Reflecting on his novel, Lion Country (1971), Frederick Buechner writes, ‘it was from [Leo] Bebb that I learned to be braver about exposing myself and my own story as I have both in this present book and The Sacred Journey.’[1] A consummate prose stylist, Buechner knew exactly what he was doing when he used the word exposing in conjunction with a character who may or may not be guilty of indecent exposure.
If you’re new to the writings of Buechner, I should probably advise you against starting with Lion Country. This is not garden-variety reverse psychology, but an honest assessment of a book that on first blush seems to represent a stark departure from the rest of the man’s oeuvre. A comedic mix of the sacred and the profane, the novel introduces us to Leo Bebb—a former bible salesman turned minister who now runs a diploma mill out of Armadillo, Florida: “Put yourself on God’s payroll—go to work for Jesus NOW.”[2] If this doesn’t sound shady enough, the man also did five years in the slammer for an incident involving public nudity before a group of children. Though the novel introduces the possibility that this incident was a setup, it’s hard to view Bebb with anything less than suspicion. A religious charlatan is bad enough, but a possible sexual deviant as well? What exactly was Buechner up to with such a scurrilous character?
Add to this the fact that the tone of Lion Country is at odds with most of Buechner’s other books. Gone are the graceful cadences of the memoirs and the sermons. Instead, we get Antonio Parr (Tono). A narrator with a decidedly florid voice, Tono’s sentences tend to be ponderous and heavy on allusions, even when he’s conveying the most mundane of details. At one point, he describes his girlfriend, Ellie, as stroking his sick cat with ‘Tennysonian hands.’ He’s also fond of four-letter words and winking at the reader. On this score, he mentions borrowing a book titled, The Apocryphal New Testament (1924) edited by one M.R. James.[3] While Buechner makes it clear that Tono’s voice made for a seamless writing process, his turgid style often makes for a baggy book.[4]
When we first meet Tono, he is sleepwalking through his life. He has a relationship with a girl named Ellie that’s more perfunctory than passionate. His New York City apartment is littered with the remains of his latest artistic ambition. In this case, scrap-iron sculptures. He’s also tried his hand at teaching before opting to become a novelist, though he’s chronically stuck at page thirty-four of every attempted book.[5] A modest inheritance sponsors these haphazard pursuits, but Tono knows full well that they amount to little more than halfhearted gestures. He is lost. Meanwhile, his twin sister and closest friend, Miriam, is dying of myeloma in a nearby hospital. His vocational wanderings thus amount to little more than a means of escape.
What rouses Tono from his stupor is none other than Leo Bebb. When he comes across the ad inviting him to put himself on God’s payroll, Tono hatches a plan to write a daring exposé. The world will know that Leo Bebb is no man of God, but instead a monster and a fraud. And it will all be thanks to his courageous journalism. The scandal will expose Bebb and make Tono a household name. But it is Bebb, not Tono, who will do the exposing, both figurative and literal.
Buechner’s memoir Now and Then (1983) takes its title from the opening epigraph by Paul Tillich: ‘We want only to show you something we have seen and tell you something we have heard . . . that here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation.’[6] Much to Tono’s surprise, Bebb seems to bring new life to all that he touches. This vitality stands in sharp contrast to the stark circumstances of his life. His only child perished when his wife, Lucille, was in the throes of depression. A vacant swingset still stands in their yard. For her part, Lucille, with her ‘liverish lips’ and wry demeanor, now haunts their large house, perpetually nursing a tropicana (gin and orange juice). The couple have an adopted daughter, Sharon, who is as beautiful as she is distant. Bebb’s assistant pastor at the Church of Holy Love, Incorporated is Laverne Brown (Brownie)—a man whose devotion to him is equal parts slavish and lifeless.
When Tono makes the pilgrimage to Armadillo, Florida, he is confronted by a spot of kitschy desolation, all ‘stucco, or cinderblock and bleached to about the same shade of oystery white.’[7] A crumbling sidewalk that simply peters out stands as a kind of symbol of the town: ‘When I think of Armadillo, it is of this sidewalk I think first—a native American ruin and not entirely without a kind of appeal as it rambles on into the scrub, going nowhere.’[8]
One of the more startling conversations in the book arrives when Tono asks Brownie why he’s such a glutton for punishment from Bebb. After all, the man treats him like dirt. ‘“He has given me my life, dear. Leo Bebb raised me from the dead,”’ he states matter-of-factly.[9] The man isn’t speaking in symbolic terms. In his former life as a used-car salesman, Brownie accidentally stepped into a puddle holding a fallen power line. The electrical shock stopped his heart and he was pronounced dead by the doctor. At this point, Bebb, a former customer and somewhat of a friend, found his way to Brownie, prayed over him (‘“Brownie, stand up!”’), and witnessed the first faint stirrings of life in the man’s nether regions. Soon Brownie was back up on his feet.[10]
Tono is stunned. Surely such a stupendous miracle would rouse the faith of the community, draw worldwide attention, and make Bebb a star! The fallen power line and the building in which the dead man rose would all be converted to holy sites attracting scores of devoted pilgrims. Brownie’s response is profound: ‘“But you take a real miracle, like resurrection—nobody wants those kind, dear, because they make it so you’ve got to believe whether you want to or not.”’[11] Brownie proceeds to enumerate the ingenious strategies for explaining away his restored life—the doctor’s sketchy credentials, shaky witnesses, the unreliable nature of memory, as well as the habit of incorrigible myth-making that’s a perennial feature of human life.
The scene as it’s relayed is also confoundingly commonplace, a heavy-set bible salesman praying over a recently deceased friend. The modern imagination moves in a decidedly more garish direction on the subject of the dead returning to life. For most of us, the prospect of a physical resurrection calls to mind not Christ emerging from his tomb, but rather a mad scientist laboring to reanimate a corpse in a laboratory, much like what we see in James Whale’s adaptation of Frankenstein. The best we can do is some version of the “living dead.” In stark contrast to these ghoulish and promethean fantasies, our Lord’s miraculous work comes to us clothed in the unassuming garb of the everyday—baptismal waters running down the astonished face of an infant, the bread and the cup.
Lion Country takes its title from a lion safari park of which the aptly named Leo Bebb is particularly fond. Though I wouldn’t dare cheat the reader out of the pleasure of experiencing all this novel’s twists and turns firsthand, it’s worth concluding with a few vignettes: Bebb exiting the vehicle in Lion Country to capture two copulating lions at close range with a camera. And Bebb accidentally flashing the entire audience as he performs an ordination service—a moment that gives uproarious expression to the notion of baring one’s soul. What are we to make of this corpulent minister who blunders his way through the Lord’s business, raises the dead, and feels at home among the wild beasts? Buechner seems to think we could learn a thing or two from him about what it means to walk by faith with feet of clay.
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[1] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (New York: HarperOne, 1983), p.101.
[2] Frederick Buechner, The Book of Bebb (New York: HarperOne, 2001), p.4.
[3] Ibid., 121.
[4] Now and Then, p.98: “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 get 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.”
[5] Bebb, p.5.
[6] Quoted in Now and Then.
[7] Bebb, p.31.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p.95.
[10] Ibid., p.98.
[11] Ibid., p.99.
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