Well Said, Fred

Who is your favorite writer?

Mine is Frederick Buechner. He writes beautifully, has something to say and writes in at least three distinct genres.

As a novelist, he burst on the scene in 1949 with a best-seller called A Long Day’s Dying, which he wrote while a student at Princeton University. His novel Lion Country was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972 and Godric, perhaps his crowing achievement, was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

But he also has more or less invented the genre of the spiritual memoir, and the recent memoir craze in publishing owes a debt to Buechner. He has written three memoirs and at least two other “memoirish” books. A book called Telling Secrets, published in 1991, begins with as arresting a first line as I’ve ever come across: “One November morning in 1936 when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat on the running board to wait for the exhaust to kill him.” Writers are trying to hook you into wanting to read more with their first lines. I’d say in this instance Buechner succeeds.

He also has published books of what I call “popular theology,” in collections of sermons (among other things, he’s an ordained Presbyterian minister, although he never served a congregation) and in three books that are best called lexicons. I was looking through my Buechner shelf a couple of weeks ago and realized I was missing one of those books – a slim volume called Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary. So I spent a few dollars at Amazon and got a copy and as I’ve been reading it I can’t tell if I’ve read it before. I know there are certain sections I’ve read, but it is entirely possible I’ve read them in other anthologies of his work. The book was published in 1988 and I can imagine that we were so overwhelmed with diapers at that point in our lives that I might have missed it.

Buechner takes words – both religious and non-religious words – and gives fresh insight and meaning to them in this book. Here are a couple of new discoveries for me:

Tourist Preaching

English-speaking tourists abroad are inclined to believe that if only they speak English loudly and distinctly and slowly enough, the natives will know what’s being said even though they don’t understand a single word of the language.

Preachers often make the same mistake. They believe that if only they speak the ancient verities loudly and distinctly and slowly enough, their congregations will understand them.

Unfortunately, the only language people really understand is their own language, and unless preachers are prepared to translate the ancient verities into it, they might as well save their breath.

X – Rated

The terms Adult Books, Adult Movies, Adult Entertainment imply that whereas the young must be somehow protected from all those bare breasts and heaving buttocks, adults will simply take them in their stride. Possibly the reverse is closer to the truth.

The young seem to have the knack for coming through all sorts of heady experiences relatively unscathed, and paperback prurience and video venery are less apt to turn them on than to turn them elsewhere. The middle-aged, on the other hand, having fewer elsewheres, settle for what they can get.

After the first half or so, the X-rated titillations tend to turn tawdry and tedious, but even days later, they keep on flickering away somewhere in the back of the mind to a captive audience of one.

The chances are that the loneliness and sadness of it then may leave deeper scars on the forty-five year old than the gymnastics of it on a thirteen-year-old child.

Well said, Fred. What a joy to discover something new to me from my favorite writer.

Want to get into Buechner? You can’t go wrong with either Godric, Telling Secrets or Whistling in the Dark as introductions.

Who is your favorite writer?