Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr
Fox, Richard Wightman
DR. & MRS. NIEBUHR REMEMBERING REINHOLD NIEBUHR Letters of Reinhold & Ursula M. Niebuhr Edited by Ursula M. Niebuhr HarperSan Francisco, $29.95, 423 pp. Richard Wightman Fox Ursula Niebuhr is...
...But the letters and memoirs themselves deliver a much more complicated message...
...I think this may continue with our children...
...There is no question that she has given us something in this volume that no one else could provide: an account of that part of him, inseparable from the rest, that was Ursula herself...
...The book ends with a short memoir called "Easter Memories," which stands in relation to "Cheese and Dill Pickles" as a resurrection to a crucifixion...
...The liberal crusader against liberalism...
...Reinhold does often express his love for wife and children, along with generally bland reports on his comings and goings...
...The religioussecular preacher chastising the pious and chiding the worldly...
...Her letters are pithy, dense, whimsical, fnlled with unexpected transitions and mockauthoritative pronouncements...
...No response from Ursula...
...No story could remind us more of Reinhold Niebuhr, who adored such accounts of simple, quixotic faith...
...The uniqueness of Reinhold Niebuhr," reads the dust jacket text, "lay in the energy and zeal with which he pursued paradox and irony in both life and thought...
...The German-American Anglophile...
...The particular quality of his humanity was its paradoxical mix of traits and achievements...
...Truth could be expressed only in paradox, he believed, and life lived as a succession of pregnant contradictions...
...The Jamesian relativist who embraced the God of Abraham and the revelation of Jesus...
...And the most signifncant problem he raises in the whole marriage correspondence draws no response from Ursula, either in a letter from the time or in her editor's commentary...
...Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr is a very poignant document of a forty-year marriage that began in 1931, when Reinhold was a thirty-nine-year-old political journalist and star preacher at Union Theological Seminary and Ursula was a twenty-four-year-old student of theology from England...
...It is to Ursula Niebuhr 's credit that she has included so much material that works against her controlling thesis...
...Reinhold's have little shape, spirit, or play...
...In 1936 he writes her about a possible teaching job for her at Sarah Lawrence...
...I am really so much married," Reinhold wrote her in 1936, "that I feel as if I had lost my personal identity...
...But the book itself is very forthright about the last of these, as it is about the conflicts (as well as the warmth and hap34: 31 January 1992 Commonweal piness) that marked their marriage...
...Framed as a "conversation" with Reinhold in which she addresses him directly, she writes lovingly about how he moves her...
...Richard Wightman Fox Ursula Niebuhr is to be praised for shepherding these letters and recollections to publication...
...At the end of "Cheese and Dill Pickles" she is starkly alone...
...I mean, you were, I am frank to say, very much in love, but I don't think you were really interested in what I would call the archaeological, sociological, personal side of me— my family, my background...
...She believes that this compilation will "show what manner of man Reinhold Niebuhr really was," and will "disclose the quality of his humanity...
...In telling that story Ursula Niebuhr both reminds us of, and shows us how deeply she shares, the spirit of her husband...
...It leaves out the following sentences: "The prophet-priest seeking influence and humility...
...I realize they are not very interested in my family...
...And she will not let us miss her own pain then or now...
...They often seem dutiful and tired, which stands to reason since so many of them were written while he was on exhausting trips...
...Am I right to say I think you go through alternations of wanting to merge your work with mine and then perhaps protesting against that...
...The same thing happened to Ursula...
...Then she embarks on a stream-of-consciousness but very controlled meditation on how "cynical" she has always been about family life—"more cynical than you...
...The dust jacket does not use all of what I wrote in my summation of Niebuhr's life and career...
...For one thing it shows Ursula to have literary talents, at least in the letter form, far superior to her husband's...
...We are not sure we find out exactly how depressed or uncertain or elated Reinhold was, because Ursula has pruned and edited the letters that are published here, and left others out altogether (assuming they still exist...
...The teacher-academic who distrusted the scholars and hoped for their respect...
...Even better: she leaves us with the unforgettable image of a fellow Englishman, Colonel Dobie, who decided years ago to live in Jerusalem and preside over "the Garden tomb" to the north of the Damascus gate...
...It is because the theme of paradox gets him right...
...They are very moving documents because Reinhold again and again asks for forgiveness for being "bad" or insensitive, and they both again and again proclaim their love for one another despite all the disagreements, despite, indeed, Ursula's bleak prenuptial conclusion that "nntellectual and psychological 'understanding,' even the scriptural 'understanding of the heart,' does not always carry with it emotional `sympathy.— The tension does not end with the engagement...
...She wonders how badly Reinhold himself may have hurt H. Richard by being such a dominant older brother...
...The further one reads the more one concludes that the dust jacket flaps have it right...
...It turns out that there is no simple answer to the question of who Reinhold Niebuhr really was...
...She wonders how badly Gustav, Reinhold's father, disabled his brother H. Richard by locking him in a closet for punishment...
...Despite her silence on that issue, the book tells us as much about what kind of woman Ursula Niebuhr was and is as it does about "what manner of man Reinhold Niebuhr really was...
...Just as Gustav and Reinhold took a toll on H. Richard, Reinhold made Ursula pay too...
...To be quite frank, you were not particularly interested in me and my life...
...I honestly believe that you need to have a right to your own vocational work...
...Two decades on her own has not lessened her comforting and confusing bond to Reinhold...
...The Reinhold revealed in their engagement letters of 1931— by far the largest selection of letters in the book— is a man who was indeed transformed by joy, but also burdened by doubts and depression...
...I had my suspicions about the family being all peace and love...
...Which of course makes life, married life, more interesting...
...So, we were very, very different...
...His parenting and his husbanding were devoted, warm, and happy, but they were also marked by self-doubt and tension...
...Niebuhr himself was keenly conscious of these personal paradoxes, about which he reflected often...
...36: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...
...Overall, the engagement letters disclose a tense and troubled quest for communication...
...The letters included from the period of their marriage are unfortunately almost all from Reinhold, so there is even less exchange here between them...
...But occasionally Reinhold broaches something troubling...
...The most moving single feature of this book is that she is still struggling to make sense of who she is and therefore who Reinhold Niebuhr was...
...He was afraid to part with his mother Lydia, who had lived with him as co-worker and companion for eighteen years, and he was predictably tongue-tied (as he keeps saying in the letters printed here) about expressing his deep love for Ursula...
...The booming polemicist beset with hidden anxieties...
...With Reinhold Niebuhr she had not just a relationship, but a mysterious sort of identity...
...Reinhold has loved her but not understood her, made a life with her but not been interested in her life...
...It is not just because I wrote those sentences—they have been borrowed word for word, without permission or attribution, from page 291 of my Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (1985)— that I find them so compelling...
...The preface and introduction announce these goals as the paramount purpose of the book...
...It will also establish that Reinhold was a "devoted father" and that they had "a warm and happy" married life...
...Sometimes you do beat against the bars and that ought to teach us both that we must find the greatest amount of happiness together if you can feel yourself a little more independent of me...
...In "Easter Memories" she speaks beautifully of the paradoxes of Faster, the dying and the hope, the pretensions of dolled-up worshipers and the mystery of a new life that lies beyond death...
...The ultimate meaning of this collection Commonweal 31 January 1992: 35 is that neither of them could make sense of themselves without the other...
...It's not the place where Jesus is thought to have been laid, but Colonel Dobie stands guard there anyway...
...Yet, I realized I was more interested in your background and in your life than you ever would be in mine...
...Ursula Niebuhr's preface and introduction miss the dialectical quality of his humanity by avoiding any mention of his feelings of pride, inferiority, and depression...
...Except that she has been widowed for twenty years and has had to conduct her continuing conversation with Reinhold alone...
...Her short memoir "Cheese and Dill Pickles" near the end of the book is an elegantly written and startlingly frank discussion of this problem...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 2
