Enter Leo Bebb

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 subcellar of me a character who was to dominate my life as a writer for the next six years and more. 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. His name was Leo Bebb.

I had never known a man like Leo Bebb and was in most ways quite unlike him myself, but despite that, there was very little I had to do by way of consciously, purposefully inventing him. He came, unexpected and unbidden, from a part of myself no less mysterious and inaccessible than the part where dreams come from; and little by little there came with him a whole world of people and places that was as heretofore unknown to me as Bebb was himself. I have no doubt that, as in my earlier novels, I had to do more hard work than I now remember. I had to figure out names for people that seemed to suit them and to explore possible relationships between them. I had to search my memories of the South where they lived so I could get the look and the feel of it more or less right and the country way they some of them had of talking. I had to worry about plot, about what scenes to put in and what scenes to let the readers imagine for themselves. All of that. But in the case of Lion Country especially—the first of the four novels I wrote about Bebb—what I found myself involved in was a process much less of invention than of discovery. I had never written a book that seemed so much "on the house." 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.

-Originally published in Now and Then

Words

WORDS—ESPECIALLY religious words, words that have to do with the depth of things—get tired and stale the way people do. Find new words or put old words together in combinations that make them heard as new, make you yourself new, and make you understand in new ways. "Blessed are the meek" are the words of the English translators—words of great beauty and power—but over the years they have become almost too familiar to hear any more. "Heureux sont les debonnaires" are the French words—Blessed are the debonair—and suddenly new beauty, new power, flood in like light. Blessed is Fred Astaire in white tie and tails. Blessed is Oliver Hardy in rusty black suit and derby hat as he picks his dapper way toward the unseen banana peel on the sidewalk. Blessed is my old friend as she tries to let me win at Aggravation, rattling her dice in the cup which the pills that keep her alive come in. Arrange the alphabet into words that are true in the sense that they are true to what you experience to be true. If you have to choose between words that mean more than what you have experienced and words that mean less, choose the ones that mean less because that way you leave room for your hearers to move around in and for yourself to move around in too.

-Originally published in Now and Then

Unmemorable Moments

WHEN IT CAME TO my work, my ministry, writing books was not the only form it took. I continued to preach from time to time—at fancy places like Yale and Princeton and unfancy places like the small Congregational church in Rupert, where the thirty or so people who came of a Sunday and the creaking old organ and the swept and dusted shabbiness gave me often a richer sense of a place where God had been truly spoken to and heard than many a more Gothic and grander. I taught Sunday school in the deserted bar of an Inn in Dorset and helped with religion conferences elsewhere. When some of the local churches were without a minister for one reason or another, I took weddings and funerals and christenings. Every once in a while, people with problems who had never found their way to a church found their way to me precisely because I had no church and for that reason seemed to them more approachable. And I kept on trying to pray the way Agnes Sanford had taught me because I was helpless to do otherwise. So both at work and at play, life went on in many places other than the room where I wrote, in other words; there were memorable moments and unmemorable moments, and as far as my sense of being trapped is concerned, it was the unmemorable ones, the apparently random and everyday ones, that turned out to be the key moments, the key that let me out of the trap at last.

-Originally published in Now and Then

Call to Prayer

BECAUSE THE WORD that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word—a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see—the chances are we will never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.

-Originally published in Now and Then   

A Memorable Woman

AND PART OF ME will always be homesick, too, for a person I came to know, also in Manchester, during those same years. When the Baptist church, of which she was a member, was without a minister one winter, I took the services every Sunday for a few months, and that was how we met. She was a woman well on into her seventies, very thin, very stooped. She had been married a number of times, and for years, as a widow, had been living alone, on welfare, in the one small apartment left inhabitable in a house that had been gutted by fire a few years earlier. Shaking hands at the church door after the service one Sunday morning, I had said to her—neither expecting nor much caring about an answer—"How are you?" and she looked up at me out of her wry, beleaguered old face and said, "As well as can be expected." Just that and no more, then made her way down the steps and out into the cold.

I am as deaf as the next one and usually deafer when it comes to calls for help, but I was all she had by way of a minister just then, after all, and I was not so literary and detached and specialized as not to know that every once in a while, if only to keep their hands in, Christians are supposed to be Christs to each other for Christ's sweet sake, so I steeled myself and went to call on her one winter afternoon. I expected the worst, of course, because that is my nature. I expected a long, dreary monologue. I expected plenty of complaints with some tears to go with them. I expected to feel awkward and inadequate. I expected to be bored and hoped to get away as soon as I decently could. And I couldn't possibly have been more wrong on every count. None of the things I expected to happen happened, and none of the things I expected to feel did I feel, neither on that first day I went to see her nor on all the other days I went to see her from that time on until finally, around Saint Valentine's day some seven or eight years later, she died, and I conducted her burial service before a little knot of family and friends under a gray Vermont sky with the wind flapping my black robe around my ankles.

-Originally published in Now and Then