NOTE: I was not much of a fan of Frederick Buechner, a writer who died last week at 96. I tried his quartet of novels about a semi-charlatan-but-maybe-a-saint preacher in Florida, but Buechner lost me with his character’s name, Leo Bebb, which is bar none the most uneuphonious & off-putting monicker in my experience of what is said to be serious fiction.

But on the other hand, his work did hit me a glancing blow once, glancing but perhaps mortal.

It happened when a woman friend named Patricia, assigned to do a reading, pulled a slim book from her purse and opened it somewhere in the middle. The book is called Peculiar Treasures, and in it Buechner collected short sketches of various biblical characters. Here is what Patricia read, complete:

Isaiah

There were banks of candles in the distance and clouds of incense thickening the air with holiness and stinging his eyes, and high above him . . there was the Mystery Itself . . . and the whole vast reeking place started to shake beneath his feet . . .and he cried out, “O God, I am done for! I am foul of mouth and the member of a foul-mouthed race. With my own two eyes I have seen him. I’m a goner and sunk.”

Then one of the winged things touched his mouth with fire and said, “There, it will be all right now,” and the Mystery Itself said, “Who will it be?” and with charred lips he said “Me,” and Mystery said, “GO.”

Mystery said, “Go give the deaf hell till you’re blue in the face and go show the blind Heaven till you drop in your tracks because they’d sooner eat ground glass than swallow the bitter pill that puts roses in the cheeks and a gleam in the eye. Go do it.”

Isaiah said, “Do it till when?”

Mystery said, “Till Hell freezes over.”

Mystery said, “Do it till the cows come home.”

And that is what a prophet does for a living, so starting from the year that King Uzziah died when he saw and heard all these things, Isaiah went and did it.

— Frederic Buechner, “Peculiar Treasures, A Biblical Who’s Who.”

NOTE: I’ve forgotten when and where the reading took place, and lost touch with Patricia. But I hunted down & bought the book, and hung on to it for years. Just one sketch like that can put a reader in permanent debt to a writer, even if the guy published 38 other books (as Buechner did) which were over my head or didn’t speak to my condition.

As a writer, I should be so lucky.

New York Times

Frederick Buechner, Novelist With a Religious Slant, Dies at 96

He drew on his theological credentials in essays and memoirs, and his fiction, full of colorful characters, was admired for its elegance, wit and depth.

Credit…Alan Fortney, via Buechner family

By Robert D. McFadden

Published Aug. 15, 2022

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister who never held a church pastorate but found his calling writing a prodigious quantity of novels, memoirs and essays that explored the human condition from inspirational and often humorous religious perspectives, died on Monday at his home in Rupert, Vt. He was 96.

His son-in-law and literary executor, David Altshuler, confirmed the death.

Drawing on literary and theological credentials over six decades, Mr. Buechner (pronounced BEEK-ner) published 39 books, many of them well-received fictional excursions into the adventures of charlatans, lovers, historical or biblical characters and ordinary people who take on self-imposed superhuman challenges and stoop to only-too-human skulduggery, all in the name of God.

His 10th novel, “Godric” (1980), the first-person tale of a 12th-century English holy man who purifies his soul of the mortal sin of pride, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1981. His “Lion Country” (1971), a novel about a pedophilic former jailbird who ministers to the faithful as a fake pastor in a phony church, was a National Book Award finalist in 1972.

While he was best known for his novels, some translated into 27 languages, Mr. Buechner also wrote poetry, literary reviews, essays on secular subjects and “meditations” on religious matters. He lectured widely at colleges and universities and delivered sermons in the United States and Europe. His four autobiographies professed to find divine grace everywhere in the human experience.

Where does a Christian novelist get his ideas? For Mr. Buechner, the protagonist of his “Book of Bebb” quartet — “Lion Country” followed by “Open Heart” (1972), “Love Feast” (1974) and “Treasure Hunt” (1974) — was conceived in a barbershop, as he was waiting his turn and reading a magazine. The image of an antihero floated up like a mystical vision, and it dominated his writing for years.

In a memoir, he recalled the character: “He was a plump, bald, ebullient southerner who had once served five years in a prison on a charge of exposing himself before a group of children and was now the head of a religious diploma mill in Florida and of a seedy flat-roofed stucco church called the Church of Holy Love, Incorporated. He wore a hat that looked too small for him. He had a trick eyelid that every once in awhile fluttered shut on him. His name was Leo Bebb.”

Other characters proliferate in “Open Heart,” as Cynthia Ozick noted in The New York Times Book Review: “Bebb has a gin-swigging wife who drowned her baby long ago, a well-domesticated ex-homosexual assistant who believes Bebb raised him from the dead, and a tough adopted daughter who sleeps with strangers.”

Can Bebb and his entourage be repositories of grace? Might his house of worship turn out to be, as Ms. Ozick put it, “the truly-revealed Invisible Church, an adumbration of the divine intention? When the Redeemer is called on only to help a man make a living, does he make a life instead? Buechner implies yes.”

Likened by some critics to the works of Mark Twain, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Truman Capote, Mr. Buechner’s novels were admired by loyal readers for their elegance, wit, depth and force. His more homiletic memoirs and essays reached much larger audiences of Christians and consumers of religious books, even though he did not hold orthodox religious views.

“Contrary to widespread religious belief,” he wrote in a 1994 essay for The Times, “I don’t think God goes around changing things in the sense of making bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people, or of giving one side victory over the other in wars, or of pushing a bill through Congress to make school prayer constitutional.”

Mr. Buechner said he believed that chance largely ruled the universe, but also that “through the chance things that happen, God opens up possibilities of redemptive human change in the inner selves, even of people who wouldn’t be caught dead believing in Him.”

Emerging from a chaotic childhood in which his family moved constantly as his father, an unsuccessful salesman for industrial chemical companies, drifted from job to job during the Depression and committed suicide when the boy was 10, Mr. Buechner attended a private boarding school and his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and taught for a few years before starting his writing career in New York City.

His first novel, “A Long Day’s Dying” (1950), about conflicts among a college student, his widowed mother, his grandmother and his mother’s lovers, appeared when he was 23. It won both lavish critical praise and commercial success. “All in all, this is a work of real art, fine sensitivity and uncanny human understanding,” David Daiches, a Cornell English scholar, wrote in The Times Book Review.

It was not until after publication of his less-successful second novel, “The Seasons’ Difference” (1952), which explored the moral vacuum in a group of sophisticates, that Mr. Buechner had his spiritual awakening. Attending the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, he heard a sermon by its celebrated pastor, George Buttrick, that inspired him.

He entered Union Theological Seminary in 1954, studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and, in 1958, earned a divinity baccalaureate and was ordained as a Presbyterian evangelical, a minister without pastoral charge. He joined Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire as a chaplain and founded a religious studies department and taught religion and English there until 1967.

Credit…HarperOne

Starting with the novels “The Return of Ansel Gibbs” (1958), which questioned the human values of a former statesman recalled to Washington for a cabinet post, and “The Final Beast” (1965), which linked a young widowed minister to a woman in a small-town scandal, Mr. Buechner’s writing took on new theological dimensions, finding divinity in everyday life.

In a series of autobiographies — “The Sacred Journey” (1982), “Now and Then” (1983), “Telling Secrets” (1991) and “The Eyes of the Heart” (1999) — Mr. Buechner examined his relationship with his deceased parents and his insights gained from therapy sessions. He explained his intention in an introduction to the first volume:

“More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, I determined to try to describe my own life as evocatively and candidly as I could in the hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsed in it would shine through my description more or less on their own.”

Critics sometimes accused Mr. Buechner of moralizing. But more typical was Cecelia Holland, in The Washington Post, on his novel “Brendan” (1987), about an Irish saint whose sixth-century voyages were likened to those of Sinbad. “In our own time,” she wrote, “when religion is debased, an electronic game show, an insult to the thirsty soul, Buechner’s novel proves again the power of faith, to lift us up, to hold us straight, to send us on again.”

Credit…Blake Gardner/Frederick Buechner Center, via PR Newswire

Carl Frederick Buechner was born in Manhattan on July 11, 1926, the older of two sons of Carl Frederick and Katherine (Kuhn) Buechner. With their father roving from job to job, Frederick, who never used his first name, and his brother, James, attended another school in another community every year until 1936, when their father died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a car.

Both parents came from upper-class backgrounds, but their inheritances were dissipated during the Depression.

In 1939, Frederick enrolled at the Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey. He published his first poems in its literary magazine and graduated in 1943. He attended Princeton for a year but was drafted into the wartime Army. After the war, he returned to Princeton and earned a degree in English in 1948. He taught at Lawrenceville for five years, then moved to New York to focus on writing.

In 1956, he married Judith Merck, a daughter of George W. Merck, chairman of Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical maker.

Besides his son-in-law, he is survived by his wife; their three daughters, Katherine B. Arthaud, Dinah Buechner-Vischer and Sharman B. Altshuler; and 10 grandchildren.

Mr. Buechner wrote much of his work in Pawlet, Vt., but had lived in recent years in Cambridge, Mass., Rutland, Vt. and Hobe Sound, Fla.

In his last memoir, in 1999, Mr. Buechner recalled his mother, his brother and his childhood friend, the poet James Merrill, all of whom had died. A central character in his recollections, however, is his long-dead maternal grandmother, Naya Kuhn, whom he invites to an imagined conversation in his study at Pawlet.

Searching for insights, he asks her about death: “You’ve already set sail. What can you tell me about it?”

She responds that she considers it misleading to speak of people as having passed away. “It is the world that passes away,” she says.

Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.

From Publishers Weekly:

Buechner is the recipient of nine honorary degrees (including from Cornell, the University of Virginia, and Yale), the winner of the O. Henry Award, and a finalist for both a Pulitzer and National Book Award. His writing has been compared to Christian thinkers including Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Merton, and more. In addition to his writing career, Buechner attended Union Theological Seminary, and was ordained in 1958

In a statement about Buechner’s passing, Michael Maudlin, senior v-p, executive editor at HarperOne, said he is mourning “a unique figure, a literary figure.” He added that Buechner “confounded everybody by becoming ordained as a Presbyterian minister while continuing to publish in multiple genres. His books are on many leaders’ shelves of ‘most influential.’”

Quoting Buechner’s 1983 memoir Now and Then (HarperOne), Maudlin says: “Despite the diversity of means, all his books shared his overriding mission: ‘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.’”

Recurring themes in Buechner’s work centered on death, grief, life’s darkness and light, and he often drew on both his father’s suicide and his daughter’s near-death from anorexia. Speaking to PW during an interview in 2005, Buechner emphasized the importance of offering readers “life and meaning,” an accomplishment that brought him great pleasure and gratitude. “Gladness is many times the last thing you think about in terms of life’s work,” he said. “Lots of people tell you to make money, do your duty, be responsible—all of which are important. But if you leave out gladness, you have a dreary life.”

Maudlin noted: “The world needs more authors like him, not less.”

3 thoughts on “Frederick Buechner: Religious Novelist”

Hank Fay says:

August 19, 2022 at 12:52 pm

Hi Chuck,

OMG, what a treasure indeed.

Thanks!

Hank

Claire Cafaro says:

August 19, 2022 at 3:23 pm

Thank you Chuck for introducing me to this fascinating writer.
Now I will return the favor: I just finished reading All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg. I had never heard of her until I came upon a review of the book by someone who said it had changed her life. I’m a sucker for life-changing experiences.
NG was an Italian Jew, the book takes place before, during and right after WW2 in Italy. It may not appeal to everyone but it spoke to me.

Helen Bayes says:

August 19, 2022 at 6:40 pm

I don’t have any inward urge to read this book or any of his others! 🙂

A Friendly Letter

Chuck Fager — Writer, Editor

Frederick Buechner: Religious Novelist

Frederick Buechner, Novelist With a Religious Slant, Dies at 96

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3 thoughts on “Frederick Buechner: Religious Novelist”

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