Because God works almost always in hidden ways, we are free to decide for him or against him.
Frederick Buechner (pronounced Beekner) has been writing for 30 years. To date, he has published 17 books. In each of them, fiction and nonfiction, he explores, defines, and celebrates the Christian faith.
“I don’t write novels particularly for evangelicals,” he told us in a recent interview at his home in the mountains of Vermont. He was saying that many religious readers have found his fiction disturbing. Yet the time is long overdue for Christians to be aware of the work of this skilled and deep-sighted writer. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister who has given his life to presenting the gospel to the secular reader.
Buechner has received significant critical praise for his latest book, Godric (Atheneum, 1980), his tenth novel, which is a fictional biography of a twelfth-century saint. Godric is a startling departure from the four novels preceding it, all of which are centered in a character named Leo Bebb, an irrepressible evangelist, founder of the Church of Holy Love and a mail-order religious diploma mill.
When Flannery O’Connor was asked why she, a dedicated Roman Catholic, wrote stories about Protestant fanatics, she replied that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you retire to a cloister and are never heard from again—whereas if you are a Protestant, you go about the world getting into all sorts of trouble. After following one of these Protestant fanatics around for four novels, Buechner has pursued one of the Catholic saints into the inner sanctum of his private consciousness—and he is heard from again, telling his own story at age 100. We asked Buechner:
What led you to write about Godric?
I found it hard to complete the Bebb books. I kept writing sequels. When I finally finished, with no conscious thought of what I was going to do next, I sat down exactly where you’re sitting and picked up the little Penguin Dictionary of Saints. I had done a book on theological words and I thought I might do—maybe not a book—but something on saints. I opened it up just by accident to Godric, whom I’d never heard of. I was just enchanted by him. And then it suddenly occurred to me that this was Bebb in an earlier incarnation. Of all my books, it’s the one I like best, and it was something I didn’t have to struggle for. It was on the house.
If Godric is a twelfth-century Bebb, that would make Bebb a twentieth-century Godric. Where did the notion of Leo Bebb as saint come from?
Perhaps it began with the reading of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which of all the novels I’ve read, with the possible exception of The Brothers Karamazov, has had the greatest effect on me as a writer. 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. Or it became that. When I first began I thought of Bebb as an Elmer Gantry figure whom I would expose in the process of writing about him. But I came to like him more and more and to see more clearly what was saintly about him.
What exactly do you mean by saint?
I would think that the New Testament meaning of saint would be different from what one means by “the saints,” like Saint Francis or Saint Augustine. When Godric resists being classified as a saint, he’s thinking of Saint Cuthbert and other giants he had known. My view is that Godric is a saint in the sense that through his life the power and glory of God is made manifest in a very special way, even though like all the rest of us he is standing up to his ankles in mud.
In The Alphabet of Grace you say that at its heart most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiography. How autobiographical is your work?
By and large, I haven’t drawn very heavily on my own life in my novels—except my fantasy life. There are certain exceptions, of course. In The Final Beast the conversion experiences of the minister Nicolet were very much my own. And Kuykendall, the clergyman-professor in The Return of Ansel Gibbs, was modeled on a Union Seminary professor who had a tremendous influence on my life in every way.
What has influenced you in a literary sense?
I’ve already mentioned Graham Greene and Dostoevsky. Shakespeare’s King Lear. As for poets, the one I come back to more than any other is Gerard Manley Hopkins.
He’s also one who has had an influence on my style.
How have your books sold? Have any of them been best sellers?
Only the first one. The nonfiction books do quite well, but with the exception of A Long Day’s Dying, none of the novels has gone much beyond a few thousand copies.
Have you found that discouraging?
I think I’d write even if there were nobody to read. Fortunately, there have always been enough people who’ve responded to my novels the way I’ve wanted them to, so I’ve never felt entirely neglected. Further more, writing is more than a craft for me. It’s my ministry.
If writing is your ministry, who are the members of your parish?
I think of myself as addressing two different kinds of audiences. In the nonfiction, it’s more on the order of a congregation in a church. In the novels, I’m trying to reach the people who wouldn’t be caught dead in church or reading a religious book—the people Schleiermacher called religion’s “cultured despisers”—in a language I think they will understand.
Even though your main role as a novelist is that of a Christian apologist to unbelievers, it seems that with your stress on the mystery at the heart of existence and on the risk of faith, you have something important to say to the clergy.
Perhaps so. In my book Telling the Truth, I speak of a certain kind of minister as being like the captain of a ship who’s the only man aboard who doesn’t know the ship is going down. Everybody in the congregation knows that in addition to faith there are doubt and despair, and if in some sense the minister doesn’t acknowledge this in what he says, he shuts people off. There’s always the element of risk and doubt and mystery. It’s never easy for me. I can’t affirm anything easily.
Do you think your novels have anything to say to Christians in general?
Yes, I think so. I hope so. What I’m saying to Christians in my novels is what, if they’re honest with themselves, I think they know already. I’m saying that yes, God indeed does so love the world that he is at work in it continually, but almost always in hidden ways, ways that leave us free to decide for him or against him. When he does his work through human beings, they are apt to have feet of clay just as much as Leo Bebb or Godric, because that’s the only kind of human beings there are, saints included. My novels are not Sunday school stories with detachable morals at the end. They are my attempt to describe the world as richly and truly as perhaps only fiction can describe it, together with the truth that God is mysteriously with us in the world. That is in essence what I am saying to Christians and to anybody else who will listen.
SHIRLEY AND RUDY NELSON1Mrs. Nelson is a novelist, and her husband a professor of English at the State University of New York in Albany.
