The two young friends: “Freddy” (left) and “Jimmy” (right).
flâneur, n.
A literary and theoretical urban figure who walks and experiences the city […], who [has] come to terms with the anonymity, alienation, and confusion of urban life, and [is] taken with modernity.
— The Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
— Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (1983)
It is best to begin at the beginning, in 1948, when, aged twenty-three, Frederick Buechner graduated from Princeton, turned down a job offer at the Hun School, and chose to spend the summer writing on Georgetown Island off the coast of Maine. He was joined at the cottage by his lifelong friend, James Merrill, and there the two young men pursued their respective callings—Merrill, his first commercially published poetry collection, First Poems (1951), and Buechner, his debut novel, A Long Day’s Dying (1950).
Buechner documents these halcyon days in his fourth memoir, The Eyes of the Heart (1999): quiet mornings writing by hand, accompanied by Stravinsky, Satie, and Prokofiev via the wavering strains of an old phonograph; sun-filled afternoons, digging for quahog clams, and regular trips along dust roads to the local store to buy ice blocks for an ice box (no refrigerators here, and no plumbing either); balmy evenings on the porch, or spent with the bohemian menagerie of sculptors, poets, artists, and socialites who summered on the island. ‘Looking back’, he concludes:
The selves we were beginning to grow into that summer were still in the shadowy wings awaiting their entrance cues […]. In the meantime we went on being the only selves we knew how to be just then—picnicking on those beautiful, vacant beaches, shopping in Bath, taking turns reading The Wings of the Dove out loud to one another on evenings when there was nothing else going on, and such like.[i]
While there is undoubtedly an innocent self-absorption to these literary labors and seaside capers, Buechner’s description of himself is also characterized by something else—a certain knowingness, self-consciousness, even performativity. Although he remembers that summer with evident fondness, his later reflections upon it and the novel it produced are tinged with embarrassment: to read it, he winces, is like reading ‘a letter you wrote when you were twenty-two years old’.[ii] Just as the days were ‘easy, companionable, nurturing, celibate, insulated’, so too he admits, with an honesty that typifies all his work, when visitors came to the cottage ‘by prearrangement’ one host would “spontaneously” ask the other ‘to read out loud something from his own work in the hopes that they would find it as wonderful as we invariably did ourselves’.[iii]
To Dale Brown’s observation that A Long Day’s Dying might well have been composed ‘with an outline of the tenets of literary modernism tacked on the wall above the typewriter’[iv] we should add that—evidenced by his memories of the writing process—the young author did not merely follow those tenets in the playful crafting of his prose. Indeed, Buechner gives the impression of having watched himself becoming a writer quite closely. There is, for example, something deeply self-ironizing, self-aware, and, well, modern, about his request that Merrill ‘write a single sentence’ that could be inserted somewhere in the book, a sentence emulating his ‘preposterously mandarin style’.[v] The glee with which the fledgling poet rose to the occasion is tangible: ‘But then’, he laughs (at us? at himself? at the very act of writing? —it is not quite clear…), ‘as though not sufficiently punished by his slow, melancholy presence for the ugliness of her words, she saw, and managed somehow to recognize, who else was witness to her humiliation, Maroo advancing from the groin of the hall as she had never, for Elizabeth, advanced before.’[vi] It all feels quite Bloomsbury-by-the-sea, albeit transplanted into a youthful East Coast context, and divested of carnality, existential exhaustion, and spite.
Buechner’s entrance into authorship is characterized by a kind of flâneurialism. To amend part of the definition given at the top of this page, upon encountering literary modernity this young writer is not merely taken with it but also with watching himself navigate its stylized rhythms and attitudes. He strolls down the streets and avenues of the literary process, he self-consciously becomes a late-modernist author, and the resulting novel is saturated with the qualities and preoccupations that arise from his flâneurial instincts. Its champion, Tristram Bone, a marvelously fat and dandyish scion of “Old New York”, rejoices in modernity, gliding around the metropolis with smooth synchronicity and quietly observing himself do so with a careful eye: ‘the hidden and wise’, he moves in ‘submarine safety’ with ‘fluid speed and ponderous grace’.[vii] When Bone rises to the surface and briefly sheds his treasured anonymity, it is to perform great acts of harmony with his surroundings. Perhaps the best example of this is his interaction with a young woman, who, while waiting for a bus on a street corner, drops a coin, ‘which rolled on the sidewalk before him’:
Without so much as breaking his stride he had managed somehow to retrieve the bit of silver, to press it into her gloved hand with a slight bow and continue down the street so gracefully and effortlessly that the very wind blew his praise. Never in all eternity could he have repeated it, but never, he felt, would that be necessary. It was only once, perfect, a unit, and it had happened in full view of the statues behind him.[viii]
Such demonstrations of symbiosis—oneness with the metropolis—are, to Bone’s mind, a kind of veiled unveiling of his role as the city’s secret dance partner. The glowering ancestors and their tradition present within the watching statues, the flowing crowd embodied in the lonely figure waiting at the bus stop, even nature itself—all stand in astonishment as the flâneur reveals himself in their midst. For a controlled moment, they alternate with him to become the observers of his actions, before he disappears into anonymity and becomes the wise watcher once more.
Peculiar to Bone’s flâneurialism is an evangelical strain that, as the future would show, is a deep expression of an attitude that is native to Buechner himself. In a nod to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Claude Monet, as the novel moves towards its climax our hero is brought into that most modernist of places, a train station. Though unnamed, it is clearly Grand Central: ‘the shiny floor of the tremendous, vaulted room modelled after some famous Roman baths with its distant ceiling of glass’.[ix] Within this space, Bone fully inhabits the attitude of one who revels in ‘the anonymity, alienation, and confusion of urban life’, allowing himself to feel fully ‘the comparative insignificance of his own enormousness’.[x] For ‘a few moments’, Buechner continues, he ‘was indeed as lost as he had hoped to be in merely observing some part of his intricate, shifting surroundings.’ Fascinatingly, however, mere solipsistic extrospection proves dissatisfying, and, in what was to become a hallmark of the author’s work, conscientious observation leads to a revelation.
Watching the crowds, ‘great numbers of them’, moving past him ‘slowly or rapidly, singly or in groups, carrying bags and parcels, asking for directions, perusing time-tables, searching for something familiar like the face of a friend or the name of a particular town’, Bone notes with distress that, unlike him, these individuals are detached from their surroundings: their ‘eyes glazed and half unseeing’. Moved by this mass of strangers—like so many fragile petals on a wet, black, bough—and by the unspoken discovery that death and nescience has undone this many, it is all that Bone can do to restrain himself from ‘rising to his feet, stretching his arms to their full length above his head, and shouting with all his power so that his voice might fill the whole enormous room’:
telling them to stop, stop, see where and who they were, where and why they were going; to awake, take notice, awake, awake, and discover that they were men and women in a station, passionately involved with trains, with arrivals and departures, and no more.[xi]
Tristram Bone’s desire that modernity, the city, and life in all its glittering strangeness, should be fully encountered by all, is Buechner’s first attempt at expressing a flâneurial conviction that would become central to his work. ‘Pay attention’, he urges his readers in Secrets in the Dark (2006): ‘As a summation of all that I have had to say as a writer, I would settle for that’.[xii]
Paying attention, for Buechner, equates to an ongoing spiritual exercise in which the individual takes time to focus upon the people, moments, feelings, and thoughts that populate ordinary life:
The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The odd coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life.[xiii]
In his second memoir, Now and Then (1983), he famously exhorts his readers to ‘listen’ to their lives:
See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.[xiv]
Mature Buechner, the self he would ‘grow into’, does not lose his flâneurial instinct; rather, he develops it into a serious way of life, engaging in the same process with a greater sense of purpose: still stylish, still self-aware, still playful, at times still raucous, but also deliberate, earnest, self-deprecating, and bearing reverently the twin weights of joy and suffering.
Interestingly—and unlike so many other twentieth-century Christian authors—Buechner’s engagement with modernity does not lead to a wholesale rejection of it. To further amend the definition given at the top of this essay, his exploration of the inner walkways of human experience leads him to locate anonymity, alienation, and confusion (and many other things besides) in contexts urban and rural, modern, medieval, and ancient. Bone’s instinct to call the crowd out of introspection should not, therefore, be understood as a repudiation of modernity per se, but rather as a general call, relevant and necessary to people everywhere, to drink in their lives and surroundings—a call that one might reasonably expect any of Buechner’s subsequent characters to make, and that Buechner charged himself with even while hidden away in his Vermont home.
Indeed, when he does descend from his mountainside retreat or sends his characters into the cosmopolitan places of his youth, what catches the eye is the extent to which Buechner’s prose is taken with what it discovers. This is perhaps best reflected in one particularly striking passage, taken from a sermon published in The Clown in the Belfry (1992). Returning to New York City, he writes:
When I came out of the Lincoln Tunnel, the city was snarled and seething with traffic as usual; but at the same time there was something about it that was not usual. It was gorgeous traffic, it was beautiful traffic […]. It was a beauty to see, to hear, to smell, even to be a part of. It was so dazzlingly alive it all but took my breath away. It rattled and honked and chattered with life—the people, the colors of their clothes, the marvelous hodgepodge of their faces, all of it; the taxis, the shops, the blinding sidewalks. The spring day […] made even the litter and clamor and turmoil of it a kind of miracle.[xv]
This passage, written when Buechner was in his sixties, represents a fully-orbed realization of the impulse that he first gave expression to in A Long Day’s Dying. The impulse itself is rooted in a hunch as old as time: that all things here below might be accurately described as “creation”, and that creation, though radically flawed, is shot through with a shimmering coherence, which, from time to time, is revealed to those who are seeking it (and even to those who are not). The claim—summarized helpfully by Paul Tillich in a quote that would give Buechner’s second memoir its title—is that, ‘here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation, usually hidden, but sometimes manifest’.[xvi] Certainly, even without knowing it, this is the reality that Bone rejoices in as he rescues the coin from the sidewalk, and that Buechner sees in the city’s glistering chaos:
In some ways it was like a dream and in other ways as if I had woken up from a dream. I had the feeling that I had never seen the city so real before in all my life. […] It was New York Coming down out of heaven adorned like a bride prepared for her husband.[xvii]
In seeking to offer a brief description of Buechner’s career, you might call it the clarification of an invitation, worked out across the decades in fiction, essay, sermon, and memoir. This invitation, subconscious in his first novel and explicit in his final works, is to walk the world with a roving and expectant eye in search of the signs of New Creation. Buechner’s reported embarrassment at the (glorious) adolescence, (dazzling) precocity, and (endearing) self-awareness of his first novel, therefore, should be treated with some caution, since, in the final analysis, his oeuvre is clearly the product of one who grew into the flâneurial calling rather than out of it.
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Works cited:
[i] Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: a memoir of the lost and found (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), p.39-40.
[ii] Dale Brown, The Book of Buechner: a journey through his writings (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
[iii] Buechner, Eyes of the Heart, p.38, p.40.
[iv] Brown, Book of Buechner, p.19.
[v] Buechner, Eyes of the Heart, p.39.
[vi] Frederick Buechner, A Long Day’s Dying (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), p.228.
[vii] Ibid, p.26, p.194.
[viii] Ibid, p.173.
[ix] Ibid, p.217-8.
[x] Ibid, p.217.
[xi] Ibid, p.220-1.
[xii] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: a life in sermons (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p.183.
[xiii] Ibid, p.183.
[xiv] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: a memoir of vocation (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), p.87.
[xv] Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: writings on faith and fiction (New York: Harper Collins), p.166.
[xvi] Paul Tillich, The New Being (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p.18.
[xvii] Buechner, Clown in the Belfry, p.167.
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