Does anyone, really, like priests? Antidericalism seems a healthy human instinct, our peasantry of spirit asserting itself. I grew up among priests; they were stationed throughout my family, as uncles and cousins. A certain kind of Church of England rectory became as familiar to me as my bedroom: the heavy woods and meager ornaments of the main rooms, faintly warmed either by the woolly heat of an electric fire or by the unpleasant residue of the last supplicants to occupy it -those needy parishioners with apparently nothing else to do. Sometimes, as cheap stays against the cold, plastic sheeting had been pinned to the windows, so that the garden beyond seemed submarine. One dreaded having to use the bathroom, down the frigid corridors, invariably to be faced with green medicinal soap attached by an ingrown magnet to its stingy holder. And then there were the priests: the pedants or the saints, the zealots or the retirees, the trendy or the tired. Their long cassocks appeared to be hiding things. To a child it seemed, impossibly, that these men, dressed from neck to shoes in black, the tough vestments always a little shiny, were entirely clothed in shoe leather. They hung their heads with loud modesty. One of them had a fondness for the verb “titivate”;
another always introduced each of his self-pleasing observations with a pompous “Apropos of nothing …”
This is also the world, though Catholic, of the American writer J. F. Powers, a novelist who wrote supremely well about the postwar midwestern Catholic church between the late 1940s and late 1980s. Powers, who was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1917, and who died in 1999, is now barely visible at the end of that stretched telescope, “the writer’s writer” He wrote sparely and sparingly, and produced only two novels—one of which, Morte D’Urban, won the National Book Award in 1963—and three collections of short stories, which were praised by Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, and Philip Roth. He disappeared into a rather cloudy posterity while still alive; that is to say, he lived to see all his works go out of print. Actual posterity, in the form of reprints of all his writing by The New York Review of Books, has been kinder (Morte D’Urban, and a second novel called Wheat That Springeth Green, along with The Stories of J. F. Powers), though it seems sadly likely that the combination of Powers’s refined style, ironic pessimism, and chosen subject—priests and more priests—will eventually deal his work a second death.
Though Powers has inevitably been claimed by his fellow communicants as a “Catholic writer,” his world is the opposite of an advertisement for the church. By and large, his priestly heroes are ferociously unappealing, and in such a way that one wonders if Powers really liked or approved of most Catholic priests. They are not glamorously errant, like the priests of Greene and Mauriac, whose sins make them interesting, and possibly better shepherds. They are petty disappointments. Greene’s priests are too worldly, but also ultimately too religious, to be conventional believers; Powers’s men of the cloth are too conventional to be really religious. What piety and spiritual alertness they ever had has long softened amid the gluey fixtures and routines of daily parish life. Freed of all their old seminary ideals, they have become courtiers of compromise.
Greene is enjoyed by Catholics in part, one suspects, because his
pessimism is not threatening. He tells us, in effect, that the religious life is more complicated than we imagined, which ultimately consoles us. But Powers is very threatening, and ought not to be easily enjoyed by Catholics, because the cumulative suggestion of his work is that the religious life, at least for priests, has become practically unattainable. Hardly ever, in over a thousand pages of fiction, do we see one of Powers’s priests reflect spiritually on a spiritual matter. It is not simply that, on the principle of the Koran’s never mentioning camels, these men do not speak of what surrounds them. It is that they are slaves to what Kierkegaard attacked as “Christendom”—the business of priestly activity rather than the practice of Christian witness, love of the world rather than imitation of Christ.
Powers was himself a true priest of his craft: devout, retiring, and unworldly, qualities rarely found in his subjects. He was a conscientious objector in the Second World War and served thirteen months in prison. His writing, he felt, was God-given. “I am in the alphabet God uses when I do my best work … I think God has given me talent,” he said in 1988. “I have thanked God for it, usually every day in my prayers.” A delicate stylist, he husbanded that talent: the nice hazard of a single phrase, or even a word, could consume days of effort. In his excellent introduction to the collected stories, Denis Dbnoghue writes that the Irish short story writer Sean O’Faolain would joke about how Powers “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” It is a firm, rich, American prose, at once a literary style and a way of talking, in which the dominant tone, belying the effort that went into its making, is a kind of heightened relaxedness. A characteristic passage, from the story “The Presence of Grace,” has a priest sitting unwillingly with some drowsy parishioners after lunch:
There was a lull during which Velma loaded her cigarette case and Father Fabre surveyed the room—the bookcase with no books in it,
only plants and bric-a-brac, and the overstuffed furniture rising like bread beneath the slipcovers, which rivaled nature in the tropics for color and variety of growing things, and the upright piano with the mandolin and two photographs on top: one would be the late Mr. Mathers and somewhere in the other, a group picture of graduating nurses, would be the girl he had married, now stout, being now what she had always been becoming. Mrs. Mathers was openly napping now. The room was filled with breathing, hers and Mr. Pint’s in unison, and the sun fell upon them all and upon the trembling ferns.
For many years Powers taught at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a Benedictine foundation, where he shared the daily religious observances. He has that devotion to the church which often expresses itself in a kind of smothered anger, in disgust at the failures of the church. Because he is a comic writer, this anger is bandaged in smiles, and sometimes difficult to make out. But his work really offers a hard critique of the church in its useless postwar prime.
In his history of religion and philosophy in Germany, Heine writes that Martin Luther failed to see that the idea of Christianity, in its “annihilation of sensuality,” demands the impossible of human nature. But the Catholic church, says Heine, did acknowledge this, and appropriately worked out a contract between God and the devil, spirit and matter. Powers’s priests are such contractualists. These are not men who would bother to throw an inkpot at the devil; they might hand him a pen and a dotted line. In one of Powers’s stories, “Zeal,” a bishop tires of listening to a zealous priest who has been idealistically telling parishioners that they should not tip waiters, since the activity infringes the dignity of those who serve. In response, the bishop thinks to himself that “people should do what they could do, little though it might be, and shouldn’t be asked to attempt what was obviously beyond them.”
Father Urban, the hero of Morte D’Urban, and Powers’s most engaging character, is a roving ambassador of Minnesota’s churches
who wants “simply to pump a little life into the parish, without being pretentious about it.” He busies himself in addressing the Great Plains Commercial Club, drives around in a borrowed English sports car, and builds a golf course at his order’s retreat house. Vain, ambitious, slippery, he is greased in secularism and slyly avoids theological controversy—“He could meet somebody on the other side tomorrow.” In Powers’s second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green (1988), Father Joe Hackett—he is indeed a hack—begins his seminary life determined to be saintly, but quickly squanders the impulse in parish life: “The truth was he hadn’t sacrificed his spiritual life—it had been done for him, by his appointment to Holy Faith.”
These priests tend to shrink from the more pious worshippers. Father Burner, in “Prince of Darkness,” “liked his parishioners to be retiring, dumb, or frightened.” Some of the funniest scenes in this very funny body of work involve priests fleeing from, or more subtly evading, their most passionate solicitors. “A backslider he could handle, it was the old story, but a red-hot believer, especially a talkative one, could be a devilish nuisance. This kind might be driven away only by prayer and fasting, and he was not adept at either.” Often they are cynical. Of the bishop in Morte D’Urban, Powers writes: “Great Plains, after all, was a rural diocese, and so the Bishop made a point of being for everything rural—hence the prayers all summer long for whatever it was he was told that the farmers wanted in the way of weather.”
They are spiritually incurious, philistine—Father Burner thinks Studs Lonigan “the best thing since the Bible”—and their daily bread is merely the spoiled grain of bureaucratic trivialities: whether they will get their free railway passes, the guttering and the heating, the fund-raising for new buildings, the Men’s Club, the Altar and Rosary Society, whether attendance percentages are up or down. These are men who, against Jesus’s exhortation in the Gospels, give all of their thought to the morrow. They are full of ambition—but only the ambition to go from curate to pastor, from “mouse to rat, as the saying
went …” An archdeacon is seen reading Forbes. In another of the stories, a former bishop is praised because “he did know real estate.” The church is a corporation, “second only to Standard Oil” in its efficiency, and is to be managed as such.
Powers, in this jiggly satirical mode, can sound, for better or worse, like Sinclair Lewis. At times perhaps, as more regularly in Lewis, the ironies are too broad: Father Burner thinks to himself, “Yes, if he had to, he would die for the Faith,” while driving to a café for a hamburger. (Though the moral stutter of that “if he had to” is finely judged.) But Powers suggests a deeper criticism of the church. The priesthood was originally imagined as a retreat from the world, as monkishness; and for all the obvious worldliness of Powers’s priests, there is something still rather unworldly about them. Indeed, one might say that they have also been corrupted by their unworldliness. The parochialism and claustrophobia of their minds and conversation, for all the sour prosperity of their businesslike approach, has a naivete, a complacency, a closedness. It is shop-talking with nothing to sell. They may not be worldly enough, in fact. Their worldliness may be that they are too easy inside their own little world.
Powers captures this closedness with fine artistry—and of course, if he did not, his fiction would have only sociological value. Here are the rectories, womenless but for their bitter housekeepers, their awful food (“hashed brown potatoes, scorched green beans, ground meat of some kind … sliced canned peaches and cardboard Fig Newtons”), their wordlessly loyal janitors, their mean, self-absorbed, dry pastors, and the fresh curates sent to assist them, still idealistic and pious from the seminary but suddenly standing on the precipice of utility. His writing has a Chekhovian concreteness of detail, whereby each detail is not static—not jelled in its own little pride of chosenness—but dynamic, mobile, a wheel of story. Reading Powers, one is often reminded of Chekhov’s “The Bishop,” in which is briefly told the anecdote of the short priest and his enormously
tall son, a theological student, who one day lost his temper with the cook and called her “thou ass of Jehudiel,” which caused the student’s father to go very quiet—“ashamed that he could remember no such ass in the Bible.” Chekhov stole from Ivan Bunin the real anecdote of a deacon who ate all the caviar at a funeral, and made it the opening of his story “In the Ravine.”
Powers’s details are like that: exploding anecdotes. Joe Hackett, in Wheat That Springeth Green, tips a little extra in a restaurant “in case the waitress was a Catholic, or a non-Catholic …” But parsimony is more common in Powers’s priests. In “The Presence of Grace,” we make the acquaintance of a memorably mean pastor, “a graying dormouse” who speaks to his curate only in savagely arrested phrases. Presumably to save money, he blows out, at the end of the last Mass, all the prayer candles lit by parishioners. “‘Fire hazard, ’ he’d said, caught in the act.” In “One of Them,” an equally stingy priest is said to have kept the Christmas ham in the trunk of his car, bringing it out only for meals. Of yet another unpleasant priest, a proud and chilly monsignor, in “The Forks,” Powers writes that he “could not conduct a civil conversation.” The monsignor delivers an arid little lecture on the history and significance of handshaking rather than shake the hand of his new curate, and is seen, with devastating irony, entering a doorway thus: “He held the screen door open momentarily, as if remembering something or reluctant to enter before himself—such was his humility …”
These rectories are chambers of denial, and we see how, trapped inside them, priests might overcompensate with a cynicism of permissible worldliness. But it is only a faux worldliness, limited in danger, since it substitutes for the real worldliness, the carnality that cannot be. A slick businesslike manliness, a virility about attendance percentages and fund-raising, a gluttony in food and drink and tobacco, an antisocial selfishness, a stupefied obeisance to television sports—Powers’s characters submit to these allowed lapses as flights from the unreality of their domestic habitats, and as escapes into a
merely sanctioned secularism. They are shallow sinners, as they are shallow believers.
The carnality that cannot be is sex, of course—not just the desire or the act but the realm of normality to which sex is the introduction: family life, free relations with other women (Powers’s priests keep their study doors open when females are visiting), a life with one’s body which is inevitable rather than forced. Sex is at the heart of sin because it is the central desire; and if, as Kierkegaard said, sin is at the heart of Christianity, then so must sex be. And sex is also limitless, because it is the most natural desire. Alcohol, gluttony, cynicism—these are controllable sins, even if only notionally, because they are not entirely natural, not universal. The priest can have these little moral hernias, but he cannot allow the enormous collapse into sexual desire. Jesus wished us to police the mind itself. Thus, strangely, the church praised by Heine for its compromise between spirit and matter in fact demands the impossible of its priests, demands an “annihilation of sensuality.”
One has to infer some of this from Powers’s work. For his priests are curiously hulled—bereft of sexual desire, so that all their small sins and failures seem ruins around this dark absence. The reader is struck by the fact that Powers’s priests are never seen discussing sex, are never depicted thinking about sex or desiring other humans. One would like to suppose that this was Powers’s way of gesturing toward the unspeakable, the truly impermissible, in these men’s lives. But “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined,” as Wallace Stevens has it. Instead, Powers never addresses this lack at all, and this silence comes to seem not deliberately expressive but a peculiar omission on Powers’s own part, one that marks out one of his occasional weaknesses as a writer—an unwillingness, at times, to freely enter the consciousnesses of his characters.
After all, insofar as we are not allowed to see what these men truly desire—and it is inconceivable that they would not desire sexually—we do not partake of their damaged wholeness. There is
an externality—brilliant, vivid, marvelously rendered—to these characters and their trials, but sometimes a corresponding lack of interiority. Very occasionally we see priests resist sexual temptation, but the temptations are put in their way; their minds are never seen as themselves generating temptation, as happens every day in life. Father Urban, for instance, is challenged by a woman who undresses in front of him, and Powers winningly writes that he takes his eyes off her, and keeps them off. “It was like tearing up telephone directories, the hardest part was getting started.” He is like Father Burner, who, hearing high heels outside, turns “firmly away from the window.” There is a pathos in this determination, and the writing has force because it is so glancing. But we are never admitted to the pain this determination causes these men. We are only at the lintels of their minds.
It might be argued that Powers rarely shows his characters enjoying spiritual lives, either, and that we are to understand this silence as indicative of a painful lack. But Powers does write every so often of the almost forgotten attempt to pray. He does write, for instance, about the regret Father Hackett experiences when he sees that his spiritual life has been compromised. But we never read of Father Hackett’s regret about the loss of a past sexual life. Yet Wheat That Springeth Green begins by narrating the teenage years of Joe Hackett. Powers writes of Joe’s sexual adventures, tells us that the boy caught VD, and then leaps over several years to the seminary. From this moment through the next 280 pages, in which we see Father Hackett indulge in a range of vices, sex is never again mentioned by Powers, not even as an external temptation. It drops out of Joe’s mind, and out of the novel, and the VD begins to seem like a rather clumsy way of effecting this silence. Of course, Father Hackett is the duller fictional character for it.
Powers’s reticence about the matter of the spiritual life does become something of a problem in his two novels. The heroes of those books lack sufficient consciousness in part because the novels are picaresque
in motion, character revealing itself in the journey of action. The relentless emphasis on worldly parish activity, or on petty vices, at the expense of any discussion of spiritual aspiration, becomes, after a while, a little stultifying. Especially in Powers’s second novel, we feel we should not have to share, quite so entirely, the barrenness of these men’s lives. The problem with writing about priests as if they were business managers is that, inevitably, one is really reading about business managers. Powers is often praised for depicting priests as if they were no different from other men. But in itself this can’t be a virtue, only a lesson. Implicit in this praise, I think, is the suggestion that the secularism of priests may be more interesting than the secularism of nonpriests. But actually, the secularism of priests might be somewhat less interesting than other men’s secularism—first, because it is more limited, and second, because it may be presented as interesting only because it is the secularism of people who are not usually secular.
These problems afflict the novels only, and acutely only the second. The stories—and many short-story-like scenes in the novels—blaze, because Powers is not compelled to stretch his hero’s interiority over hundreds of pages. (He resembles Eudora Welty and V S. Pritchett in this talent for the short visit, and comparative weakness at the long engagement.) Like many writers of short stories, he is a master of the portrait, of character as a bright blot of essence. Since his stories present only a quick swipe of life, we do not attempt to construct wholeness from particles, and do not feel its lack. Instead, we revel in the vitality of his people, leased only briefly to their fictional worlds.
Powers’s prose is consistently superb—rare but not thinned by mandarinism, richly metaphorical but never unbudgeted in its wealth, each sentence a pondered finality. The slightest phrases bloom: “a few twigs folded in death”; a priest “caught in the old amber of his inadequacy”; the same priest, seen lying on his bed trying to get his trousers on, “his legs heaving up like howitzers.” A disagreeable pastor is seen, from above, by a nun who dislikes him: “Father
massaged his bald head to rouse himself. He wrinkled the mottled scalp between his hands and it seemed to make a nasty face at her.”
Like some, but by no means all, stylists—like Joyce, not Nabokov—Powers is a stylist of conversation; dialogue is style by other means. From Chekhov and Joyce, perhaps also from Pritchett (who praised his stories), he learned how to observe the brief non sequiturs by which people express themselves, and to see that these bursts of illogic represent little riots of freedom, and thus actually of trapped logic, in otherwise orderly souls. In these stories, the parishioners who so bother their priests are invariably little bursting egotists, humble people for whom the pastor is a mobile confessional into which an almost punitive expansiveness can be spilled. Mrs. Klein, recently widowed, comes to see Father Eudex, in “The Forks,” and, without invitation, comments: “It’s a German name, Father. Klein was German descent … It ain’t what you think, Father … Some think it’s a Jew name. But they stole it from Klein.” Gradually it becomes clear that Mrs. Klein has come to ask her priest for advice about how to invest her new inheritance. She becomes angry when Father Eudex suggests that she might give her money away. “But I got to say this—you ain’t much of a priest. And Klein said if I got a problem, see the priest—huh! You ain’t much of a priest!”
Powers is at his most comic when catching, as if by luck, this brackish overflow of people’s souls. Father Urban, when asked by a stranger where he comes from, replies that for many years he traveled out of Chicago, at which the man suddenly bursts out: “Chicago! Don’t tell me you haven’t got a problem there!” Mrs. Stoner, a miserable housekeeper, in “The Valiant Woman,” keeps a list of new Catholic converts. She is sitting with the pastor after a meal. “And Henry Ford’s grandson, Father. I got him down.” A second elapses, and then Mrs. Stoner remarks, for no apparent reason: “I see where Henry Ford’s making steering wheels out of soybeans, Father.” (The obsequious placement of that final “Father” is wonderful.)
Or—my favorite—a fat man churning ice cream: “‘By Dad!’ he breathed, a little god invoking himself.”
Just as Powers alights gently on these little storms of egotism, so he slantingly illuminates the sad cruxes in which his priests find themselves—a fat, lonely curate, long passed over for promotion, is encouraged to think that the bishop wants to discuss a new job with him, and imagines how he’ll look when he receives the news: “reliable, casual, cool, an iceberg, only the tip of his true worth showing”; he has, of course, merely been transferred (“Prince of Darkness”). A bishop is excited about building a new cathedral until one day, visiting the site, he notices that the arches are not built with keystones. Feeling that he is himself of diminishing importance in his diocese, not enough of a keystone, he broods on this architectural lack, and his interest in the cathedral withers (“Keystone”). A pastor does not feel powerful enough to speak firmly to the housekeeper who lords it over him (“The Valiant Woman”).
The best of these stories are surely among the finest written by an American. Powers shows again what comic realism can do: how it attends to the human exception, how it scathes our pretensions and blesses our weaknesses. Modern comedy, the comedy of forgiveness, is incurably secular. For despite Powers’s Christian faith, and despite the severity of his disappointment with the Catholic church, his writing, in its humane irony, tends toward an unwitting inversion of Christianity, whereby his characters are not punished but already forgiven for sins they do not repent of, and the dry ground of their souls is moistened by the author’s gentle laughter.