The Book of Bebb

Cover of the first collected edition
Lion Country Open Heart Love Feast Treasure Hunt
Author	Frederick Buechner
Language	English
Publisher	New York: Atheneum
Published	1971–1977
No. of books	4
Preceded by	The Entrance to Porlock
Followed by	Godric

The Book of Bebb is a tetralogy of novels by the American author and theologian, Frederick Buechner. Published in 1971 by Atheneum, New York, Lion Country is the first in the Book of Bebb series. It was followed by Open Heart (1972), Love Feast (1974), and Treasure Hunt (1977). In 1972 Lion Country was named a finalist in the National Book Award for Fiction. The Book of Bebb is an edited single volume edition containing the four novels, and it was published by Atheneum, New York, in 1979.

The Bebb novels revolve around the figure of Leo Bebb, a clergyman with a shady past, and are narrated by his son-in-law, Antonio Parr.

Summary of the plots

Main characters

• Leo Bebb (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast): In his autobiographical work, Now and Then (1983), Buechner offers a compelling description of the character of Leo Bebb:

He was a plump, bald, ebullient southerner who had once served five years in a prison on a charge of exposing himself before a group of children and was now the head of a religious diploma mill in Florida and of a seedy, flat-roofed stucco church called the Church of Holy Love, Incorporated. He wore a hat that looked too small for him. He had a trick eyelid that every once in a while fluttered shut on him.^[4]

• Antonio Parr (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): Antonio, or ‘Tono’ is a man struggling to find an identity and purpose with which to give his existence meaning. Numbed by his sister’s slow succumbing to cancer, wracked by doubts, and by doubts about his doubts, Antonio’s life is dogged by mild failures: his inability to make a success in the worlds of teaching, sculpture, writing, and eventually marriage. Ironically, it is his failure to entrap Bebb and author an exposé on his mail order seminary that leads him into deeper realizations about life and his place within it. Dale Brown notes the similarities between Antonio and several of Buechner’s previous characters: ‘no Buechner character to this point has been more full of longing, more incomplete, than Tono’, he writes, ‘though he is certainly brother to Tip Ringkoping [The Entrance to Porlock (1970)], Theodore Nicolet [The Final Beast (1965)], and Peter Cowley [The Season’s Difference (1952)].’^[5]

• Laverne Brown (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): the assistant pastor at Bebb’s Holy Love church, Brownie is also involved in the administration of the mail order seminary. When Antonio first encounters Brown, the preacher offers a somewhat original interpretation of a Biblical passage, explaining away its difficult edge. Brownie’s propensity to smooth out the more challenging texts of Scripture is emblematic of his boundless optimism, and his apparent determination to be content with the world as it is.
• Sharon Parr, nee Bebb (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): the apparent adopted daughter of Bebb and Lucille, Sharon is playful, confident, and yet, like Antonio, suspended between doubt and certainty, both with regards to her faith and also with regards to Bebb himself. Her love for Antonio leads her into a quiet courtship with him, and eventually into marriage. The difficulties of married life, however, and unanswered questions about her past, make her partnership with Antonio a strained one. The final revelation that Bebb is her father, and that her mother is the wife of Bebb’s twin brother, provides resolution to Sharon’s questions regarding her own identity.
• Lucille Bebb (Lion Country, Open Heart): Lucille’s alcoholism, and her particular penchant for ‘Tropicanas’, which, as Antonio discovers, are composed of ‘two parts […] orange juice’, and a third part ‘gin’.^[6] Like her daughter, Lucille also appears somewhat cynical about the work of her husband, and occasionally mocks or criticizes him in front of her guests. In conversation with Sharon, however, Antonio learns of the tragic death of the Bebbs’s first and only child, who, it is rumored, died accidentally at the hands of Lucille herself.
• Miriam Blaine, nee Parr (Lion Country): Miriam is confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of Lion Country, as her body is slowly crippled by cancer. Her conversations with her twin brother, Antonio, are often directed towards encouraging him to improve his life and outlook, or devoted to remembering their shared childhood. A divorcee and mother of two, Miriam is desirous to see her two sons adopted by Antonio – an initially happy outcome that is brought about when Antonio marries Lucille, and the two move to Connecticut.
• Gertrude Conover (Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): a septuagenarian theosophist with blue hair and a prophetic air, Gertrude becomes a confidante and supporter of Bebb following Lucille’s suicide. Her home in Princeton NJ is the home of Bebb’s great revival in Love Feast, and her penchant for travel helps to instigate Sharon and Antonio’s pilgrimage to Poinsett, South Carolina, in Treasure Hunt. Convinced that she and Bebb had enjoyed a love affair in a previous life – she as the ward of a Pharaoh and he a priest of Ptah – a number of critics including Dale Brown^[7] have noticed the similarities between her character and the figure of Agnes Sanford, a mystic, whose influence Buechner notes in Now and Then.^[8]
• Tony Blaine (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): the youngest son of Miriam and Charlie, Tony is described by his uncle Antonio as a ‘muscle-bound jock’, and a: 'track star and Lothario who glittered in the waters of our domesticity as harmless as a beach ball until you touched him the wrong way, or the right way, and he went off like a mine, scattering wreckage for miles.’^[9] Tony’s affair with his adoptive mother is both a symptom and cause of the breakdown of Antonio and Sharon’s marriage, and his eventual union with Laura Fleishman, with whom Antonio has had an affair, is a further cause of confusion and tension.
• Chris Blaine (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): the eldest son of Miriam and Charlie, Chris is described by his uncle Antonio as:

  [T]hat pimply, pale, and stage-struck boy who was endlessly exploited by Sharon as resident baby-sitter [...]. After graduating from Sutton High, where I taught English, he was accepted at Harvard, where he went with every intention of becoming Elia Kazan if not Tennessee Williams only to become instead Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and whoever it is rolled into one. He started a typing service his freshman year, branched out into Xeroxing as a sophomore, and by the time he was a junior was earning more than his tuition and switching his major from Drama to Economics. Vacations he took to spending with his father and Billie Kling and summers he worked as runner for a Wall Street brokerage so that Sharon and I rarely saw him.^[10]

• Charlie Blaine (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, Treasure Hunt): ex-husband of Miriam and father to Chris and Tony, Charlie is an ineffectual hypochondriac, who, though harmless, is generally incapable of considering others.
• Clarence “Fats” Golden (Open Heart, Love Feast): Bebb’s ex-cellmate, Golden is initially a mysterious figure, whose harmless smile appears to bely harmful ulterior motives. It is wondered whether he is an angel, or a malevolent presence sent to disturb Bebb’s ministry, until Golden reveals himself as an old friend of the preacher with many tales to tell, most of which Bebb insists are not to be believed.
• Babe Bebb (Treasure Hunt): Leo Bebb’s twin, Babe shares a number of similarities with his brother, including a certain self-confidence and perceptiveness. Unlike Bebb, however, Babe is convinced that the world has been visited by aliens, and that all of the holy figures throughout history are best understood as being extra-terrestrial beings. Beyond this alternative worldview, however, Babe is also endowed with a cruel streak, which leads him to dress up as his disturbed wife, Bertha, and terrorize the local townsfolk at night in order to gain power over them.
• Bertha Bebb (Treasure Hunt): wife of Babe, Bertha’s absent-mindedness and strange behavior suggest the suppression of a past source of grief or trauma. That source is revealed to be Sharon, who is the love child of Bertha and Leo Bebb, and was adopted by Sharon and Bebb after their own baby mysteriously died. Bertha initially responds well to Sharon’s desire for them to begin a new life as mother and daughter back in Connecticut, but, after Babe is revealed to have been terrorizing the townsfolk, she decides to stay with him, rather than leaving him to die alone.

Themes

In Now and Then Buechner reflects on the themes that run through the Bebb novels. Concerning his departure into a first person narrative and the injection of comedy into his prose, the author writes:

[F]or the first time as a novelist I used the device of a first-person narrator, and although Antonio Parr was by no means simply myself in thin disguise – our lives had been very different; we had different personalities, different ways of speaking – just to have a person telling his own story in a rather digressive, loose-jointed way was extremely liberating to me as a writer. For the first time I felt free to be funny in ways that I hadn't felt comfortable being in print before, to let some of my saltier-tongued characters use language that before had struck me as less than seemly in a serious work of fiction, to wander off into quirkish reminiscences and observations that weren't always directly related to my central purpose.^[11]

With their exploration into the inner life of their central character, the novels are a continuation of the character-driven focus that became one of the hallmarks of the earlier fiction. Buechner’s choice of a first-person narrative, however, differentiates the tetralogy from Buechner’s previous novels because, rather than revealing their thought lives via an omniscient narrator, the thought lives of his other characters become the mystery which Antonio Parr attempts to discern. As such, Antonio’s discoveries of truths about himself are invariably arrived at through his endeavors to understand and read those around him.

In her study of the work of Buechner, titled Frederick Buechner: theologian and novelist of the lost and found, Marjorie Casebier McCoy writes that incarnation ‘is an underlying theme in all Buechner’s work, as insight into ourselves, our companions, and God emerges in unexpected places’. Concerning the tetralogy, she suggests that the element of ‘incarnational surprise’ is present in the moment at which its characters meet one another.^[12] Literary critic Dale Brown, in his companion to the works of Frederick Buechner, The Book of Buechner, writes that the Bebb tetralogy ‘continues with the questions dominating all of Buechner’s work’. These, he suggests, are: Belief versus unbelief, the ambiguities of life, the nature of sin, human lostness, spiritual homesickness, the quest for self-identity, the need for self-revelation, the search for meaning, and the possibility of joy.^[13]

Marie-Hélène Davies suggests that The Book of Bebb "reveals the preposterousness of life and the amazing grace of the God who sustains it."^[14]

Composition

Lion Country was the second novel composed by Buechner while in residence at his family home in Vermont. In his autobiographical work, Now and Then (1983), Buechner remembers the inception of the novel:

I was reading a magazine as I waited my turn at a barber shop one day when, triggered by a particular article and the photographs that went with it, there floated up out of some hitherto unexplored sub-cellar of me a character who was to dominate my life as a writer for the next six years and more.^[15]

Critic Dale Brown adds further detail regarding the ‘particular article’ that Buechner found so compelling, noting that it was a 'Life magazine exposé of the Reverend Doctor Herman Keck Jr.', pastor of Calvary Grace Christian Church, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Brown notes that he was ‘Famous for his advertisement, “Answer God’s call – start preaching today,” and for the mail-order theology degrees he dispensed to all who could pay the fees.'^[16] Concerning the character of Bebb, who would be one of the author’s most popular and enduring creations, in Now and Then Buechner claimed that the process of writing the Bebb tetralogy, particularly Lion Country, was 'a process much less of invention than that of discovery'.^[17] He continues:

It floated up out of my dreaming so charged with a life of its own that there was a sense in which almost all I had to do was sit back and watch it unfold. Instead of having to force myself to go back to it every morning as I had with novels in the past, I could hardly wait to go back to it; and instead of taking something like two years to write as the earlier ones had, it was all done in just short of three months.^[18]

For Buechner, the character of Bebb appears to have held a particular personal significance. In Now and Then he writes: 'Bebb was strong in most of the places where I was weak, and mad as a hatter in most of the places where I was all too sane. Bebb took terrible risks with his life where I hung back with mine and hoped no one would notice.'^[19]

Elsewhere in Now and Then, Buechner claims that this fascination with the character of Bebb ‘supremely and without any question’ became the driving force behind his immediate commencement with a second novel centered around the mercurial preacher, and subsequently a third and, finally, a fourth.^[20]

Critical reception

The most widely reviewed novel of the tetralogy was undoubtedly Lion Country. Dale Brown suggests that the reason for this is found in the growing perception among critics that Buechner was a novel-writing preacher, which led to a decrease in interest from literary reviewers as the series progressed: ‘In reviews and critical pieces from the mid-1960s forward', he writes, ‘Buechner the novelist was consistently associated with Buechner the minister'.^[21] Brown further notes that: ‘The insidious suggestion that the one calling precluded the other must have cost Buechner some readers in one venue, though the mix of novelist and believer would eventually cultivate readers in another venue'.^[22] Brown further argues that this critical predilection for finding homilies in Buechner’s fiction is unfair, and largely unsupported by the novels themselves: ‘I’d be hard pressed to believe’, he writes, ‘that any uninformed readers of The Book of Bebb imagined that a minister was pulling the string behind the curtain’.^[23] David R. Ebitt strongly agrees with this assessment, asserting that:

To describe Lion Country as deeply religious novel is to risk turning away some readers who would enjoy it enormously. For it is a novel of chicanery and sex, or exhibitionism and infanticide. Frederick Buechner has been writing good books for a long time. He was never written a better one.^[24]

Despite the common suggestion that Buechner’s work was becoming increasingly Christian in tone and preoccupation, Brown points out that the manner in which Lion Country was received by critics was generally ‘extremely positive’.^[25] Indeed, in his review of Lion Country James Dickey argued that:

Frederick Buechner is one of our finest writers. He has produced a body of work as impressive as any American writer currently practicing the art of fiction. Lion Country […] has many morals, not the least being that a constantly entertaining novel can also deal successfully with the most serious ideas.^[26]

William Pritchard’s write-up in the Hudson Review stated that Lion Country is a ‘powerful and beautiful creation’,^[27] a conclusion echoed by Rosemary F. Deen, who suggested in her review, published in Commonweal, that Bebb constituted a ‘masterful creation of the improbable genuineness of a latter-day apostle, a tarnished Daniel among the Babylonian lions’.^[28] Deen adds that this new prose is ‘economically written, easy and humorous in the best way without any sacrifice of seriousness.’^[29] Buechner’s altered writing style in Lion Country drew further comment from reviewers, including Guy Davenport, who declared that it was ‘beautifully written and told with the mastery of a craftsman’.^[30] Martin Waldron even suggested that, ‘This sometimes explosively funny novel reads as if it were plotted by Nathanael West or James Agee, with dialogue by Peter de Vries.’^[31] Noting that the novel is ‘very different from anything else this major writer has yet produced’, Barbara Bannon writes that ‘Lion Country is a human comedy of complexity and persuasion […] two quite disparate elements fuse brilliantly in a novel that is genuinely entertaining and also genuinely moving.’^[32] Both Harry T. Moore and Reynolds Price are similarly laudatory, the former claiming that ‘Buechner now reaches a new high level with the absorbing, tender and comic Lion Country’,^[33] the latter that:

Lion Country is Frederick Buechner's richest work, an unprecedented comedy which resounds with a depth and length that reconfirm not only his high position among living novelists, but our overdue doubt of attention and gratitude to him for craft, stamina, wisdom, and now laughter.^[34]

With the introduction of this new stylistic direction came a number of interesting comparisons between Lion Country and works by other authors. Alvin Beam noted a certain resemblance between the tone and approach taken by Buechner in Lion Country and the work of John Donne.^[35] Writing for Best Sellers, P.A. Doyle made a comparison slightly closer to home, remarking that the novel was reminiscent of the work of Flannery O’Connor.^[36] A number of reviewers commented on Buechner’s juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane: Geoffrey Wolfe wrote that ‘Buechner has turned upon sacred matters a most wonderfully secular, often profane, fancy’,^[37] while Rose Jeanne found that ‘Bawdy humor and symbolic mysticism make strange partners, but Mr. Buechner has mated them surprisingly well’.^[38] Beyond Lion Country, the other three constituent parts of The Book of Bebb also drew praise from critics. Literary critic Michael Putney called Open Heart ‘a wise book’, writing that this ‘extraordinary new novel’ was ‘antic, introspective, belly-laughing funny, eerily other-worldly, ribald, and devout.’^[39]  In a review published by the Library Journal, B.M. Firestone wrote of Treasure Hunt that:

There’s a little of everything here: UFO’s, life rays, and karmic fields; philosophy and theosophy; Messiahs that run the gamut from Christ to the Lone Ranger….Treasure Hunt is a rare find, a serious novel that never seems serious. Buechner laces his sermons with humor, with irony, even with fantasy. In this journey south, it’s hard to tell the homilies from the grits.^[40]

The tetralogy as a whole drew positive reflections from a number of critics, including Roger Dione, who argued in the Los Angeles Times that Buechner remained ‘one of the most underrated novelists writing today’.^[41] This sentiment was repeated by several other reviewers, including Louis Auchinloss, who contended that ‘Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland.’^[42] Benjamin Demott’s review of the tetralogy, published in the Atlantic, made comparisons between The Great Gatsby and The Book of Bebb, particularly in the ‘two centers’ that revolved around one another in each novel, ‘not merely the major Bebb but the minor Antonio’.^[43] Finally, in her wide-ranging study of Buechner’s work, titled Frederick Buechner: theologian and novelist of the lost and found, Marjorie Casebier McCoy concludes that, in The Book of Bebb, Buechner skilfully captures the struggles of human existence:

Life and death are wrestling throughout the Bebb stories, as indeed they are contending with one another in Buechner’s experience and in the experience of all of us, if we have awareness enough to notice or have been jolted into awareness by someone such as Bebb.^[44]

References