I don’t think Frederick Buechner believed in saints, not exactly. The holy people he depicts in his novels are resolutely what he himself called “clay-footed,” which is to say, earthbound. No ethereal light here. No gauzy angelic presence. In both Godric and Brendan, the reader encounters figures who, for all their historical and cultural remove, we might have known and might know still. But still, I thought of Buechner, who died earlier this month, as a kind of patron saint, one particularly for artists.
Just about every artist of faith I know — photographers, poets, actors — all count his books as among their dearest treasures. The outpouring of affection in the days since his death has been enough to convince a great many people, who meant to read his works, that they were missing, or had missed, something. They had. And what that was — and what of course he still can be, though it feels different now — was a confidant. Someone who had seen it. Whether artistic fame, childhood trauma, family troubles, struggling friends, inspiration dead ends, or the highs and lows that accompany the life of religious faith, Buechner had been there, and more importantly still: he told us.
That act of radical self-disclosure across several autobiographies is quite distinct from the TMI memoirs writers seem to deal in these days. His writing is closer to Augustine because in every library nook, garage, pulpit, and darkened room there lingers this … what? The big other? You’ll have to read his books, really, any one of them, to see what I mean, but it is there, as real as anything: a hovering over the face of the depths into which he plunges us, nothing spared from view, because for Buechner, every thing in its thing-ness is saturated with God-presence. Nothing isn’t holy for him if we pay attention to it aright. And since the artist’s work, in any genre, is primarily an act of paying a kind of attention, a great many of us found him a guide to a certain way of being in the world.
The other part of it though, is that I owe him personally. Not only because of the books, although for heaven’s sake those too, but because when my own life was spiraling out of control, I waved my hands around in the salt-spray and he threw me a life-preserver. I’d been reading bad books, or reading good books badly, and quit my church-going and started drinking, and began to believe maybe I wasn’t a Christian. Maybe the whole thing was a wash and I should dry my hands of it. My last gesture before attempting to escape the hand of grace — and I can’t tell you quite how precarious it felt, teetering on that edge, though I have a feeling Buechner could have done it — was to write him a letter. I think I found the address of his agent in some publishing reference book and thought why not? I’d never written to an author before, but I thought that Buechner (if anybody could) would understand what I was thinking. God bless him, he wrote back. He was kind and natural, and he told me (I’d been thinking of becoming a Buddhist because of Jack Kerouac) that I could do a lot worse than to become a Buddhist, but that before I did I should read a few books he had in mind. I did. They gave me a new way of looking at the gospel that was generous enough to keep even an ingrate, a wretch, like me. We kept up a correspondence for awhile as I worked out my salvation — which is not to say built, or acquired, but understood –– and through it all he was patient and giving and nothing I said shocked him, which counted for a great deal. I could be completely honest.
When we met in person, the thing that struck me most was that he spoke the way he wrote. His readers will know what I mean about the Proustian, Augustan, and Augustinian rhythm of his sentences. They turn in on themselves like incense reeling out from a censor. I think you could plop twenty sentences in front of me, chosen at random, and I could identify which was Buechner’s. They just have this gracious quality no matter what the ostensible subject. But that wasn’t artfulness. Or if it was, he learned to do it in his speech too because really every single thing out of his mouth sounded like it was written in calligraphy.
Would that there were time for me to tell you how he changed my view of Shakespeare: lessons I still impart to my literature students now, or of family — what it is for and how to suffer through life together when suffering happens. But if you’re wondering why so many of us are moved by the gentle passing of a nonagenarian no one has heard from much in decades, it’s because he laid bare to many, for the first time, the great laughter at the heart of creation, the boundless absurdity of grace, and the importance of our lives — really, every single one of us — as a vehicle for laughter and grace. He told, that is, and taught us to tell, something like the truth.
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11 responses to “Corresponding with Buechner”
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Thank you, Mischa. Still processing this news, and the particularity of my gratitude for Buechner’s life and work. Many textures of that gratitude were named here, and so personally (when you could’ve easily kept the personal bits back for yourself). Thank you. And, I hope, more to come!
I would love to see the book list that Buechner gave you in that initial correspondence! Do you still have it Mischa?
I have his letters still, back in the states (I’m away), but I do remember it started with “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” by Marcus Borg. After that, a Paul Tillich book idk
Excellent piece. Thank you!
Thank you for this. The funny thing for me is that I had just picked up Buechner again just before he died. I read Alphabet of Grace and Now and Then, and I have just finished Brendan. What has reached me is that somehow Buechner made everything beautiful, be it words, or the hurt of family, or the miserable life of a Celtic Druid. I’ve been trying to see life through this lens again, see the beauty.
[…] “Corresponding with Buechner.” Mischa Willett tries to articulate what the writing and vision of Frederick Buechner meant for him: “Nothing isn’t holy for him if we pay attention to it aright. And since the artist’s work, in any genre, is primarily an act of paying a kind of attention, a great many of us found him a guide to a certain way of being in the world.” […]
I love when Mischa writes for Mockingbird
I love it too, CJ! Have to do more soon…
thank you for writing this piece!
You’re very welcome. You know, in a way I couldn’t help it…
Buechner wrote me also in 1984. I still have the letter tucked away in one of his books. He was gracious and humble to this senior English major. His path was difficult but he extracted the bad under a microscope and found the good.
Thanks for excellent remembering.