Frederick Buechner. Speak What We Feel. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. 176 pp.

The title of author Frederick Buechner’s latest volume of essays, Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought To Say), belies its rhetorical aggressiveness, slightly. This book about faith, courage, and literature seems driven by a pathos created by age and tragedy.

In one sense, Speak What We Feel is an extension of Buechner’s feelings first evinced in The Clown in the Belfry (1992), in which he pontificated about his favorite literature. Three of the authors he wrote about then reappear in this new volume.

In another sense, Buechner here is in an “old age reflective” mode. Just as older Christians identify with favorite scriptures as they reassess their lives, Buechner goes back to his favorite literary voices in an attempt to discover the deeper reasons why these authors penned extraordinary works.

Buechner’s subjectivity is evident; his feelings are on his sleeve as he suggests that the greatest works, in his mind, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mark Twain, C.K. Chesterton, and William Shakespeare—Hopkins’ late poems, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Man Who Was Thursday, and King Lear—are steeped in a grudging faith tapped during tragic times and old age.

For each author, Buechner presents biographical background and then interprets their works in light of his main thesis—that tragedy mixed with faith is a powerful incentive to produce literature that resonates beyond its era. Of course, Buechner dabbles with a psychoanalytic rhetoric that begs some questions, but he can be excused, for he knows this literature “by de back.”

In the Hopkins chapter, perhaps the strongest, Buechner’s empathy for the Jesuit priest is so deep that the reader can’t help but be drawn into both the author’s compassion and the good father’s suffering.

As for Twain, Buechner sees the American’s courage to bridge races as evolving from Twain’s distancing himself from the mainland during his financial difficulties, an intriguing interpretation as Buechner takes us step by step through the classic work’s development.

In King Lear (the final words of which make up the book title), Buechner sees the Bard’s own elderly reflections, suggesting that much of Shakespeare’s life, especially his family times, is reflected through the main characters.

The book’s only weakness exists in the Chesterton section, where the Vermont minister tends to summarize the book in order to clarify the metaphors; at the end I felt as if I had read the book with him instead of discovering it for myself. In this chapter Buechner seems to be ever so slightly selling his reflective interpretation but redeems himself with a neat and tidy conclusion, putting the rotund English writer in his proper place.

Throughout, Buechner’s staunch Christian faith permeates his diction, as if, in momentary enlightenment, he strides upon his pulpit to announce yet another found truth that a portion of Scripture can clarify.

But it’s not a bully pulpit he climbs. Buechner’s love for the material and respect for its authors shines through, giving us still another reason to revisit and rethink these works.

Jeff Cebulski