own as he excitedly wrote Lion Country in a kind of white heat; and how those lives simply would not be laid to rest with the completion of that first Bebb book but demanded further and still further elaboration and development.
As the critics recognized, the Bebb books represented another new departure in Buechner's fiction. He showed himself for the first time to be a master of comedy without ceasing to explore what Pascal called "the motions of grace, the hardness of the heart, external circumstances" in the crazy entanglements, the ambiguous motives, and the lonely exiles of the human situation. Nothing in Buechner's previous fiction quite prepares us for the witty and imaginative variety of comic materials in the Bebb books; interestingly, he first reveals his delightful capacity for humor in The Alphabet of Grace, which closely precedes Lion Country. At the same time, this newly-found comic dimension stands side by side and intimately bound together with beautifully rendered scenes of human poignancy and with perceptive theological explorations. It is in the Bebb novels, in fact, that Buechner comes the closest to a fully balanced artistic portrayal of that inseparable mix of the ridiculous and the sublime, the absurd and the gracious, the accidental and the providential, which Buechner sees as the human condition. In the final analysis, however, it is comedy that provides the most adequate metaphor for the ultimate state of things-for the "great laughter" at the dark depths of reality. Tragedy is an essential metaphor, but its truth is penultimate in the light of the Gospel.
Stylistically the Bebb novels likewise represent the fruition of Buechner's art. He has left the prose of A Long Day's Dying far behind and fully achieved a narrative style which is clear, conversational, and vivid without sacrificing lyrical power and beauty. He has developed a sure ear for dialogue, and brings it off with ease and naturalness. The Bebb novels reveal an unprecedented and fascinated attention to plotting, a sheer delight in telling a story well-paced with action and full of surprising twists and turns and mysteries to be solved. In addition, as I observed earlier, it is in the tetralogy that Buechner's love of fantasy achieves its widest and most imaginative scope. It is significant in connection with the development of Buechner's style that in the Bebb books for the first time he tells a story in the first person-the narrator is Antonio Parr, one of the main characters-rather than as an omniscient author.31
Leo Bebb is surely one of the most memorable characters in recent
30 BB vii-ix.
31 Buechner explicitly notes this., and remarks
on how "extremely liberating" it was for him to write in the first person. See
NT 98.
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American fiction: ex-Bible salesman and ex-convict, founder of the Church of Holy Love, operator of a theological correspondence school and diploma mill; a man who has learned through his experiences a remarkable courage, compassion, and faith. Bebb is clearly a Rinkitink or "whiskey priest" figure. His appearance is comic, at first glance he is the stereotypical Southern evangelist, his arrest years before was for indecent exposure, his ecclesiastical enterprises seem shady and he is always in trouble with the IRS. But through him a "crazy, holy grace" works to fill up empty lives, to challenge the torpid and skeptical, to heal and renew and reconcile and empower all who come in contact with him-often of course in unorthodox ways. Leo Bebb's message is simple: it is a gospel of pure, unbounded love undergirded by a profound and graphic sense of human pain and tragedy. The theology Buechner creates for him, a kind of liberated Southern biblicism, is extraordinarily creative.
Bebb is joined by a memorable cast of characters whose lives are or become connected with his and who are surely Buechner's most fully three-dimensional figures. There is Antonio (Tono) Parr, a gently cynical New Yorker who begins by planning to expose Bebb as a fraud, becomes his son-in-law, has his barren heart moved in strange new directions, and with his educated, ironic observer's eye functions as an appropriate narrator of the stories. Tono's twin sister Miriam is painfully dying of cancer in Lion Country, and her sons Tony and Chris eventually come to live with him and his wife Sharon. Lucille Bebb, Leo's wife, is a pathetic woman keeping to herself the tragedies of her life with him and ending her days an alcoholic. Sharon, their daughter and Tono's wife, is a free and sexy spirit and a humorously hard-nosed cynic about things. Laverne Brown-always called Brownie-literally owes his life to Bebb, having been raised by him from his apparent electrocution by a live power line, and functions as Leo's much-abused assistant and Lucille's only real friend. Miriam's son Tony is a handsome high school jock who eventually winds up in bed with Sharon, an event with serious and long-range repercussions for both her and Antonio. Herman Redpath, an oil-rich Texas Indian surrounded by a howlingly bizarre array of relatives and retainers, believes he has been restored to sexual potency by Bebb, moves his church to his ranch near Houston (the sexual restoration requires repeated "healings"), and leaves him a large sum of money. After Lucille's death by suicide, a wealthy Theosophist from Princeton, Gertrude Conover, becomes Bebb's constant companion.
To attempt to summarize the plots of the four Bebb novels-the action of which takes us to New York; Armadillo, Florida; Houston; Connecticut; Europe; Princeton; and Poinsett, South Carolina-is impossible within the compass of the present paper. Suffice it to say that these four books are a Buechner tour de force: intrinsically interesting plots with detective-story mysteries and discoveries, rich fantasy elements, fascinating characters, high and low comedy, powerful prose,
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and deeply insightful wrestlings with what are finally theological questions.
IX
Buechner's theological writings continued throughout the 'seventies, now marked not only by his provocatively creative imagination but also by the wry wit which The Alphabet of Grace and especially the Bebb tetralogy decisively brought to light. Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973) is a Dr. Johnson-like little dictionary of a miscellany of theological terms with serious insight and sharp-witted humor bound together in an earthy religious wisdom. The title is typical Buechner, and of it he says: "Christianity is mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept…. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it."32
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Buechner's 1977 Beecher Lectures, is his most "formal" theological study. As the title and the subtitle suggest, he brings to the understanding and communication of the Christian message both the perspective and the creativity of the literary artist. The result is a study that demands consideration of the relationship between the literary and the theological imagination. Very appropriately, Buechner announces his theme by referring to his favorite Shakespeare play, King Lear, which he calls "one of the mightiest of all preachments":33
Insofar as the truth is tragic…. [Shakespeare] told a tragedy of men and women suffering more than even their own folly and wickedness seem to merit. Insofar as the truth is comic, both in the sense of a kind of terrible funniness and of a happy end to all that is terrible, he told a comedy of madmen and fools. Insofar as the truth transcends all such distinctions and points beyond itself, he told a kind of fairy tale where everybody is disguised as something he or she is not and only at the end are all disguises stripped away so that finally all are revealed for what they truly are, and like the beast in "Beauty and the Beast," the old king, with Cordelia in her beauty dead in his arms, is finally turned into a human being.34
In successive lectures Buechner develops each theme as an aspect of the threefold truth about things that is the Christian Gospel.
In Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who (1979), illustrated by his daughter Katherine, Buechner returns to the "dictionary" format of Wishful Thinking. This time we have what amounts to a series of delightful contemporary midrashes on a number of biblical figures, again uniting a fresh perception of the biblical stories with razor-edged humor in such a manner as to bring them alive to modern readers. Of the climactic theophany in the book of Job, Buechner writes: "You can think of God as a great cosmic bully here if you want, but you can think
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of him also as a great cosmic artist, a singer, say, of such power and magnificence and so caught up in the incandescence of his own art that he never notices that he has long since ruptured the eardrums of his listeners and reduced them to quivering pulp."35
The publication in 1980 of his most recent novel, Godric, has marked yet another stylistic and thematic departure in Buechner's fiction. Godric is a short historical novel about the eleventh-century English hermit-saint who may have been England's first lyric poet. The book is remarkably written in a style and language that seeks to capture the homely earthiness and lyrical cadences of Middle English. With the opening sentences of the story, narrated by St. Godric himself, we are plunged into the semblance of an earlier English tongue: "Five friends I had, and two of them snakes. Tune and Fairweather they were, thick round as a man's arm, my bedmates and playfellows, keepers of my skimped hearth and hermit's heart till in a grim pet I bade them go that day and nevermore to come again, nevermore to hiss their snakelove when they saw me drawing near or coil themselves for warmth about my shaggy legs."36
Godric is another vivid example of those "peculiar treasures" about whom Buechner loves to write, the latest member of the diverse but always-recognizable Rinkitink succession. For the first half of his very long life, Godric is a thoroughly worldly man with lusty appetites often indulged, a merchant seafarer and sometime pirate. For the second half of his life, he is a devoted but cantankerous-nay, irascible-Christian hermit who tries through harsh austerities to starve the appetites and never fully succeeds. Godric stands with the Bebb books as Buechner's most vividly concrete fiction. Again, perhaps it is no accident that like them it is narrated in the first person by a protagonist, a perspective which Buechner has recognized both disciplines and liberates his prose and also reflects his more recent preoccupation with personal story as a source of religious truth.
Buechner was working on Godric when he wrote an essay in The Christian Century series on "How My Mind Has Changed." Characteristically, he incorporated an illustrative passage from the novel into the essay, and the latter furnishes a close theological commentary on the mind of Buechner as he was writing that novel. Speaking of how his mind has changed about himself, about death, and about God, Buechner says that the old Godric sees what he himself is only just beginning to see, "that if it is by grace we are saved, it is by grace too that we are lost-or lost, at least, in the sense of losing our selves, our lives, our all." He continues:
We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old. This seems to be close to the heart of that mystery. I know no more now than I ever did about the far side of death as the last letting-go of all, but I begin to know that I do not need to know and that I
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do not need to be afraid of not knowing. God knows. That is all that matters.37
Buechner adds, in his autobiography, that in writing Godric, "more than half without knowing it, I was trying on various ways of growing old and facing death myself."38
X
In this essay I have sought to introduce Frederick Buechner and his work largely by surveying his fictional and theological writings against the background of his life. I have been able only to offer samplings from a rich corpus of writing and some brief commentary, but I hope by doing this that I may have at least laid the groundwork for the sort of overall presentation and evaluation that I believe Buechner's work deserves. Both his fictional and his theological works are interesting on their own merits and because of their interrelationship. Buechner is not only a very good novelist whose work has been somewhat neglected; he is also a rare combination of literary artist and creative theologian, which should make him of special interest to the theological community.
Buechner is of especially pertinent interest in the context of the contemporary recovery of narrative (both fictional and autobiographical) and metaphor as essential dimensions and vehicles of the theological art. Buechner has seen and practiced this essential connection between the religious and the artistic imagination, between theology and story, for a number of years. In the 1969 Noble Lectures, he observed that for both theology and fiction "the idea and the experience, the idea and the image, remain inseparable."39 and that both are "essentially autobiography."40
Of particular value in Buechner's contribution is that he comes to theological reflection primarily as a talented literary artist and storyteller, with the singular perspective his craft brings to bear on the relations among experience, language, imagination, and thought. Equally important is the fact that Buechner is a working embodiment, in both his fictional and his autobiographical writings, of precisely that narrative incarnational mode of theologizing that is being talked about so much today by its theoreticians. Such a person surely deserves further study by theologians, who in the process will also find themselves curling up with some absorbing and entertaining books.
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BUECHNER BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a bibliography of Buechner's works cited in the article, listed in chronological order. It comprises all of his major writings, and indeed all
37 ALAF
284.
38 NT 107.
39 AG 4.
40 AG 3.
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but a scattered handful of his writings generally. The rest are for the most part short, occasional pieces: a short story, Lenten meditations for The Christian Century, a few poems, excerpts from his theological books in The Reader's Digest and Time, and the like. In the following list those writings included in the footnotes are also designated by the initials under which they are listed in the footnotes.
A Long Day's Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950 (Buechner's copyright date 1949).
The Seasons' Difference. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952 (Buechner's copyright dates 1950, 1951).
The Return of Ansel Gibbs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958 (Buechner's copyright date 1957).
The Final Beast. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
The Magnificent Defeat. New York: The Seabury Press, 1966.
The Hungering Dark. New York: The Seabury Press, 1969.
The Entrance to Porlock. New York: Atheneum, 1970 (Buechner's copyright date 1969).
The Alphabet of Grace. New York: The Seabury Press, 1970. (AG)
Lion Country. New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Open Heart. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. (WT)
The Faces of Jesus. Text, Frederick Buechner; photography, Lee Boltin; design, Ray Ripper, Croton-on- Hudson, New York: Riverwood Publishers, 1974.
Love Feast. New York: Atheneum, 1974.
Treasure Hunt. New York: Atheneum, 1977.
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. (TT)
Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who. With illustrations by Katerine A. Buechner. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. (PT)
The Book of Bebb: Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt. With an Introduction by the Author. New York: Atheneum,1979 (BB)
"All's Lost, All's Found." The Christian Century 97:9, March 12,1980. (ALAF)
Godric. New York: Atheneum, 1981 (Buechner's copyright date 1980). (G)
The Sacred Journey. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992. (SJ)
Now and Then. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. (NT)