Frederick Buechner and the Poetry of Understanding

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 6^th 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.

Photograph by Eddie Fouse via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Frederick Buechner and the Poetry of Understanding

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.

What I didn’t know was that Buechner also wrote poetry, including 16 poems that are about the suicide of his father when Buechner was 11.

To read more about the poems, please visit my post today at The Master’s Artist.

Developing a passion

It had been several years since I read Frederick Buechner, the novelist, essayist, minister and theologian. And then I was in a bookstore, and saw The Longing for Home. Since it was published in 1996, and I’m looking at an unused copy in 2011, I’m not sure what it was doing on the shelf, except, perhaps, waiting for me.

I didn’t read it right away, so it had to wait a bit more. And then, earlier this week I pulled it from my bookshelf and started reading.

It’s part memoir, part essay collection, part poetry (I didn’t know he wrote poetry) and part speculation. He begins talking about houses, for it is often houses that we think of when someone asks about home. And he says that the older he gets (he just turned 85 last month, so this was written when he was 70), the more he thinks about home, the more he thinks about the people who inhabited his childhood, and the more defined his memories of childhood become.

He understands what’s happening, of course. The older one gets, the more one considers eternal things, and that the home of our childhood (assuming it was happy) and the memories associated with it (assuming they were good) become a representation of our eternal home, and that is what we are truly longing for.

Not too long ago, my wife asked me if I found myself thinking more about my hometown of New Orleans, and, surprised since I hadn’t said anything about it, I nodded. “”I could tell,” she said.

The New Orleans I grew up in is quite a bit different from what the typical tourist sees. I lived in a suburb, and it looked as American as any place else. There were stretches of woods with paths well worn by the neighborhood kids. And kids ruled – this was the era when the Baby Boom became obvious; Halloween in my neighborhood went on for hours, with hundreds and hundreds of children running door to door.

I’m thinking more about home, and my childhood, and my parents, especially my father.

In addition to this thinking about home, I’m developing an interest, a growing interest, in literature, the literature I was introduced to in high school and college. The poetry I’ve been reading is part of this interest. Sitting on the shelf above my computer as I type this are several books waiting to be read:  The Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, The Poetry of Robert Frost, A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman, Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a novel by Carlos Fuentes and two by Dickens – all waiting to be read.

And lately, I’ve been reading the Book of Common Prayer, a reprint of the 1928 edition.

And I know what I’m doing, and I know what this interest is, and what I’m developing a passion for.

And it’s language and literature and the beauty of it all when it’s beautiful and the ugliness when it’s not.

Over at Faith Barista today, Bonnie Gray is hosting a blog carnival on a passion or interest you want to go. Please visit to see the other posts that are linked.