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The Character of Saints
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10084 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
2,834 Words |
| Author
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George Garret
George Garrett's latest novel is Entered From the Sun. He is
the author of James Jones, Death of the Fox, Which Ones Are
the Enemy, and more than twenty other titles, including
poetry, short fiction, and drama. He is Henry Haynes Professor
of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. |
In many ways we know, or at least are able to know, more about Frederick Buechner than any other working American novelist. It is not that he is, like any number of others, a celebrity or a public figure, though he had a taste of that kind of exposure long ago. His own comments about it, in the autobiographical Sacred Hunger (1982), are characteristically understated.
The novel came out as A Long Day's Dying in January 1950, my second winter of teaching at Lawrenceville, and to my surprise as well as to the publisher's, it was immediately a considerable success both critically and commercially despite the fact that it was very dense, static, psychological, and written in such mannered, involuted style--the residue of my romance with the seventeenth century--that it seems outrageous when I look at it now.
Not yet twenty-four years old, Buechner was, in the terms of the time, about as famous as a young novelist could possibly be, long before talk shows and People magazine. Aware that he might well have "tried writing to dazzle the public eye while it was still so much on me," he elected not to do so for complex reasons: "I was afraid, I think, of the person that I was--and to some degree, I suppose, always am--in danger of becoming." Nevertheless, we have the texts and records of his fourteen novels since 1950 and we have an equal number of nonfiction books, works that include sermons Buechner has delivered as an ordained Presbyterian minister (and, for a decade, chaplain and chairman of the Department of Religion at Exeter), meditations, literary criticism, personal essays, and three specifically autobiographical volumes that deal directly and candidly with the deep sources of his fiction and with the place and purpose of the art of fiction in his life.
In an interview in the late 1960s Buechner said, "As a novelist my aim continues to be no different from that of any other serious member of the trade: to try to describe as fully as possible a vision of the world." And in Now & Then (1983), explaining the difference between himself as minister and as a novelist, he described the process of his art:
I don't start with some theological ax to grind, but with a deep, wordless feeling for some aspect of my own experience that has moved me. Then, out of the shadows, a handful of characters starts to emerge, then various possible relationships between them, then a setting maybe, and lastly, out of those relationships the semblance at least of a plot. Like any other serious novelist, I try to be as true as I can to life, as I have
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