Reinhold Niebuhr
McCann, Dennis P.
vaudeville one-liners in his scenes, which, now reduced in the screenplay, refresh rather than bore by repetition. The slight story is also magnificently edited: economic flashbacks provide key...
...But what Fox discovered and persuasively argues is the extent to which these paradoxes reflect, but only partially resolve Niebuhr's deep, yet usually repressed, feelings about his father, the German immigrant pastor, Gustav...
...The other exploration of madness, "In Prison," describes a man obsessed by the need to control all the patterns around him: fields, cobblestone courtyards, walls, wallpaper...
...Real seriousness, even real comic seriousness like Chaplin's, however, involves more than inside references and insider movies...
...It is sympathetic, and also the result of sometimes rugged, but never tedious, travel and research...
...Circuses were mentioned...
...Somehow the struggle against complacency must be lifted from the shoulders of the isolated prophet and placed within nurturing communities of faith...
...Barbara Hershey (whose affair with Caine is her secret) is convincingly racked by guilt...
...But it does mean that Niebuhr's vocation as the nation's "intellectual preacher" will most likely t~e inherited by very loose networks o1( more or less anonymous men and won~n, capable of communicating the skills necessary for public discourse Commonweal: 152and of practicing the virtue of civility...
...reminiscence goes into the essays, biography into the fiction...
...151context of his personal relationships with family and friends, as well as his shifting public commitments to various political causes, Fox for the first time sheds light on the extraordinary inner turmoil that animates Niebuhr's theology of paradox, his "Christian realism...
...a political democrat infatuated with Burkean traditionalism...
...So I say good riddance to theological celebrities...
...Universalizing Niebuhr's insight into sin will only distort it...
...It is unfortunate he never quite explores it deeply...
...The_ family theme does include a fine surprise at the end, what one might even call a tear-jerker...
...a skeptical relativist committed like William James to the life of passionate belief and moral struggle...
...Indeed, some have suggested that Hannah is Allen's Fanny and Alexander...
...Choosing "aggravation over tranquillity," Christian realism sees "the moral vocation" as "a continuous renegotiati6n of the balance between taking the world as it is and transforming it in the cause of justice," In a word, it must be a relentless assault on complacency, beginning with one's own...
...Since he has concluded that the only place this control might be possible is in a jail cell -- for life -- how will he achieve his ambition...
...elliptical cuts sustain suspense...
...The prose pieces work the same way...
...Minha Vida de Menina had been written and published under the pseudonym "Helena Morley" by a young, half-English girl who grew up in Diamantina in the mining province of Minas Gerais at the turn of the century...
...the Introduction is reprinted here...
...For they have protested his tendency to exaggerate the pervasiveness of the sin of pride when its opposite, a lack of self-esteem, is a crippling affliction for so many urban men and women...
...The prose is effortless, almost reportorial, but the affection shines...
...The best involves a lovely line from e.e...
...But the conclusion that Fox fails to draw from his own discoveries is that this assault, when undertaken by the singular man, however heroic his Christian anti-heroism, exacts an appalling toll on those who are fated to love and nurture him...
...He quotes Hawthorne, but it is Poe who comes to mind...
...it can be no coincidence that the titles of her collections of verse include North ~ and South, Questions of Travel, and Geography III...
...As Fox himself points out in his Epilogue, Niebuhr "was not a man for all seasons...
...Two stories stand apart as concrete and objective...
...While the resulting paradoxical view of human nature and destiny was presented by Niebuhr as having virtually universal significance, in light of Fox's discoveries, it may more usefully be seen as symptomatic of the spiritual malaise specific to a certain type of selfconsciously modem, successful urban character...
...What sort of culture are we creating, when the once impressive insights of "Christian realism" may appear to be as problematic as the vulnerable "tough guys" so effectively portrayed by Humphrey Bogart...
...No scene better achieves this than a difficult lunch between the three, where Allen's camera pans around the table in an unobtrusive but all inclusive manner...
...but his unwillingness or inability to comprehend the irony of his private life must cast a shadow upon his theology -- even the mature "Christian realism" of The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943...
...Miss Bishop writes only of what she herself observed and heard: of the old-fashioned, strong-minded Miss Moore, of the other poet's tastes and whims, of her treasured basket full of rejection slips, of their shared experiences...
...An alert reader at Vassar College in the 1920s, Elizabeth was persuaded by the college librarian (Miss Fanny Borden: the tribute is typical) to go to New York to meet a still relatively unknown but already wary I Miss Moore...
...His reading of Niebuhr's paradoxes is unexceptional: "He was a thoroughgoing naturalist despite his contempt for what he called 'naturalism...
...The visual fulfillment of the line a few moments later is exquisite...
...Hannah and Her Sisters is a hopeful sign...
...14March 1986:153...
...During one of her Brazilian stays, Miss Bishop was urged to look at a nineteeth-century diary, made into a cult item there by the admiration of Georges Bernanos, and warmly praised by all her friends...
...but it will assist at the birth of what Martin Marty has called the "public church": a religious "communion of communions" that seeks to empower all its participants for an active role in the nation's public life and not just its celebrity theologians...
...The casual becomes perfect THE COLLECTED PROSE F_Jizabeth Bishop Edited by Robert Girouz Farrar Straus & Giroux, $17.50, $8.95 paper, 210 pp...
...More tellingly, he suggests that "our intellectual gurus today are secular writers, academic popularizers, therapeutic counselors, psychological sages...
...such, for example, is the vivid portrait of the 1903 Chatauqua at Lincoln, Illinois, with which he begins his story...
...His judgments on Niebuhr's own books are anything but tendentious: he generally confirms what by now may be conventional academic wisdom that although Niebuhr wrote too much, too often, some of his works, like Beyond Tragedy (I 937) and The Irony of American History (1951), deserve to be remembered as minor American classics...
...or, having read "The Fish," can forget that veteran, so majestic that the author, having hooked him, must throw him back into the sea...
...It fits too with some of the shorter pieces in this book...
...It is explored, for example, in "The Country Mouse," with its direct expression of self-pity: "It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree...
...What emerges is surely one of the most endearing literary portraits ever achieved...
...Yet ultimately, the heaviest toll may consist in the singular hero's failure to understand himself...
...So far so good...
...Allen still has to imagine his way into wider circles of experience...
...Fox's biography of Niebuhr deserves all the favorable attention it has been getting in the secular press...
...Allen has always been a romantic ironist...
...The word of rural "Christian America" that nurtured them no longer exists, but even more decisively, in various ways we have all been conspiring to destroy the kind of civic culture that would confer celebrity status on its would-be prophets...
...What we need are theological communities, if "Christian realism's" vision of the "moral vocation" is to be rescued from its own distortions...
...By placing Niebuhr's thought in the 14 March 1986...
...In order to achieve this transformation, theologians will have to learn to work in teams, bringing a variety of gifts and interdisciplinary perspectives to the task of giving voice to the community...
...The author uses scenes familiar to her, but perhaps exotic to her readers...
...After having witnessed Fox expose something of the compulsions that drove Niebuhr on, one may be forgiven for wondering why the commendation...
...Richard Fox's excellent biography of Niebuhr, besides presenting as much of the indispensable evidence for interpreting Niebuhr's life and thought as may ever be available, hints at some of the reasons why that vacuum may never again be filled...
...Her early history was tragic: her father dead in her infancy, her mother going permanently insane, and an abrupt uprooting from Nova Scotia to the home of her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...His findings are wellorganized and lucidly presented...
...Please come flying...
...Who, who has read "The Moose," can forget the giant shape looming by moonlight in the path of the bus...
...cummings: "No one, not even the rain, has such small hands...
...a religious modernist devoted to biblical symbols...
...They attended one together and a long friendship began...
...But then Allen is at his best when honoring women...
...At present, he makes films for movie critics and New Yorkers...
...This piece fits, in her work, with the Brazilian sections of Questions of Travel and her other translations from the Portuguese...
...Some of the other essays and stories go ~back to a much earlier period of her life -- as a small child in the village of Great Neck, Nova Scotia, where the coinage wore the face of King George V, and the anthem in school was "The Maple Leaf Forever...
...Does this mean that theologians will no longer be able to address a national audience...
...Marianne set the appointment at a precise time, at one particular bench in the New York Public Library so that she might easily escape if her visitor proved uncongenial...
...TOM O'BRIEN Books: THE LAST SUPERSTAR R EINHOLD NIEBUHR died fifteen years ago, and in the time since then, no religious figure, clerical or lay, theologian or social activist, has emerged to fill the vacuum that his death created, not only in the "mainstream churches" of Protestant Christianity but also in the so-called "vital center" of American politics...
...The key to his growth toward s "ccess in that effort is the last scene, when he even has the -grace to deny himself a last witty word...
...Margaret Wimsatt E LIZABETH BISHOP is best known as a poet, with a spare, economical style that nevertheless can startle the reader by unexpected ~insight...
...Hardly...
...Those who once may have hoped to imitate Niebuhr's personal achievement, of course, will be disappointed...
...For that sort of toughminded, hard-boiled personality Niebuhr's preaching may still open the most accessible path toward selfknowledge...
...All is smooth and easy, till the breath catches...
...Geography stirred her from the time she was old enough to look at maps...
...To make a better film, Allen must, to borrow a term from The Right Stuff, "push through the envelope...
...The younger Woody Allen would have wisecracked...
...continue to be a reforming influence in our pluralistic society, it will have to find another way...
...Like many public figures, then, Niebuhr was hard on his family and friends...
...They will no longer be restless and rootless superstars, but familiar intellectuals organically rooted in the everyday conceres of the people whose faith they envision...
...and the long-suffering women in his life, beginning with his mother and his sister, and including Ursula, his wife, and his friend and biographer, June Bingham...
...The Sea and Its Shore" about Edwin Boomer, hired to spear trash from the town beach at night, is lit by the gatherer's nightly bonfire, from which is saved scraps of writing to read by the lesser light of his lantern...
...The table of contents is divided into "Memory: Persons and Places," and "Stories" but the separation is not sharp...
...The slight story is also magnificently edited: economic flashbacks provide key past family history...
...Who will be his victim...
...Despite the contrived plot, when Allen concentrates on these tensions and on what sustains a family despite them, he nears a gold mine of genuine emotion...
...Yet, above all, Fox strives to create an account that does not simply rehash the history of Niebuhr's restless thinking about religion and politics...
...Dianne Wiest is at her nervous worst, having just been rejected at another audition...
...What emerges is the portrait of a compulsive workaholic, a modern circuit-rider whose willingness to deliver too many lectures, chair too many organizations, and edit too many journals, may have masked an unholy temptation to self-evasion, a compulsion to prove himself again and again in public while refusing to accept the gift of unmerited love in the privacy of family and friendship...
...Despite formidable obstacles, Fox clearly has done better research, more successfully penetrating Niebuhr's privacy and that of his family, than any previous study of his life and thought...
...To the Botemquim and Back," and "A Trip to Vigia" show the same sharp eye and broad tolerance -- tolerance for simple people and the dirt, and even for the often shabby or grotesque churches of a very poor country whose religion, like all others, she dismissed...
...both regard their "earth mother" sister Farrow with fine sibling love/hate...
...Just as most ordinary citizens, however intensely religious, have learned to be skeptical about pious politicians aspiring to the mantle of William Jennings Bryan, so the American "community of conscience" may be learning to live without the prickly comfort afforded by "intellectual preachers" like Reinhold Niebuhr...
...The longest piece in the book is "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore...
...In the past decade or so, liberation theologies, whatever their faults, have rightly insisted that critical theological reflection is not the special preserve of the heroic individual, but the fruit of the whole community's collective struggle to bear witness to the Gospel...
...Are Niebuhr's works, like Bogie's movies, to be left to nostalgia buffs...
...Hannah is the best of them...
...Fox's analysi's suggests that Niebuhr's "Christian realism" is as close to repentance as an aggressive, self-made man, consumed by ambition, and ruthlessly unforgiving of personal weakness in himself and in others, is likely to get...
...Their work, if it bears fruit, will not restore a "Christian America...
...Allen has always idolized Ingmar Bergman...
...If mainstream Christianity is to , , , , C...
...A third story written in an objective voice, though many of the details are drawn from the Nova Scotia childhood is "In the Village," where selected facts and scenes are made into a poetic whole...
...an extremely picturesque scene, in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in many ways not...
...Why was I a human being...
...The family themes and feelings he touches on here could be explored far more profoundly...
...and if his doctrine of sacrificial love is unthinkingly sentimentalized, it may end up paralyzing the already poor in spirit and perpetuating the illusions of those restless souls who would escape from themselves through compulsive achievement...
...But dispelling this shadow cannot be the last word on Niebuhr's mature theology...
...The waves are running in verses this fine morning...
...She was born in Nova Scotia in 1911, and lived at Key West, in Mexico and California and London, and near the end of her life bought a house in Brazil...
...Yet, surprisingly, he still commends Niebuhr's "Christian realism" as "a compelling model of the moral vocation...
...but i'n light of Fox's discoveries regarding the toll exacted in achieving it, they may also be led to discover a more trustworthy foundation for "Christian realism...
...From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, Please come flying . . . . The flight is safe...
...the weather is all arranged...
...Feminists and liberation theologians who have criticized Niebuhr's "Christian realism" must surely find vindication here...
...Dennis P. McCann contemplating Richard Fox's biography, I conclude that perhaps it's just as well...
...the problem has been getting the two elements properly co-ordinated...
...his imitation Bergman film, Interiors, sketched something of the same plot as Hannah, where yon Sydow provides a Bergman echo...
...In the end Fox lauds Niebuhr for insisting that "the moral l i f e . . . [ i s ] . . . not a restful state...
...One remembers the happy poem, "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore...
...The shift is permanently in her mind...
...If theologians there still must be, let the community be empowered to speak through them, and not the other way round...
...his brother, the Yale theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr...
...Though its doctrine of the anxious self, inevitably sinful and yet justified through grace "in principle" if not "in fact," may have been inspired by the sermon Niebuhr was continually preaching to himself, its very austerity may rest, not upon unflinching insight, but upon a refusal of genuine introspection...
...At times his narrative is good enough to make a novelist jealous...
...Helena Morley" was still alive, with a proud husband eager to forward Bishop's project...
...After REINHOLD NIEBUHR A BIOGRAPHY Richard Wightman Fox Pantheon, $19.95, 340 pp...
...and the use of titles (on a blank screen between scenes) piques curiosity...
...This is evidence of the eye that made Elizabeth Bishop so good an amateur painter...
...But how often anymore, . even in the secular city, do we encounter such masterful men...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
