The World According to Bebb

Leo Bebb, vivacious hero of four highly praised novels by Frederick Buechner, assembled as THE BOOK OF BEBB (Atheneum, $16.95), begins life unpromisingly in backcountry South Carolina. His father, a house painter, falls off a ladder when Leo is small and spends “most of the rest of his life in bed.” His mother is a “hard-working woman, a good woman, but she [doesn’t] have a particle of charity . . .” Bebb marries young and manages to find work as a Bible salesman, but bad luck dogs him. His wife, maddened by the wailing of the couple’s baby boy, batters the child to death with a toilet brush and afterward sinks into remorse lightened only by regular overdoses of “Tropicanas”—a gin and orange mix. And when Bebb falls into dalliance with his sister-in-law, his brother refuses shelter to the product of their union, a baby girl.

So, seemingly Faulkner-like, it goes. Bebb advances from sales to preaching, founding the Church of Holy Love, Inc. and a religious diploma mill called Gospel Faith College. (For a fee, or “love offering,” GFC provides its clients with certificates of ordination as well as lists of tax exemptions available to persons of the cloth.) He charms several people of means, including an aged and lubricious Texas millionaire named Herman Redpath (by a laying-on of hands, Bebb restores Redpath’s sexual potency), and a zany octogenarian theosophist named Gertrude Conover, who’s in residence, in this incarnation, on a Princeton, New Jersey, estate. Some glory days ensue. In one volume of the quartet, Bebb the revivalist leads a sensational (and hilarious) Jesus freak march on university administration headquarters at Old Nassau. In the final volume, his followers search committedly for evidence confirming their faith in his immortality. And, back in his Bible-drumming days, Bebb raises the dead.

A riveting, superbly imagined episode. The dead man, an associate of Bebb’s named Brownie, is fatally struck after a storm by a jolt of electricity from a blown-down power line. “They tried to administer artificial respiration and sent for a doctor, but their efforts were unsuccessful, and when the doctor finally arrived, he pronounced Brownie dead.” What happened next the dead man himself tells, drawing on the words of a barber-undertaker friend named Billy, an almost trustworthy eyewitness:

“Being in the business of selling Bibles, Mr. Bebb knew his Scripture even back then, and going by what Billy told me later, I think he must have had John eleven in the back of his mind the whole time. He said, ‘Billy, our friend Brownie sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep.’ Then he walked up to the head of the bed and laid both his hands down on top of me where Billy had my hair all fixed up and combed. He raised his eyes and seemed to be praying, Billy said—I am the resurrection and the life, he said, he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live—and then, after a few moments of silence when Billy said his face got as red as though he was holding his breath, Mr. Bebb called out in a loud voice almost like he was mad, ‘Brownie, you stand up!'

“Billy said at first he didn’t think anything was going to happen. I just kept on laying there with my face about the same color as the pillow, but then Billy thought he saw something move. Now, because I am not telling this in mixed company . . . but just to another member of the male sex, I do not mind telling you that what Billy said he first thought he saw move was my private parts—just a very faint movement down there the way it can happen sometimes for no reason and you don’t even notice it, but I was wearing only my underdrawers at the time so Billy noticed. Then he thought he saw some color returning to my face, and Mr. Bebb held his arm out, crooked at the elbow, and after a while I reached out and grabbed hold of it and pulled myself up to a sitting position. Billy said he did not know if what he saw running down off Mr. Bebb’s face was tears or sweat.

“. . .The first thing I remember was, it was like if I was lying at the bottom of a deep pit and way up at the top I could see this arm, and I knew if I could only manage to reach it, I would be all right. I did not know or care whose arm it was.

I just knew I had to reach it or perish, and fortunately I reached it. When I opened my eyes, it wasn’t Mr. Bebb I saw first, it was Billy. The light seemed so bright it made my eyes ache, and for a moment I thought he was on fire.”

Despite miracles and glory days, though, the Bebb show is distinctly small-time—at least when compared with such an act as Billy Graham’s. The man who raises the dead also lowers the moral tone (at one point in his life he does five years in the slammer on a flashing rap). When his wife’s Tropicanas lose their kick, she flees the house. At the end he himself is in flight from the IRS, the U.S. “Department of Education,” and a fire insurance company, charged with tax evasion, arson, and worse. And his own summary self-estimate is sour: “All my life,” Bebb declares, “I wanted to do something big for Jesus only nothing I ever did amounted to scratch. Could be the best thing I ever did for him was back when I was on the road selling Bibles where folks could read up on him for theirselves, but that wasn’t big enough to suit me. I wanted to be up there in the head office .... but it’s small potatoes. Everything I ever did, it was small potatoes.”

In the age of H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, the approved line of approach to lives like Bebb’s was satiric. (Meet shoddy, small-time Leo, cynical exploiter of ignorance and gullibility, representative citizen of the Boobocracy. Meet him and scorn him.) But nowadays, obviously, other options are open. The Book of Bebh acknowledges the sordidness and meanness of scale of episodes in the life story it recounts. But its tone is closer to panegyric than to satire, and its narrator presents the evangelist ex-con not as a maniac but as manna.

Nothing mysterious about this, if you stop to think. People who imagine themselves, as Mencken and Lewis did, to be suffocating in a period of superstition are bound to be severe on hot gospelers, bigor small-time. People who see themselves as liberated, on the other hand, are likely to notice what their predecessors missed, namely the force and freshness of the revivalist sensibility even at non-superstar levels—the novelty and power of the very idea of belief. And, as it happens, that last idea is especially attractive to the narrator of The Book of Bebb. Young enough to be Bebb’s lost son, Antonio Parr—the narrator—is a member of the bored, confused, faintly desiccated American upper middle class—an unusually self-knowing member. The acuteness of his self-knowledge—his alertness to the defects of his own kind—stimulates strong responsiveness to Leo Bebb, man of clear aims and total conviction, if spotty achievement. And Frederick Buechner develops, on the foundation of this responsiveness, a complicated set of relationships—parent-child, teacher-student, counselor-patient—between hero and narrator. The result is a work which, like The Great Gatsby, comes to have two centers—not merely the major Bebb but the minor Antonio, a participant-observer who grasps that, while worldly ratings would have it otherwise, Bebb is a hero and he himself is just par.

Parr diverges, admittedly, in a few details, from stereotypes of upper-middle-class lifelessness. He’s of mixed stock (an Italian mother), hasn’t a standard Ivy brand (Wesleyan, ‘55), and was raised as a Catholic. A further sign of unconventionality is his encountering Bebb in the first place. (It’s after reading a newspaper piece about Bebb’s diploma mill that the narrator seeks a meeting; he has in mind writing a fulllength exposé and launching himself as a muckraking free lance.) But Parr’s own life story, which is intermingled with Bebb’s from the first to the last page of the series, soon establishes his right to play Nick Carraway to the hero’s Gatsby. He has, for advantages, charm, manners, and a small private income, but he suffers the class blight—no intensity, ambition, or will. After graduating, he spends years “trying” novel writing, scrap-iron sculpting, and journalism, and each time fades in the stretch, at length settling into English teaching, famous last refuge of the energyless. His immediate family offers no models of engaged or active life. (His parents are gone; his twin sister is dying of cancer; his brother-in-law is timid, finicky, and addicted to long naps.) And he himself seems, when first met, sexually asleep. His girlfriend, a Vassar graduate with a UN job and a fondness for liberal causes, has a chilly distaste for her own physicality—and that problem doesn’t both* er Parr a bit.

In sum, the narrator of The Book of Bebb is a specimen of underanimated mental consciousness, and therefore a perfect audience—assuming a readiness to learn—for the sort of lessons that a life-loving man of passion can teach. And, since the vivacious Bebb is both a life-loving man of passion and a teacher, this work has education at its

core. One part of Bebb’s teaching is that deference to orthodoxy—sexual, moral, theological, or economic—is contrary to the spirit of Our Lord. (“Listen, was it a racket Jesus saying lay down your fishpole? Leave go your buck-saw, your manure fork, you name it, and follow me. Two-bit whores, crooks, sodomites—Jesus didn’t ask for any credentials, and I didn’t either.”) Another is that fearlessness is fun. (Bebb leaping joyfully from the safety of his car on a Florida lion farm to take pictures of the beasts in the nearby bush—Parr cowering in the back seat—is among the narrator’s first glimpses of his hero.) Still another lesson is that exulting in the real world makes splendid sense. (“This world Jesus come down to, it’s got good things in it too, praise God. It’s got love in it and kindness in it and people doing brave and honest things, not just hateful things. It’s got beauty in it. It’s got the silver light of the moon by night and golden beams of the sun by day .... It’s got human forms and faces that are so beautiful they break your heart for yearning after them.”)

Some lessons are more difficult to master than others, naturally. Parr isn’t quick about, for example, the uses and pleasures of an awakened sexuality. The teacher helps by offering the pupil his own (illicitly conceived) daughter, who’s lively, uninhibited, and delightfully demanding; by the close of the first section of this work, Parr is married to Sharon Bebb and learning the names and nature of homely physical desire. But while he’s fascinated by

the spontaneity and freedom of his wife’s appetite, he nevertheless stands at an unrelaxed remove from both (before the end his teenaged nephew actually cuckolds him). On this front Bebb avoids pressing him too hard.

But elsewhere Bebb is pertinacious, and nowhere more so than about the need to live one’s life rather than be lived by it. Our obligation is to energize our days, he contends, to radiate them with a sense of possibility, to make ourselves truly new from morn to morn. Bebb is forever urging, as indicated, unrestrained celebration of life as it is. He lays it down that “The kingdom of heaven. . . . It’s life. Not the kind of half-baked, moth-eaten life we most of us live most of the time but the real honest-to-God thing. Life with a capital L.” He badgers Brownie—the chap he’s said to have raised from the dead—for failing to make use of the life miraculously restored to him. (“The Almighty gave Brownie life, and Brownie never lived it. He just shoved it up his ass.”)

In the fullness of four novels, Parr finally gets the message. After years of tutelage, direct and indirect, he’s capable of distinguishing low levels of animation from high, and unembarrassedly assigns top place to the latter. The surest and most touching proof of this is that by the end of the book —having heard a thousand grand Bebbian prayers and witnessed more than a few failed attempts at miracles; having followed his leader through a dozen scrapes; having attended with extreme care to the man’s utterances, highhearted and self-doubting alike—he arrives at Leo Bebb’s proper praise. “. . . what was there about [Bebb] that made me miss him more than any man? Even at his lowest and bluest, there was a life in him that rubbed off on you, that’s all. You might feel better or you might feel worse when Bebb was around, but in any case you felt more. There was more of you to feel with.”

While none of the Bebb novels was a best seller on first publication, each was, to repeat, highly praised here and abroad—highly and deservedly. Frederick Buechner, ordained Presbyterian minister (graduate of Princeton and Union Theological Seminary), author of several volumes of meditations as well as nine novels, has a go-go-go sermoniacal side that can become wearing. He’s too fond of funny names and nicknames—Bip, Bopper, Harry Hocktaw, John Turtle, and the like—and too tolerant of the necking component (Let’s everybody “exchange with the neighbor to our right the kiss of peace”) in populist religion. Some passages in The Book of Bebb resemble the late Christianizing Faulkner as he might sound if rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut after a week’s retreat with Harvey Cox (softer than Faulkner, that is, leavened by cute names and explicit endorsements of hugging in the pews, but nearly as unrelentingly upbeat as the original). And one or two other serious objections can be lodged. The oppositions controlling the work—rogue hero vs. The Establishment, spirited poor vs. spiritless rich, the humming South vs. the moribund North—are too starkly drawn. And a problem triumphantly met in Gatsby—how to explore unsentimentally the theme of primitive virtue and vitality in a criminal—is at best only partially solved.

But, with these defects weighed, Buechner remains a writer of uncommon range and virtuosity. The hospital scenes in this book —Antonio Parr’s nephews visiting their young, mortally afflicted mother—are composed with exceptional grace, respect for the immemorial human search for a language of concerned unconcern simultaneously intensifying the poignance and rendering it more bearable. The current of observation on domestic events runs clear and strong: “When a marriage cracks like a plate and is glued together again, of all the things you’ve got to be careful about, the first is to look as if you aren’t being careful about any of them.” The comedy is by turns boisterously raunchy, as in an account of the antics of an Indian named Joking Cousin, and delicately lyric, as in chapters detailing Parr’s hesitant affair (a refuge from the too volatile Sharon Bebb) with a gentle former student.

And throughout there’s the happy satisfaction provided by a writer prepared to acknowledge that, even now, post-everything, everybody on earth simply isn’t the same. We know, regardless of the gospels of universal alienation and deracination propounded in numberless modernist masterworks, that differences continue to exist among us, that juicy people survive, as do people as dry as clay courts in a hot spell, and that such differences count. And, at the present hour in literary history, a writer who takes this as a given is hard to fault.

It doesn’t follow, of course, that The Book of Behh will entrance every reader. Bebb’s buoyant miracle-working and Parr’s golden learning experience, the author’s occasionally willed and arbitrary optimism, his assertion (in an introduction) that “real life is a love letter,” his firm endorsement of Father Zossima’s claim that “anyone who is truly happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth’ ”—these and other features of the work are bound to rouse suspicion in audiences habituated to literary blackishness. What makes this Ivy WASP think he can raise the ghost of humanistic optimism from its grave? How can anybody write as though the great tract of knowing melancholy separating us from the hope of our grandfathers doesn’t matter or perhaps doesn’t exist? The Book of Bebb may, in a word, take a trouncing here and there as naive.

I’m sure it is naive, a little. I myself found its yea-saying a shade shrill. And I’d concede that the terms of the author’s optimism are remote from the vital scientific languages now in use– languages that are still the best non-anthropocentric instruments we possess for discovering our place. Intellectually speaking, The Book of Bebb belongs to a time when finding one’s way home was at once a less interesting and less arduous project than most thinkers in the late twentieth century have considered it to be.

But while nothing in the work would be found especially helpful or pertinent by, say, a structuralist or a phenomenologist or a geneticist or a psychobiologist, it’s worth reminding oneself that pretty much the same holds for the chefs d’oeuvre of our classic voices of doom. Modernist pessimism, awash in tragedy, comfortable with impotence, superior to longing, convinced that the will to be positive is some kind of disease, isn’t all that easy to square, either, with the shrewdest contemporary versions of who and what we are. Up the road a way, possibly, minds are waiting that will nudge us authoritatively forward from the cliches of yea and nay, upbeat and downbeat, positive and negative, and the rest. Meantime there’s The Book of Bebb—no work of revelation but an immensely entertaining piece of fiction —right here at hand. I’d rate it a buy.