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THE REDISCOVERY OF WONDER: A CRITICAL
INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

OF FREDERICK BUECHNER

By
Stacy Webb Thompson

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1979

ABSTRACT

THE REDISCOVERY OF WONDER: A CRITICAL
INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS OF FREDERICK BUECHNER

BY
Stacy Webb Thompson

Frederick Buechner has published nine novels since
1950. They have received only minimal critical attention,
yet Buechner's fiction is recognized by such critics as
John Aldridge and Ihab Hassan, and by such novelists as
Reynolds Price and John Gardner, as worthy of extended
critical attention. David Madden's REDISCOVERIES amply
proves what many literary critics and scholars know, even
if they are not always anxious to admit it: that there is
a large body of excellent fiction that has gone unrecog-
nized or unheralded, or simply been forgotten. This ne-
glect is due to a variety of complex causes such as shifts
in literary fashion, or an individual author's failure to
produce anything of note after writing an initial tour de
force. Had we but world enough and time, such works as
Djuna Barnes' NIGHTWOOD, Glenway Wescott's APARTMENT IN
ATHENS, Christina Stead's THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN, or
Frederick Buechner's THE FINAL BEAST would have received
the attention they deserve. But we have not and they have
not. Such neglect is particularly unjust and troublesome
when it involves not just a single work but a whole body

of work, as it does in the case of Frederick Buechner.

Stacy Webb Thompson

This study is an attempt to pay a long overdue debt
by providing a critical introduction to the novels of
Frederick Buechner. It concentrates on the three major
themes that are most consistently developed throughout the
novels: the theme of wonder; the theme of innocence; and
the theme of transformation. These themes are examined
through a careful analysis of the novels' major allusions,
dominant patterns of imagery, and characterization.

Buechner's major themes function as correctives to
such typical themes in modern literature as alienation,
purposelessness, or metaphysical doubt. Buechner indicates
that modern life is largely problematic, yet he insists
that even within a problematic interpretation of existence
there are still legitimate bases for affirmation, for cele—
bration, for joy. The theme of wonder in Buechner's novels
stresses the extraordinary nature of what we usually under-
stand as ordinary experience. Reading Buechner, we are
constantly invited to reappraise much that custom and habit
have led us to take for granted--1ife itself is miraculous,
Buechner suggests, and mysterious, and wondrous. The theme
of innocence is embodied in those characters in Buechner's
novels who are able to remain Open to the most wondrous
elements of their experience. Innocence seems to be a pre-
requisite to wonder, and includes the ability to maintain a
lightness of heart in circumstances that would lead many to
despair. The theme of transformation functions as the

agent of spiritual perception in Buechner's characters. It

Stacy Webb Thompson
is the means by which wonder and innocence are tested and
justified. The harshest aspects of modern life are made
bearable through transformations in characters' lives that
allow them to be aware of the metaphysical implications of
their lives. These transformations are of three basic
types: 1) the personal, e.g., answers to questions of
identity; 2) the interpersonal, e.g., strengthened love re-
lationships; 3) the symbolic, e.g., moments of metaphysical
insight or vision.

It is clear in his first few novels that Buechner is
a child of modernism, and that he inherited a good many
modern assumptions. But Buechner's major themes, increas-
ingly important as we move away from Buechner's earliest
fiction, remind us that modern life is not entirely dark or
demonic. To see only the bleakest prOSpects, to believe
only the worst news, is to distort and unnecessarily to im-
poverish our existence. In an age when much of our litera-
ture is dominated by metaphors of the waste land and images
of darkness, Buechner's fiction is refreshingly and unsen-

timentally affirmative.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER I. THE THEME OF WONDER . . . . . . . . . . . 21
CHAPTER II. THE THEME OF INNOCENCE . . . . . . . . . 65
CHAPTER III. THE THEME OF TRANSFORMATION . . . . . . 93
CHAPTER IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . 146

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

ii

INTRODUCTION

Frederick Buechner has published steadily since 1950,
often receiving fine reviews, yet his novels have received
practically no attention from critics. Ihab Hassan de-
votes about one page in RADICAL INNOCENCE to Buechner's
first novel, A LONG DAY'S DYING, and John Aldridge dis-
cusses the same novel in greater detail in AFTER THE LOST
GENERATION. One doctoral dissertation devoted to the
influence of formal theology on Buechner's novels has
recently been completed. This is the only critical atten-
tion that Buechner's novels have ever received. Occasion-
ally Buechner is listed in the indexes of books on the
contemporary novel, but in almost every such case he is
merely mentioned along with a handful of others in a para-
graph about the other authors who deserve to be, but are
not, studied in any detail in the book. Both Hassan and
Aldridge recognize the brilliance and the promise of
Buechner's first novel. Yet since the publication of
A LONG DAY'S DYING in 1950, eight equally interesting
novels have followed (THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE in 1952,

THE RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS in 1958, THE FINAL BEAST in 1965,
THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK in 1970, LION COUNTRY in 1971,
OPEN HEART in 1972, LOVE FEAST in 1974, TREASURE HUNT in

l

2
1977), surely enough to suggest that Buechner is more than
a promising contemporary American novelist, or that what-
ever the first novel may have promised, the others are
likely to have achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to examine that achieve-
ment by providing a critical introduction to the novels of
Frederick Buechner. Its essential method will be to eXpli-
cate the individual novels and thereby provide "readings"
which focus primarily on the thematic and formal concerns
of each of the nine novels, as well as to account for those
wider thematic and formal patterns which develop in and run
through all of the novels. The themes which will receive
extensive examination are the themes of wonder, innocence,
and transformation; the formal elements of greatest impor-
tance to the development of these themes include the major
allusions, the dominant patterns of imagery, and character-
ization.

Buechner's career as a novelist begins at roughly the
end of the literary period we identify as modern and
stretches for twenty odd years into the post-modern or con-
temporary period. Yet, as Jerry Bryant (THE OPEN DECISION)
suggests about the work of several other contemporary Amer-
ican novelists, it is primarily the problems and issues of
modernism that continue to interest Buechner. In fact,
Buechner's major themes all seem to be responses or cor-
rectives to some of the ideas and assumptions we have come

to associate with modernism.

3

Now such a generalization requires a great deal of
qualification and support, for when we Speak of modernism
as the dominant strain in Western literature for the past
century or so we automatically risk saying nothing at all.
Like "romanticism" or "classicism" or "existentialism"
the term "modernism" has been used in so many different
contexts to mean so many different, even apparently con-
tradictory, things, that its usefulness has been severely
jeopardized. Still, however treacherous its use might be,
it is difficult to get along without it. As Irving Howe
contends, when we use the term "modernism" we mean to sug-
gest roughly the following clusters of ideas and assump-
tions: 1) the loss of religious certainty and moral ab-
solutes, and their replacement by skepticism, doubt, ag-
nosticism, and intellectual relativism; 2) an emphasis
upon estrangement (often called alienation) from the prev-
alent standards of society, which are seen as corrupted,
mediocre, or hypocritical; 3) a preoccupation with human
subjectivity--that is, the notion that what matters most
in our time is not the nature of the external physical
world nor the social world, but, instead, the ways in
which our impressions of these worlds are registered on
human consciousness; 4) a feeling that in a universe de-
prived of God and the comforts of religion, man has been
left homeless, an anxious stranger in the universe; 5) an
increasing doubt as to the value or relevance of rational

thought; 6) a feeling that men must engage in bold

4

experiments to forge a new order of values; 7) a disturbing
doubt as to the purpose or value of human life.1

Together, these ideas, very evident in American nov-
els of the last two decades, suggest "that human existence
is profoundly and inherently problematic."2 Raymond Older-
man, in his book on the American novel in the 'sixties, re-
asserts what Ihab Hassan and Jonathan Baumbach had already
firmly established about the novels of the 'fifties. The
major assumptions of modernism help to produce fictional
worlds in the American novels of the 'fifties in which
"absurdity rules human actions; there are no accepted
norms of feeling or conduct to which the hero may appeal;
the hero [or anti-hero] is at odds with his environment,
and much of his energy is the energy of opposition; human
motives are forever mixed--irony, contradiction, and ambi-
guity prevail."3 The ambiguity and irony which prevail,
not only in the novels of the 'fifties but in many modern
novels, lead to a position of inaction, of stasis, for
many modern protagonists. The more they know about the
dead-ends of action, about the limitations of intellect,
about their own mixed motives, the less likely they are
apt to commit themselves to any course of action. Ambi-
guity, ambivalence, and paradox indeed prevail, and the
result is often paralysis. Undoubtedly, any reader could
supply his own extensive list of the American novels of
the last few decades that include variations on the broad

themes of modernism already mentioned. The important

5
thing to note here is that Frederick Buechner's first two
novels, A LONG DAY'S DYING and THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE,
could easily serve as textbook examples of many of these
themes as well.

Tristram Bone, protagonist of A LONG DAY'S DYING, is
preOCCUpied with questions about the value of his existence.
He wants someone to authenticate his existence for him,
some "witness" able to testify to its meaning. But Eliza-
beth, the woman he apparently loves and the most logical
"witness" in the novel, slips impulsively into a meaning-
less relationship with another man and, though curious
about Bone and occasionally sympathetic, she sees Tristram,
finally, as a reserved and stuffy man. Emma, Bone's maid,
and Simon, Bone's pet monkey, seem to be his only remaining
possible witnesses, but the one is rather dense and the
other is not even human. A11 human relationships seem to
fail in this novel of "cripples and show-offs"4 (this is
Motley's phrase-~he is the novelist in this novel), and the
plot of the novel moves from Tristram Bone pontificating
on love to his manicurist (he never speaks of love to Eliz-
abeth), to the death of Marco, Elizabeth's mother, perhaps
the only character in the novel who has been able to lead
a fulfilling life. Tristram, a large, fat man, cultivates
weightiness in his thought and seems always concerned with
personal dignity. He has money, leisure, the respect of
peers; he has an apparently vast intelligence, and he has

wit. One form that Tristram's desires for meaning and

6
order take is propriety, but beneath that prOpriety is
Tristram's sense of himself as a fool, and Buechner de-
scribes him as a whale who seeks the safety of isolation
in the submarine depths of self. Bone is lonely and love-
less and, unlike the birds in his aviary, stuck in a cage:
the cage of self. The possibility of dramatic change and
escape, indeed of transformation and flight, is present in
the constant allusions to the myth of Philomela. But the
ancient myth serves only as an ironic counterpoint to pres-
ent reality. The miraculous transformation of the myth
which saves the sisters from a life they can no longer bear
is not available to Tristram. Tristram's fate, like that
of so many modern protagonists, is to have to keep on keep-
ing on. And Bone's problems are more than a mere mechani-
cal repetition of the symptoms of modernism already well
charted by other American novels. They begin to lead us
to one of the dominant concerns in Buechner's fiction:
Buechner'sS insistence that modernism (represented here by

Bone's sensibility) is ultimately inadequate.

 

And this sense of inadequacy pervades THE SEASONS'
DIFFERENCE as well. Sara and Samuel Dunn are thoroughly
modern characters, and their SOphistication is played off
against the innocence and freshness of the children in the
novel and of the child-man, Peter Cowley, the Dunns'
cousin, who seems "'to have had a vision.'"6 Sara's art
(she sculpts) and Sam's intellect (similar to Tristram

Bone's) give some purpose and direction to their lives,

7
but they are skeptical of "visions," as any modern caught
up in ambivalence and ambiguity must be. It is not sur-
prising that the Dunns' best friend is a character named
Lundrigan, modern man incarnate, a "fact” man, a complete
skeptic whose life is empty and anxious. Nor is it sur-
prising that when they are gathered together by Cowley to
witness what might be an encore of the miraculous vision
which he thought he had already eXperienced, their responses
merely reflect their own preoccupations, skepticism, or
indifference. Sam sleeps through the event, and Lundrigan
sees nothing, just as he has maintained that Cowley had
really seen nothing previously. The final impression left

by Sam, Sara, and Lundrigan is that many of the possibili-

 

ties of life are closed to their modern sensibilities, and
that their lives are thereby impoverished.

Through the characterization of Peter Cowley and of
the children he tutors, Buechner first presents some of
the themes that function in his novels as correctives to
the inadequacies of many of the assumptions of modernism.
Through their eyes we see the beauty of the commonplace,
the extraordinary nature of the ordinary, and the possi-
bility, however wild or contrived or even trite it might
seem to the SOphisticates in the novel, that human life is
meaningful, even beautiful. But there is nothing simple
about the presentation of these themes, and Buechner is
far from naive. The irony and ambiguity that pervade most

modern fiction pervade Buechner's as well. He is not a

8

breezy sentimentalist who, faced with the twentieth cen-
tury, decides to do an about-face and ignore it. In THE
SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, the irony and ambiguity stem from
Buechner's decision to put what might be the words of
truth in the mouths of babes, or in the mouth of Cowley,
who may be slightly "cracked" even though he might also be
a kind of saint, or in the mouth of a character named Dr.
Lavender, who is obviously crazy. Between the modernism
and ultra-SOphistication of the characters in this novel
whose lives seem anxious and inadequate (Sam, Sara,
Lundrigan), and the innocence of those whose lives are
overly idealistic or immature (Dr. Lavender, Peter Cowley,
the children), there may be a middle ground (Mollie Purdue,
Sara's model), but even that middle ground is riddled with
ambiguity, as are the extremities. Buechner seems at
times to romanticize innocence and the child's-eye view in
THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, but he also makes us aware that
he is doing so, and that a romanticized view of human ex-
perience is finally just as inadequate, however tempting,
as the over-sophisticated, world-weary views of Tristram
Bone or Lundrigan. Apparently Buechner subscribes to the
view that human life is essentially problematic. But, as
much of this study will attempt to prove, Buechner does
not see this as a legitimate cause for despair.

To the degree that they are ironic, ambiguous, and
problematic, Buechner's first two novels conform in some

important respects to the general tendencies of the

9
American novel in the 'fifties. But there are also signi-
ficant ways in which Buechner is at least beginning to go
against the grain. In all of the novels after A LONG
DAY'S DYING, Buechner refuses to st0p with a statement of
the ambiguities of modern experience and the suggestion,
implicit in his technique, that an ironic perspective is
probably the only means we have of dealing with them. He
continues to recognize ambiguity and irony as the water-
marks of our age, and they are the basis of much that is
important in his own novels, but he insists on the inade-
quacy of the paralysis they may produce. Too often,
Buechner implies, this problematic view of human life robs
us of wonder and leaves us helpless. This need not be the
case, and Buechner's THE RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS is a good
example of this.

Ansel Gibbs is a concrete universal, a highly indi-
vidualized character who is also representative of larger
truths; "as much as any other single man . . . Ansel Gibbs
indeed was civilization, was among the rarest treasures
that his era had yet produced: a living proof that
idealism could still flourish in out-of—the-way corners
of the political scene."7 All of the characters closest
to Gibbs feel that he is eminently suited for appointment
to the President's Cabinet, and Buechner presents Gibbs
quite sympathetically. Yet Gibbs's own comments on what

it means to be modern and civilized are very telling:

10
"To be civilized means to stand at the t0p, to be the
last and best as far as things have gone to date, the
educated, liberated man with his back to the grotesque
mystery of his origins and his face to God knows what.
. . To be civilization, to be civilized, is to be
aware of so many possible courses of action at any
given time that no one of them ever seems to be with-
out qualification right. Everything is qualified."
(pp. 113-114)
And again:
"For the civilized man there aren't apt to be any
absolute principles or holy causes. That's what makes
civilized life possible. We may not be heroes, but by
and large we're also not villains--either collectively
or taken one by one. Tolerant. Ambivalent." (p. 120)
"'Ambivalent.'" It has a familiar ring. And THE
RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS is Buechner's most extended study of
ambivalence. Ansel Gibbs is even physically representa—
tive of this ambivalence. He is strikingly handsome at
the same time that he has a whole range of "disorders,
real and rumored, such as a silver plate in his skull with
a flap of toupee to cover the scar, a brace at his back,
and some vascular disturbance, an intermittent numbness of
the hands and feet which necessitated hydrotherapy and a
careful diet."10 Ansel is perhaps as close to being a
great man as modern civilization has produced, yet he has
more than his fair share of difficulties, and he feels
that he may have fallen short of common humanity. He
feels guilty because he was unable to save a close friend
who committed suicide (Rudy Tripp). He is guilty of
having a daughter he barely knows. He is unable to trust

his best friend's son. He feels that a Senator's distrust

of himself and men like himself is perhaps justified,

11
since this Senator is a man of the people whereas Gibbs
remains "'on the outer edge of things. I populate the
coasts and borderlands of the world. I've never had occa-
sion to know the homely inner details. If my views are
apt to be liberal and disinterested, it may be simply that
compared to Farwell I'm at heart uninterested'" (PP. 91-93.
Gibbs is an articulate man of words in a world that
may need action instead. He has Spent the last two years
before his "return" on his Montana ranch, writing an intro-
Spective and literary autobiography centering on his ex-
periences during the war years (World War II), quite re-
tired from public life. After his return, when he has
second thoughts about entering public life again and
momentarily decides to decline the presidential appoint-
ment, it is partly out of a sense that words are his life,
and that he should return to the ranch to finish his auto-
biography. A commitment to words, to language, has been
characteristic of Gibbs's life. Senator Iarwell, Gibbs's
political and intellectual foil, attacks Gibbs as a man
given to language and incapable of action. Gibbs responds
by admitting that he has always been
"rather ashamed of my words. . . . Because they've
been so necessary. When you suggest that I'm an
overly verbal person, you've put your finger on some—
thing. There have been times when I've wished I had
chosen the kind of life that more clearly speaks for
itself. A soldier's life. Or a priest's. Even a
prodigal's. The kind of life that doesn't have to
depend so heavily upon words to define it." (p. 117)

To be modern and civilized is also, it appears, to be

12
attracted to language, dependent on language, and nothing
is more ambivalent than language. Kuykendall, Gibbs's
former professor of religion who now ministers to the
social and religious needs of the poor in Harlem, delivers
a sermon on the story of Saul and David that could also
serve as a parable of Gibbs's ambivalence. Kuykendall
stresses Saul's indifference; he had neither loved nor
hated enough to kill Agog or to save him. The code of the
gentleman--Gibbs's code-~is similar. Gibbs knows, almost
instinctively, that to commit oneself wholeheartedly to
anything is in questionable taste, quite out of keeping
with the disaffiliation of a SOphisticated, cosmopolitan,
modern man. The gentleman has only words. Once again,
Gibbs on himself:
"If seeing as much falseness as truth in almost every-
thing paralyzes you when it comes to the action of
self-commitment, it leaves you peculiarly fit to
describe what it is you've been unable to commit your-
self to, and I have words for such describing. I have
been at a loss for everything else perhaps but never
for words. I was made for words. I sometimes believe
I am made of words." (pp. 245-246)

More emphatically than the two novels which precede
it, THE RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS stresses the inadequacies of
such symptoms of modernism as ambivalence and paralysis.
The novel ends, significantly, with Gibbs deciding to
commit himself to action by accepting the presidential
appointment that has teased him out of his semi-retirement.

Until this point, the result of Gibbs's awareness of the

ambivalence of human life has been a detachment from those

13
things in his life that Buechner suggests could have been
most meaningful: his relationship to wife, daughter,
friends, colleagues. If we are to take Gibbs's relation-
ship to Porter Hoye, his secretary and attorney, as
typical of Gibbs's human relationships, surely Buechner is
suggesting that Gibbs's relationships leave much to be de-
sired. The commitment to other human beings represented
by Kuykendall, however imperfect its result might be, is
the new direction Gibbs's life must take. Ansel Gibbs has
truly returned by the end of the novel. His final speech
testifies to a new direction in his life, and it makes ex-
plicit that which had previously only been implicit in
Buechner's earlier novels: "'You cross your fingers and
hold your tongue and do what you can in the time that's
left. That is the only holy cause, my dear, ambivalence
be damned. . . . No more words. It's a promise I've made“'
(p. 308). At the same time that a cocktail party is being
held to celebrate Gibbs's appointment to high governmental
office, Inez Rosas's baby is bitten to death by rats in a
cold-water apartment in Harlem. There is work to be done,
peOple who need help, and Gibbs is the best man for the
job even if he is, as he insists, no prOphet.

In all of his first three novels, Buechner is im-
plicitly weighing his protagonists on a moral scale. To
the degree that their modern sensibilities lead to isola-
tion, to paralysis (those typically modern themes), they

are guilty: Tristram Bone is guiltiest; Lundrigan is a

14
close second; Sam and Sara Dunn tie for third. Ansel
Gibbs is also guilty, but he will atone for that guilt.
To the degree that their sensibilities lead to commitment,
even to affirmation, Buechner's characters are forgiven.
This emphasis on affirmation over resignation carries over
into all of the rest of Buechner's novels. The paralysis
of a Tristram Bone is diSplaced by commitment to the signi-
ficance of human relationships, by action, and eventually
by wonder. But there is nothing soft or easy in Buechner's
affirmation. He continues to present human life as essen—
tially problematic, and the fictional worlds of his later
novels often include harsher elements than do his first
three. The suffering of prison camps, the agony of slow
death by cancer, the deSpair of the forlorn and the love-
less, the paradoxical contentment of demented individuals
who seem only half human: these are at the center of
Buechner's later novels. Yet Buechner is firm in his
implication that to emphasize only the worst, most gro-
tesque or demonic aspects of modern human experience, as
much modern literature does, is to distort and to
impoverish.

The movement away from ambivalence and isolation
toward commitment and affirmation noted in THE RETURN OF
ANSEL GIBBS parallels the thematic deve10pment of Buech-
ner's fiction generally, and also represents microcosmi-
cally what Raymond Olderman sees as a major direction in

American novels of the 'sixties. In BEYOND THE WASTE LAND,

15
he maintains that instead of such metaphors as "the Ameri-
can Adam" or "the American Dream" or "lost innocence,”
the novel of the 'sixties finds its "controlling metaphor
in the image of the waste land."8 The inhabitants of the
waste land

are characterized by enervating and neurotic petti-
ness, physical and spiritual sterility and debilita-
tion, an inability to love, yearning and fear-ridden
desires. They are sexually inadequate, divided by
guilts, alienated, aimless, bored, and rootless; they
long for escape and for death. . . . their lives are
vain, artificial, and pointless.9

Just as Buechner's first three novels are dominated by the
assumptions of modernism and attempts to overcome them, 01-
derman suggests that many of the novels of the 'sixties
which present the waste land as the most comprehensive

metaphor of modern experience also seek "to move beyond the

10

waste land." The general resolution of these novels, he

maintains, "is not escape or even 'accommodation'; it is

the bare, necessary, and simple affirmation of life over

11

death." This affirmation is achieved by seizing "upon

the very surface texture of life and affirming its val-

.,,12

ue The means of this affirmation is often black humor,

and the form these works take is the form of the modern fa-

ble as explained by Robert Scholes in THE FABULATORS.1’3 1h“:

the affirmation, the joy, of these works is tempered.

For the contemporary fable, by containing the horrors
of the waste land in a form that contradicts its
content . . . exorcises those horrors and implies

the possibility of love and wonder in the world. But
the joy it supplies is usually too complicated by pain
to be very much more than fragments shored against

our ruins.1

16
The joy in Buechner's novels is often "complicated by
pain," but it represents much more than "fragments shored
against our ruins."
Olderman also maintains that since we live in the
waste land, it is "the enduring wish of our age that some-

"15

one, some quester, would heal us and make us whole. He

suggests that "wonder has been . . . obscured by the pro-

16 and

fusion of deadening detail in contemporary life,"
that the "rediscovery of wonder in the world may ultimatebr
be the best that our decade [the 'sixties] can offer as a
substitute for a truly accepted mythology to move us out

of the waste land.”17

By Olderman's own admission, in the
novels with which he is most concerned, this wonder is
evidenced by an emphasis on the fabulous in the fgIm_of the
novels, in their self-conscious proclamations that they
are, after all, stories, and we should delight in the

18 But the vision of these novels

"story for its own sake."
is still dominated by the metaphor of the waste land, and
form in fiction is, it would seem, a long way from being a
"healer."

In Buechner's novels of the 'sixties and the 'seven-
ties, the possibility that the old stories are still the
truest, that there is a mythology which makes sense of'
things, even if we are obliged constantly to reinterpret
it, is of central importance. Buechner also turns to the

fabulous, even to the miraculous, in his novels, and

Scholes's and Olderman's generalizations about the

l7

rediscovery of wonder in the contemporary American novel
are more than applicable in Buechner's case. But in
Buechner's later novels it is not just the form but the
content as well which is cause for joy. The following
comment from BEYOND THE WASTE LAND is perhaps even more
applicable to Buechner than it is to the novelists
Olderman treats in detail.

Life can still be affirmed, but laughter seems even

more necessary as the ambiguities and paradoxes

multiply. The man who would affirm life must pull

affirmation from the very causes and roots of paradox;

he must be "made bold by his very fright, comforted

by . . . the slimness of his chances."1
If there is a single thread running through all of Buech-
ner's later novels, it is that he pulls "affirmation from
the very causes and roots of paradox.”

Richard Rupp suggests that one of the central prob-

lems in contemporary American fiction is "a general in-

20 He maintains that genuine

ability to celebrate reality."
celebration is rare in contemporary life and in contem-
porary fiction, yet "the need to celebrate reality in the
face of the apocalyptic present is primary in contemporary

fiction."21

It would be difficult to state the general
direction of Buechner's fiction more succinctly. BuechnerNs
novels, particularly his later ones, are acts of praise

"22 With

expressing "faith in the livability of life.
their constant emphasis on the miraculous nature of ordi-
nary life, Buechner's novels do just what Olderman, Scholes,

and Rupp seem to agree that the best contemporary American

l8

fiction does. They confront the problematic nature of
modern life and, at the same time, present us with an
extended "assent to reality, a willingness to live."23

A detailed analysis of the themes of wonder, inno-
cence, and transformation in Buechner's novels should
lead us to a greater appreciation of Buechner's rediscovery
of wonder, of his joyous and hard-won affirmation of life.
Since his work has been largely neglected by critics, it

might also lead to a reassessment of Buechner's substantial

contribution to contemporary American fiction.

19
NOTES-~Introduction

1This is an abbreviated and paraphrased version of
the list Howe provides in his "Introduction" to Fyodor
Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground," in CLASSICS OF
MODERN FICTION, ed. Irving Howe, 2nd ed. (New York, 1972),

pp. 5-6.

2Ibid., p. 6.

 

3Raymond M. Olderman, BEYOND THE WASTE LAND: A
STUDY OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL IN THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES (New
Haven, 1972), p. 13.

4Frederick Buechner, A LONG DAY'S DYING (New York,
1950), p. 111. All further references to this work will
include only the page number in parentheses following the
quotation or, when necessary, the abbreviation ALDD along
with the page number.

5Whenever ”Buechner" is used in this way, the refer-
ence should be understood as the ”implied author" rather
than as the historical person. The concept of the "implied
author" is delineated in: Wayne Booth, THE RHETORIC OF
FICTION (Chicago, 1961), pp. 71-76, pp. 211-221.

6Frederick Buechner, THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE (New
York, 1952), p. 6. All further references to this work
will include only the page number in parentheses following
the quotation or, when necessary, the abbreviation TSD
along with the page number.

7Frederick Buechner, THE RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS (New
York, 1958), p. 6. All further references to this work
will include only the page number in parentheses following
the quotation or, when necessary, the abbreviation TROAG
along with the page number.

8Olderman, BEYOND THE WASTE LAND, p. 8.

91bid., pp. 11-12.
lolbid., p. 22.
lllbid., p. 7.
lzlbid., p. 7.

13

New York, 1967.

14Olderman, BEYOND THE WASTE LAND, p. 26.

20

 

 

 

 

151bid., p 10.
16Ibid., p 221.
17Ibid., p. 222.
181bid., p 26.
191616., p 53.

 

20Richard H. Rupp, CELEBRATION IN POSTWAR AMERICAN
FICTION (Coral Gables, 1970), p. 18.

211bid., p. 19.

221bid., p. 218.

231616., p. 18.

I

THE THEME OF WONDER

The theme of wonder in Buechner's novels is perhaps
the most all-inclusive of his themes. It represents an
awareness of the possibilities of contemporary life, how-
ever wild or outrageous some of them might be, as well as
an acceptance of its limitations, ambiguities, and para-
doxes. Margaret Wimsatt suggests that there is a moral in
Buechner's fiction that is Bunyanesque: that "grace turns
up in the most unlikely places, not by any means in the
channels you might expect . . . [it] is not to be com-
manded nor commandeered . . . [it] is a condition of Open-
ness to all the worlds."1 This condition of Openness,
this willingness to affirm and to celebrate life even
though contemporary life is largely problematic, is essen-
tial to Buechner's theme of wonder. The characters in his
fiction who can successfully maintain an openness to their
experience, who can see in their ordinary and mundane ex-
perience elements that are extraordinary and wondrous, are
granted a kind of success that is denied other characters
such as Lundrigan or Tristram Bone.

In A LONG DAY'S DYING, the theme of wonder is at
best only implicit. We can perhaps infer it from its ab-
sence, or from the wondrous nature of the Philomela myth

21

22
to which the novel so often alludes, but we may merely be
looking for it here because of its obvious importance in
Buechner's later work. Still, with the above precaution
in mind, it is useful to examine the novel to see if it
contains even slight indications of Buechner's later
interest in the theme.

In AFTER THE LOST GENERATION, John Aldridge devotes
considerable space to denigrating A LONG DAY'S DYING. He
suggests that Buechner's first novel really has no sub-
stance at all, that it is merely a fashionable imitation
of the kind of fiction that was academically most reSpect-
able at the time. The sources for the novel came from the
university classroom, Aldridge argues, and its technique
was "learned not from practicing novelists but from teacher-
critics who merely write and lecture about the novel."2
The most fundamental objection Aldridge raises concerns
Buechner's allusions to the Philomela myth, their impor-
tance to and function in the novel. Aldridge feels that
these allusions are rather heavy freight which the insub-
stantial material of this novel is unable to bear. He
sees the novel as a kind of brilliant exercise that suc-
ceeds in meeting the requirements of a creative writing
course, but in little else. He says that Buechner

has been taught that, to be truly acceptable, a novel
which pretends to come to grips at all with the con-
temporary world should make liberal use of the re-
sources of myth and symbol, and that it should be
written in a language which will suggest, in its tone,

imagery, and structure, the full implications of the
theme the author intends to evoke.

23
Aldridge sees T. S. Eliot's criticism and poetry,

James Joyce's fiction, and Mark Schorer's criticism as the
basis of what Buechner's professors have allegedly taught
him. He then suggests that for such acknowledged masters
as Eliot or Joyce, myth and symbolic language are tools
used as a means of achieving full significance. He distin-
guishes between using these tools as a means and as ends in
themselves in a work of art. For Eliot and Joyce, he ar-
gues, they were clearly "the most effective means of pre-
senting the material which they had already chosen to pre-
sent . . . in each case, myth or language was the result
and not the cause of the writer's work.”4 In A LONG DAY'S
DYING, Aldridge maintains, the process is reversed.

A LONG DAY'S DYING represents an attempt to apply both

methods literally and for their own sake to the writ-

ing of a novel; and apparently it was undertaken for

no other reason than that Buechner thought such an

application fashionable at this time. The result is a

novel written in strict observance of all the rules

but in which the game for which the rules were devised

never gets around to being played.5

Since Aldridge does not see the problems of the char-

acters in Buechner's novel as significant or convincing,
he resents Buechner's reliance on myth as a means of sug-
gesting their significance. When T. S. Eliot used the
Philomela myth in ”The Waste Land," Aldridge argues, he
did so because it was organically necessary and allowed
Eliot to make a connection between the theme of spiritual

sterility and the theme of sexual violation, and to link

antiquity and contemporaneity in a fresh and meaningful

24
series of parallels. Of Buechner's use of the same myth,
Aldridge suggests the following:
the myth remains a static story detached from its
ancient setting and applied merely as a story to a
contemporary setting. It does not serve to enhance
the meaning of the dilemma described in the novel but
is simply a borrowed framework on which the characters
and their problems are hung and through which Buechner
obviously hoped to create an illusion of their
significance.
Yet later, attempting to explain why Buechner has taken
such great pains working out the parallels between the
Philomela story and the lives of the major characters in
his novel, Aldridge states what would seem to be an impor-
tant justification of Buechner's allusiveness. Aldridge
sees Buechner's reliance on the myth as an attempt
to come to terms with the problem which the novels of
nearly all his contemporaries have been attempts to
solve-~the problem of ordering and making dramatically
meaningful the experience of a valueless time.
Through the myth he has tried to bring to bear on his
material the form and richness of an ancient truth;
through symbolic language he has tried to extend the
implications of that truth to the outermost limits of
his material.
Since Aldridge sees Buechner's novel as dramatizing
"a trivial dilemma centering around a trivial act and per-
petrated by trivial people who had nothing inside them,"8
he assumes that Buechner's set of parallels between the
myth and the present exists in order for the richness and
resonance of the one to suggest by analogy the richness
and the resonance of the other. The novel fails, Aldridge
argues, because Buechner is unable to "make the dilemma of

his characters either moral or significant,"9 and he

25

cannot do this because he cannot ”discover a system of

moral value on which to project it."10

It would be difficult to state the major theme of
Buechner's novel any better than Aldridge does in his ob-
jections to it. He sees much of what the novel accom—
plishes, but expects or desires something else of it and
thereby fails to appreciate it. The lives of the major
characters of A LONG DAY'S DYING are trivial. That is
just the point Buechner is most intent upon making. The
problem of the novel i§_precisely that these characters
live "modern" lives; they exist in a "valueless time" and
they cannot "discover a system of moral value" on which
to base their lives.

Aldridge correctly identifies the parallels Buechner
suggests between the characters of the myth and the major
characters of his novel. Aldridge also correctly identi-
fies the major changes Buechner introduces when he adopts
the myth for his own purposes:

Elizabeth is King Tereus made female. Motley, in
the beginning, is Procne made male; for it is he who
brings Elizabeth and Steitler (Philomela made male)
together. But as soon as Motley reports his suSpi-
cions of Elizabeth to Bone, Bone becomes Procne, the
outraged wife turned suitor, and Motley takes on the
function of the tapestry that brought the news of
Philomela's violation to Procne. Elizabeth's affair
with Steitler of course constitutes his violation; and
the lie she tells Bone about him not only parallels
Tereus's lie to Procne but amounts to a figurative
cutting out of his tongue to prevent him from telling
the truth.

The meeting of Bone and Steitler to discuss Eliza—
beth's accusation parallels the meeting of Procne and

Philomela to plan the death of Itys; and even though
the two men decide not to tell Leander of his mother's

26

lie, it is Elizabeth's fear that they will that brings
on her anger.11

It would seem that Buechner is playing fast and loose
with his mythic parallels, and in many respects he is. He
is not interested in exact parallels, and the two other
changes he makes in his adaptation of the Philomela story
attest to this. In the myth, Procne and Philomela murder
Itys and are pursued by Tereus until finally they are
trapped and there is nothing left for~them but to pray to
the gods for deliverance. Their prayers are answered and
Tereus, Procne, and Philomela are miraculously transformed
into birds. In A LONG DAY'S DYING, Leander (Itys) is
saved rather than killed and the transformation of Tereus
(Elizabeth), Procne (Bone), and Philomela (Steitler) does
not occur. In Buechner's version of the story it is appar-
ently important that the gods (Marco and Bone) save Itys
(Leander). However, since Aldridge sees nothing in
Leander's character that seems to him worthy of salvation,
it is difficult for him to accept this change from the
mythic version of the story as meaningful or significant.
Since he sees Bone as a man whose life is pointless, "as

"12 and Marco

empty of Spiritual conviction as the others,
aS undramatized and mysterious, it is impossible for him
to accept them as the agents of Leander's salvation.

Since Aldridge suspects that the major theme of Buechner's

novel is supposed to depend upon "the difference between

blind primitive vengeance and an awareness of universal

27

human guilt,"13

it is not surprising that he is disap-
pointed by the contrast between the richness of the myth.
and the haplessness of the major characters in A LONG
DAY'S DYING.

But if we see the myth in the novel Operating more
as a contrast to the present than as a parallel to it,
then the myth functions consistently and well. Its rich-
ness and wonder lend strength to Buechner's emphasis on
the meaninglessness and triviality of the present, and
that is the major theme of the novel. The world of heroic
action represented by the myth is unavailable to the likes
of Tristram Bone or Elizabeth, and the resolution of the
myth iS likewise unattainable for them. Buechner's altera-
tions of the myth clearly suggest this. In altering the
myth for his own purposes, Buechner also suggests the fond
hope that at least one character, Leander, can be saved
from the fate of most of the others--the emptiness, trivi-
ality, and haplessness of their lives. But he clearly
denies to the majority of his characters any resolution at
all, and Leander's salvation may be only the h0peful dream
of a dying woman.

In terms of their symbolic roles in the novel, Al-
dridge is equally disappointed in Buechner's major char-
acters. He sees Buechner's attempt to manipulate them as
symbols as pretentious. Now if Bone is meant to be the
priestly agent of a mysterious truth embodied primarily in

the seemingly omniscient and serene Maroo; if Elizabeth

28
and Steitler represent echoes of original Sin; if Leander
represents the idea of salvation; and if we are to see all
of this as somehow suggestive of a Christian version of a
pagan story, then Aldridge may well be right. But it is
also possible that Aldridge condemns the novel not for
what it does but for what he thinks Buechner intended it
to do, or what Aldridge thinks it Should have done.

Bone is presented as a priestlyfigure in the novel,
but Aldridge fails to see that Bone is, at best, a mock
priest unable to preach (he cannot tell Elizabeth of his
love for her) since he has no gospel other than the gospel
of self; he is most priestly in the barber Shop, the mock
church which glorifies fleshly vanity. The most important
characteristic of the Elizabeth and Steitler love scene is
its lack of passion. It is sad precisely because it is so
casual, so empty, closer to being a parody of love than
anything else. And Leander's salvation is both uncertain
and ironic. What has he been saved from? The answer is
clearly that he has temporarily been saved from learning
the truth of what actually transpired between his mother
and Steitler. His salvation does not embrace or represent
the truth as Aldridge suggests; it is rather an ironic
reversal in which salvation is ignorance.

Much of Aldridge's distaste for this novel can be
traced to a weakness in the novel that is apparent. Buech-
ner does not dramatize his characters as successfully as

he might; they are less fully realized than they could be,

29

and this failure is partly due to Buechner's interest in
the Philomela myth and its predominance in the novel.
But the novel is not as flawed as Aldridge accuses it of
being, and once we understand what the novel actually
does, rather than what Aldridge thinks it Should have
done, the novel's accomplishments are clearer and many of
Aldridge's objections to it pale.

The themes of innocence and transformation also help
to clarify the nature of Buechner's accomplishments in A
LONG DAY'S DYING, as later chapters on these themes will
Show. The theme of wonder is not as important to this
novel as they are, but there are some seeds of the theme
in it. The most obvious failure of Tristram Bone, Eliza-
beth, Steitler, and Motley is their inability to see in
their everyday lives a basis for wonder and joy, a basis
for affirmation. They respect and admire Marco, particu-
larly her ability to see life clearly and see it whole.
She delights in life, even though She sees in it the same
ambiguities and difficulties as they. She cares deeply
about her friends, her neighbors, her family; She remains
Open to their difficulties and offers them some warmth and
comfort. But Maroo's joyousness, graciousness, and open-
ness (her sense of wonder) remain mysterious to them and
inimitable. Just as the Philomela myth functions essen-
tially as a rich contrast to the lackluster lives of most
of Buechner's major characters, Marco's life functions as

a contrast to their lovelessness and anxiety. In the act

30

of dying, She is described as all-accepting and serene.
In the act of living, they are described as frustrated and
paralyzed.

One other possible source of the theme of wonder in
A LONG DAY'S DYING may be the prose style of the work.
The richness of the Philomela myth is mirrored in Buech-
ner's rather self-conscious, Jamesian style. The major
imagery of the novel is imagery of entrapment, flight,
and transformation: all directly linked to the action of
the myth. Even Aldridge is struck by what he calls Buech-
ner's "sensitive, carefully polished, meticulously allu-

14 But he

sive, and oftentimes quite excellent style."
does not see what purpose it serves. The Philomela myth
serves Buechner as a source for developing his own rich
imagery and as a source for the wonder and suggestiveness
of his own prose style. It is precisely this sense of the
suggestive, the wondrous, that attracts Buechner to the
myth, and it is the death of any such wonder (Marco's
death, that of the novel's title) that his novel so elo-
quently presents.

The theme of wonder is much more than implicit in
THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. The novel's plot is Simple. Sam
and Sara Dunn are spending the summer relaxing at their
summer home. With them are various friends and an assort-
ment of children who are being tutored during the summer

by Peter Cowley, a cousin of the Dunns'. One day while

exploring the grounds, Cowley sees something miraculous,

31

something he thinks must have been a metaphysical vision.
The reactions of the major characters to Cowley's vision;
his attempt to recreate the circumstances of the vision so
that it might reoccur and the other adults might witness
it; and a staged vision, done by Mollie Purdue (Sara's
model) and the children, form the basis of the plot.

The sense of wonder and possiblity that Cowley's
vision represents in the novel is introduced early when
Sam and Sara have the following discussion:

"Come to think of it, you might call flying a kite
very much like fishing--fishing in the Sky, of course.

Mightn't you, Sam. Sam?"

". . . Only what would you be fishing for in the
sky, I wonder?"

”Well, for God I suppose. If you were Cousin Cow-
ley, that is, and it pleased you."

"Yes." She considered this. "I can just see Peter
pulling God down out of the clouds, His mouth all
ragged and bleeding. . ."

"Yes," Sara agreed. "Peter would catch him if
anyone could." (pp. 5-6)

The metaphoric attempt to pull God down out of the clouds,
to reinvest the world with wonder, is essential to Buech-
ner's thematic purposes in this novel. The fact that his
major characters are unable to see either Cowley's original
vision or the staged vision, the "surprise" put on by the
children, as miraculous merely underscores their modernity.
That there is a connection between the wondrous world of
Cowley's vision and the ordinary lives of the major char—
acters is implied consistently throughout the novel.

The setting itself is wondrous; Buechner describes

the lavish grounds of the Dunns' summer home as if he were

32
describing an earthly paradise. There are numerous formal
gardens,stately and ancient trees, Spacious lawns. The
novel Opens with an extended description of "the extraor-
dinary summer beauty of the place" (p.3). The house it-
self is labyrinthine and wondrous, especially to the
children. At one point Buechner even suggests that, for
children, the Dunns' summer place might be "the Emerald
City of their giddy Oz" (p.4). But what are we to make
of all this? It remains difficult to understand the full
importance of the setting until Buechner's major allusions
are understood.

One of the major allusions of this novel is the allu-
sion to Andrew Marvell's "The Garden.” The long and lovely
description of the Dunns' summer house and the flora and
fauna of its grounds and gardens which begins on the very
first page of the first chapter is repeated again, almost
verbatim, at the beginning of the last chapter. There are
numerous references to Sam's library and to his penchant
for seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry.. At the end
of the novel, when Lundrigan comes to bid farewell to Sam
and finds him, he thinks, asleep, Sam explains that he has
not been Sleeping, that what Lundrigan took to be Sleep
was "just a green thought in a green shade" (p. 300).

This famous line from Marvell's "The Garden," this final
hint about the particular nature of the major themes and
sources of metaphor in this novel, suddenly draws our

attention to the elaborate conceit that Buechner has been

33
develOping all along. The reference, through allusion,
to the spiritual confidence and innocence of a previous
age, the mystery of the inexplicable summer beauty of the
Dunns' residence, the numerous references to gardens, the
innocence of the children, Peter Cowley's bachelorhood and
alleged virginity, the dramatic introduction of Woman
(Mollie Purdue) into this setting, Dr. Lavender's fall,
the children's introduction to death, the implicit sugges-
tion that the Dunns' gardens may be distant echoes of ihs
garden, of Eden, as Marvell's garden is in his poem, and
Cowley's insistence that under an apple tree, no less, he
had a vision that convinced him of the reality of Spiritual
experience--all of these parts finally fall into place and
the puzzle is indeed complete. Once we look carefully
enough, one of the faces we see in this complex picture-
puzzle is Marvell's. Relying on the indirection of meta-
phor, irony, and allusion, Buechner has written a modern
analogue of "The Garden."

But the serene world of Spiritual contemplation de-
scribed and advocated by the speaker of Marvell's poem
exists in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE only as a distant memory.
Sam, the novel's most contemplative character, is a modern
man, however devoted he may be to seventeenth-century
poetry. In place of the Spiritual confidence and serenity
of the Speaker in Marvell's poem, we find in Sam the mock
serenity of manners. Sam's life is outwardly serene; he

is always polite. But politeness, the gentleman's belief

34
that one should always be civil, is hardly a substitute
for belief in God.

The sensuous beauty of the Dunns' summer retreat
rivals the sensuous beauty of Marvell's garden, but only
for Peter Cowley does this sensuous beauty function to sug-
gest another and a higher form of beauty. Even if Peter's
initial vision weren't a vision at all, and even if his
restaged vision amounted, finally, to no more than the im-
posture of Mollie and the children combined with an ex-
traordinarily beautiful sunset, Peter's sensitivity to the
natural beauty of the physical world is itself a form of
Spiritual reward. His life is fuller, more meaningful,
than the lives of the other characters in the novel. His
openness, his ability to recognize the problematic nature
of human experience without being defeated or paralyzed by
it, without losing faith or hope, functions to allow him
an appreciation of the wonder of this world, of the mirac-
ulous nature of this world, that is impossible for Sam,
Sara, or Lundrigan.

The authenticity of Peter's initial vision is never
confirmed or denied in the novel. Peter believes that he
witnessed, perhaps by coincidence, a kind of miracle. The
children in the novel overhear the adults discussing Cow-
ley's vision and finally agree among themselves that what
happened to Cowley is somehow magical. The other adults
in the novel are, of course, Skeptical. Their responses

range from simple disbelief to questions of Cowley's

35
sanity. Sam and Sara fear that Cowley may have become
mildly fanatical. The various responses to the staged
vision parallel those to the initial alleged vision, but
they are thematically more important than the responses to
Peter's story of his original vision.

While Peter organizes the adults, preparing them for
what he hopes will be a miracle repeated, Mollie Purdue
and the children practice a surprise for the adults.

Their surprise is a Skit in which Mollie plays the lead as
a mysterious saintly figure surrounded by children, dressed
in Sheets, pretending to be angels. Their skit is meant to
be a humorous parody of the stories they have been hearing
(and themSelves inventing) about Cowley's initial vision.
Peter leads the adults out to the apple tree, the location
of his original vision, and he prays for a miracle--for
some visible manifestation of the invisible. What the
adults then see, vaguely because of the splendor of the
sunset in the background, is Mollie and the children per-
forming their surprise. After their own initial surprise,
most of the adults finally realize what they actually saw.
Now it would logically follow that they should react to

the whole affair of the staged vision as if it were a hoax,
innocently perpetrated and mildly ironic. Sam and Lundri-
gan do. But Sara is charmed by it, and Mollie's response
to participating in the incident suggests that it can not
be as easily dismissed as Sam and Lundrigan think it can.

In fact, Mollie's response seems closest to what Buechner

36
approves, and it clearly contributes to the deve10pment of
the theme of wonder in the novel. Discussing the matter
with one of the adolescents in the nOvel, Mollie speaks to
some of the novel's central issues.

"We were awful to do it maybe, and maybe I was the
most awful of all. But it was almost beautiful, and
I didn't even mind when Georgie messed things up by
Spinning too long and nobody could hear him. So could
it be awful and beautiful both? Anyway it wasn't what
Colley came to see. A vision, didn't you say, and
that he really believed in it? And it was only us.
Maybe if we hadn't've been there, he'd've gotten what
he wanted. And maybe . . . But this is so queer I can
hardly say it. I told you I prayed that he'd get what-
ever he wanted, and maybe he did. Maybe we're it!"
"You mean we were the vision?" Harry asked her.
"Maybe," She said. (p. 209)

 

Buechner's theme of wonder depends heavily upon such
words as "maybe." Maybe our lives are themselves miracu-
lous. Cowley himself recognizes that the children's sur-
prise was not the miracle that he had hoped for, however
beautiful and startling it was, but he also learns that it
was foolish to expect what he had expected. His final
appraisal of his Spiritual command performance echoes
Mollie's position:

"But whatever my feeling used to be, I no longer be-
lieve--and that's what I had to look a lot farther to
see--that miracles are our only hope or even our h0pe
at all. What we've got already is enough." (p. 221)
What Sam, Sara, and Lundrigan must realize is that what
they have already is a legitimate basis for the wonder and
awe inspired in Peter by his vision. Peter realizes this,

and Mollie is well on her way. For the others it will be

a difficult, if not impossible, lesson to learn.

37

The theme of wonder is displaced in THE RETURN OF
ANSEL GIBBS by the general issues of commitment and affir—
mation mentioned earlier, but in THE FINAL BEAST the theme
of wonder reappears, once again in a broadly religious
context, and the question of whether the old stories are
the best, the question of a credible mythology, takes us
to the heart of the protagonist's dilemma. At the begin-
ning of the novel we learn that Theodore Nicolet, the
minister in the small town of Myron, has bolted and left
his two children in the care of his housekeeper, Irma
Reinwasser. We soon discover that Rooney Vail, a parish-
ioner and a good friend of Nicolet's, has gone off some-
where too, and left her husband, Clem, behind. Nicolet
and Rooney Vail meet in Muscadine. Their departure, their
return, and the reactions to them by the citizens of Myron
are the central elements of the novel's plot.

While wondering if Nicolet will ever return, Irma
Reinwasser introduces some of the novel's central prob-
lems. Irma decides that Nicolet will return because of his
two girls, Lizzie and Cornelia (nicknamed Lizard Boy and
Pie Face),

but she discarded every other reason. . . . There was

God, of course, but God made Irma Reinwasser very

angry. He asked so much of His servants and rendered

so little: marry and bury, christen and counsel, joke
with, solicit from, try somehow to live by Him, live
with Him. It emptied a man. . . . "And when they tell
me he looks like Abe Lincoln," Irma said, "I tell them
after Abe Lincoln got shot is what he looks like. If
you got God for a friend, you don't need any enemies."

What did God give in return? A dead wife, knots in
the stomach.1

38
Nicolet's wife has been dead for about a year when

the novel begins. Nicolet himself is a Skinny young man
with "a clown's arched eyebrows . . . [and] a gay foolish
smile, like a drunk's or a lover's" (p. 6). But his ser-
vice to God is a harrowing experience, and we are led to
believe that it has taken its toll. His housekeeper

had seen him come back haggard from their dying [old

ladies], his stomach in knots. The doctor told him

that there was nothing wrong with him but just that

he had sat out too many terminal cancers--a simple

stroke, a heart failure, and he would be back on his

feet again. (p. 12)
Irma questions the worth of Nicolet's calling; Rooney,
full of doubt, runs off to consult with a Spiritualist;
Nicolet himself is troubled over his commitment to the
church, and his doubts are presented just as dramatically
as his faith. The novel is full of doubt and the modern
reasons for doubt. Yet this doubt leads to affirmation,
a peculiar, paradoxical affirmation full of joy, laughter,
and wonder. The paradoxical nature of this affirmation
is easily illustrated. Here is Irma, once again, thinking
about her employer: "You could never be sure about Blue-
beard [one of Nicolet's many nicknames] and God. There
were times when she felt that each must take the other as
a kind of joke” (p. 13). On the other hand, she knew "it
might not be a joke at all" (p.14).

The conventional religious themes of temptation, sin,

guilt, doubt, and salvation are given a most unconventional

treatment in THE FINAL BEAST. Nicolet is described as a

combination of such fabulous characters as Bluebeard, Noah,

39
and St. Nicholas. Irma is one of the clumsiest and oddest
saviors in our literature. Nicolet is so in love with
this world that Poteat, the editor of the local newspaper,
accuses him of paganism in an "Epistle to the Myronians."
Although the novel deals largely with Spiritual issues,
its dominant imagery is, oddly, animal imagery: Lizard
Boy, Betty Blackburn, Irma the "chiken," Poteat the
"beast," Metzger the "squirrel," Clem's "furry chest," and
Clem's Something ShOp which is a "damned pack rat's para-
dise," (p. 20) and includes among its paraphernalia ”don-
key bells, goat bells, cow bells, camel bells” (p. 20).
Lillian Flagg, the Spiritualist, may well be a charlatan
or a fanatic, yet Nicolet wonders whether she is not
closer to the truths of Christianity than he is himself.
Nicolet's father, a hypochondriac, is "making an art of
dying," (p. 38) and Nicolet has difficulty understanding
him, forgiving him, loving him. Nicolet is running both
to and from God as he also runs to and from Rooney. He is
paradoxically a clown and a saint, a doubter and a be-
liever, guilty and innocent at the same time. He first
thought of becoming a minister when he heard a beer-
drinking college friend combine words he had never heard
combined before, nor ever thought of combining: "Christ
and . . . eats it" (p. 82). The novel is riddled with
paradox, but there are no attempts to rob paradox of its
power by explaining it away. The result is affirmation.

The rather unconventional religious affirmation of

40

THE FINAL BEAST carries with it certain quite conven-
tional implications about our responsibilities to one
another. Rooney is struck by Nicolet's definition of
sin:

"Nicko said that sin meant moving farther and farther

apart . . . from other men, God. . . . Like points on

the surface of a balloon you blow up, the distances

grow greater and greater until distance is all there

is wherever you look . . . landscapes of air." (p. 59)
Nick and Rooney, the novel's major characters, grow by
being capable of forgiveness and by learning to love.
Nick can finally forgive and properly value his father.
Rooney returns to Clem and will, it is suggested, give
birth to his child. But however easy these resolutions
might seem, they are not easily come by. The latter chap-
ters of the novel are overshadowed by the absurd and un-
necessary death of Irma Reinwasser. Rooney's questions
may or may not have been answered. When She tells
Nicolet why She comes to church, she suggests that She has
only one reason: she wants to know whether what the
church represents is or is not true. When Rooney goes to
Lillian Flagg she asks her to "'make it very clear
what a person has to believe in,'" (p. 54) and Lillian
responds, as if it were quite Simple, ”'Miracles.
Miracles. Miracles'" (p. 54).

However alien and apparently anachronistic the above

might seem in a serious American novel written in the

'sixties, it is surely miracle, the miraculous, that

Buechner has in mind. The density, the nuance, the

41
variegated texture of ihis_world, ibis life, is truly mirac-
ulous, Buechner implies, however paradoxical, and however
little we understand it. Like Peter Cowley's in THE SEA-
SONS' DIFFERENCE, Nicolet's sensitivity to life itself
seems to be a form of Spiritual reward. This world as
miracle. This life as miracle. Lying in a field out be-
hind his father's barn, Theodore Nicolet hears two branches
rub together and the "clack, clack" of those brances intro-
duces one of the most joyous and wondrous experiences de-
scribed in contemporary American fiction. The commitment
fo Ansel Gibbs has become the faith of Theodore Nicolet,
and with it Buechner's rediscovery of wonder is well under
way.

In THE FINAL BEAST, the wonder is underscored by the
hundreds of animal and fecal images which constantly rein-
force the central allusion of the novel--the allusion to
the story of Noah's ark. It is important to see that such
words as "fabulous," or "miraculous" help describe Buech-
ner's view of ordinary reality in his later novels, as well
as the stories he alludes to and builds upon in all of his
novels. Forty days and forty nights of rain: it is almost
always raining in THE FINAL BEAST. Nicolet is compared to
Christ, to Noah, and he is, after all, a Christian minis-
ter. How absurd, how outrageous, we might think, at first.
And Buechner would apparently agree: yes, absurd; crazy;

outrageous; impossible; miraculous; wondrous. The world of

 

Buechner's later fiction is a world of wonder and a world

42

of possibility. It is a world in which to
wake up is to be given back your life again. To
wake up--and I suspect that you have a choice always,
to wake or not to wake-~is to be given back the
world again and of all possible worlds this world,
this earth rich with the bodies of the dead as our
dreams are rich with their ghosts, this earth that
we have seen hanging in Space, our toy, our tomb,
our precious jewel, our hope and our despair and our
heart's delight. Waking intotflmenew day we are all
of us Adam on the morning of creation, and the world
is ours to name.

It is also a world often described by images of air,
earth, fire, and water: the four basic elements of seven-
teenth century cosmology. Here as in the majority of his
novels, Buechner fashions his imagery out of the Stuff of
his major allusions. Since the major allusions of THE
FINAL BEAST are to the story of Noah and to Pentecost, it
is appropriate that the imagery Should be as elemental as
it is, but it is also interesting to note that the imagery
of air, earth, fire, and water is dominant in THE SEASONS'
DIFFERENCE, THE FINAL BEAST, and THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK,
the three novels in which the theme of wonder is most promi—
nent. It appears that Buechner finds in seventeenth cen-
tury cosmology a richness and beauty that our scientific
age lacks, but could nonetheless rediscover. This would
explain why Buechner makes the protagonists of each of
these works out to be in love with the world. Peter Cowley
fears that he loves it too much; Peter RingkOping wants to

give away his mountain, but fears doing so because he has

loved it so much and so long; Theodore Nicolet is accused

43

of loving the world so much that he may be a pagan.

Imagery of the four basic elements is so pervasive in
THE FINAL BEAST that there is no need to dwell upon it. A
glance should suffice. Nicolet suggests at one point that
the air we move about in veils a wondrous reality; we
would see this if only we "'could get hold of it by the
corner somewhere, just Slip . . . [a] fingernail underneath
and peel it back enough to find what's there behind it'"
(p. 182). The fecal imagery of the novel is a kind of
earth imagery obviously connected to the Noah story, and
the water imagery, the dominant imagery of the novel, also
comes naturally out of the Noah allusions. Nicolet's
church becomes the ark awash, and when Nicolet returns
from Muscadine (a wonderfully earthy name) he sees himself
piloting the ark to safety. The water imagery also sup-
ports the Spiritual cleansing associated with Nicolet's
tribulations. By the end of the novel, the fecal material
is washed away. The imagery of fire functions in much the
same way as the water imagery: to transform, cleanse, and
purify. Irma's suffering is ultimately relieved by her
firey death. The novel ends on the fourth of July. As the
fireworks of the local celebration explode in the air,
Buechner suggests that the town of Myron is "being inun-
dated by fire from beyond the darkness" (p. 253). Much of
the previous fire imagery is associated with Pentecost,
the birthday of the church. Buechner makes a point of

indicating that Nicolet's sermon on Pentecost is preached

44
weeks late: the birthday of the church and the nation's
birthday, the Holy Spirit and political freedom are oddly
merged. The secular and the spiritual are never separate
in Buechner's version of things, but continue, however
oddly or outrageously, ambiguously or paradoxically, to be
presented as one. This curious mixture of the sacred and
the profane is nowhere more startling than in the death of
Irma Reinwasser. Irma's recurrent dream of her experience
in a Nazi prison camp is filled with images of beasts and
torture, but as she dies it is replaced by a serene dream
in which images of earth, air, water, and fire abound in
radiant harmony entirely supportive of Buechner's theme
of wonder.

But however wondrous Buechner's later novels might
be, many of the symptoms of modernism remain; the irony and
ambiguity of the early novels are still evident in his
later works. The implication that the inadequacies of
modernism can be overcome is perhaps itself the most radi—
cal element of Buechner's later fiction, child as it is of
modernism. AS the ambiguity, irony, and paradox persist
in his later novels, the wonder Buechner insists upon is
produced by ever more outrageous characters and Situations.

Peter Ringkoping, the octogenarian protagonist of
THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK, thinks that there may be doorways
in the air, behind which some kind of other-worldly reality
lurks, teasing such worldlings as himself into fanciful

dreams or visions. He sees ghosts, or thinks that he sees

45
ghosts, and the ghosts he sees are Shakespeare's ghost and
a vision of Gloriana, the Faerie Queen. The entire novel
is an updated retelling of the 02 story: Peter Ringkoping
is the tin woodman in search of a heart; Peter's son,
Tommy, is the straw man, in search of a brain; Peter's son,
Nels, is the cowardly lion in search of courage; Peter's
grandson, Tip, like Dorothy in the original, is concerned
with finding out where his home is. A character named
Strasser is the wizard, and Sarah, Peter's wife, and Alice,
Tommy's wife, are the witches. AS the novel begins, we
even have an outrageous image of Alice with her feet Stick-
ing out from under the house where she is looking for a
lost ring. The Oz of the original Story is replaced by a
”pilgrim village," run by Strasser, which is a sanctuary
and clinic for mongols and assorted others who are either
less or more than ”human."

The pilgrim village seems to be a combination of
paradise, full of lost innocents, and the kind of enchanted
island brought to mind by the many allusions in the novel
to ShakeSpeare'S THE TEMPEST. lfluamajor device of the
plot is, of course, a journey, and the journey becomes a
metaphor of life itself; "'The journey becomes your life.

It is not just a journey any more, don't make any

mistake about that."'17

This allows Buechner to suggest
the various ways in which the major characters got lost
along the way, as well as the hOpeful possibility that

they may once again find their way.

46
The ways in which the major characters in THE EN-

TRANCE TO PORLOCK have become lost are most evident in
their interpersonal relationships. However seductive Peter
RingkOping'S metaphysical visions may have been, their
effect has been to lure him away from his family (he Spends
much of his time in an old barn that has been converted in-
to a used book Store), and to alienate him from his family.
This alienation has resulted in difficulties for Peter's
children who have had no father in any sense that matters.
The inability to love characteristic of Peter is reflected
in his progeny. Nels, the Dean of Students at an eastern
prep school, has convinced himself that the barrier he has
always insisted on placing between himself and the Students
is necessary, even beneficial. But the suicide of one of
the students at Putnam who obviously needed something more
than a bureaucratic, authoritarian response from Nels,
something more on the order of compassion, ultimately
Shows Nels that he erected the barrier for his own benefit,
and that his essential concerns (he is constantly worried
about his heart) are, and always have been, egocentric.
Tommy fails in his relationships by never taking them seri-
ously. In fact, he seems unable to take anything seriously,
and his reactions to life are a series of comic "takes”;
he has become a full-time practical joker. His equipment
includes the following:

A bow tie with flashlight bulbs that lit up when you

pressed a button and a set of monster teeth were among
his other props, worst of all perhaps, a pair of lips

47

made out of red chewing-gum wax. The double take,

the slow burn, counting his fingers after he had
shaken your hand, his repertoire was as classic as the
phrases that accompanied it: Goomb e. Abyssinia

W__.h.._a__t_ 9.3.2 .1. 5.12 2192 £92? (pp. 15-165

 

Not until he overcomes his fears of his own inadequacy can
Tommy break the comic, rather pathetic, mask he hides be-
hind and learn that he, too, is loved and can love. Each
of the major characters in this novel is his own problem
and solution at the same time. The heart, the brain, the
courage, and the security sought by the travellers in Oz
were theirs to begin with, to create for themselves out of
their own "journeys." But it is always difficult to dis—
tinguish precisely between the world as it is, the world
as we subjectively perceive it, and the world as we think
it ought to be. One of the major sources of ambiguity in
Buechner's fiction results from the tension between the
objective and the subjective, as Strasser suggests bril-
liantly when he mentions that he does not know whether the
mongols of his village dwell in Paradise, Since they have
no fears of death and see everyone as their friends, or
whether Paradise dwells in them.

Ambiguity is still at the heart of Buechner's complex
vision, even in this fairy tale for adults. Love is the
great necessity in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK; isolation and
loneliness are too often the realities. All of the major
characters in this novel, except Strasser, have neglected

the human relationships which could have provided them

48

fulfillment. Peter Ringkoping has spent his life dreaming
of "the land of heart's desire," (p. 249) some enchanted,
metaphysical landscape theoretically more attractive and
more meaningful than this world. He keeps looking for a
loose corner on a patch of air that he could tear loose
and peer through. He may even have had a few fleeting
glimpses of this other world. But Peter finally finds a
kind of demi-paradise in and of this world. He and his
family journey to Strasser's village and discover a com-
munity of lost innocence, a place in which human warmth,
acceptance, and love are all-pervasive. Yet, as Strasser
reminds us, it is really not available to us.

"For us it is too late for Paradise," he said. "We

have come along too far. The mongol is the raw clay

we are all of uS molded out of, but we have been molded

now and glazed and baked in the oven. He alone comes

to remind us of our original being.” (p. 218)

The world that is available to us, however, the im—
perfect, problematic, every-day world, is quite enough,
Buechner implies, and far more wonderful and beautiful than
we ordinarily admit. THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK ends with
Buechner's most sustained presentation of the theme of the
extraordinary, wondrous nature of ordinary reality. The
mongols, with some help from their visitors, make a mosaic
on a feltboard out of bitszuuipieces of brightly colored
cloth. Significantly, they name their creation "Today,"
and indicate that it is an artistic rendering of this day

of the Ringkopings' visit. Strasser, commenting on the

mosaic, describes many of the causes for wonder that have

49
come up throughout the day, that come up in all of our
lives each day. And they involve the many ways in which
we are inextricably related, bound to one another in a com-
mon effort, responsible to one another for making each day
what it finally becomes.
”That is a good name," Strasser said. ”Thank you.
Today. This day. There it is," he said. "A little
bit of this and a little bit of that. There has never
been a day just like it before, and there never will
be again, not just like it anyway. How queer and
beautiful it is, and we have made it together. It was
not easy to make it. Who says it was easy? . . . The
gold and the violet and green of us. The blue and red.
We overflow the board into the air. We flow in and out
of each other every moment. We crowd each other and
change shape. Sometimes it is very painful. Can you
tell me why it sould be anything less, to make some-
thing so rare, so precious?" (p. 239)

In the urbane, cosmopolitan worlds of the earlier
novels, Buechner stresses the inadequacies of the major
characters' lives, their entrapment in the self, their
inability to communicate meaningfully with one another,
and suggests that ii there is a way out it is not available
to them precisely because of their sophistication. In the
innocence of the pilgrim village in THE ENTRANCE TO POR-
LOCK, the major characters are allowed to find at least
some partial answers to their problems, and the prevailing
tone of the novel is far more affirmative than that of A
LONG DAY'S DYING or THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. The affirma-
tive resolution of THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK is implied all
along by the many allusions to the 02 story. Peter Ring-

k0ping begins to realize the importance of involving

50

himself in ssis life, ERIE world; Nels gains the courage
necessary to overcome his previously Oppressive fears of
death; Tommy lays aside his practical joking and quits
acting like an idiot; Tip decides to spend more time at
home.

This retelling of the Oz story, with its mixture of
realistic journey, fabulous visions, and dreams, is full
of wonder. And the wonder of ordinary reality, Buechner
implies, is just as great as the wonder of Peter's visions.
In fact, the two are ultimately inseparable. Peter's
visions are believable, must really have been visions, he
suggests, precisely because of certain realistic details
that no one could possibly attribute to ordinary dreams.
When Shakespeare appears to Peter in the entrance to the
horse stall (now used to shelve the books on drama) which
used to house a horse named Porlock, he Speaks part of
Macbeth's famous soliloquy. The crazy thing about it, the
realistic flaw that Peter figures he couldn't merely have
dreamed, is that Shakespeare's ghost speaks with a liSp and
mixes his r's and w's. The speech comes out "tomowwo and
tomowwo" (p.98). The same quirk is evident in Peter's
vision of Gloriana, the Faerie Queen. She appears all
dressed in white in a dress that has a large ruff, like a
peacock's tail, and she seems to be in every detail vision-
ary. Then she opens her mouth. "'She had the worst set
of teeth I've ever seen, as if She'd been eating blueberry

pie. Now the dress and all could have been a figment of

51

my imagination. The dress I could have dreamed, but not
the teeth. It would have taken a dentist to dream a set
of teeth like that'" (p. 247). In the book he wrote about
his visionary experiences, called DOORWAYS IN THE AIR,
Peter had ”never made it clear whether he was writing auto-
biography or fairy tale or whether, as he saw it, there was
even any difference between them” (pp. 54-55). In THE EN-
TRANCE TO PORLOCK, Buechner implies that the two, real life
and fairy tale, the ordinary and the fabulous, are really one.

As in THE FINAL BEAST, the dominant patterns of
imagery in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK are of earth, air, fire
and water. Peter's mountain is presented, through his love
of it and Strasser's paintings of it, as wondrous and beau-
tiful. When the Ringkopings arrive at Strasser's village
it is raining, and the rain refreshes the travellers and
buoys their Spirits. Peter's search for doorways and less
obvious openings in the air allows Buechner to develop his
images of air and Space in a wholly wondrous context.
Alice, old and arthritic, dreams a peculiar, recurrent
dream (similar to Irma's in THE FINAL BEAST) in which
grandmothers like herself become burning candles and their
pain and age are transformed by fire into aesthetically
lovely images, serene and mysterious. The many references
to Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST reinforce the same kind of
seventeenth-century cosmology that Buechner draws upon in
THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE and THE FINAL BEAST. Strasser's

village is a combination of Oz and the enchanted island of

52
Shakespeare's play, complete with the cosmology of wonder
thatBuechner borrows from ShakeSpeare'S age.

The outrageousness of Buechner's characters and Situa-
tions is intensified in his next three novels, LION COUNTRY,
OPEN HEART, and LOVE FEAST (a trilogy). With this trilogy,
Buechner turns his attention to the comic novel, the form
which Raymond Olderman maintains is most suited to pulling
affirmation from the very causes and roots of paradox. Leo
Bebb, the character who dominates our attention and fas-
cinates the narrator of the trilogy, Antonio Parr, runs an
illegal diploma mill called GOSpel Faith College and adver-
tises by running such items as this in local newspapers:

"Put yourself ss_God'S payroll——Gs is work for Jesus nowJJB

 

 

 

Never more than a step or two in front of the law, Bebb
claims ”'All things are lawful for me, but all things edify
not. One corinthians ten'" (LC p. 3). With these words,
one of the most outrageous scamps in contemporary litera-
ture is introduced. Parr's association with Bebb begins
when Antonio decides to do an expose of Bebb's religious
con game, and Antonio's casual investigation of Bebb surely
turns up more than enough suspicious evidence to justify
the exposé he intends to write. He discovers that Bebb was
previously imprisoned for sexual exhibitionism. Bebb claims
that he is constantly being investigated and pursued by
agents from the FBI and the IRS as well as representatives
of lesser bodies of the law. Bebb courts the favor of a

wealthy Indian named Herman Redpath (an oil baron with a

53
ranch in Texas and numerous sexually demanding wives), and
eventually gains that favor plus an apparent sinecure by
performing a curiously mixed pagan-Christian fertility
ritual to restore Redpath's virility. Bebb prays to God to
help Herman Redpath.
"He is here that he may mount up in thy service like an
eagle, so grant him the strength of a young man to
mount with. Herman Redpath is here to receive from thy
hands the holy power to love, so of thy love-power give
him good measure, pressed down and shaken together and
running over so that he may receive it into his lap and
scatter it abroad like seed. Grant him the gift of
charity so that he may be very charitable." (LC p. 215)
Redpath gets an erection; Bebb gets one hundred thousand
dollars and a permanent church instead of his church of
Holy Love in Armadillo, Florida. The peOple closest to
Bebb are themselves further evidence of the legitimacy of
Antonio's suspicions about Bebb. Lucille, Bebb's wife, is
an alcoholic addicted as well to television. She may have
killed her only child. Bebb's right-hand-man, Brownie, is
effeminate. Bebb's daughter, Sharon, turns out to be
adopted, in her early twenties, and sexually adventurous.
Yet the more Antonio learns about Bebb, the more
enigmatic Bebb seems, and the less certain Antonio is that
Bebb is entirely a fake. Even though he knows that it is
crazy to think so, Antonio begins to think that Bebb might
be something of a holy man after all. Brownie tells a con-
vincing story about Bebb raising him from the dead in the

presence of several amazed witnesses; Herman Redpath did

regain his virility rather dramatically; Lucille constantly

54

suggests that Bebb is really an extraterrestrial being
with more than human powers. While they are all motoring
through "Lion Country," a wild game reserve in which wild
lions roam unfettered, Bebb gets out of the car and con-
fronts the animals with no fear and no difficulty. The
Holy Love of Bebb's advertisements might be curiously mixed
up with con games and sexuality, but it might also contain
elements of the truly religious. The ambiguities of Bebb's
personality and situation may be the Outrageous features of
the mask of faith in a largely faithless world. In the
person of Leo Bebb, Antonio Parr, part-time free-lance
wirter, some-time English teacher, full-time skeptic, may
have discovered a saint. And through Leo Bebb, Buechner
seems to be asking us to at least consider some of the
most outrageous, unlikely possibilities; a credible myth-
ology is one of them, and faith, and hope, and wonder.
Bebb and his entourage may be, as Charles Rice suggests,
"more than they seem. The religion they peddle just may
be, by some outside chance, a religion they possess."19

By the end of the trilogy, Antonio has himself become
a member of Bebb's entourage: he has married, separated
from, and rejoined Sharon; he has become the part-time sub-
stitute father for his two nephews, one of whom has sexual
relations with Sharon; he has witnessed the ambiguous suc—
cess of a series of religious revivals sponsored by Bebb
including some "love feasts" held at Princeton that even-

tually deteriorated into sexual orgies. But he has not and

55
will not write the exposé he set out to write at the be-
ginning of the trilogy. Through Leo Bebb, Antonio has be-
gun to realize that maybe anything is possible. As Buech-
ner himself suggests elsewhere, the

language of God seems mostly metaphor. His love is
like a red, red, rose. His love is like the old
waiter with shingles, the guitar playing Buddhist
tramp, the raped child and the one who raped her.
There is no image too far-fetched, no combination of
sounds too harsh, no Spelling too irregular, no allu-
sion too obscure and outrageous.

As a form, the comic novel lends itself remarkably
well to the development of Buechner's theme of wonder.
Leo Bebb is to Buechner what Falstaff is to Shakespeare.
If Bebb is inconsistent and a liar, it is only "in order

to protect himself against the conventional dishonesty of

"21

other men. Bebb's ex erience is varied and seam ' he
P ,

has "suffered all sorts of hard knocks . . . yet there is

in him no fatigue, no world-weariness, and he retains a

remarkable zest and enthusiasm for the human adventure."22

That Bebb's character is so outrageous need come as no
Shock to us if we simply remember the Shared tendencies
of most comic characters, for as Nathan Scott suggests

the comic man is unembarrassed by even the grossest
expressions of his creatureliness: though the world
may not be all dandy, he has no sense of being under
any cruel condemnation; nor does he have any sense of
desperate entrapment within a caged prison. He can
say, without ironic bitterness, "I'm only human," in
full recognition of the fact that the making of this
admission is itself the condition of his life being
tolerable and of his being able to address to God an
appropriate Confiteor. He does not insist upon life's
conforming to his own special requirements but consents
to take it on the terms of its own created actuality,
and the art of comedy is devoted to an exhibition of

 

56

his deep involvement in the world: so it shirks

nothing--none of the irrelevant absurdities, none of

the vexatious inconveniences, that are the lot of such

finite creatures as ourselves.23

A tragic view of the human condition, a view we often

find in works that subscribe to the major tenets of mod-
ernism, tends to Stress "the burden of human finitude."24
The anguish and anxiety which accompany this burden are
Often paralytic, reducing the possibilities of wonder and
affirmation by overemphasizing the imperfection or injus-
tice of the human condition. For the tragic man (e.g.,
Tristram Bone or Lundrigan), human finitude

is a profound embarrassment and perhaps even a curse,

for he would be pure intellect or pure will or pure

something-or-other, and nothing wounds him more deeply

than to be reminded that his life is a conditioned

thing and that there is nothing absoigte at all in the

human stuff out of which he is made.
The stuff of everyday life, its density, its nuances, its
stresses, strains, and small rewards, are subordinate for
the tragic man to his sense of quest or vision or rebel-
lion. But the comic view, the view that informs Buechner's
trilogy, immerses us in the very stuff of ordinary life and
"enables us to see the daily occasions of our earth-bound
career as being not irrelevant inconveniences but as pos-
sible roads into what is ultimately Significant in life.”26
However imperfect, absurd, or outrageous the world of
Buechner's trilogy may be, it is always profoundly affirma-
tive, constantly surprising and wondrous. That comedy,

Christian faith, and the theme of wonder are as easily com-

bined as they are in the trilogy is best explained by

57
Nathan Scott in his essay, "The Bias of Comedy and the
Narrow Escape into Faith.”
"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold,
it was very good." And upon what is implicit in this
Single sentence rests the whole Biblical interpretation
of life and history, for that is a view of things which
is fundamentally premissed upon the assumption that the
world of finite and contingent existence is not essen-
tially defective simply by reason of its finiteness.
Indeed, when the Christian faith has been true to it-
self, it has never quite forgotten that its genius in
large Imufl: consists in its understanding that the
finitude and particularization of created existence
are not in themselves evii7 since they are a part of
God's plan for the world.

TREASURE HUNT, Buechner's latest novel, adds little
to our understanding of any of Buechner's major themes, so
it will receive little attention in this study. It con-
tinues in the comic vein of the trilogy, and could easily
be seen as an addition to the trilogy since its narrator
and major characters remain the same. However, without Leo
Bebb and without any really new thematic direction, it is
difficult to see the novel as anything but a kind of post-
script to the earlier novels. In it, we discover that Leo
Bebb was actually Sharon's natural father, and that her
mother is married to Leo's twin brother, Babe, whose sur-
prising existence (there is no reference to him whatsoever
in the trilogy) is the only apparent justification for
this novel's existence.

Lucille's suggestion that Leo Bebb might be from
outer Space, maintained humorously throughout the trilogy,

is taken up and developed in TREASURE HUNT through the

character of Babe Bebb who just happens to live in the

58

Bebbs' ancestral home in Poinsett, South Carolina, which
he has transformed into a "Uforium"--a museum of artifacts
supposedly from outer space. It is quickly apparent that
Babe is at least as outrageous and ambiguous a figure as
was his brother: he holds consultations in his Uforium for
those who are troubled and in need of cosmic advice; he
maintains that the little black dots on his teeth are tran-
sistors, and that his teeth are somehow attuned to the fre-
quencies of outer space; he suggests that flying saucers
make frequent landings near his house; and finally, he sug-
gests (Shades of Leo) that Jesus was a Spaceman.

"There's some say I'm cuckoo. A phony. You name it.

So what? Sticks and stones. It's the wave of the

future. HOpe of the world. Most folks I don't tell

the half of it. Come see me in the office sometime

and I'll Show you things. Blow your mind."

He talked about Jesus. He said, "You thought I

was funning you about Jesus. I was and wasn't both.

Know something? Someday Jesus'll climb out of a

saucer. Sunshine in his hair. Gather his own up just

like it says. Only he's a spaceman, that's what.

You'll see."28

Obviously TREASURE HUNT is more tOpical than Buech-

ner's earlier works, though Signs of this tOpicality begin
to appear in the trilogy as well. Instead of allusions to
seventeenth century poetry and images drawn from seven-
teenth century cosmology, the trilogy and TREASURE HUNT
are full of allusions to our technological age, particu-
larly to films, radio programs, and the famous characters
(usually comic) we have come to know because of these

media. The natural imagery of the earlier novels is re-

placed by the artificial imagery of recorded sights and

59
sounds. In reSponse to the outrageousness of some of the
suggestions and behavior of Leo and Babe Bebb, Antonio him-
self introduces many zany, flippant, outrageous suggestions,
allusions, and analogies. In TREASURE HUNT, for example,
Antonio often refers to Christ as The Lone Ranger. He sees
the brothers Bebb as the Laurel and Hardy of his own comic,
ironic existence. When he dreams of his dead Sister, the
comic allusions of Antonio's dream illustrate perfectly the
nature of Buechner's comic allusions throughout TREASURE
HUNT.
She says her doctor looks like Groucho Marx. She asks
if I think dying is going someplace or just going out,
like a match, and I am inspired to tell her how I have
a fantasy in which Jesus is Don Giovanni, the great
lover himself, with a little gold earring in one ear
and an Errol Flynn smile as he runs Satan through with
a sword and puts Death to rout. Bene, Bene, Antonio,
she says. For once I have said the right thing al-

though I can be sure of nothing except that it's a
thing I've said. (p.217)

 

Antonio's most serious moments are often oddly mixed
moments in which the faces of comedy and tragedy are almost
indistinguishable from one another, or moments in which
dreams and life and film are curiously mixed together.
Death wears the face of Groucho Marx and Jesus is Errol
Flynn. Antonio's answer to Miriam's question is in many
ways no answer at all, yet the suggestion that an answer
may lie in an analogy between life and film is one that
dominates the trilogy and TREASURE HUNT. In the trilogy,
Antonio suggests that he sees his life as a home movie,
and in TREASURE HUNT it seems to be the movies, especially

the comic ones, that Speak to him about his life. Reality

60
and fantasy may be closer to one another than we ordinarily
admit. AS Antonio says, thinking of dreams: "In a world
where we are often closer to the truth in dreams than any-
where else, who is to say what is possible and not possible,
true and not true, any more than in dreams you can say
it?" (p. 189)

The evanescent nature of dreams and films provides
Antonio with a suggestive metaphor of the evanescence of
life. The curiously vivid and immediate reality of dreams
and films strike Antonio as Similar to that of life itself.
The intensity of waking human experience is underscored by
a consciousness of death, and this consciousness lends to
life itself an illusory quality which destroys the sense
of solidity or permanence that we customarily associate
with life, undermining the apparently solid distinctions
we maintain between the present and the past, dreaming and
waking, the imaginary and the real. Memory and dream,
Buechner suggests, are much like film, allowing the past
to continue to live in the present, unaffected by the
stream of time that separates them in our conscious lives.
In TREASURE HUNT, Gertrude Conover discovers a tape re-
cording left behind by Leo Bebb. The information it pro-
vides about Leo's relatives and property affects the lives
of all the major characters of the novel. In fact, it gen-
erates the entire plot of the novel. In the trilogy and in
TREASURE HUNT, images captured on film or tape allow lives

that have flickered out to flicker on again, providing a

61
life beyond life, and the metaphysical implications of
these technological resources provide Antonio with a source
of Speculation and wonder that rivals the visions of such
characters as Peter Cowley (THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE) or
Peter Ringkoping (THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK).

Although Antonio Parr remains a far more skeptical
character throughout the trilogy and TREASURE HUNT than
many of the characters who support Buechner's theme of won-
der in earlier novels, he remains willing at least to enter-
tain the possibilities of wonder represented by such slap-
stick characters as Leo and Babe Bebb. The difficulties
of his own "treasure hunt" (his life) do not overcome him
or paralyze him. He remains a modern character for whom
irony is the bedrock of all human experience, but, as he
suggests near the end of TREASURE HUNT, he has A

moved step by step to a kind of panicky openness to
almost any possibility, which I suspect must be, if
not the same thing as what people like Bebb would call
faith, at least its kissing cousin. (p. 189)

Coupled with an awareness of the problematic nature
of contemporary life, Buechner's theme of wonder often
seems wildly outrageous. That is perhaps the reason that
Buechner relies so heavily upon irony throughout his work.
The characters who bear the weight of Buechner's moral
concerns almost always appear to be far-fetched: Babe
Bebb, in TREASURE HUNT, claims to have access to extra-

terrestrial intelligence; Leo Bebb, in the trilogy, may be

a con man, a cheap opportunist abusing peOple'S fondest

62
wishes; Joey and Bonzo, in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK, are,
by definition, less than fully human; Irma Reinwasser, in
THE FINAL BEAST, is accidentally burned to death by a fire
that was started in a paper bag full of human feces; Lil-
lian Flagg, of the same novel, may be a charlatan; Peter
Cowley, of THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, may or may not have
had a vision; and Dr. Lavender, of the same novel, "mar-
ries" the children Peter tutors. The list could be ex-
tended a great deal before it would be exhaustive. The im-
portant thing to note about this outrageousness is that it
often introduces other thematic concerns that run through
many of Buechner's novels accompanying and complementing
the general theme of wonder already detailed above; they

are the themes<xfinnocence and transformation.

63
NOTES--Chapter I

lMargaret Wimsatt, "A Novelist for the New Church?"
America, 127 (Oct. 7, 1972), p. 261.

2John W. Aldridge, AFTER THE LOST GENERATION (New
York, 1951), pp. 219-220.

31616., p. 220.
41bid., p. 221.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sipig,, pp. 221-222.
6Ibid., p 223.
71bid., p. 230.
81bid., p 230.
91919:: p 230.
loIbid., p 230.
111616., p. 226.
lzipig , p 229.
131616., p 228.

 

14Ibid., p. 230.

15Frederick Buechner, THE FINAL BEAST (New York, 1965L
p. 13. All further references to this work will include
only the page number in parentheses following the quota-
tion or, when necessary, the abbreviation TFB along with
the page number.

16Frederick Buechner, THE ALPHABET OF GRACE (New York,
1970), p. 22.

17Frederick Buechner, THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK (New
York, 1970), p. 27. All further references to this work
will include only the page number in parentheses following
the quotation or, when necessary, the abbreviation TETP
along with the page number.

18Frederick Buechner, LION COUNTRY (New York, 1971),
p. 6. All further references to this work will include
only the page number in parentheses following the quota-
tion or, when necessary, the abbreviation LC along with the
page number.

64

19Charles Rice, "Theology as Autobiography in the
Novels and Sermons of Frederick Buechner," an unpublished
paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy
of Religion in Washington, D.C., 1974, p. 9.

20THE ALPHABET OF GRACE, p. 13.

21Nathan A. Scott, Jr., "The Bias of Comedy and the
Narrow Escape into Faith," in COMEDY: Meanin and Form,
ed., Robert W. Corrigan (San FranCISco, I9655, p. 105.

22Ibid., p. 105.

 

23Ibid., pp. 93-94.

 

24Ibid., p. 93.

 

ZSIbid., p. 93.

261bid., p. 107.

 

271bid., p. 109.

 

28Frederick Buechner, TREASURE HUNT (New York, 1977),
p. 104. All further references to this work will include
only the page number in parentheses following the quota-
tion or, when necessary, the abbreviation TH along with
the page number.

66

deveIOpS variations on the theme of innocence. As does
William Blake, in his "Songs of Innocence” and "Songs of
Experience," Buechner suggests the necessity of both views
of human experience. Modernism is almost entirely on the
side of experience: everything is mixed and imperfect;
nothing is fresh and uncomplicated. But this is only a
partial view, Buechner implicitly argues, however much it
might seem to be complete. And the more we stress this
partial view and accommodate ourselves to it, Buechner im-
plies, the more "the waste land which holds us in thrall
could come from within as well as from without."1

Innocence, the conscious protection of innocence,
and the realization of the importance of innocence, are
means of countering the effects of the waste land in Buech-
ner's novels. And this innocence takes many forms. In
several of the novels, the theme of innocence develops out
of the subplots and minor characters. In A LONG DAY'S
DYING, innocence is a minor theme, less important than it
becomes in the later novels. Yet it is unmistakably a con-
cern even in this first, most modern of the novels. Lean-
der, Elizabeth's son, is in college, and Maroo, Elizabeth's
mother, writes long, beautiful letters to Leander, the in-
tent of which is apparently to protect Leander. Maroo,
herself, is apparently an aged innocent whose neighbors
speak to her ”'as they would to a drunk or a child, think-
ing . . . that the old citizen isn't what She once was and

that they had therefore best jolly her along'" (p. 91).

II

THE THEME OF INNOCENCE

Since Buechner presents modern life as essentially
problematic, and since problematic experience can lead to
the skepticism, despair, or ennui exemplified by such char-
acters as Tristram Bone in A LONG DAY'S DYING, or Lundrigan
in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, one of Buechner's most difficult
problems is to present convincing reasons for the affirma-
tion and wonder of his novels. Buechner's many "innocents"
are both the causes of and the vehicles for much of the
affirmation in his novels. In innocence there may still
be some hOpe.

The SOphistication of the major characters of the
early novels is highly valued by its possessors and serves
them as a kind of tonic for their essential malaise. The
world of good books, good music, vintage French wines,
civilized friends, and witty conversation provides some
insulation from the barbarities of modern life, and serves
as well to distract Tristram Bone or Sam and Sara Dunn from
the emptiness, the purposelessness of their lives. But
this distraction is merely a distraction, Buechner implies,
and, as previously noted, Buechner insists on its inade-
quacy. As a corrective to the inadequacy of the various
tonics available to his characters, Buechner carefully

65

66

deveIOpS variations on the theme of innocence. AS does
William Blake, in his "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of
Experience," Buechner suggests the necessity of both views
of human experience. Modernism is almost entirely on the
side of experience: everything is mixed and imperfect;
nothing is fresh and uncomplicated. But this is only a
partial view, Buechner implicitly argues, however much it
might seem to be complete. And the more we stress this
partial view and accommodate ourselves to it, Buechner im-
plies, the more "the waste land which holds us in thrall
could come from within aS well as from without."1

Innocence, the conscious protection of innocence,
and the realization of the importance of innocence, are
means of countering the effects of the waste land in Buech—
ner's novels. And this innocence takes many forms. In
several of the novels, the theme of innocence develops out
of the subplots and minor characters. In A LONG DAY'S
DYING, innocence is a minor theme, less important than it
becomes in the later novels. Yet it is unmistakably a con-
cern even in this first, most modern of the novels. Lean-
der, Elizabeth's son, is in college, and Marco, Elizabeth's
mother, writes long, beautiful letters to Leander, the in-
tent of which is apparently to protect Leander. Maroo,
herself, is apparently an aged innocent whose neighbors
speak to her "'as they would to a drunk or a child, think-
ing . . . that the Old citizen isn't what She once was and

that they had therefore best jolly her along'" (p. 91).

67
Marco enjoys being treated as an innocent, even though she
is certainly not as Simple as her neighbors might believe.
She is conscious of just how fragile innocence is in the
modern world, and She is conscious as well of its necessity.
Somehow She managed to age and mature, to gain insight into
the dangers and fears of life without being embittered by
experience or overwhelmed by the darker possibilities
which have brought other characters in the novel to the
edge of despair. Hers is not an innocence based on igno-
rance, and it is important to recognize this as a first
step to understanding the ways in which the theme of inno-
cence functions in Buechner's novels.
Steitler, one of Leander's instructors, suggests the

following about his educational function:

"I teach them English is all," he continued, "and the

pay-off they finally get is a kind of corruption, be-

cause what they learn, when they've had the full treat-

ment, is nothing about any particular book or any

particular author or period so much as something

fairly unnerving about life." (p. 59)
Marco knows that Leander will have to learn to face much
that is "unnerving," just as she has, and we are told that
if "it were possible to imagine fear as ever being her mo-
tive, then it could be that she was afraid for the boy as
of or for nothing else" (p. 92). Her letters to her grand-
son are gracious, witty attempts to provide him with some
ability to defend himself. The style of the letters is

dominated by irony and ambiguity, the very tools of modern-

ism used, in this instance, to resist and combat it.

68
Could he only become accustomed to danger, to the
sense that to be alive was perilous, as the quaint
fiction of an old lady, might he then not come to see
the acts of fear or their possibility as a fiction too;
yet all this must be done humorously, quaintly, in just
the ways least likely to reach him, for otherwiSe he
might pay too much heed. . . . Oh what a delicate game
. . . to point out the trap yet pretend not to notice
it. (pp. 92-93)

Leander's innocence is preserved in A LONG DAY'S
DYING, but the cost is enormous. Leander's mother has
sexual relations with Steitler, who is Leander's friend as
well as his teacher, and the complications which arise
from the attempts to keep this knowledge from Leander are
enough to strain almost all of the relationships in the
novel and to wreck Leander's friendship with Steitler.

The danger to Leander of "corruption" from Steitler and
his modernism is overcome. But the fragility of Leander's
innocence is evident. It is best stated, metaphorically,
by Tristram Bone when he is speaking to Steitler:
"When anyone is walking his lonely tightrope," he
paused, the image growing in his mind, "without a
safety net, with a minimum of courage or conviction
and a maximum of vulnerability, dangerously, impera-
tively, it is a kind of sin for someone else even to
suggest that by jumping down there is nothing to lose
but a precarious balance and the questionable safety
of the far platform." (p. 182)
The necessity of protecting innocence is evident even to
Bone. Yet for all the characters in A LONG DAY'S DYING
other than Leander and Marco, innocence is irretrievably
lost. What this novel clearly establishes through its

theme of innocence is Buechner's interest in the possibiliQr

of recognizing the dangers of modernism and remaining,

69
somehow, invulnerable to them. It also suggests that this
is not a Simple matter.

In THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, innocence is a major
theme, though once again it is embodied primarily in the
minor characters. Buechner details three principal types
of innocence in the novel: there is the conventional inno-
cence of the children; there is the innocence of Peter Cow-
ley, an idealistic, child—like adult; and there is the
innocence of Dr. Lavender, perverted to the point of
fanaticism.

The children's innocence is valuable in that it
enables them to view the world as continually wondrous.
Almost everything is new to them and anything seems pos-
sible. With little experience and few ingrained habits,
the youngest of the children in the novel are more open to
experience than any of the other characters in the book.
Since Buechner's theme of wonder has already been intro-
duced, it should be obvious that those elements in the
children's experience which help to produce a sense of
wonder and awe are likely to be approved. And they are.
Yet the innocence of the youngest children in THE SEASONS'
DIFFERENCE is not entirely sufficient. Georgie Bundle's
innocence is, after all, merely inexperience; he and the
other young children will outgrow it, just as they outgrow
their clothes. As experience begins to weigh more heavily
upon them, they will, like Rufus Este and Harry Fogg (the

adolescents in the novel, the "Uglies," as they call

70
themselves), begin the acolescent process of losing their
innocence, will even become desirous of losing it. But in
the meantime their games will continue to reflect a world
of innocence, of unlimited possibility.

Sam Dunn believes in protecting the innocence of the
children, and Lundrigan, who values nothing as highly as
he values maturity, tells Sam that this attitude is pOppy-
cock and that the ”artificial prolongation of innocence"
(p. 30) is immoral. The contrast and Opposition of these
attitudes exist dramatically as well as propositionally in
THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. The children's innocence, which
is natural and transitory, has its counterpart in Dr.
Lavender's idea of innocence, which is unnatural and fixed.
Lavender romanticizes innocence to the extreme point of
seeing children as the source of the modern world's salva-
tion. He tells Peter Cowley that "'in order for the world
to be saved, the world must see things simply again and in
innocence'" (p. 126). He then suggests that

"complexity is unhappiness and damnation too, and the
race of man is unhappy and damned because it is com-
plicated. If only it might be replaced by the race
of children! Then there would be simplicity again,
and happiness and salvation." (p.127)

Much of what Lavender suggests about the children as
a source of salvation is convincing if it is taken meta-
phorically. Lavender himself reminds Peter Cowley of
Christ's injunction to "'be as a little child'" (p. 118).

But Lavender reSpondS to Christ's words literally; he joins

in the children's games with them, much to their bemusement,

71
and he attempts to perpetuate the race of children by
actually marrying the children in the novel, one to another.

His idée fixe becomes the source of what can only be de-

 

scribed, finally, as fanaticism. Lavender's romantic no-
tions of innocence eventually lead to his own death. In

an attempt to climb up to the children's tree house, Laven-
der falls and kills himself. Ironically, rather than help—
ing to perpetuate their innocence, Lavender tarnishes that
innocence by introducing them to death. Lavender's ideas
of innocence sis important in the novel. Even Sam admits
that Lavender may have been "'the best and wisest of us
all. Wrong, wrong, but issi_wrong'" (p. 281). Yet Laven-
der is ultimately a foolish old man. Buechner seems to be
suggesting that innocence must be preserved as a psssi-
bility, as a state of being that does have its own charms
and rewards and insights, as something to learn from. But
Lavender's insistence that innocence alone is ihs_answer is
nonsense.

In between the extremes of the children's natural in-
nocence and Lavender's ideas of innocence there is the in-
nocence of Peter Cowley. Cowley iS "a quiet, pleasant
young man, much devoted to his profession as a teacher, but
certainly never wild-eyed about it, nor about anything
certainly not a mystic or a visionary" (p. 43). Yet Cowley
has had a vision, at least he thinks he has, and this
vision convinces him that he was right in believing what

he had previously only hOped that he was right in believing,

72
"'that there is God, and that we matter to Him. Very
much'" (p. 79). The entire plot of THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE
depends upon Cowley's vision, his attempt to restage that
vision for his friends, and the reactions to both of these
events by all of the other characters in the novel. The
sophistication and the Skepticism of Sam, Sara, and Lundri-
gan exist in vivid contrast to the innocence of Cowley, an
innocence which, at the very least, allows for the possi-
bility of the authenticity of an apparently visionary ex-
perience. Cowley is a childlike adult, but unlike Dr.
Lavender, Cowley does not seem to be unnaturally straining
to maintain his innocence. Lavender believes that he
QEEBE to be childlike; he desperately yssis to be child-
like. Cowley is.

Cowley is the only character in this novel who re-
ceives Buechner's unqualified approval, and this approval
seems to be linked to Cowley's innocence. Cowley desires
to live meaningfully and he does. Like Maroo, in A LONG
DAY'S DYING, Cowley seems to be the single adult character
in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE whose initiation into adult life
has not left him embittered or helpless. Also like Maroo,
Cowley has preserved a precarious innocence which has left
him open to life and has allowed him truly to love life.

In Peter's case, as in Maroo's, this love of life, this
innocence, is not the coefficient of ignorance. He knows
that much of human life involves suffering and defeat.

Still, just after a dramatic reminder of this (a

73
performance by the freaks in the visiting circus), Peter
is "filled with an emotion like great grief or great happi-
ness but richer than either, [and he] gave unspoken thanks
for a life of which his only fear was that he loved it
perhaps too dearly" (p. 67).

By the end of the novel, Cowley has decided to forego
his teaching of children and to teach instead, or at least
try to teach, Sam, Sara, Lundrigan, Julie McMoon. The
novel has already proven, through the relative failure of
Cowley's restaged vision and the difficulty he has had con-
vincing his friends that his first vision was genuine,
that it is precisely these people who will be the hardest
to reach with the lessons of wonder, affirmation, and love
at Peter's disposal. Sam's response to Peter's decision
makes this very clear.

"So we're to be the ones then. Well I can only praise
your valiance. You won't find us easy, although I
daresay you've learned that already. The first time
you say anything, even the glittering truth itself,

so that it sounds however remotely like a cliche,
you'll lose half of us because that's an indelicacy
we can't forgive. And as soon as you start trying

to appeal to our--what do they call them?--our emo-
tions, you'll find the other half has also gone 5 -
cause that's a breach of taste they simply won't have
been able to abide. . . . We're too clever to react

to threats or bribes, and don't remind us of our pecu-
liar faults because we're fully aware of them as is,

and don't ignore them either because they're a source
of considerable pride to us." (p. 282)

 

Yet Sam also admits that Peter may have something to teach
the rest of them, and he even suggests a method of doing
so remarkably similar to Buechner's own method, in his

later novels, of presenting his-themes of affirmation.

74

"Teach us,” he said . . . "teach uS to love maybe.

Better still, perhaps, teach us to suffer.

And at the same time, don't neglect to laugh at

yourself a bit, and at us, because there can be little

under the sun quite so amusing as a game of blindman's

buff played on the scale you've chosen to play it.

Then maybe we'll listen to you. Maybe we won't, of

course, but the advice is still excellent." (p. 283)
As in A LONG DAY'S DYING, the innocence Buechner details
in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE is presented as necessary and
valuable, but its existence is perilous, and the chance
that it will be prOperly valued is Slim. Like Maroo,
Peter Cowley will have to approach those most in need of
what he can tell them through indirection, and only through
indirection.

The theme of innocence is not evident in THE RETURN

OF ANSEL GIBBS, but in THE FINAL BEAST it is again a major
theme. Its treatment there is very Similar to its treat-
ment in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. Again there are children,
innocent and charming. Again the character who receives
the implied author's approval is a character who recog-
nizes the problematic nature of human experience, but is
not defeated by it. Again this character affirms the
reality of the Spirit and Opposes the impoverishments of
modernism. However, in THE FINAL BEAST, the theme of inno-
cence is not deveIOped primarily through minor characters,
as it was previously. In this novel it is embodied by
Theodore Nicolet, the protagonist.

Nicolet's innocence is more complex than Peter Cow-

ley's. We can understand Cowley almost exclusively in

75
terms of his innocence, but Nicolet's innocence is compli-
cated by elements in his character such as guilt, doubt,
and apparent failure which make it difficult for him to
maintain his innocence. As is Peter Cowley's, Nicolet's
innocence is deveIOped largely through its opposition to
the world-weariness, the over-rationality, and the despair
of another character. In this case his name is Poteat.
But, unlike Peter Cowley's, Nicolet's innocence is opposed
from within as well as from without.

Buechner even provides Nicolet with a genealogy of
weakness and failure. Nicolet's grandfather adopted the
pseudonym Leon Laliberte, and was involved in a series of
misadventures. Roy, Theodore's father, remembers Lali-
berte this way: "'He was a romantic, my poor young dad,
and an idealist, but it was one bad joke after another for
him all the way through'" (p. 156). And Roy carries on
the family tradition of incompetence. Faced with the
demands of life, he seems to prefer death. He has been
”dying" for almost as long as his son, Theodore, can remem—
ber. Nick (Theodore's nickname), put out with his father's
constant demands on his time, refers to Roy as an artist of
death.

"He's been on the point of death for thirty years, may-
be longer--a specialist," he said, "a specialist in
dying, an artist when it comes to the death-bed sum-
mons, and they're always remarkable for this same lit-
erary flavor. Medicos! Medicos! Where does he get
it? He runs a boardinghouse, you know--strong as a

horse. Dying is just a hobby for him." (p. 38)

Nicolet's innocence is precarious, and as the novel

76

progresses we discover that Nicolet is skeptical of his
own work amongst the faithful of Myron, uncertain whether
he is running £122.h15 congregation and its needs or is
Rooney, and uncertain as well of the adequacy of his own
faith. Every element of Nicolet's life that has previously
been meaningful and fulfilling now seems to be problematic
and charged with anxiety. His wife, Franny, has been dead
for only a year. Her death has placed Nicolet under a
good deal of emotional stress, and the task of raising
their two daughters without her help and counsel is a
large one. Nicolet's relationship with his congregation
is strained, and this strain is taking its toll. His rela-
tionship with his father is obviously deteriorating.
Nicolet is slandered and accused of paganism by the local
newspaper editor whoissjealous of Nicolet's relationship
with Rooney Vail. Nicolet's faith itself is apparently
being tested by the emotional stresses of his situation;
he is tempted by the flesh, by self-pity, and by doubt.
Yet, by the end of the novel, he has not only maintained
but strengthened his faith, and it is clear that one pre-
requisite to his renewed faith is the same kind of inno-
cence described above as important in THE SEASONS'
DIFFERENCE.

Nicolet's innocence involves his ability to recog-
nize those aspects of human life which lead others to de-
spair, or to a kind of death-in-life (e.g., Metzger, Po-

teat, and Roy, Nicolet's father), but not to be overpowered

77
by them, not to allow his own trust in the essential good-
ness of life to be Shaken. Like Peter Cowley of THE SEA—
SONS' DIFFERENCE, Nicolet is able to be lighthearted and
to maintain a childlike joy and spontaneity which cause
some of Myron's citizens to see him as something of a
clown. The irony is that they are not entirely wrong,
that Nicolet is something of a clown, and there is at least
a large comic potential in his situation. AS a man of
faith, Nicolet is involved in the same game of blind man's
buff that Sam suggests as an apprOpriate metaphor of Peter
Cowley's faith in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. Nicolet's
effectiveness as a minister is somewhat dependent on the
lightheartedness and spontaneity that are so large a part
of his clownish personality.
They had eaten the Gospel out of his hand--his own
brand of it, warmed and sweetened by no particular
Skill that he had as a preacher but by some curious
lightness of heart that seemed to be in him, a way
that he had in the pulpit of smiling sometimes as
though he knew beyond all doubt a hilarious secret
which was that the glory that he was proclaiming
either really was, or really was not, true, but that
in either case it was a cause for lightheartedness:
life was a joke too terrible or too wonderful to take
any other way. They ate up anything that he chose to
give them, jolly Saint Nick. (pp. 192-193)
Yet Nicolet's lightheartedness is itself ambiguous. His
innocence is not the result of inexperience; his faith is
tempered by doubt as well as by a sense of modern experi-
ence which acknowledges the darkest possibilities. Be-

neath the clown's painted smile there may be tight lips.

Life may be, after all, "too terrible" to take in any but

 

78
a lighthearted manner.

Nicolet wants some Sign that will release him from
his doubts, some indication (like Peter Cowley's vision)
that human life, problematic as he knows it to be, is
ultimately meaningful. Just as much as Rooney Vail or the
rest of his parishioners, Nicolet wants to know whether
the message he has been bringing to them is true, whether
he can, in good conscience, continue to preach "the best

knowing the worst" (pp. 174-175). Once Nicolet has
successfully resisted the temptation of the flesh (Rooney),
and is well on his way to reconciliation with his father,
Buechner grants him his revelation. Lying in the grass
out behind his father's barn, thinking of the sermon he
wants to preach on the coming Sunday, Nicolet suddenly
feels that something is about to be revealed to him. He
prays for Jesus to come and he expects to hear something
conventional such as "'Feed my sheep'" (p. 177 ) if Jesus
does miraculously appear. But He does not appear. When
Nicolet raises his head he sees that "nothing was happening
except that everything that he could see--the shabby barn,
weeds, orchard--had too much the look of nothing happening,
a tense, self-conscious innocence" (p. 177). Then some-
thing, however slight it seems, does happen.

Two apple branches struck against each other with
the limber clack of wood on wood. That was all--a
tick-tock rattle of branches--but then a fierce lurch
of excitement at what was only daybreak, only the
smell of summer coming, only starting back again for

home, but Oh Jesus, he thought, with a great lump in
his throat and a crazy grin, it was an agony of

79
gladness and beauty falling wild and soft like rain.
Just clack-clack, but praise him, he thought. Praise
him. Maybe all his journeying, he thought, had been
only to bring him here to hear two branches hit each
other twice like that, to see nothing cross the thresh-
old, to hear the dry clack-clack of the world's tongue
at the approach of the approach perhaps of Splendor.
(pp. 177-178)
This ambiguous "clack-clack,” this "approach of the ap-
proach perhaps of Splendor," is enough for Nicolet--more
than enough. We know that Poteat wouldn't have heard it
at all, and Nicolet thinks that Denbigh, a more conven-
tional clergyman than himself, would have heard the Apos-
tle's Creed instead. But Nicolet heard "clack-clack,"
heard God calling to him through the world, and the music
of the Spheres could not have been sweeter.

The ambiguity of Nicolet's innocence, Buechner im-
plies, parallels the necessary ambiguity of the central
concepts of the Christian religion that Nicolet preaches.
The central symbol of Christianity, Christ's crucifixion,
represents a "magnificent defeat,"2 and such Christian con-
cepts as grace, miracle, and salvation have always been
essentially paradoxical. Buechner is obviously not inter-
ested in explaining away what he dramatizes as the essen—
tially mysterious nature of human experience; his refusal
to deny the ambiguities of Nicolet's innocence or of his
peculiar moment of grace lends power to the themes of won-
der and innocence in THE FINAL BEAST.

The theme of innocence receives its most extensive

treatment by Buechner in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK. The

80

Ringkopings' journey to Strasser's sanctuary becomes no
less than a journey to discover the Significance of lost
innocence; it poses the question of what those who have
lost their innocence can learn from those who have not.
The four major characters, Peter, Nels, Tommy, and Tip,
are all guilty of not knowing themselves very well, nor
anyone else. In varying degrees, they have all failed in
their human relationships. They are all "innocent" in the
sense in which the word implies absence or incompletion.
Their innocence tends to be negative; it prevents them from
living well rather than fostering their well-being.

Peter's innocence is the innocence of the dreamer.
He has spent a large portion of his eighty years preoccu-
pied with his notion that at some time during his life he
might have a moment of pure metaphysical insight. He hOpes
to find a loose corner of the air and to tear it back to
find, well, he does not know exactly what, "'something
like fire'" (p. 29) perhaps. He has written a book in
which he described those moments in his life when he came
closest to his dreamed-of vision. They were moments when
he saw, or thought he saw, the ghosts of ShakeSpeare and
of Gloriana, the Faerie Queen. But Buechner is not as
sympathetic to Peter Ringkoping's visions as he was to
Peter Cowley's, in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, nor as he was
to Nicolet's crazy moment of grace in THE FINAL BEAST.
These three characters are unquestionably involved in

similar kinds of experiences; even the ambiguities of

81

these experiences are similar. In Peter Ringkoping's case,
the visions may be ”either the product or the discovery of
his imagination," (p. 98) and even his book on the subject
never makes it "clear whether he was writing autobiography
or fairy tale” (p. 54). But the result of these metaphysi-
cal yearnings and experiences is not the same for these
three characters: Peter Cowley's visions lead him to
dedicate himself to teaching and helping those near him
who most need the kind of insight he might be able to pro—
vide them; Theodore Nicolet's experience leads him to re-
affirm his dedication to his faith, his church, his congre-
gation; Peter RingkOping's "ghosts" lead him into isolation
not only from peOple generally but from his own family.
The isolated, uncommitted life is not one of which Buechner
wholly approves, however tempting it might be. Peter Ring-
koping is a sympathetic character, and the possibilities
that his visions represent uphold Buechner's previous re-
jection of modernism and his themes of wonder and innocence.
But Peter's journey to Strasser's colony of innocents
teaches Peter that he has not been a good father nor a good
husband. Only when he realizes this, only when he begins
to involve his life with the lives of others, does Buechner
suggest that he is forgiven.

Tommy's innocence is evident in his perpetual clown—
ing and in his avoidance of responsibility. He is an absen-
tee father and husband, or might as well be. He apparently

feels that he is entirely unloved, and he is unloving in

82
return. The reasons for Tommy's clowning are not made
clear until Tommy thinks of a boyhood friend, Bill Barnum,
who was, "unlike Tommy, a natural clown. He used no props,
did it all by making everything seem larger than life"
(p. 90). Barnum was a Spontaneous fellow, full of life
and vitality, who might have been able to provide Tommy
with some direction in the absence of any from his father.
"If Bill Barnum had lived, things might have been differ-
ent. Bill Barnum had told him about sex--maybe he would
have told him other things" (p. 91). Tommy's life not only
lacks direction, but the only person he ever knew who
seemed able to live life meaningfully, to confront the dark-
ness, found his final victory Simply in not giving in.tx>the
darkness. In a passage suggestive of some of the ideas we
associate with the waste land, Tommy remembers Bill BarnumE;
drowning.
Puffing and hooting, Bill Barnum had clambered to the
top of the high wall and stood there against the Sky
with the starlight on his shoulders. With his two
fists he pounded an ape-man vibrato out of his hair-
less chest, then leaped feet first, knees jack-knifed,
arms Spread, into the night, into the depths of the
quarry where in prehistoric shapes, bearded with rust
and rot, the old machinery craned up to make a terrible
mess of that great mess of a boy. (p. 92)

In the waste land, water is for drowning. Tommy sees
his own clowning as similar to Barnum's drowning. "Play it
for laughs. And when they came at you with their demands
to be a man, a husband, . . . let them have it in the eye

with your feather duster or a squirt from your trick bou-

tonniere. There were more ways than one of drowning" Q3.93)

83
Tommy, the clown, wears several masks to disguise what is
actually the darkest interpretation of human experience
in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK. In the pilgrim village, just
before nightfall and darkness, Tommy glances around at his
relatives, Strasser, the mongols, and thinks
there was nothing ever given back that darkness took.
They had, each one, an arrow through the head and wore
a set of monster teeth fixed in a skull that flesh
could not disguise for long. . . . There was no winning
against the dark except as for a moment Bill Barnum had
won by leaping into it before it had a chance to leap
at him, two hundred pimpled pounds razzing it out of at
least the dignity of victory. (P. 242)
Finally, after the evening meeting of the inhabitants and
the visitors in Strasser's village, Tommy is told that he,
too, is loved. Shortly after this, it occurs to Tommy
"that he could tell them nothing about the darkness that
they did not already know, and if he had any business
there . . . it was to hold his tongue for once” (p. 243).
Nels is clearly an inhabitant of the waste land.
He is a bachelor and apparently has nothing to do with wo-
men. He is Dean of Students at a boys' school, and his
life there is dominated by pettiness, sterility, and fear.
He attempts to deal with the emptiness of his life by
living in a very orderly manner; he is a man of schedules,
dominated by the clock, by routine, by his job. He has a
recurrent dream of dying, unnoticed, in a hospital room,
surrounded by strangers and sterility. His fear of death

has turned him into a hypochondriac, constantly worried

about his heart. But Nels's heart trouble is metaphoric

84
rather than literal or physical. He is inordinately self—
concerned, and he has failed to love others. He thinks of
himself as a tough Dean who is helping to turn boys into
young men by being authoritarian and demanding. He disap-
proves of the essentially friendly approach to the students
of Penrose, the English teacher, whom he sees as a "bleeding
heart." On the way to Strasser's, Nels runs over a cat
when he could easily have avoided doing so, and this image
of repressed violence and frustration Speaks volumes about
the Dean. Eventually, when he is informed of the suicide
of a student he was going to expel from school, Nels be-
gins to face himself more honestly and to put his own fears
of death to rest.

Tip is the most conventionally innocent of the four
major characters. He is a dreamer, like his grandfather,
and his dreaminess is compounded by his sexual innocence
and his adolescence. The idealized object of Tip's dreams
is not, however, aS insubstantial as Peter's ghosts; Tip is
in love with Libba Vann. He is too shy to tell her of his
love. Instead, he writes her an interminable letter, that
he will probably never mail, telling her about his most
private thoughts and feelings. Tip feels isolated from
his parents, and he is drawn to his grandfather's views of
our general isolation from one another. Tip imagines all
human beings

moving around through Space like those contraptions

that they used for exploring the bottom of the sea,
in each of which, all by himself, a person sits

85

looking out of his porthole and manipulating from

within those grapples and feelers that make contact

with a world with which he can never make direct con-

tact himself. . . . He thought that . . . in even

the most intimate embrace that he might contrive with

a fellow creature, the sound that they would make . ,

would be only the clanking of bathyspheres. (pp. 56-57)
When he is home from college, Tip Spends most of his time
with his grandfather up on Tinmouth Mountain in the old
barn that Peter has converted into a used book store.
Tip's mother complains that he doesn't seem to know where
home is any more, and when Tip thinks about what his motive
for the journey to Strasser's might be, he realizes that
his ”reason for going was perhaps no more than just that--
to find out where home was" (p. 67).

For each sojourner, the journey to Strasser's

colony of innocents produces greater self-awareness. In
this peculiar place, at the end of their journey, the
major characters are confronted by innocence. Strasser
describes the mongols as human beings ”'in whom heredity
has been almost entirely excluded. . . . You and I, we
look like father, like mother. There is a family look
about us. . . . But withtflmamongol, no. He never looks
like his parents. He is only like other mongols'" (p. 216k
Since mongols do not reproduce themselves, Strasser main-
tains that modern history itself is somehow responsible
for their increasing numbers. He maintains that before
1900 there was very little mongolism; "'it is a phenome-

non that seems to have appeared only Since the start of

this century'" (p. 216). The innocence of the mongols is

86
very complete. "'There is sex, for instance. They seem
to make no distinction between male and female. All are
very much alike to them, and everything that is human they
love. Also they are themselves without sexual ripeness'"
(pp. 216-217). Added to the above there is the fact that
the "'mongol has no fear of death. He has no knowledge of
it apparently, as we have, always, off somewhere in the
back of the head'” (p. 217). The mongols are all very
tender-hearted and very bashful, and they consider every-
one their friend. This prompts Peter to suggest that the
mongol lives in Paradise; Strasser reSpondS, "'Or Paradise
in him,'" (p. 217) and Tommy asks where he can Sign up.
Strasser's response to Tommy underlines the innocence of
the mongols and strongly suggests their didactic function
in this particular novel. Strasser says it is too late
for us and that this ”'iS why mongols have started being
born, I think. They are messages to us from a world that
we've lost'" (p. 218). The mongols, peculiarly less than
fully human, are complemented in the village by fellow vil-
lagers, like Bonzo, who are strangely too human. Bonzo is
"too human for his own good. He is always crying be-
cause he is naked to the wind. The lachrymae rerum,
you see . . . how sometimes you will see a certain
kind of face in a crowd, maybe just a pair of old
shoes forgotten in a closet, and suddenly you want to
weep. Only to Bonzo it is lachiymae mundi. Life it-
self is the old Shoes, the face. To him we must say,
'come and be only as human as we are. . . . Be like
the rest of us, and do not feel so much.’ And to us
he also is saying something. I think that to us he is

maybe a message from a world we have not yet reached,
a world where each stands naked to the other's pain.”

(p. 219)

 

 

87
In between the "'world that we've lost'" and the "'world
we have not yet reached,'" there is the present. In the
present there is something to learn from these examples
of extreme innocence which the world itself, in dire need,
seems to beget. It can best be illustrated by what Stras-

ser says we know about helping the victim of a grand mal

 

seizure; ”'one way to help is to take him in your arms

and hug him as tightly as you can while he struggles
with his demon . . . locked in each other's arms
against death, [you] make this little bond of life'"

(pp. 213-214).

However indiscriminate and however much less or more
than human Strasser's villagers might be, they are capable
of loving everything human. This excessive, indiscrimi-
nate love of the villagers finds its counterpoint in the
novel's major characters: Nels has been able to love only
himself, and not very successfully; Tommy's marriage has
become an empty formality; Peter has isolated himself from
others for as long as he can remember; Tip is Struggling
to learn how to deal with his love for Libba Vann. Each
of these characters needs to discover that he has the
ability to change his life, and that changes for the better
will depend largely upon relationships to others.

The innocence that Joey and Bonzo represent is an
innocence that is not available to the RingkOpingS. Their
world is the problematic world of human isolation which

has caused all of them much pain. This is not to say that

88
THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK discounts the theme of wonder
evident in so many of Buechner's works. In fact, the allu-
sions to THE WIZARD OF 02 and to Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST
reinforce an atmosphere of enchantment and innocence which
make it the most idyllic of Buechner's novels. But Stras-
ser tells a little joke about mankind that keeps the
themes of wonder and innocence in a problematic perSpec-
tive: "'Man, I say, is the missing link between the ape
and the human being'" (p. 175). We are neither capable
of loving everyone nor of being entirely Open to each
other's pain, yet the innocence of Strasser's villagers
reminds us that we can do something; we can try to love
one another, however imperfectly. In THE ENTRANCE TO POR-
LOCK, as in THE WIZARD OF OZ, the emphasis is on the in-
dividual's responsibility, and the final magic is that
there is no magic.

In the trilogy, LION COUNTRY, OPEN HEART, and LOVE
FEAST, the theme of innocence is embodied in two charac-
ters: Leo Bebb and his adopted daughter, Sharon. Neither
of these characters iS unequivocally innocent. In fact,
Buechner emphasizes the ways in which they are not inno-
cent. Many of Bebb's activities are morally and legally
questionable: conning wealth; exposing himself to chil-
dren; selling mail-order diplomas; Sponsoring love feasts;
confusing temporal and divine love; and failing to make
his marriage to Lucille successful. Yet, as noted earlier,

Bebb might be the real thing, a truly religious man, a

89
saint masquerading as a clown and a pervert. Bebb's inno-
cence is the innocence of the naif, the comic character so
true to his own view of the world that he seems honest and
appealing even when his views and actions are diametrically
opposed to those of the world at large. Since Leo's inno-
cence ultimately produces the same results as Peter Cow-
ley's or Theodore Nicolet's, an ability to affirm life,
to keep faith, even though he understands fully how prob-
lematic human experience is, there is little need to de-
tail his innocence any further here. It is interesting to
note, however, how far Buechner has come by the time he
introduces Leo Bebb. No longer are the outrageous possi-
bilities of Buechner's major themes cautiously embodied in
characters who are understood to be safe,.sane, or conven-
tional in all ways other than their peculiar moments of
grace. In Leo Bebb, Buechner's audacity is reflected in
every element of the character himself. Bebb's "radical
innocence" seems to be the objective correlative of Buech-
ner's most consistent concerns. Bebb is the word made
flesh.

With Sharon, Bebb's adOpted daughter, the theme of
innocence is given an explicitly sexual context. Antonio
Parr, the narrator of the trilogy, is somewhat overwhelmed
by Sharon. In direct contrast to the polite, refined, in-
tellectual Ellie Pierce (the New Yorker Tony had been see-
ing on and off and thought he might be in love with),

Sharon is sensual, direct, even a little vulgar. She

90
dresses in ways that allow her to flaunt her sexuality,
and Antonio is overcome by her wiles. In LION COUNTRY,
he begins an affair with her and eventually marries her;
in OPEN HEART, Sharon is unfaithful to him with his own
nephew; in LOVE FEAST, they separate and painfully work
their way back together. Yet Sharon seems innocent all
along, even in adultery. She treats sex as a kind of natu-
ral appetite, easy to satisfy and not really of much mo-
ment. When she and Tony first make love, in the Salaman-
der Motel, she tells him that it isn't the first time for
her and it won't be her last time either. When she begins
regularly making love to Tony's nephew, she does so very
casually and with no apparent feelings of guilt or shame,
as if sex were the same to her as to the pair of lions She
and Leo and Tony had observed COpulating in the sunshine
in Lion Country. Sharon is an almost purely physical
character, uncomplicated by mind. Her responses are direct
and Spontaneous. She is as confident, as self-assured a
character as any Buechner has created. Yet, however fas-
cinated he might be by Sharon, Buechner does not wholly ap-
prove of her. Antonio approaches Sharon and falls in love
with her with the wit and the playfulness of John Donne's
love sonnets always in the back of his English-teacher's
mind. When Sharon thinks of their love, she thinks of
slick, popular songs, such as "Chantilly Lace," in which
Big Bopper sings about feeling "all loose/like a long-

necked goose" (LC p. 117) when he sees the wiggle in his

91
honey's walk and hears the giggle in her talk. Antonio
says many times that ”Sharon” is a dime-store name; it
seems She also has a dime-store sensibility.

It is tempting to want to see life as Simply as
Sharon does, and this is surely one of the things that
draws Antonio to her. But Sharon's sensuality is finally
insufficient. Sharon's innocence, unlike that of a Peter
Cowley or a Theodore Nicolet, or even a Leo Bebb, tends
to restrict the possibility of wonder rather than enhance
it. Sharon is so self-possessed, so invulnerable, that we
get the impression that she would not be surprised by any-
thing. Buechner, it seems, would prefer to see us sur-

prised by everything.

92
NOTES--Chapter II

1Raymond M. Olderman, BEYOND THE WASTE LAND: A STUDY
OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL IN THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES (New Haven,
1972), p. 10.

2The title of Buechner's first collection of reli-
gious meditations is THE MAGNIFICENT DEFEAT. It was pub-
lished by The Seabury Press in 1966.

III

THE THEME OF TRANSFORMATION

If wonder is the response to life Buechner most ap-
proves and innocence is often a prerequisite to wonder,
transformation would seem to be the means by which both
wonder and innocence are tested and justified. The theme
of transformation involves the changes in a character's
"self," the causes of these changes, and some sense of
their significance. In all of his novels, for example,
Buechner is concerned with the ways in which people change
as they age. One of the most Striking examples of this
concern appears in THE FINAL BEAST when Nicolet looks at
his daughters and imagines them in their old age; he sees
in their youthful faces signs of all the different faces
they will ever have, all the different selves they will
ever be. In THE ALPHABET OF GRACE, the concern appears
very directly:

Beneath the face I am a family plot. All the people

I have ever been are buried there--the bouncing boy,
his mother's pride; the pimply boy and secret sensual-
ist; the reluctant infantryman; the beholder at dawn
through hospital plate-glass of his firstborn child.
.All these selves I was I am no longer, not even the
bodies they wore are my body any longer, and although
when I try, I can remember scraps and pieces about
them, I can no longer remember what it felt like to
live inside their Skin. Yet they live inside my skin

to this day . . . and although I am not the same as
they, I am not different either because their having

93

94

been then is responsible for my being now.1
This process of transformation is caused partly by the mere
passing of time; time acts on the stage of the self and
transforms it. But the physical self is also the roadmap
of the metaphysical, indicating possible directions taken
or yet to take as well as various dead ends. The scale of
this transformation varies widely from slight, hardly per-
ceptible, changes in a character up to and including death,
the inevitable transformation.

Buechner acknowledges change as one of the few con-
stants in human life. AS an individual changes, as he is
transformed by the world around him, he in turn transforms
that world and other people in it. The new self renews
other selves in turn.

I am a necrOpoliS. Fathers and mothers, brothers and
cousins and uncles, teachers, lovers, friends, all
these invisibles manifest themselves in my visibleness.
Their voices speak in me, and I catch myself sometimes
Speaking in their voices.
Transformation is a rough term to describe this subtle
and constant process whereby the characters in Buechner's
novels are affected by their world and its inhabitants and
affect them in turn. Ultimately, it is one of Buechner's
subtlest themes. It is also essentially mystical rather
than logical. Buechner seems to maintain through his theme
of transformation that we must allow for the possibility,

as we see it in Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground,"

that two plus two may equal five. The ultimate cause

95

behind the series of transformations that constitute a
human life is as unknowable as the "reason" for life it-
self. But one thing is obvious; Buechner believes that the
transformations of human life, the many selves we become,
are the very stuff of novels, and in his novels he examines,
dramatizes, and celebrates an impressive variety of charac-
ters and their transformations, selves and changes in self.

But the theme of transformation encompasses more than
the above; it takes many different forms in Buechner's
novels, as do the themes of wonder and innocence. The gen-
eral function of the theme is, however, fairly clear; trans-
formation works as the agent or catalyst of Spiritual per-
ception in Buechner's characters. It transforms the harsh-
est aspects of modern life and makes them bearable. Buech-
ner's many attempts to connect the ordinary with the ex-
traordinary, the profane with the sacred, the mundane with
the wonderful, involve transformations in characters that
allow them, however temporarily in some cases, to be aware
of metaphysical implications in this all too physical exis-
tence. Peter Cowley's visions in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE,
Nicolet's moment of grace in THE FINAL BEAST, and Peter
RingkOping's mystical moments in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK
are a few obvious examples.

Since the ability to love also functions as an agent
of transformation in Buechner's novels, the emphasis on the
success or failure of interpersonal relationships in his

novels is normally accompanied by the theme of

96
transformation. Like the themes of wonder and innocence,
the theme of transformation is more important, more success-
fully realized in the lives of the characters in Buechner's
later novels. But even in his first, most modern novels,
the theme of transformation is Significant.

In A LONG DAY'S DYING, transformation exists as a
series of hopeful possibilities none of which is very fully
realized in the novel. AS noted earlier, the lives of all
the major characters except Maroo are characterized by a
sense of purposelessness, a sense of life as a metaphysical
vacuum. This is particularly true of Tristram Bone, and
he is the most articulate Spokesman of this position in the
novel. His desire to fill the vacuum of his life, to make
sense of things, to transform his life, is his most
dominant characteristic.

He felt there should be a reliable witness, impartial
as a mirror, to report with overwhelming accuracy each
detail . . . of all his experience, of Tristram Bone
involved with actuality. A reliable witness, impar-
tial as a mirror but able to retain what it reflected,
having seen everything. (p. 26)

This witness would certify Bone's existence for him
much as the movies do for Binx, the protagonist of Walker
Percy's THE MOVIEGOER.3 The search for such a witness, for
relief from his isolation, for transformation, is built in
to the structure of A LONG DAY'S DYING through its plot,
its characterization, its major allusions. It takes essen-

tially two forms, and they are the most typical forms that

the theme of transformation takes in Buechner's other

97
novels as well: the symbolic and the interpersonal. Sym-
bolically, there are three possible witnesses Bone either
encounters or uses in his search for understanding, for a
sense of significance in his life.

There is a wooden statue of a saint, the representa-
tive of a Christian view of life which Bone finds attrac-
tive and would apparently like to believe. In fact, Buech-
ner often describes Bone as a rather ponderous priest in
love with ceremony:

for, whenever he found himself surrounded by the ap-
purtenances of ceremony, even the earlier ceremony
that day of the barber shop, its mirror and acolyte,
his immensity appeared to him to assume a new and
peculiar appropriateness that permitted him to wear
it with tremendous dignity as a kind of alb or
vestment. (pp. 23-24)
But if Bone is a priest at all, he is finally a kind of
mock-priest, a thoroughly modern man for whom the chance
encounter with a wooden statue of a saint, however it
might remind him of his need for a greater sense of signi-
ficance in his life, can only be, finally, embarrassing,
even humiliating. Tristram somehow manages to get his
hand caught between the statue's hand and its chest. Tris-
tram's response to this moment of his own clumsiness
clearly illustrates the ambiguity of Bone's position yis_s
yis traditional Christianity as a possible source of greaunr
meaning, of transformation, in his life. Initially embar-
rassed and humiliated, he hates the wooden figure and wants

to "kick and deface it" (p. 25). Then he kneels before it

wishing to "explain matters more fully to the saint" (p.26).

98

Ultimately the entire scene seems ludicrous and pathetic.

Then there is the major allusion of the novel, the
allusion to the story of Procne and Philomela: the compli-
cations of these sisters' relationships to Tereus, the tap-
estry that tongueless Philomela weaves to tell Procne of
Tereus's infidelity and cruelty, their terrible revenge on
him and his consequent pursuit of them, all of which ends
in the miraculous answer to the sisters' prayers, the
transformation of all three into birds, "'nightingale,
a sparrow, and a hawk . . . [which] fly screaming into the
blue sky'" (p. 83). In the pagan myth, as in Christian tra-
dition, there is relief for and from human suffering; there
is transformation; there is a connection between the human
and the divine. That it is just such a connection that
Tristram is searching for is made clear by Buechner's re-
peated allusions to the Philomela story in the novel.
Tristram tries to tell Elizabeth of his love for her and
curiously winds up telling her a confused version of the
Philomela story instead, thereby entirely baffling her.
Later, the story is told correctly and in great length by
Motley when he presents a lecture on the contemporary
Significance of myth. In case this still isn't enough,
Buechner allows Tristram the appropriate avocation of sup-
porting an aviary, and he suffuses the entire novel with
imagery of flight. The many parallels between the myth
and the actions and characters of Buechner's novel have

already received ample attention.' Here it should be

99
sufficient to note that the plenary existence of the char-
acters in the myth is denied to all but one (Marco) of the
characters in Buechner's modern adaptation of the myth.
Tristram's desire for an explanation of the significance
of things, for just such a clue to the meaning of his life
as Philomela's tapestry provided Procne, remains unful-
filled.

The third possible symbolic witness Bone encounters
is a tapestry, actually a series of tapeStries, hanging in
the Cloisters in New York City where Bone asks Paul Steit-
ler to meet him so that they can discuss what happened be-
tween Paul, Leander, and Elizabeth on the evening of Mot-
ley's lecture at the university. What actually happened
was that Paul and Elizabeth made love to one another. But
when Tristram asks Elizabeth about what happened, She lies
to him and suggests that Steitler's amorous interests were
directed at her son, Leander, not at her. Bone wants to
protect Leander and thus the conference with Steitler.

The result of this meeting is an understanding on the part
of both men that Elizabeth had lied and perpetrated much
confusion and misunderstanding. More to the point here,
however, is Steitler's response to Bone's choice of a set-
ting for their meeting: a room filled with symbolically
storied tapestries.

"All I want to know," continued Steitler, indicating

the tapestries with a gesture, "is whether I'm to take

all this as real significant and symbolic. If the

unicorn is here to help, I'd like to know about it
because I tend to bridle at this sort of thing.

100

There seems to me a kind of arrogance in thinking life

so easy that you've only got to stOp Short for a mo-

ment, keep your eyes peeled, look sharp after years of

indifference, and find right around you, in these tap-

estries for instance, the answer to most everything.

I don't think things work that way; we're never going

to have things so good, Mr. Bone." (PP. 198-199)
Bone's desire for a reliable witness, for a sensible over-
view of life as well as a skeleton key to it, is represenflxi
by his choice of the room filled with the unicorn tapes-
tries in the Cloisters. Steitler has clearly discerned
Bone's desire for transformation expressing itself in his
love for the ceremonial, the ritualistic, the symbolic.

Bone suggests that Steitler is being unjust to him

in indicating that his reSponses to life are overly simple.
Surely Steitler is unjust, and there is irony in the fact
that Bone is actually the major spokesman in A LONG DAY'S
DYING for a problematic interpretation of existence, the
very position Steitler sees himself as representing, and
toward which he accuses Bone of being insensitive. Bone's
attraction to the wooden saint, to the pagan myth, to the
subtle tapestries, is caused by his own sense of the prob-
lematic nature of modern life, and his consequent need of
transformation. They represent views of human existence
that are unavailable to Bone since he knows that they are,
however beautiful, antiquated. It is precisely their un-
availability that draws Tristram to them. He would of
course like to discover in them some key to an understand-

ing of contemporary life that would be equally comprehen-

sive and invigorating. But through his experience with

101

these witnesses of the past, Tristram is always left with
the sad contrast between the past and the present: His
symbolic witnesses fail him. Transformation remains at
best a hOpeful possibility for him rather than an actuality.

Other possible sources of witnessing and of transfor-
mation in Bone's life are his interpersonal relationships.
He directly refers to Emma, his maid, and to Simon, his
monkey, (Simon is treated as if he were a person) in this
context. "In the end they were, the two of them, his most
reliable witnesses, he thought, but of the pair it was
Simon that he most trusted and loved" (p. 237). As his
maid, Emma is privy to many homely details of Bone's life
that no one else could know, yet there is really nothing
in the novel to suggest that she understands him; his hOpe
that she might be a reliable witness is largely the result
of Bone's vanity. Nothing ever really comes of their rela-
tionship. Tristram's notion that his monkey might be such
a witness is difficult to explain realistically since the
monkey, however well he might be able to mimic his master,
is bound to be insufficient for the formidable task of wit-
ness. Symbolically, an explanation of Simon's significance
is possible, even if it does not seem to be entirely satis-
factory. Simon's name is suggestive of the Sin of simony,
of "buying or selling ecclesiastical preferments or bene-
fices."4 Simon represents Tristram's desire to become
truly priestly. But Tristram's church remains the barber

shop of the opening scenes where Tristram, the mock-priest,

102
pontificates on love. Simon functions as a symbolic denial
of the possibility of transformation for Tristram, and in
keeping with this function Simon, a grotesque alter-ego,
mimics Tristram's gesture of suicidal despair (Tristram,
toying with the idea of suicide, pulls the blunt edge of a
straight razor across his throat) and slits his throat with
his master's razor. Exit monkey and excess symbolic
baggage.

The greatest single possibility of transformation in
Bone's life resides in his love for Elizabeth. He hOpes
that she can invest his life with greater meaning and
thereby transform him into a new being. It is very logi-
cal, then, that when he tries to tell Elizabeth of his
love he does so via the sophisticated conceit of applying
the Philomela story to their own situation and suggesting
that their lives are in need of transformation. His notion
is apparently that mutual love might bring this about. But
Elizabeth does not even understand what Tristram is saying.
Besides, she does not love him. Bone is finally, as he
admits to Steitler, his own most reliable witness. Both
the symbolic and the interpersonal possibilities for trans-
formation fail Tristram Bone. Ultimately he is stuck in
the cage of his own self. His life, like the lives of so
many characters in this novel, remains essentially static.

The transformation scene from the Philomela story
does have its parallel in A LONG DAY'S DYING, but it is

associated not with new life and escape, but with death.

103

Maroo functions throughout the novel as its moral center,
the only character who has been capable of living a pur-
poseful life and the character to whom many of the others
turn in their purposelessness for guidance and consolation.
Even Steitler, resident modernist at the university, is
struck by her moral force when he reads a letter She has
written to her grandson, Leander. In fact, in a peculiar
inversion of the Philomela myth, Leander (who would be Itys
in the myth) is saved from the destructive forces around
him rather than sacrificed as Itys is in the myth. This
salvation is attributed to Maroo whose letters to him have
been intended to preserve his innocence and keep him safe.
Her power and wisdom parallel those of the gods in the
Philomela story. It is the death of this wisdom, this
source of transformation, that ends the novel and to which
the title refers. Maroo's death itself is described in
terms of the transformation and flight of the Philomela
story:

Her head sank more deeply into the pillows while the

rushing noise as of wind or many wings grew stronger,

pierced here and there by wordless exclamations, mur-

murs and cries, lonely and keen like the cries of

birds . . . circling still, wings spread, around,

around, through what appeared a sky high, high and

blue above. (p. 266)
If it is successful, transformation makes the harshest as-
pects of Buechner's characters' lives more bearable; it al-
lows them to recognize the darkness of their times at the

same time that they refuse to give in to it; it provides a

context that relieves the apparent or immediate

104
difficulties of their lives. Maroo's life was just such a
transformed life, but her death represents the disappear-
ance from the other characters' lives of the only viable
model of transformation in the novel, the only character
capable of belief or love.

The Spectrum of possible transformation is more com-
plete in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, ranging from children so
innocent that they have no need of transformation to Lun-
drigan, who thinks he is so mature that he is beyond the
need of transformation. Both Sam and Sara Dunn pursue sym-
bolic forms of transformation; Sara turns to her sculpting,
to the creation of works of art, and Sam turns to his sev-
enteenth-century English poetry, to the contemplation of
works of art, for a sense of Significance and consolation.
Their lives are extremely modern, and their need to relieve
this modernity of its vitiating consequences is very clear.
Julie McMoon, a widow whose husband committed suicide,
feels that her life is entirely empty. She deSperately
needs transformation, but she is so afraid that it is not
available that she will not venture to find out. Peter
Cowley has a vision and finds himself transformed by it and
by his renewed dedication to the symbolic system of ideas
it represents--Christianity. Dr. Thomas Lavender is also
dedicated to Christianity as a source of transformation,
but his transformation seems to have gone awry. As an an-

swer to the problematic nature of modern life, Lavender

105
believes in innocence, in recapturing childlike innocence
in order to respond to life freshly, spontaneously. But
his vision of a world in which childlike innocence is uni-
versally reborn is itself puerile. Lavender's vision of
an ideal world of childlike innocence is not a realistic
means of coping with the problematic elements of existence;
it is a fanatic's impossible vision of a world he would
prefer to the real world. The prOper function of transfor-
mation is not to allow for escape from the problematic
world, but to allow for living in it more fully. This
brings us to the "Uglies,” Harry Fogg and Rufus Este, whose
adolescent problems illustrate more clearly than any of
the other characters in this novel what has been only im-
plicit in the comments on the theme of transformation until
now: the paramount importance of the search for self, for
a sense of identity, to the theme of transformation in
Buechner's novels.

Rufus and Harry are both fourteen years old. They
occupy that treacherous ground between the end of childhood
and the beginning of adulthood called adolescence. Their
budding sexuality and their increased interest in the world
around them cut them off from the other children in the
novel, all of whom are younger than they. But they are
still, after all, children, so they are cut off from the
adults of the novel as well. In one another they find the
consolation of mutually shared difficulty. Both boys have

had experiences which suggest that the world and life are

106

not as pleasant as they might like them to be; both boys
are beginning to realize that life has its darker side,
and that they need to be able to face and to deal with it.
They need transformation of some kind. They discuss the
first "horrible thing" (p. 48) that ever happened to each
of them. Harry tells Rufus about killing a sick and crip-
pled robin by squeezing it to death in a brown paper enve-
IOpe. Rufus tells Harry about finding a robin's egg, fro-
zen solid, with a little, stiff leg sticking out of it.
Agreeing that these experiences are very ugly and represent
a type of experience they will face more and more, the boys
decide to call themselves "the Uglies!" (p. 50) Their
friendship provides each of them with a stay against lone-
liness and allows them to begin to define themselves as
distinct individuals.

"Uglies are so lonely," said Rufus. "An Ugly is an

island. So is a person."
"But two Uglies are an island whereas two people
are two islands. That's the difference." (p. 51)
The sometimes painful business of growing up, of

individuation, of having to learn to face the ugliness,
the loneliness, the difficulty of human life, involves
constant transformation in that it involves constant change
as well as the perpetual need to understand and to COpe
with that change. Rufus and Harry are quite deliberate in
their attempts to deal with the darker side of human exis-

tence which they are beginning to see as one of the duties

of maturity.

107

When confronted with something broken, helpless, hid-

eous or . . . dead, there was no looking vaguely away,

no furtive stare and pretense then of blindness, but

rather, the direct inspection, the articulated ob-

servation. (p. 57)
Through the struggles toward maturity of Rufus and Harry,
Buechner implies that the more highly developed the defi-
nition of self becomes, the greater the loneliness. The
price of maturity, of individuation, is an increased sense
of loneliness because the essential assumptions of modern-
ity rob the individual of a sense of the Significance of
self by cutting the self adrift from the major sources of
meaning, such as godhead, nature, or community, which pre-
viously helped to define the self. At the same time that
it undercuts the significance of the self, however, moder-
nity also suggests that the self is perhaps the only real-
ity; it emphasizes the essential subjectivity of human ex-
perience and the essential uniqueness of each person. The
result is a type of solipsism that Buechner presents as an
emotional and psychological dead-end.

Ultimately, the problem for the Uglies is to recog-
nize that the loneliness and confusion which they believe
is peculiar to themselves is actually a general part of
adult human experience. By the end of the novel, the
Uglies have realized that the distinctions they have in-
sisted upon between Uglies and People do not really exist.

"We know, of course," Harry continued at last,
"what an Ugly is "
”Of course."

"But I've decided now that I also know what a
Person is."

108
”Ah," said Rufus, "that has always puzzled me."
"I think a Person is just an Ugly who doesn't know

he's an Ugly." (p. 296)
Harry and Rufus find some transformation in their relation-
ship to one another. Having known and trusted one another,
both have been better able to deal with the harsher as-
pects of their initiation into greater and greater maturity.
Each passing year will bring Rufus and Harry closer to the
kinds of difficulties their elders know; the novel's title
itself seems to refer to aging and to the increasing need
for transformation as death approaches. Yet the problems
of the young and the old in this novel seem to differ more
in degree than in kind. All alike are faced with identity
problems, Sam and Sara at a different level than Rufus and
Harry, but the problems are essentially the same. Even
death, a problem which adults tend not to associate with
children, is a problem faced by the young in their own in-
direct way. When the children of this novel play, their
games might easily represent the kind of perpetual trans-
formation which Buechner sees as representative of the
continuum of life. All of the games the children play are
ultimately one game that has

neither a beginning nor any end. . . . Roles changed,

and today's aged beggar might be day after tomorrow's

most reckless young aviator, the afternoon's tyrant

might become the object of the evening's tyranny, but

a curiously consistent atmOSphere prevailed, a sameness

of intensity and direction, that fused all personages

and events, however diverse, into a single, panoramic

legend. (p. 288)

Aging, suffering, and death are the result of "the

109
penalty of Adam/The seasons' difference,"5 and they in-
tensify the problems of identity in an age which stresses
the isolation and the uniqueness of the self, as ours does.
We find at least a partial answer to the problem in Rufus
and Harry's realization that even though they are alone,
their aloneness is itself a common denominator which brings
them together and ultimately suggests that their relation-
ships to other people are important as well. In our common
aloneness we still have one another and our lives are "how-
ever diverse . . . a single panoramic legend" (p. 288).
But this insight belongs essentially to the implied author
of THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE and to its narrator. As sug-
gested earlier, the kind of transformation it represents
remains largely unavailable to the majority of the charac-
ters in this novel other than Peter Cowley.

In THE RETURN OF ANSEL GIBBS, the theme of transfor-
mation is present primarily in the interpersonal relation-
ships of the novel's major characters. Ansel's daughter,
Anne, falls in love and Spends much of her spare time try-
ing to help the poor in Harlem. Kuykendall is a constant
reminder to all of the novel's major characters of their
moral Obligations to one another. Ansel, himself, re-
establishes several human relationships which he has al-
lowed to languish. The novel begins with Ansel's return
to public life consequent upon his realization that the
private, luxurious, secluded life he has been living (it

continues to tempt him until the novel's end) is somehow

110
not enough. Although he is not certain that getting in-
volved in national politics will do much good (Ansel is too
conscious of ambiguity to be certain), he finally decides
that he must at least try. If nothing else, Gibbs's deci-
sion to return to an active public life provides him the
opportunities he needs to straighten out the major inter-
personal relationships of his life.

By the end of the novel, Ansel has begun to get to
know and to love his daughter again. He has also begun to
deal directly with his feelings of guilt over the suicide
of a former close friend, Rudy Tripp. Ansel's isolation,
his feelings of guilt, and his sense of the paralysis of
modern life are all overcome by his return. Yet it is ob-
vious that Gibbs's return to public life is a less signifi-
cant issue in this novel than his return to meaningful re-
lationships with others. We can only guess whether or not
Ansel's political future holds much hope for the country
or for him. We can be certain, however, that the future
of Ansel's most important interpersonal relationships is
a hOpeful one. Therein lies the transformation that
Buechner offers Ansel Gibbs.

All of the major elements of the theme of transfor-
mation, its emphasis on the self, its concern with inter-
personal and symbolic means of making the harshest elements
of modern life bearable, and finally, by implication, its
emphasis on the celebration or affirmation of life, are

combined in THE FINAL BEAST. Here, once again, Buechner's

lll
strategy is to juxtapose characters whose lives are trans-
formed with those whose lives remain untransformed, i.e.,
anxious, desperate, lonely.

The minor characters in this novel tend to lead the
kinds of untransformed lives typical of so many of the
major characters in Buechner's previous novels. A few
examples should suffice. Madge Cusper, one of Theodore
Nicolet's parishioners, has lost her daughter to disease
and finds herself deserted and lonely. She unsuccessfully
tries to soothe her sorrow with drink. Metzger, a high-
school English teacher in Myron, leads a self-centered,
loveless life. His only friend is Poteat, one of Buech-
ner's most modern characters, whose life is a kind of
living death. Metder is even less alive than Poteat.
When Rooney Vail angrily confronts Poteat over an editorial
in which Poteat suggests that the local minister, Nicolet,
and she are involved in an affair, Metzger flees the scene
and the narrator's comments on his character are excep-
tionally telling:

When Rooney Vail had burst in mad as a wet hen at the
outrageous piece in the "Repository," he had thanked
his stars that he was not old Willy Poteat. He had
fled gladly. But what he had fled was just what hexed
him now. It had been an ugly scene, he was sure-~gar-
bled, teary, unnecessary--but human at least, with the
blood trembling and fire in the bowels. A life lacer-
ating a life; The gust of it had blown him away like
chaff. The world of men was no place for a squirrel.
Willy had not even thought to introduce him. It was
as if among the living he had no name. (p. 212)

Poteat, himself, is the character whose life seems most in

need of transformation. The most important event of his

112

adult life has apparently been his almost accidental seduc-
tion of Rooney Vail. Before it occurred, Poteat's life was
barren; after it occurred, Poteat became jealous and petty
and vindictive. The seduction itself was more like wish-
fulfillment or erotic fantasy than anything else, and Since
no one, including Rooney, ever does anything to acknowledge
that it really happened, Poteat finds himself doubting the
actuality of the experience. When Poteat finally realizes
that he no longer cares about Rooney at all, he is strangehr
pleased. He likes not feeling anything. When he gets a
bad cold, his escape from feeling is complete.

He drank lots of fruit juice, and he gargled. But he

knew well enough that a cure was the last thing that

he wanted. Not to be able to smell the world or to

taste it, to hear everything as if it came from another

room with the door closed--this was his peace and it

was enough. (p. 251)
Poteat's escape from feeling (both emotional and sensual,
in this case) is a kind of final step in his gradual re-
tirement from life. Poteat's is the most hopeless life in
THE FINAL BEAST not because his life remains untransformed
but because Poteat does not even desire transformation. If
a fuller life were miraculously available to Poteat, he
would undoubtedly reject it. He prefers not to live fully;
he prefers failure; he prefers death.

Transformation, at least partial transformation, is

available for a few of the minor characters in THE FINAL

BEAST. Lillian Flagg's takes the form of evangelical re-

ligion; but the sheer Simplicity of her position tends to

113

undermine it in the context of a novel as committed to an
exploration of the problematic nature of modern life as
this one is. Roy, Theodore Nicolet's father, desires for-
giveness for his shortcomings as a father. Old and lonely,
he also Simply needs more attention from his son. By the
end of the novel, he has gained both of these, however
tentatively.

Whatever had happened between himself and Theo, he was

afraid to press it too far . . . for fear that neither

of them would be able to sustain it. (p. 218)
The reconciliation between father and son has not been com-
plete. Theodore will not be as attentive as his father
might wish him to be. Nonetheless, Roy's life is more
bearable once he believes that his son has forgiven him,
and some relief from his loneliness has occurred. The
transformation Buechner provides Roy may well be transfor-
mation in a minor key; it is nonetheless better than
nothing.

In the early novels, Maroo, of A LONG DAY'S DYING,
and Peter Cowley, of THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, are the only
major characters whose lives seem adequately transformed.
In THE FINAL BEAST, transformation is available to most of
the major characters.

Rooney Vail seems to desire transformation in each of
its major forms: the personal (the quest for identity),
the interpersonal, and the symbolic. Her marriage to Clem
provides ample evidence of Rooney's difficulties on the

personal and interpersonal levels. Her marriage seems

114
peculiarly tentative, right from the start. On their
honeymoon, Rooney ran away from Clem. If he hadn't mir-
aculously found her She may never have returned to him.
Since She never explains why She ran away (indeed, she ap-
parently does not know), Clem remains puzzled and anxious;
She could always run away again. Clem is content in Myron
Operating his Something Shop; Rooney is restless and dis-
content. "Rooney seemed to remain on the surface here,
uncommitted, while Clem went out of his way to hem himself
in wherever he could" (p. 26). Rooney's marriage to Clem
is just not enough for her. She runs away again, notify-
ing only Nicolet that she has gone to Muscadine. Rooney
is tempted to begin an extra-marital relationship with
Nicolet. She has been serving as a guardian of Nicolet's
children since their mother's death, and this role of sub-
stitute mother, substitute wife, has brought her unusually
close to Nicolet.

AS a parishioner of Nicolet's, Rooney has been drawn
to him for spiritual guidance; she is anxious and frus-
trated partly because she wants to know with certainty if
the Christian story is £323: In Muscadine, Rooney's quests
for interpersonal and symbolic transformation are merged.
On the one hand She goes to Muscadine to seek the advice of
Lillian Flagg and to try to overcome her feelings of guilt
over her brief sexual encounter with Poteat. On the other

hand, She seems to be inviting Nicolet to come and help

115

her, even if it means becoming her lover as well as her
minister. By the end of the novel, Rooney and Nicolet
have managed to remain friends. They have not become
lovers. Rooney has learned that she can face and accept
her guilt, and she has returned to Clem. Since it is sug-
gested that she might be pregnant with Clem's child, there
is every reason to believe that Rooney's desire for a means
of making the loneliness and rootlessness of her life more
bearable may be achieved. She seems, finally, to be able
to accept herself, thanks to Lillian Flagg and Nicolet.
It is clear that her marriage will be stronger in the
future. Rooney's bout with anxiety and loneliness is by
no means over, but She has realized some success in her
fight against them. Rooney's life is transformed on the
personal and interpersonal levels; it appears that symbolic
transformation, faith in the "truth” of Christianity, may
remain problematic for Rooney. It is important to note,
however, that the catalysts of Rooney's personal and inter-
personal success have been Flagg and Nicolet, the novel's
major representatives of Christian faith.

In Theodore Nicolet, the protagonist of THE FINAL
BEAST Buechner's theme of transformation finds its most
compelling representative. That Nick needs transformation
is obvious. Since his wife's death, Nicolet's dedication
to the Christian ministry and his faith itself have under-
gone severe tests, severe doubt. Suddenly the difficul-

ties, the sorrow, the suffering which Christian faith is

116
at least partly intended to make understandable, even per-
haps to soothe, are his sys. Suddenly, after years of
faith, Nicolet is uncertain and puzzled. He feels alien-
ated from his congregation, annoyed with his father, at-
tracted to a woman with whom it would be disastrous for
him to be intimately involved. Several of the previous‘
sources of meaning and direction in Nicolet's life are now
either gone entirely or have begun to seem dubious to him.
The entire plot of THE FINAL BEAST is based on Nicolet's
attempts to deal with these crises. The transformation
that attends his success in dealing with these crises
represents all of the significant varieties of the theme:
the personal, the interpersonal, the symbolic.

Since Nicolet's personal and interpersonal difficul-
ties and transformations are so intimately related to the
symbolic transformation he undergoes in the novel (his
reaffirmation of his Christian ministry), it is the latter
that demands attention here. Nicolet's explanation of his
initial impulse to become a Christian minister is itself
redolent of the theme of transformation. Nick hitches a
ride to Muscadine and when he tells the boy who is driving
that he is a minister, the boy, surprised, asks, "'No
sweat, what makes a guy decide to be a thing like that?'”
(p. 80) Nick explains that there were essentially three
steps in his decision. The first was a realization of how
crappy the world is. He came to this realization in a

rather Startling way through a college drinking buddy.

117

"Eats it," Nicolet said. "The great fecal indictment.
It's all he could say. I suppose I should have been
able to see what was coming next, but I didn't. We'd
gotten on religion, I told you. Well, he suddenly said
a memorable thing, an epic thing--at least it was to

me. . . . He just put together two things I'd never
heard put together before. One of them was eats it.
. And Jesus Christ. . . . According to him, Christ

eats it too." (p. 82)

Nicolet goes on to explain to the boy that Christ does eat

 

it because "'it's all that this world has ever given him
to eat'" (p. 83). The second step of Nicolet's "call" to
the ministry involved his recognition of the richness and
the mystery of the Christ story, though it occurred, iron-
ically, in a context of utter silence. Nicolet visited a
monastery where the monks were sworn to virtual silence
for the rest of their lives.
”None of them Spoke except to God. Imagine it!” .
But instead they rapped wood; rapped on the door of
his cell at dawn with a muffled "Christ is risen!"--
rapped on the refectory table as they finished their
food . . . and when he met them in corridors not even
good morning, good night. They would only nod and
smile as though it was some joke too rich for
telling. (p. 85)
The young driver never hears of the third step Since he
comes to the road where Nicolet has to turn off before
Nicolet gets a chance to explain it, but Nicolet remembers
it as he walks the remaining five miles to Muscadine. A
college preacher had been delivering a sermon in which
there was
nothing that you could not have expected: like Cae-
sar, the Lord had refused a crown when the Tempter
offered it . . . yet again and again in the hoping
heart of the believer he was crowned, yes, of course,

"crowned amidst confession and tears," the preacher
said, yes . . . "crowned amidst great laughter."

 

118
The preacher had barely paused at the phrase, but

it was the end and the beginning of Nicolet: the great

laughter at the heart of silence, the incredulous

laughter and rain dance of faith. (p. 87)
Previously, Nicolet had apparently known and felt much of
what the preacher was saying; the references to God's
glory and to His silence were nothing new, but the laughter
--"that was the secret, he thought: the laughter. And
that was also the third step" (p. 86).

From the point at which Nicolet recognized Christian
faith as a peculiar mixture of the vulgar and the Spiritual,
the serious and the absurdly comic, expressive of an essen-
tial joyousness, his call to the ministry had been clear.
In the present, however, he finds himself deeply troubled
by personal problems which threaten his joyousness, uncer-
tain of his ministry, severely doubting his efficacy as the
Spiritual leader of a rather staid congregation. Once he
meets Lillian Flagg, he even wonders whether her brand of
Christian faith, lacking as it does any ambiguity whatso-
ever, isn't perhaps more genuine than his own: a modern's
faith, riddled by, perhaps even based upon, a sense of
irony and ambiguity.

When he meets Lillian Flagg, Nicolet asks himself,
with typical ambiguity, is she "a great warrior of the
faith or a deluder of the credulous, a deluder of herself?
Could the line be drawn neatly at all?" (p. 104) Sus-

pecting that Christianity is the basis of a kind of con

game for her, Nick is slightly outraged at the possibility

119
that some people might take her as a more tenable Christian
leader than himself.
Who, looking at them, would take her for the profes-
sional, he wondered, and himself for the fumbling
dilettante, or was this part of the divine absurdity,
part of the great laughter? (p. 111)
Yet, in a demonstration of Buechner's pervasive sense of
irony, it is precisely Lillian Flagg who brings Nicolet
back to a sense of the joyousness of Christianity that
had led him to the ministry in the first place. Rooney
goes to Lillian Flagg hOping that Flagg can somehow make
it possible for Rooney to have a baby; Lillian diagnoses
Rooney's problem quite accurately as a desire for forgive-
ness of sin. Nicolet goes to Lillian Flagg to recover
Rooney; in the process, Flagg suggests to him the nature
of his own greatest difficulty, his own sin. She tells
him that sin is "'not being full of joy'" (p. 115).

Later, when he has left Muscadine and gone to visit
his father, Nicolet realizes the truth of Flagg's sugges-
tion and admits to himself that he has been a "love-Sick,
God-sick little man," (p. 166) confused and astray. He
then wanders out behind his father's barn, thinking about
Rooney, about Flagg, about Pentecost and the birth of the
church, and the sermon that he wants to preach the next
Sunday. Suddenly he feels that something is about to be
revealed to him; perhaps some Sign, some tangible evidence
of the intangible, is about to be revealed.

His heart pounded, and he did not dare Open his eyes

not from fear of what he might see but of what he
might not see, so sure now, crazily, that if ever it

120
was going to happen, whatever it was that happened--
jTy_, Nicolit, jsy--it1m:s§ happen now inlggis unlikely
ace as a ways in un 1 e y p aces p )

What follows is the wonderful "clack-clack" scene described
earlier. The connection between the physical and the meta-
physical is re-established for Nicolet, and while Poteat
retires from modern life, an emotional cripple in a modern
waste land, Nicolet undergoes a symbolic transformation
that allows him, once again, to embrace life. The "clack-
clack" scene functions as the catalyst of the completion
of Nicolet's other transformations in THE FINAL BEAST: the
personal (a recovered sense of self, of identity), and the
interpersonal (the return to his congregation, his chil-
dren, his father). It does not come as a surprise. The
"clack-clack" scene is foreshadowed earlier in the novel
when Nicolet is heading for Muscadine, uncertain of his
reason for going. The journey to Muscadine and Nicolet's
life itself are presented as extended metaphors of faith.

It was good to be going and not to know why; if you

waited until you knew why, you would never go any-

where. It was faith, after all: Simply to go--to

have as having not, to grasp nothing but always to

hold in the Open palm of your hand. (p. 45)
Nicolet knows that life can be bewildering and sorrowful,
difficult and lonely, even for those who are not as lost
as the Poteats and Metders of the world. But his sym-
bolic transformation, his reaffirmation of faith and pur-

pose allow him to return to his congregation with a mes-

sage of joy: to "preach the best . . . knowing the worst"

(p. 174).

121

Another example of symbolic transformation in the
novel is presented through the character of Irma Reinwas-
ser, Nicolet's live-in housekeeper. During the Second
World War, she was imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in
Germany. A german officer adopted her as a kind of mascot,
thus saving her from much of the torture and privation suf—
fered by her fellow prisoners. At the same time that he
served as her defender, however, he also subjected Irma to
much humiliation (e.g., forcing her to imitate a chicken
for the amusement of his colleagues), and became her tor-
mentor as well, ultimately disfiguring her feet so severely
that she still has difficulty walking without pain. The
memories of her imprisonment infect her dreams, and one
dream, full of images of beasts and barbed wire, recurs
over and over again. That Irma has suffered and suffers
still is unquestionable. The relief from this suffering,
the transformation she is afforded, is not as immediately
satisfactory as Rooney's or Nicolet's. It does less to
relieve her of her anxieties than theirs. It is, however,
thematically significant, even tantalizing, for the trans-
formation Irma is provided occurs in her dreams and is sug-
gestive of outrageous possibilities: the barbed wire iS
transformed into flowers; Heinz Taffel, her persecutor-
savior, turns into Nicolet; the disorder and stench of the
world are transformed into images of geometric order and
precision. Even the fire which kills Irma while She Sleeps

is transformed in her dream into an image of aesthetic

122

beauty.

At one end of the lintel, a rose of fire blossomed,

then another and another until the whole door was

framed in roses. They spread out along the Shelves

where jars cracked, Shooting brilliant roots down into

the newspapers. Scarlet and lilac, gold, green, coral,-

the floor was thick with flowers. By the time that

Irma opened her eyes, the little room had become a

bower. (p. 264)
Irma's prison camp experiences serve as a reminder of the
worst things we know about ourselves in this accursed cen-
tury; her dreams, however, symbolically transform every-
thing, even the barbed wire of the prison camp, into images
of great beauty and Spiritual calm.

In mental states not entirely subject to rational

control and occasionally, by coincidence, in life, the
most outrageous things crOp up. When Nicolet's children
dream, they dream of angels, tiny and black like flies,
according to one of them. The blasphemy of Nicolet's col-
lege drinking companion eventually leads Nicolet into the
ministry. The dung of the world, such as Poteat's ugly
rumors about Rooney and Nick, eventually leads to something
extraordinary, such as Irma's valiant attempt to save Nico-
let from the gossip-mongers and to Shift all the blame for
the Rooney-Nicolet rumors to herself. The language of our
experience in the twentieth century, Buechner seems to be
implying, is the language of paradox; the language of para-
dox, to take Buechner's implication one more step, is the

language of faith. Irma's German officer, Heinz Taffel,

was her "savior betrayer, gentle torturer,” (p. 135) and

123
Irma wonders at one point if "God himself [has] such a
face" (p. 135).

In THE FINAL BEAST, many of the formal elements as
well as the major characters contribute to the theme of
transformation. In the plot, death, sorrow, and suffering
lead to Spiritual renewal. The novel's major allusions,
to Pentecost and to the story of Noah and the ark, are the
sources of much of the most important imagery in the novel:
the imagery of feces, of fire, and of rain. The rain and
fire transform the "dung-heap world," (p. 135) purifying
it and cleansing it of its accumulated feces. The ugly and
the vulgar are transformed into the beautiful. Nature it-
self, through Buechner's natural imagery, is presented as
a process of wonderful and perpetual transformation. And
the many transformations in the novel ultimately function
to support what Nicolet dreams of saying (or of not saying)
to his congregation:

The madness of presuming to speak for God; better if
you had the courage, to stand up there and be silent
for God or to say, as he had dreamed by Roy's barn of
saying, just "Yes. It is true about God. Whoever
would have believed it? But it is true." And then
the silence, he thought. No organ hamming it up.
Just the slap and rattle of the rain at the tall
windows. (p. 225)

As indicated earlier in the treatment of the theme
of innocence, THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK is partly a retelling
of Frank Baum's THE WIZARD OF OX. Its major characters

all have difficulties, all take a journey to a kind of en-

chanted land, and all receive some help for their problems.

124
The problems these characters experience are Similar:
each is full of self-doubt, and each desires to live a
fuller, more meaningful life; for each this means culti-
vating interpersonal relationships. Through these rela-
tionships, each can gain a better sense of self, of iden-
tity. The transformations of THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK are
primarily personal and interpersonal, though with Hans
Strasser, the major agent of transformation in the novel,
the symbolic element of the theme is important as well.

Peter's family is not well known to him; he has spent
too much time dreaming his metaphysical dreams and pursuing
the ghosts<M3his visions. Nels is an anxious man, afraid
of death, who hides his loneliness and self-doubt behind
a mask of self-confidence and authoritarianism. He is not
a compassionate man, yet his role as Dean of Students at
Putnam demands just such a quality of him. Tommy is a
clown, a practical jokester of the first order, unable or
unwilling to face the demands of being a husband and a
father. Tip is too Shy to tell Libba Vann that he loves
her. He is also confused (as who would not be with Tommy
for a father?) about the responsibilities of the adulthood
he is on the verge of entering.

The journey to the pilgrim village introduces or re-
introduces each of the main characters to Hans Strasser,
the owner and manager of the sanctuary. Since Strasser is
the character in the novel who parallels the wizard in the

‘allusions to THE WIZARD OF OZ, it is not surprising that he

125
functions as a magician of transformation in THE ENTRANCE
TO PORLOCK. Yet his secret is precisely that he is not a
wizard, that he has no more in the way of ultimate answers
than the next man. Whatever transformation he helps to
provide for his villagers (mongols, epileptics, and others
with physical and/or psychological disabilities) is pro-
vided through wholly human means. The two main sources of
transformation Strasser favors are art and love.

When Strasser used to visit Peter and Sarah on Tin-
mouth Mountain, he would paint landscapes that transformed
the mountain completely; they did not correspond to the
empirical reality of the mountain.

"He used to paint the queerest pictures I've ever
seen" Sarah said, "Sitting up there in the meadow
under his umbrella day after day. He made his trees

look like fountains, and his Skies were covered with
little dabs of color-~coral and yellow and gold."

(9. 78)

Now Strasser shares his artistic leanings with his villa-
gers, providing them with a flannel board which they use
to transform their experiences into art. Through their
artistic renderings of their own experience, they are en-
abled to deal with it, to accept it, even to celebrate it.
But it is primarily through loving one another that the
villagers are able to transform their lives. Earlier, in
the treatment of the theme of innocence, the notion that
Strasser's sanctuary is a kind of Paradise was introduced.
The mongols in the village love everything and everyone.

There is no indication in the novel that the major

126

characters (other than Strasser) can or should be as loving
as the villagers; there is much indication that the best
source of transformation available to them is nonetheless
their interpersonal relationships. What Strasser and the
villagers do for the major characters of this novel is to
Show them that what they seek is wholly within their own
poWer, that they will only solve their problems through
their own efforts. By the end of the novel, Peter (the tin-
man in search of a heart) realizes that he has been very
lonely and that he must pay more attention to his family,
less to his barn full of books; Nels (the Cowardly Lion
searching for courage) learns to cope with his fears of
death, even to reduce their influence on his life, and he
also discovers that the barrier he has imposed between him-
self and the students at Putnam is not entirely necessary;
Tommy (the Scarecrow, looking for a brain) has begun to
"wise up" to the fact that his constant pranks are not an
adequate substitute for reSponsibility, that he Should
think less about himself all the time and more about his
wife and son; Tip (Dorothy, searching for home) will Spend
more time at home and will apparently make his feelings
about Libba Vann better known to her.

The journey to Strasser's village (the journey to
02) has made the ordinary lives of the major characters
more precious to them; it has allowed them to return to
their ordinary lives with a greater sense of wonder and of

possibility. The dreamlike sense of enchantment which

127
pervades the village becomes the source of a renewed sense
of the enchantment of ordinary life. Sarah's dreams are
dreams of transformation. Peter's land, which he has in-
tended to give to Strasser, is given back to him, and he
realizes that the "land of heart's desire" (p. 248) he has
sought all his life is the land he already had. Strasser
(the Wizard) is a wizard indeed, able to transform his own
life and the lives of his villagers through the magic of
human love, able to transform the lives of his visitors
by his own example.

The many allusions to THE WIZARD OF OZ combined with
the allusions to Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, reinforce one
of Buechner's most prevalent implications: that there is
much in life to celebrate, much that is wonderful and en-
chanting. How easily the disabilities and abnormalities of
the villagers could be used to deveIOp the kinds of themes
we expect from and find in much contemporary American fic-
tion: isolation, incommunicability, hopelessness. It is
important to note that for Buechner they become instead
the sources of wonder and transformation, love and
affirmation.

In Buechner's comic trilogy, LION COUNTRY, OPEN
HEART, and LOVE FEAST, the theme of transformation is de-
velOped primarily through Antonio Parr, the narrator and
protagonist. His need for transformation is clear from the
outset. Antonio's story begins at a difficult time in his

life: his twin sister, his other half and only immediate

128
family member, is dying of a rare disease which causes her
bones to disintegrate; Tony is nearly thirty-five years
old and sees himself as once again between periods in his
life (e.g., teaching, writing incomplete novels, messing
about with scrap iron sculpture, almost anything that
keeps him distracted and preoccupied); and a long-cultivated
relationship with his female friend, Ellie, seems less and
less likely to become anything but friendship, so that An-
tonio is beginning to think it likely that he will remain
a virtual celibate. In New York City, where he lives,
gray November has set in.

LION COUNTRY, the first novel of the trilogy, takes
Antonio from New York City and Madison Avenue to Armadillo,
Florida, and the tourist attraction called Lion Country,
from bachelorhood and the prOprieties of his relationship
with the prim Ellie Pierce to marriage and the impropri-
eties of the lovely Sharon ("'Hey peckerhead'"), from the
buttoned-up world of his ivy-league background (Wesleyan,
class of '55) to the peculiar mixture of piety, vulgarity,
and opportunism of Leo Bebb and his church of Holy Love.
Ultimately, Antonio's journey to Armadillo can be mapped
in psychological as well as physical terms, for it involves
a pilgrimage toward greater selfhood, the various stOps
along the way in the gradual transformation of self that
Antonio undergoes in the trilogy.

When we first meet him, Antonio is a SOphisticated,

skeptical, even somewhat cynical fellow reminiscent of the

129
Dunns in THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE. His ivy-league education
and his economic independence (he grew up on Park Avenue
and has an independent income) suggest a good deal about
the parameters of his experience. He is somewhat bored and
uneasy. His life does not seem to be progressing satisfac-
torily. It has no center. His various periods, as he
calls them, are obvious evidence of his lack of direction,
his willingness to let his life be shaped and defined by
circumstance. He sees himself, or is it his lack of self,
reflected in his scrap iron sculptures:
Old ratchets, wheels, tongs, strappings, hasps, hinges
and nails, whatever I could lay my hands on I would
paint with Rustoleum black and then assemble in various
interesting and I hoped entertaining ways. I resorted
as little as possible to welding but used balance
wherever I could or the natural capacity of one odd
shape to fit somehow into or on top of or through
another--entirely autobiographical, in other words--
the idea being to leave the lover of my art (of me?)
free to rearrange it. (p. 8)
Antonio sees his next period as investigative reporting.
AS a kind of a lark, he responds to one of Leo Bebb's ad-
vertisements for Gospel Faith College and gets himself or-
dained as a minister of Holy Love. When Antonio sets up a
meeting with the head of this mail-order diploma mill it is
entirely in keeping with his intention to write a magazine
article exposing Bebb as a fraud. When Tony goes to Arma-
dillo to visit Gospel Faith College and Holy Love (Bebb's
church), it is with the same intent; he thinks he will be

able to amass evidence of Bebb's charlatanism and chica-

nery. Much to his surprise (and the reader's), what

130
Antonio finds in Armadillo is not as clear-cut as he had
expected it to be.

Antonio discovers that Bebb probably is a fraud in a
legal sense, at least. The IRS, the U.S. Post Office, the
Better Business Bureau, and the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission are all investigating his business affairs; Bebb
also Spent five years in prison for an act of sexual exhi-
bitionism performed in front of a group of unsuspecting
children. Yet Antonio also uncovers evidence of another
Side of Bebb's character which disallows his writing Bebb
off simply as a fraud or a con man. However tangled Bebb's
worldly affairs may be, his religious zeal is apparently
genuine. According to Brownie, Bebb's devoted assistant
at Holy Love, Bebb raised Brownie from the dead twenty
years ago in Knoxville, Tennessee. When Antonio suggests
his own disbelief by saying that if such a thing had hap-
pened there, and there were as many witnesses as Brownie
says there were, it would have "put Knoxville, Tennessee
on the map" (p. 189) and the place would have become a sort
of shrine attracting pilgrims from all over the world,
Brownie's response introduces one of the basic issues of
the trilogy, and extends the paradox which the character
of Bebb comes to represent:

"When you come right down to it, dear, you see, peOple
don't want miracles.”

"But that's just what they do want," I said. "Get
the rumor started that a statue of the Virgin's nose
has started to run, and within twenty-four hours people

will be lined up six deep."
Brownie said, ”Little miracles, yes. PeOple will

131
flock to anything that seems to mean there is still
some magic left in the world, some little leftover
piece of holiness. But a real miracle--something that
makes everything you ever thought you knew about the
world look kind of Sick and that doesn't leave you
much choice except to believe in something--nobody
wants one of those kind, dear." (p. 190)
Antonio, thinking of his dying sister, suggests that a
real miracle is exactly what he does want. Brownie says:
"Well, maybe. For you. But in the case of most people,
a real miracle upsets too many applecarts and leaves
too little room to turn around in. So they explain it
away. ‘Take the miracle of life, for instance. PeOple
say it's all acids." (p. 190)
Further evidence suggesting that Bebb may somehow be the
genuine article continues to turn up throughout the tri-
logy. At the end of LION COUNTRY, Bebb ordains Herman Red-
path and restores his virility. In LOVE FEAST, once again
in an extraordinarily ambiguous situation, Bebb at least
begins to heal a crippled boy. At the end of LOVE FEAST,
Bebb is reportedly killed in an airplane crash; but there
is no evidence in the wreckage that Bebb actually died in
the crash. There is no trace of him.

Bebb's character does not lend itself to easy inter-
pretation. The issue of Bebb's authenticity is never re-
solved in the trilogy, is, in fact, central to many of the
other problems that the trilogy explores. It is clear,
however, that the world of faith and possibility that Bebb
represents is an increasingly necessary alternative for
Antonio Parr. That this alternative is difficult in the

modern world probably goes without saying. It is even

difficult for Bebb himself.

132
"Antonio," Bebb said. 'q believe everything."
It was the second time in my life that I'd heard
him make a remark of such classic grandeur.
"You make it sound almost easy," I said finally.
”Don't kid yourself," Bebb said. . . . "It's hard
as hell."7
For Antonio, the difficulty is immense. His parents

died when he was only twelve years old. He has been lonely
for years, and his loneliness is compounded by the fact
that his sister, Miriam, the only person he ever felt very
close to, is dying in a New York hospital of an illness
that seems to him unSpeakably cruel and unjust. Buechner
does not provide Antonio with the kind of Christian sym-
bolic transformation that he provided Nicolet in THE FINAL
BEAST. Antonio remains a lapsed Catholic, like his sister,
and his fascination with Leo Bebb does not affect his own
religious faith. He remains a light half-believer of a
casual creed (to paraphrase Matthew Arnold) throughout the
trilogy. Buechner does, however, indicate that for An-
tonio the mere possibility that Bebb might be the genuine
article provides some transformation, allowing Antonio to
leave some doors open that are Shut for many men, doors
that had gradually been closing for Antonio before he met
Bebb. And even if symbolic transformation is incomplete
for Antonio as far as Christian faith is concerned, there
are two other sources of symbolic transformation available
to him in the trilogy; there are the lions of Lion Country,

and there are Antonio's art projects.

Shortly after Antonio arrives in Armadillo, Bebb and

133
Sharon take him to visit Lion Country where the lions roam
free in a large compound very like their native habitat.
At one point Antonio sees a majestic male mount a female.
There didn't seem to be any passion about it as far
as I could tell, but on the other hand it didn't seem
perfunctory either--rather like two old friends seek-
ing refreshment in each other's company toward the
middle of a hot afternoon. (LC p. 129)
He thinks of his friend Ellie, how She would have found the
coupling improprietous, would have "pretended not to notice
when the lion with the kink in his tail took a leak" (LC
p. 131). Antonio, himself, is fascinated by the lions, and
allusions to them recur throughout the trilogy. The pecu-
liar mixture of the vulgar and the majestic that he sees
in the lions is Similar to what attracts him in Leo Bebb;
and the apparent ease of the lions' existence, their
unself—consciousness, attracts Antonio as well, for he is
plagued by self-consciousness. The lions become a symbol
in the trilogy of all that Antonio vaguely feels his life
lacks, and function as a reminder of and a contrast to his
previous existence: the majesty of the lions versus the
domestication of his pet cat, Tom; the cold of New York
versus the warmth of Florida; the SOphistication, intel-
lectuality, propriety, and caution of his New York, ivy-
league acquaintances versus the openness and Spontaneity
of his new acquaintances, particularly Sharon; the skep-
ticism and denial of life represented by Charlie Blaine,

Miriam's husband, who sleeps his life away and fails even

to visit his dying wife, afraid to confront her pain or

134
his own directly, versus Leo Bebb who bounces out of the
car to photograph the lions (Antonio refuses to get out of
the back seat), who is willing to take whatever chances he
must in order to live fully, who affirms life in all its
variations including its pain and suffering. However
trite it may sound, Antonio seems to realize (like Saul
Bellow's Henderson) that he needs to become more like the
lions, that in his own peculiar way that is exactly what
Leo Bebb has done.

In OPEN HEART, five years have passed since the
events described in LION COUNTRY took place. Antonio mar—
ried Sharon at the end of LION COUNTRY; they now have a
baby boy and live in Sutton, Connecticut, where Antonio has
taken a job as an English teacher at Sutton High. Miriam
is dead, and Antonio has taken in her boys, now teen-agers,
to live with his family. Bebb has left Brownie in charge
of the new Holy Love founded on Herman Redpath's generosity
in Houston, Texas, and Bebb has moved to Sutton to begin a
new church which he names Open Heart. In this second novel
of the trilogy we discover that another form of symbolic
transformation, of making the difficulties of his life
bearable and protecting himself from the various threats
to his psychological equilibrium, is available to Antonio.
It is art, his own and that of others. In LION COUNTRY,
Antonio notes that his scrap iron sculptures are largely
autobiographical; in OPEN HEART, he builds a huge wooden

mobile roughly the shape of the letter A, and he tries to

135
teach Sakespeare's KING LEAR to his students.

Antonio's own art work seems to allow him to trans-
form his pain and bewilderment into something he can live
with, functions, in other words, as a type of therapy for
him. His scrap iron sculptures may easily be seen as meta-
phors for the particular difficulties he was having when he
made them; the loneliness and formlessness of his pre-
Armadillo life are mirrored by works which are themselves
essentially formless, or at least capable of assuming a
multitude of different forms, no one of which is any more
legitimate or final than any other. His huge wooden mobile
represents another stage of his existence and other prob-
lems. While in New York, Antonio bumps into his old friend
Ellie Pierce and they have dinner together. During the
meal, Antonio tries to describe his new art project to her:

‘ "Is it supposed to be anything, Tono?" She had

always liked things to—he something.

I told her I didn't think so, and when she asked
me to describe it, I was reduced to trying to draw it
on the tablecloth with my butter knife.

"It looks like a big A," she said, and she was
right. I hadn't noticed before, but it did. Was it
Miriam's A-shaped cast, I wondered, or A for Antonio
which, the way things were happening, might turn out
to be a brand new name for number two. "It's the
scarlet letter," I said. (p. 131)

The final stages of Miriam's illness, the continuing strug-
gle to define himself, and adultery: these are central
problems for Antonio in OPEN HEART and they are reflected
in his mobile. That Antonio sees his mobile as just as

autobiographical as his scrap iron sculptures is clear

from the use he makes of it. When he is troubled, he often

136
wanders back to the shed where the mobile was built and is
now stored.

After dark I went out to commune with my Thing, my
dangle. . . . Nothing is as fascinating as something
you've made yourself. Just as your own handwriting on
an envelope, or a shelf you've put up, even a crap
you've taken--they give you the feeling, if you look in
a certain way, that they contain a secret and that if
you could only get at the secret you'd find out that
maybe it was the secret of your life. (p. 64)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Antonio's
art is not that it represents various stages in the con-
stant transformation of his own life, but that the works
themselves seem to be mysterious objects of perpetual
transformation: the scrap iron sculptures are free form
sculptures that can be rearranged into a practically in-
finite number of shapes; the wooden mobile has many parts
that constantly move, others that can be readjusted by
hand. Antonio even decides to leave the wood unfinished
so that its color and texture will change as the piece
weathers.

It should be obvious by now from the many references
to Buechner's allusions that Buechner relies heavily upon
other works of art, primarily literary art, to explain and
clarify his own. In like manner, Antonio, an English
teacher, alludes to a wide range of literature when he
attempts to put his own experience in perspective. His
literary background serves Antonio as another source of

symbolic transformation. As his life becomes more compli-

cated, he turns to the complexities of literature for some

137

relief. Teaching KING LEAR, for instance, he fastens upon
certain lines as if they had been prescribed for him.
After he discovers that his wife has gone to bed with his
nephew and his own mental state is dark indeed, Antonio
thinks of Lear's "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothe-
cary, to sweeten my imagination" (OH p. 111). When his
nephew breaks a piece of Antonio's wooden mobile, Antonio
responds by quoting Bacon: "There is no excellent beauty
that hath not some strangeness in the prOportion" (OH
p. 254). When he broaches the subject of her infidelity
to Sharon, Antonio thinks of the opening lines of Matthew
Arnold's "Dover Beach." In LOVE FEAST, when Antonio is
separated from Sharon, he begins a brief affair with Laura
and he thinks of Lear again: ”'And we will take upon us
the mystery of things'"8 Later: "Ripeness is all" (p.
165). To be able to see his experience in terms of the
imagined experience of literature at least allows Antonio
to step outside himself momentarily, and even if the re-
lief this provides is only the kind suggested by the old
cliche about misery loving company, it nonetheless helps.

Another important source of transformation in the
trilogy is Antonio's relationship to Sharon. LION COUNTRY
is largely the story of their romance: city boy meets
country girl. The inhibited, prOprietouS Antonio is over-
come by the sensuous Sharon who asks to use his shower at
the Armadillo Motel to "'wash the lion off'” (LC p. 142)

after their trip to Lion Country, then steps out of the

138
shower to seduce him. LION COUNTRY ends with their mar-
riage, as Oscar Wilde suggested that all comedies should
end. OPEN HEART is the story of the strengths and weak-
nesses of their marriage. Although Antonio is generally
pleased by the marriage and by their son, Bill, Sharon
seems to need more than the marriage supplies her. She is
not an attentive mother and she leaves much of the care of
her young son to Chris, Antonio's eldest nephew, while she
seeks distraction and/or fulfillment in guitar lessons,
yoga exercises, and Shopping Sprees. Eventually, Sharon
commits adultery with Tony, Antonio's youngest nephew. The
comfort that marriage had provided Antonio is replaced by
pain and anxiety. What had been a source of transforma-
tion suddenly becomes psychologically and emotionally dis-
ruptive. For the rest of the novel, Antonio Struggles to
keep the marriage alive. OPEN HEART ends with Bebb's wife,
Lucille, committing suicide and with Bebb, Antonio, and
Sharon trying to get away from their difficulties by taking
a trip to Europe. As LOVE FEAST begins, Antonio and Sharon
are still struggling. Bebb has been wandering all over the
world with a TheOSOphist named Gertrude Conover whom he met
on the boat to EurOpe. Tony and Chris have both moved out
of the house in Sutton; Tony has a job and Chris is at Har—
vard. But the strain on Antonio and Sharon's marriage has
been too great. Antonio and Sharon separate. Sharon con-
tinues to live in their house in Sutton and opens a health

food store with Anita Steen, a lesbian from whom Sharon

139
used to take guitar lessons. Antonio continues to teach
at Sutton High and takes a room in the same boarding house
as his nephew Tony. Once again Antonio is lonely, and the
darker aspects of his life begin to trouble him. Once An-
tonio is alone again, Buechner returns to an element of the
theme of transformation that has been implicit all along,
not only in the trilogy but in all of the novels in which
transformation is an important theme: ultimately the
theme of transformation involves death. The self that un-
dergoes constant transformation in life will eventually
face a final transformation: the annihilation of self.
In order to achieve successful transformation in life,
Buechner suggests, it is necessary to come to terms with
death. A LONG DAY'S DYING ends with Marco's death and
since her life has been an example of successful transfor-
mation, of facing the darkest aspects of existence without
being overcome by them, her death itself is described as
another beautiful and mysterious transformation. Irma
Reinwasser's death, in THE FINAL BEAST, is presented in
much the same way, and Sarah, in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK,
dreams about a mysterious and beautiful ceremony in which
grandmothers (she is one) are being burned like candles
and serenely transformed. For those who are able to face
life straightforwardly and courageously, death is not to
be feared; in fact, a full awareness of one's mortality
seems to be a prerequisite in Buechner's novels to living

a full life. Antonio comes to a full recognition of his

140
own mortality through witnessing the illness and death of
his twin sister in LION COUNTRY. In OPEN HEART, he has a
similar experience when he goes to visit his sister's
grave in Brooklyn.

. . just at that instant of being brought back to
myself I knew that the self I'd been brought back to
was some fine day going to be as dead as Miriam. I
knew it not just in the usual sense of knowing but
knew it in almost the Biblical sense of having sex
with it. I knew I didn't just have a body. I was a
body. It was like walking into a closed door af_hight.
The thud of it jolted me down to the roots of my hair.

The body I was was going to be dead. . . . You
might say that there at my sister's grave I finally
lost my virtue, saw the unveiling of middle-age's last
secret. There in Brooklyn 1 was screwed by my own
death. (p. 136)

While separated from Sharon, in LOVE FEAST, Antonio exper-
iences an emotional withdrawal from life similar to that
we have seen in other of Buechner's characters: Charlie
Blaine, of the trilogy, sleeping his life away; Poteat, in
THE FINAL BEAST, retiring from life before he has lived
it, affecting a premature worldliness before he really
knows much about the world; Lundrigan, of THE SEASONS'
DIFFERENCE, too mature to feel much of anything, cynical,
cold, unloving. Antonio describes his own withdrawal

this way:

I read an article in the Times once on the stages
the old go through on their way toward death, and
somewhere along the line they apparently go through
one called decathexis, which the Times defined as "an
emotional detachment from life." Ordinarily this

stage comes on gradually and toward the end of the
line, but for me it came rather abruptly. (LF p. 176)

 

Later he suggests that he has been precipitated by his

difficulties

141
prematurely into that geriatric state where life it-
self becomes a kind of spectator sport in which there
is nothing much left either to win or to lose that
greatly matters. (LF pp. 201-202)

Antonio's decathexis is dramatically integrated into
the last two novels of the trilogy through Buechner's in-
creased use of photographic and cinematic imagery. An-
tonio, as narrator, increasingly presents the events that
took place after his wife's act of infidelity as if he
were seeing them on film and as if he were objectively de-
tached from what was happening. OPEN HEART ends in a pe-
culiarly unresolved manner with references to the film
Antonio shot on the trip to Europe and with bits and
pieces of what the film will Show when developed. LOVE
FEAST begins with the suggestion that what the reader is
in for is something very like a long session of home
movies.

There was a time when it was out of Sight out of
mind. A day, a week, a year ended, and when it ended,
that was the end of it. But then they invented home
movies . . . the past may drop out of mind the way it
always used to but out of Sight never. (p. 3)

The emotional withdrawal Antonio describes goes
against the grain of the values Buechner generally ap-
proves in his characters, but by the end of LOVE FEAST
Antonio has managed a kind of truce with Sharon; they are
together again and he is working his way back from with-
drawal to the kind of engagement and transformation he

describes so well earlier, at the end of LION COUNTRY.

In the entire trilogy there is no better statement of the

142
theme of transformation:

when I was on my way down . . . I had in me already
the seeds of the Antonio I was to become; and when I
finally went back up again with Sharon as my bride, I
carried as part of my baggage and will carry always
the celibate dabbler in unwelded scrap iron that I had
been on the way down. All of which goes to Show, as
if that were necessary, that you cannot escape the
past or the future either, and at my best and bravest
I do not even want to escape them . . . all the sad
and hurtful things of the past I would prevent having
happened if I could, but failing that, I would not
wish the hurt of them away even if that were possible.

When Miriam's bones were breaking, for instance, if
I could have pushed a button that would have stopped
not her pain but the pain of her pain in me, I would
not have pushed the button because, to put it quite
simply, my pain was because I loved her, and to have
wished my pain away would have been somehow to wish my
love away as well. And at my best and bravest I do
not want to escape the future either, even though I
know that it contains what will someday be my own
great and final pain. Because a distaste for dying is
twin to a taste for living, and again I don't think
you can tamper with one without somehow doing mischief
to the other. (p. 247)

The above represents an earlier Antonio, newly mar-
ried and hOpeful. It is also the necessary resolution of
the conflicts of the first novel of the trilogy. Still,
at the end of the trilogy, ten years older with a new set
of difficulties to overcome, Antonio seems to have the
kind of resilience that transformation requires. He sug-
gests that there will no longer be any decathexis in his
life. He also suggests that he can live with the death of
some of the things that previously characterized his life,
"youth . . . a capacity for ignoring irony . . . a taste
for certain flavors of hOpe" (LF p. 248). Even the resig-
nation Antonio has adOpted by the end of the trilogy implflx;

the possibility of further transformation.

143
Out of the wreckage of things I picked up a kind of
marriage again . . . a capacity if not for rising above
irony like the saints, at least for living it out with
something like grace, with the suSpicion if not the
certainty that maybe the dark and hurtful Shadows all
things cast are only shadows. (LF p. 248)

All the way through the trilogy Antonio has been con-
cerned with defining himself, intensely aware of every-
one's uniqueness, his own included, and fascinated by such
marks of discrete identity as faces and names. In the be-
ginning of the trilogy, Antonio is known by his closest
friends as Tono, a childhood nickname that stuck. When he
breaks from his past and marries Sharon, he finally feels
that he has become Antonio and left his childhood name (and
identity) behind him. In an extended hallucination/dream
sequence in LOVE FEAST, induced by puffing on an Indian's
black, smelly cigar, Antonio imagines that he is in Lion
Country again and he meets Lucille, Miriam, and Herman
Redpath (all are dead) there. A pig appears and drOps a
Silver dollar into his hand which seems to have on it the
key to his identity. It is a name.

On the dollar there was something written, and--
how do I say it? What was written on it wasn't Antonio
Parr or Tono or Bopper or Sir or any of the other names
I've been called by various peOple at various times in
my life, and yet it was my name. It was a name so se-
cret that I wouldn't tell it even if I remembered it,
and I don't remember it. But if anybody were ever to
Show up and call me by it, I'd recognize it in a sec-
ond, and the chances are that if the person who called
me by it gave me the signal, I'd follow him to the
ends of the earth. (p. 136)

What Antonio's secret name might be we never know,

but in considering Antonio's search for self in the

144

trilogy it is interesting to note that when Sharon and
Bill return from a brief stay in Florida during Antonio
and Sharon's separation, Bill gives his father a present:
it is a sand dollar. And the last thing Sharon says in
the trilogy is "'That Bop'" (p. 245). She shortens her
usual nickname for Antonio (Bopper) and thereby provides
him with a new name. Antonio's transformation may not be
as complete as Theodore Nicolet's, and the problematic
nature of Antonio's existence may seem more imposing than
it has been for the protagonists of the novels that pre-
cede the trilogy. But by the time we meet Antonio Parr,
the intimate relationship between Buechner's themes of
wonder, innocence, and transformation is clear, and we
should realize that whenever we find even a trace of one

of them the other two must be near at hand.

145
NOTES--Chapter III

1Frederick Buechner, THE ALPHABET OF GRACE (New
York, 1970), p. 14.

21bid., p. 15.

3New York, 1960.
4THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LAN-
GUAGE, eds. Stein and Urdang, (New York, 1966), p. 1328.

5THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE, from the epigraph.

6cf. pp. 94-96 above.

7Frederick Buechner, OPEN HEART (New York, 1972),
p. 29. All further references to this work will include
only the page number in parentheses following the quota-
tion or, when necessary, the abbreviation OH along with
the page number.

8Frederick Buechner, LOVE FEAST (New York, 1974),
p. 164. All further references to this work will include
only the page number in parentheses following the quota-
tion or, when necessary, the abbreviation LF along with
the page number.

IV
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

It Should be obvious by now that Buechner is a child
of modernism, that he inherited many of its assumptions and
concerns, and that much of his deve10pment as a novelist
may be traced by examining the various ways in which he re-
acts to this legacy in his novels. AS his essentially af-
firmative major themes develop and recur in novel after
novel, the ways in which Buechner tempers many modern as-
sumptions begin to appear as some of the most distinctive
aSpectS of his fiction. Unlike many of his contemporaries,
Buechner insists that even within a worldview that is es-
sentially problematic there are legitimate bases for won-
der, joy, and the kind of enlightened innocence represented
by such characters as Marco (A LONG DAY'S DYING), Peter
Cowley (THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE), Theodore Nicolet (THE
FINAL BEAST), or even Leo Bebb (the trilogy). Buechner's
novels often portray characters whose lives are empty or
paralytic, dominated by metaphors of the waste land, but
the further we move away from Buechner's earliest novels
the more we find that these characters are counterbalanced
by characters who are able to recognize the problematic
context of their lives without being overcome by it.

The characters who best represent the themes of

146

147

wonder, innocence, and transformation in Buechner's novels
are capable of facing many of their difficulties and of re-
solving at least some of them. Instead of the passivity
and frustration of such a character as Saul Bellow's Jo-
seph, in DANGLING MAN, Buechner gives us the compassion
and resolve of a Theodore Nicolet. Instead of the tenta-
tive, limited success that we associate with such a char-
acter as Frank Alpine, in Bernard Malamud's THE ASSISTANT,
Buechner gives us the humane and successful world of Stras-
ser in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK. Unlike all but a few of
his contemporaries (e.g., J. F. Powers or Flannery O'Con-
nor), Buechner refuses to work entirely within a secular
framework. His fiction is dedicated to exploring at least
the possibility that there is a larger context available.
In fact for Buechner, fiction itself would seem to be a
means of keeping Spiritual questions and views alive in a
world in which such concerns are no longer even generally
acknowledged.

The irony that accompanies Buechner's major themes
is both the result of his being himself a modern man and a
defense against being casually dismissed by a modern audi-
ence. Like Maroo, in A LONG DAY'S DYING, Buechner realizes
that metaphor and indirection are his most valuable strate-
gies. The irony and ambiguity that so thoroughly charac-
terize the prevailing problematic view of human experience
do not, or need not, preclude the possibilities of wonder

central to the larger context Buechner explores. Actually,

148
Buechner suggests, they are central to it, and one of the
major ironies of modern experience is that modern man's
greatest need is for precisely the kind of larger context
or vision the existence of which, even the possibility of
which, he generally denies.

Perhaps Buechner's awareness of the skepticism of his
audience helps to explain the patterns of development we
find in his work. The early novels exhibit a formal
style; it is highly allusive, carefully wrought, complex
and elegant. Malcolm Cowley accuses Buechner's early work
of containing phrases so glittering and polished that they
"seem to have been picked from a jeweler's tray with a

pair of tweezers.”l

The tone of these early novels is
serious; their intent is didactic. The allusions of the
early novels are primarily classical, biblical, or Eliza-
bethan. John Aldridge's suggestion that A LONG DAY'S

DYING is too self-consciously ”literary" is probably ap-
plicable to THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE and THE RETURN OF
ANSEL GIBBS as well. But with THE FINAL BEAST, Buechner
begins to move away from the formality of his earlier
novels, and this is also the case with THE ENTRANCE TO POR-
LOCK. In these two novels the aphoristic qualities of the
earlier works are displaced by the patterns of ordinary
speech, as the self-indulgence of economically and socially
privileged characters gives way to the rhythms of middle-

Class experience. The allusions, though still literary,

are less esoteric. The Philomela myth has been replaced

149
by THE WIZARD OF 02. In his next four novels (The Leo
Bebb trilogy and TREASURE HUNT), Buechner's style is dra-
matically different. The language is informal, colloquial,
occasionally downright vulgar. The allusions are tOpical
and comic rather than "literary." Gradually, Buechner
seems to have understood that his major themes and the
world of possibility they represent are not only ironic
and ambiguous; for much of his potential audience they are
likely to seem outrageous as well.

In THE FINAL BEAST, Buechner begins to explore some
of the outrageous and comic potential of his major themes.
With LION COUNTRY, Buechner turns to the comic novel, the
form most suited to the development of this potential.
Each novel since LION COUNTRY has been just a little more
outrageous than its predecessor, and Buechner has remained
committed to an essentially comic vision ever since his
introduction of Leo Bebb.

The development of Buechner's major themes is a
dramatic one; he moves from the serious to the comic, from
the formal to the informal, from the probable to the im-
probable. The world of Tristram Bone, proprietous, empty,
and sterile, leads eventually to the world of Leo Bebb,
preposterous, hilarious, and vital. Bone's life, however
rich its trappings, is emotionally and psychologically a
series of closed doors, dead ends; Bebb's is a constant
reminder that almost anything is possible, however out-

rageous suchzinotion might seem.

 

150

Implicit in the majority of Buechner's work, explicit
in THE ENTRANCE TO PORLOCK, is the suggestion that modern
man's plight is analogous to that of the major characters
in THE WIZARD OF 02. Modern man's fondest desires--a
sense of purpose, the ability to love, hope--may be well
within reach if he realizes that they exist only when they
are exercised, that they can be his only if he makes them
his. This commonest of psychological truths does not func-
tion as a panacea in Buechner's novels. Assuming individ-
ual responsibility for one's life is never easy, and surely
cannot be for modern man stuck in the muddled middle of his
problematic existence. To do so, Buechner implies, is to
engage in an act of faith, and faith, as Leo Bebb reminds
Antonio when he tells him that he believes everything, is
"hard as hell."

Coping with the difficulties inherent in modern ex-
perience is largely a matter of psychological attitude and
perception. The characters of whom Buechner most approves
are unwilling or unable to adopt the resignation, cynicism,
or despair represented by many of Buechner's other charac-
ters (e.g., Lundrigan or Metder). They may not be cer-
tain that their more affirmative views of human experience
are well-founded, but they recognize the eviscerating ef-
fects of refusing to entertain at least the possibility
that such views are legitimate. The Characters who best
represent Buechner's themes of wonder, innocence, and

transformation are all aware of the irony, even the

151

absurdity, of their hopes that the maze of secular exper-
ience, so ambiguous, complex, and paradoxical, might still
somehow reflect what men used to call the Spirit. They
are, however, also aware of the absurdity of assuming that
their lives can be adequately explained by a series of bio-A
chemical equations. Like Binx, in Walker Percy's THE MOV-
IEGOER, these characters have all experienced moments they
can only understand as essentially mysterious and wondrous.
It is difficult for them to trust such moments, but equal-
ly difficult to ignore them. Generally, the characters
who are able to trust them are able to transform their
lives, i.e., to make the harshest elements of their ex-
perience bearable, even, on occasion, to find in ordinary
human experience much that is miraculous and beautiful.
But even for Buechner's most successful characters, re-
sponding to life affirmatively is difficult in an age domi-
nated by images of darkness and futility. Peter Cowley
can transform his own life, but it is doubtful that he
will be able to change the lives of those around him.
Theodore Nicolet's doubts are overcome for a while, but he
will continue to have them. Antonio vacillates between
resignation and a sense of ironic hopefulness. There is
no question that for Buechner the secular reflects the
spiritual, but, as his major characters consistently indi-
cate, the relationship between the two remains enigmatic.

The relationship of Buechner's work to that of his

contemporaries is also somewhat enigmatic. Buechner's

152
willingness tx> entertain an essentially hopeful view of
human experience places his work outside the mainstream of
serious contemporary literature. Buechner's predicament
is similar to that recognized by Daniel Martin in John
Fowles's DANIEL MARTIN. Martin is a successful playwright
and scenarist. At one point he muses over the fact that in
his entire career he has never written a happy ending, that
he has avoided doing so "as if it were somehow in bad
taste."2 Even in his current work, a comedy, he is careful
to send the hero and heroine on their separate ways at the
end. During all the discussions of his script, no one sug-
gests a happier resolution--even as a possible alternative.
They were all equally brainwashed, victims of the dom-
inant and historically understandable heresy.
It had become offensive, in an intellectually privilegxi
caste, to suggest publicly that anything might turn out
well in this world. Even when things . . . did in pri-
vate actuality turn out well, one dared not say so ar-
tistically. It was like some new version of the Midas
touch, with despair taking the place of gold.3
It strikes Martin as odd and contradictory that those most
committed to artistic freedom should defer so systemati-
cally to "a received idea of the age: that only a tragic,
absurdist, black-comic view (with even the agnosticism of
the 'open' ending suspect) of human-destiny could be
counted as truly representative and 'serious.'"4
Another thing that separates Buechner from some of
his contemporaries is the issue of technical innovation.

It is a commonplace that new ways of thinking and feeling

require the artist to seek new modes of expression, and the

153
works of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, or
John Hawkes provide ample evidence that many contemporary
American novelists are committed to an exploration of inno-
vative fictional technique. The result of much of the
technical innovation of recent years is a type of story
(or anti-story) we recognize as "self-conscious" or "re-
flexive," but we find none Of this innovation in Buechner's
novels. This should not surprise us. Buechner's "ideas"
are generally quite conventional, as we have already dis-
covered, and he is therefore under less constraint to pave
new technical roads. Since Buechner has not given up on
the conventional novel, his work is closer to that of John
Updike or Wright Morris (though not as well recognized)
than it is to that of Barth or Barthelme.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between Buechner
and many of his contemporaries is his relative lack of
critical recognition, and the matter of Buechner's literary
reputation brings us to the final issue of this Study. Why
hasn't Buechner received more critical attention? It
Should be understood that answers to this question are
bound to be highly speculative; nonetheless, the question
is legitimate and deserves some attention.

It is clear that Buechner's neglect has nothing to do
with his being too esoteric or obscurantist. Authors who
are far more esoteric than Buechner (e.g., John Hawkes or
Thomas Pynchon) have achieved much greater critical acclaim

than he, even if they haven't established themselves with

154

a large general audience. Nor does Buechner's preference
for the conventional novel take us very far; some of the
authors whose works Buechner's most resemble (e.g., John
Updike or Saul Bellow) have achieved both wide critical
acceptance and a large general readership. If Buechner's
craftsmanship is comparable to that of a John Updike (John
Gardner even suggests that he prefers Buechner to Updikes),
then either Buechner has been the victim of an injustice
through inexplicable neglect of his craftsmanship, or there
are matters other than craft in his work that tend to put
off most critics. Both of these assertions are at least
partially true, but the critical attention Buechner has
received suggests that the latter is more likely the case
than the former. Some small portion of the neglect of
Buechner's fiction may be attributable to the fact that
much contemporary fiction is technically more challenging
than Buechner's and therefore provides critics with more
raw material for their own technical explication. When
Buechner has received critical attention, it has consis-
tently supported the view that he is a fine craftsman. Ap-
parently, the basis of Buechner's more general critical
neglect is not to be found through questions concerning his
craftsmanship. Perhaps Buechner's most characteristic
thematic concerns are themselves part of the problem.

Contemporary critics are used to finding the issue
of transcendent values, or their absence, in much contem-

porary American fiction; the mere presence of this issue

155
in Buechner's fiction is therefore not likely to be enough
to condemn his works to critical oblivion. But when this
issue is important in the works of such authors as John
Updike, Wright Morris, or Saul Bellow, it is usually im-
plicit rather than explicit; and the resolution of the is-
sue tends to be guarded and tentative. As Joseph Waldmeir
suggests:
It is little more than a cautious hope, without prom-
ises or guarantees. Simply stated, it is the belief
that somewhere, somehow, there exists a transcendent
set of values which the individual can discover and
achieve. If he suffers long and hard enough, and is
very lucky in his search for them. The message is al-
most medieval, though of course defrocked, for there
is no fixed religious system to impose order and con-
trol on the novelist's world, and no God to whom the
individual can appeal for guidance or aid in identi-
fying true values from false.6
Much of the above applies to Buechner's work as well
as it does to that of his contemporaries, Since the dif-
ferences between Buechner's emphases and theirs tend to be
differences of degree rather than kind. However in Buech-
ner's fiction, the possibility that there is a God is it-
self the basis of many of the most important conflicts and
themes that the works develop. Rather than dealing with
the issue of transcendent values indirectly, cautiously,
by implication, Buechner chooses to make it the central
focus of many of his novels. In THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE,
Peter Cowley has a "vision," and the other characters are
forced to respond to this peculiar circumstance; in THE

FINAL BEAST, Theodore Nicolet hears "clack, clack," and

ultimately reaffirms his faith; in the Bebb trilogy,

156
Antonio is stuck with the question of whether Leo Bebb is
a saint or a charlatan. Although Buechner's major themes
are generally more affirmative than those of most of his
contemporaries, his novels do not present or resolve meta-
physical issues much less problematically than those of
his contemporaries who are concerned with the same funda-
mental questions; but they is ask the questions more di-
rectly. AS John Gardner suggests, with Buechner one always
knows where one stands. The issues are always clear and
direct, even if the resolution of these issues is still
problematic. Contemporary spiritual malaise is the issue,
Buechner suggests, laying all his cards on the table.
Knowing the name of the game, the question is whether or
not one wants to play. Even in the works of Flannery
O'Connor, the stakes are seldom so clear.

By placing these concerns at the center of his work
and treating them explicitly, Buechner may alienate crit-
ics and readers who feel that such matters are best dealt
with, if at all, implicitly. It may even be that Buech-
ner's affirmative themes strike many contemporary sensi-
bilities as just so much wishful thinking. If this is the
case, it is unfortunate. Buechner's work may exist some-
what outside the mainstream of contemporary American fic-
tion, but surely this is less true than it might initially
seem to be. Even the most casual reading of Buechner's
work should reveal that in many of the most important re-

spects Buechner's novels accomplish the same things as the

157

best of those of his better recognized contemporaries. In
Buechner's novels, as in Updike's or Bellow's,

the quest itself is at least as important and inter-

esting as the finding, just as the temptation of the

holy man is of as much moment as the vision, or as the

perilous jourgey across the wasteland is as interesting

as the Gra1l.
The finitude and particularity of the mundane world are as
important to Buechner as they are to any novelist, indeed
as they are to all of us; and Buechner renders the world
of ordinary human experience with an eye for detail and
nuance that clearly indicates his appreciation, his toler-
ance, and his approval. Perhaps, he implies, "the daily
occasions of our earth-bound career . . . [are] possible
roads into what is ultimately significant.”8

Other authors of substantial merit have been, and

often continue to be, ignored or undervalued. Ford Madox
Ford's THE GOOD SOLDIER had to wait decades for a sympa-
thetic audience. Henry Roth's CALL IT SLEEP was "redis-
covered" thirty years after its initial publication. Con-
rad Aiken, Wright Morris, and Glenway Wescott have never
achieved the critical reputations they so richly deserve.
At least for the time being, Frederick Buechner's name
seems to belong somewhere on this list. Would that it
were otherwise; for his novels address needs that we have
long recognized as fundamental, and his major themes "re-
affirm the most ancient of answers, love and individual

responsibility."9

A SELECTED BIBL I OGRAPHY

158
NOTES--Chapter IV

lMalcolm Cowley, THE LITERARY SITUATION (New York,
1958), p. 50.

2John Fowles, DANIEL MARTIN (Boston, 1977), p. 402.

3Ibid, p. 403.

4Ibid., p. 404.

5cf. John Gardner, ON MORAL FICTION (New York, 1978),
pp. 87-99.

6Joseph J. Waldmeir, "Quest without Faith,” in
RECENT AMERICAN FICTION: SOME CRITICAL VIEWS (Boston,
1963), pp. 55-56.

71bid., p. 56.

8Nathan A. Scott, Jr., "The Bias of Comedy and the
Narrow Escape into Faith," in COMEDY: MEANING AND FORM,
ed., Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco, 1965) p. 107.

9Waldmeir, p. 62.

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