This is another article originally published at The Master's Artist, which I'm reposting here.
Frederick
Buechner
is known for his novels, essays and sermons. Over the course of more than 60
years, he has produced some of the finest literary fiction in America, books
like the Leo Bebb
tetraology
which established his reputation in the late 1970s. He wrote fictional accounts
of two Irish saints, Godric and Brendan; Godric
was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. With his novels, non-fiction, sermon collections
and meditations, Buechner has published more than 30 books.
My
introduction to Buechner was Brendan
(1987), the 6th century Irish saint who spent a great deal of his
life looking for the rumored terrestrial paradise. His search became the basis
for one of the most popular medieval legends.
What
I didn’t know was that Buechner wrote poetry – not a huge amount but poetry
nonetheless. He had received the Irene Glascock Prize for poetry while he was
at Princeton, but turned his hand in other literary directions and then to
seminary.
I
discovered his poetry recently while reading his 1996 memoir The Longing for Home. While the book
is largely essays and mediations, one section, entitled “The Schroeders
Revisited,” contains 16 poems. The Schroeder family first appeared in Buechner’s
The Wizard’s Tale – a semi-autobiographical
story of the impact of the Depression years on a family – told through the eyes
of an 11-year-old boy.
What
is intriguing about these poems – also semi-autobiographical – is that they are
about the suicide of Ted Schroeder, who killed himself by carbon monoxide
poisoning because he believed his life had been nothing but failure.
Buechner’s
father, Ted Buechner, killed himself in the same way and for the same reason as
the fictional Ted Schroeder.
These
are more than just story poems. They are poems of understanding.
The
16 poems carry the title of a specific Schroeder family member. The first one
is “Ted Schroeder,” but it’s told from the viewpoint of his 11-year-old son,
Teddy:
On my father’s last dawn
I remember he opened the door.
I remember he closed the door.
I remember no thing he said if he said
a thing. Goodbye, boys,
Teddy and Billy, goodbye.
I am going downstairs.
I am going to turn on the car.
I am going to sit on the running board
and hold my head in my hands.
The two terrible women I love
will look after you…
Teddy
“remembers no thing he said, if he said a thing,” and so imagines what his
father would have said had he spoken. The poem is simple statements imagined
fact – I did this, I did that, I did this, simple sentences, simple movements
as a child might have imagined them.
In
“Great-grandfather Ruprecht,” another Schroeder/Buechner family story becomes
entangled in the suicide story. The poem is a statement of Ruprecht’s will, and
what he bequeaths to each family member. And then it becomes a piece of family
history. In 1849, Ruprecht took his family to California for the gold rush.
This story of resolute determination to succeed, placed within this series of
poems, becomes married to the idea of failure in the grandson, suggesting, for
Teddy Schroeder, and Freddy Buechner, that the boy had a choice to make, the
pioneering (and successful) way of the great-grandfather, or the way of failure
of his father. But even this success has a haunting quality about it:
…Sometimes at meals
my temper flares. A grandson spills his
milk.
A son-in-law is slow to hold my chair.
Then suddenly my fist comes down with
such a crash
That I myself am thunderstruck and see
The Sheepshead dining room at Bidwell’s
Bar.
My children drop their jaws and stare at
me
with Mother’s frightened eyes. I strike
at them
like Father with my fist for fearing me.
I strike at Father for the fear I felt
of him all washed with reverence and
love like gold
and gravel in a pan. But my worst blow
is for the eleven-year-old I was, too
weak
and craven to protect the broken face
that haunts me even as I walk up Fifth
and hurl my cane ahead of me, then stoop
for it, to keep in trim; or play at
skat;
or smoke cigars and watch the boats.
Weakness
worse than scurvy is the curse of
pioneers…
The
series of poems ends with Teddy as a grandfather, speaking to his
grandchildren. The boy who was 11 when his father committed suicide is now 70
himself, and this stories and his family are much on his mind. His father’s
suicide has weighed on him through his life, in ways small and big. But he
realizes that these stories are a kind of redemption, that he has been trying
to find a way to understand what happened only to discover that the telling
maybe sufficient. From the final poem, “Teddy to his Grandchildren:”
Until I finished them, I didn’t see
That all these poems are yours…
I never knew
that all the while within my heart,
unknowingly, I was in search of any
way I could to bring some part
of them to life so you, their children
many
times removed, might have a sense
of how alive they were when I
first knew them as a child…
Finally,
in his old age, the 11-year-old Teddy understands.
One
member of that subset is the Book of Tobit, included in
the Catholic and Orthodox bibles but not the Protestant bible. It tells the
story of a Jewish family – Tobit, his wife Anna, and their son Tobias – living
in Nineveh, part of the Jewish community carried off from the Northern Kingdom
of Israel by the Assyrians. The book covers the period roughly from 722 B.C.,
when the Northern Kingdom fell, to 612 B.C., when Nineveh itself fell and was
destroyed by the Medes and Babylonians. It’s believed to have been written in
the second century B.C., or 500 years after the historical events occurred.
