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In January of this year, King College in Bristol, Tennessee hosted the inauguration of the Buechner Institute, a faith-and-culture center directed by Dale Brown. Frederick Buechner himself was present, and when he addressed the audience, there was an expectant hush.
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The guest of honor, without much preamble, told his listeners that for about ten years he had been unable to complete any substantial writing project. A very quiet auditorium became quieter still. Buechner went on to say that each day he goes out to his "Magic Kingdom," the separate place—set apart from the house—where for decades he has done his writing. There he is surrounded by his magnificent collection of first editions and assorted objects of significance to him. He writes, yet nothing comes to fruition.
Recently, he said, he had sorted through the accumulated fragments of the last few years and found some bits that seemed to stand up on their own, enough to make up a small volume, a miscellany, to be published under the title The Yellow Leaves. He quoted the relevant lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
He then proposed to read a couple of the pieces he had salvaged, and did so, to great applause. And now, six months later, as promised, the book has been published by Westminster John Knox Press. "I can still write sentences and paragraphs," Buechner says in the half-page introduction, "but for five or six years now [or ten, perhaps], I haven't been able to write books. Maybe after more than thirty of them the well has at last run dry. Maybe, age eighty, I no longer have the right kind of energy. Maybe the time has simply come to stop. Whatever the reason, at least for the moment the sweet birds no longer sing."
It's a very slim volume, mostly consisting of short reminiscences, but also including a scene from an unfinished novel (its incompleteness much to be mourned, since it would have added to The Book of Bebb) and, at the end, a gathering of "Family Poems."
Please don't suppose that I'm bringing this book to your attention dutifully, hinting that you might want to acquire it for old times' sake and place it on your Buechner shelf more or less unread and tactfully unmentioned. I love miscellanies, and this particular miscellany—uneven, of course—has much to offer. The two pieces Buechner read that day at King College, "Our Last Drive Together" and "Presidents I Have Known," are both superb, and the contrast between them—in the way they proceed, in their imaginative register—helps to illuminate Buechner's distinctive appeal.
Go back a moment to that ceremony at King College and put yourself in the crowd. You might well feel contradictory emotions, as I did, after Buechner's opening confession. We expect this sort of candor from the author of Telling the Truth, and there was an irresistible pathos to the lines from Shakespeare, yet the prospect of hearing a writer we have much admired read fragments of unfinishable work is not exactly welcome. For a moment I was afraid for him and overcome by that awkward embarrassment which is in part, via empathy, a fear for oneself.
No need to worry, it turns out. "Our Last Drive Together," which Buechner read with occasional asides, is a blackly, terribly funny account of a car-ride from Vermont, where Buechner's aged mother (known as Kaki) had been visiting, to New York, where she lived. As so much of Buechner's writing does, it touches on his father's death "in a garage filled with bitter fumes when I was ten and Jamie [his brother] going on eight." In his asides, as elsewhere, Buechner gave the impression that he blames his mother for his father's suicide, though that isn't explicit in this piece, which concludes with an account of Jamie going to their mother's apartment after her death, having been summoned by the housekeeper. There is a mix of tenderness and savagery in Buechner's account of his mother in old age—do the imperatives of truth-telling really extend this far?—and if, as I suspect, Buechner's title is intended to remind us of Browning's "The Last Ride Together," there's an extra twist to the sardonic knife. "What if," Browning asks at the end of that poem, he and his beloved find themselves after death
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