I’d had bad beats before: lousy hands at college — and sometimes casino — poker tables, promotions I ought to have had whose politics went sideways at the last minute, a few awkward fumblings in the direction of stock investing. But nothing hit quite as hard as losing the house.
I had taught for most of the decade at Seattle Pacific University, which happens to sit at the base of the highest value real estate neighborhood in Seattle’s already hyper-inflated market. You can’t touch a garden shed in Queen Anne for less than a million dollars. So, we rented, and I assumed always would, until one day, when my wife’s best friend asked, “do you guys want this house?” What did she mean by “want”? She was a millionaire — I guess I knew that already — and at 80 years old and in declining health, probably wouldn’t around for much longer. She didn’t have any heirs either, or relatives she was in touch with. Is this woman seriously offering us a house? Turns out, she was asking whether we’d like to buy it, but for whatever we could afford rather than for what it was worth. “What do I need with extra money?” she reasoned. We were over the moon. We ran the numbers and found a fair middle. We walked with her through the rooms while she suggested, “maybe you could put the crib here and this room would be perfect for your son.” It felt otherworldly, like a dream, a blessing on a blessing. She could leave her home to friends who loved it, to people who loved her rather than selling it to strangers, and we would have the first stability we’d ever known.
It all fell apart when some well-intentioned, if distant, friends of hers presumed that my wife and I were fraudsters trying to swindle an old woman out of her land value. “She must be out of her head, too old to make financial decisions,” they said. Never mind that we were giving her twice what she’d paid for the house, the friends simply couldn’t imagine that someone of sound understanding wouldn’t want to get every cent possible, that she could cost herself, knowingly, in order to bless a poor couple of artists. They scuttled the plan, moved her to an elder-care facility, sold the house by quick-deed, and pocketed the difference. It was the ugliest thing I’ve ever been a part of.
It is also, very nearly, the plot of Frederick Buechner’s fifth novel, The Entrance to Porlock (1970), in which an aging paterfamilias attempts to leave a valuable piece of real estate not to his immediate family, but to a local disabled community instead, who might be more blessed thereby. The family imagines Peter Ringkoping, their father, is a victim of fraud, or that he’s lost his mind, and they step in. How could anyone just…give something away? What manner of man is this?
Well, one thing the novel tells us is that he’s a reader. Ringkoping owns one of those sleepy used bookstores that bejewel the American Northeast and so, in lieu of family visits, experiences another kind of community, made up of the authors and characters with whom he is existentially surrounded. Recalling the novel later in his memoir Now and Then (1983), Buechner writes that Peter ‘sees the ghosts of dead writers whose books he sells, sees glimpses of a shimmering reality within reality, and in the process, loses touch with his family’.[1] The last part of the quote makes it sound negative, of course — although Buechner knew some hard things about being estranged from one’s family — but the “shimmering” bit sounds like magic, as it is supposed to. Isn’t the goal, for the writer as well as for the preacher, to detect the “reality within reality?” And isn’t that deeper seeing the very sort of vision required for making financial moves more suited fairy-tale endings than to the practical and taxed business of estate planning?
At heart, Entrance to Porlock is a book about pilgrimage: the way we’re changed while walking on the way. The children decide to visit the community their inheritance may soon be supporting, and become who they will be in the process. In this aspect, the novel’s most obvious analogue is the Wizard of Oz stories Buechner loved so well. From grey Kansas to the glimmering Oz, the pilgrims follow the road toward the strange, even disturbing, ways of grace. Buechner explains the inspiration for the characters thus:
One son, a pathetic failure and compulsive joker, is the Scarecrow in search of a brain. Another son, the bullying and hypochondriacal dean of a school like Exeter who fantasizes continually about receiving the farewell visits of friends as he lies dying in a hospital, is the Cowardly Lion in search of courage. And there is a grandson – confused, introverted, adolescent – who, like Dorothy, is in search of home, if only a home inside himself. The Wizard is an Austrian who runs a community for the mentally and emotionally disturbed, and it is in their relationship to him that they all move at least a step closer to finding what is missing in themselves.[2]
Long-time readers of Buechner will recall other echoes of this novel — themes it takes up — ringing around in his work, even decades later. In Eyes of the Heart (1999), for instance, Buechner paces up and down his library which he calls the “Magic Kingdom” like some latter-day Peter Ringkoping, chatting with old ghosts. In the same book, he discusses the difficulty he has with leaving his treasure to immediate family who may not appreciate it. In this case, the treasure is his own library, full of first editions and containing the complete Oz, which is worth a small fortune. But his kids aren’t book people. Better to leave it to a library? To the Wade Center at Wheaton? Perhaps it is ironic that Buechner considers the justice of familial inheritance in a novel he writes at forty-four years old, and that he’s still tumbling it over in his seventies. To this reader, it shows just how closely he identifies with Peter, or better said: it shows how much of himself he wrote into that character.
But of course, the novel isn’t called “Entrance to Oz,” or “Out of Kansas,” or “Into the Tornado” or any such thing. “Porlock” is a reference to another literary specimen that undergirds the novel, and much else in Buechner’s work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Kubla Kahn” in 1797 and didn’t publish it until nearly twenty years later. It’s a strange poem, even within Coleridge’s strange oeuvre, in part because it begins with a back story, such as one might find in a footnote, about its own composition. The note details how, having taken opium, the poet fell asleep and dreamed the most fantastic things about ancient Xanadu, a place of impossible wealth and mystery. He wakes and tries to capture the vision, but it is already fading. He gets down what he can until interrupted by a knock by “a man from Porlock,” a nearby town. The poet tries to get back to the dream, but of course he can’t; the bubble is popped and Xanadu, the Oz he’d imagined, turns out to have been a fever dream.
What the title, Entrance to Porlock, is doing, then, is suggesting that there are fabulous worlds beyond, or even alongside of, this one, but also that business intrudes upon art, and that all dreams end before we would like them to. Buechner says as much in Now and Then, that the title is a ‘reference to the visitor from Porlock who woke Coleridge out of the visionary trance of Kubla Khan’ and that the novel itself is about ‘the tension between everyday reality and the reality of dreams, of imagination.’[3]
But “Kubla Kahn” is not only about this impossible palace, ‘a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’, nor only about the fragmentary nature of human experience, though it is most certainly that. It is also about artistic inheritance. What do we owe to those gone before us? To those who come after? The poem’s climactic scene features, importantly, an overhearing:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
The poet, anymore than the Presbyterian novelist, doesn’t merely invent things. They don’t simply decree, like some literary Kahn, “build me a pleasure dome!” and it appears. No, they catch traces of a former song, they see a vision and then work to re-create, if only partially, the tune.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
This is why Peter spends his days in a used bookstore. That’s where the Abyssinian maid does her singing. Artists, the novel claims, are sub-creators, reviving former melodies and turning them into yellow brick roads, flying monkeys, stately pleasure domes, and all the rest by the suspension — it flies through the air, heavy as a house — of disbelief.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), p.81.
[2] Ibid., p.81.
[3] Ibid., p.81.
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