By Joseph O'Brien

Powers of the ordinary

Why we should still be reading J.F. Powers, who lovingly explored the balancing act between the profound and mundane in priestly life

By all rights, J.F. Powers should be a Catholic household name. A short-story writer and award-winning novelist, James Farl Powers wrote fiction with a strong Catholic element -- most of his characters were priests or laypeople whose stories played out in fictional Catholic Midwestern dioceses.

Born in 1917 in Jacksonville, Ill., Powers held a variety of jobs before taking up a position as writer-in-residence and English professor at Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minn., from 1975 until his death in 1999. Born and raised Catholic, Powers' faith informed his life and his fiction.

For 40 years, Powers crafted a Chaucerian carnival of venal priests, aloof bishops and world-weary families. A couple of his stories are even narrated by a fastidious feline. His first book, "The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories," appeared in 1946, and his last, the novel "Wheat That Springeth Green," in 1988. Within that span he also published two other short-story collections and a novel. Many of his short stories first appeared in The New Yorker, Common-weal and other periodicals.

Highlighting his career, in 1963 Powers won the prestigious National Book Award for his critically acclaimed 1962 novel "Morte D'Urban."

Faded status

Yet, despite all these accomplishments, few Catholics read his work these days.

Literary critic Joseph Bottum believes that Powers' limited output as a writer contributed to his faded status. Bottum edits and writes for First Things, an opinion journal of religion and culture.

"Part of the reason for his own disappearance was due to the fact that he just didn't publish enough to keep himself in the public eye," Bottum told Our Sunday Visitor.

But Powers writes about a world that has passed away, Bottum added, and his writing seems to have passed away with it. Most Powers stories concern priests and laypeople in a time and place when Catholic America possessed a more specifically religious culture than it does today.

"His Midwestern parishes and chanceries and priests living in these little dioceses -- that world disappeared," Bottum said. "For good or for ill, Vatican II undid that world . . . and over the years his stories seemed less germane."

Powers' stories may have lost a little of their power to resonate with the reader's experience of the Church, but fellow critic Denis Donoghue sees his stories transcending the times before the Second Vatican Council. Writing in his introduction to "The Stories of J.F. Powers" (New York Review Books; $14.95), Donoghue calls Powers "a writer's writer, meaning that he was an artist too good to gratify the most casual reader, but he was also a reader's writer, if we assume a reader who thinks of fiction as intelligent art rather than low entertainment."

Nature of the office

Both critics agree that his stories reveal a thoughtful crafting of the tension between the priesthood's supernatural character and the fractured nature of those who assume the duties of that office.

This tension is no clearer than in "Morte D'Urban." The title character, Father Urban, is a silver-tongued mission priest who works the fundraising circuit for the fictitious Clementines. While battling ineffective superiors and a lackadaisical laity, the pragmatic Father Urban struggles to maintain a hold on his soul (and his order) as he wades through a world of glad-handing and spiritual compromise.

"Father Urban stumped the country, preaching parish retreats and parish missions," the novel's narrator relates, "and did the work of a dozen men. And still he found the time and energy to make friends, as enjoined by Scripture, with the mammon of iniquity."

Benedictine Sister Nancy Hynes, who has been a professor of English at Saint John's since 1957 and knew Powers personally, is currently writing a book on her colleague that's due to be published next year by Catholic University Press. She recalled: "When interviewer Sister Kristin Malloy asked J.F. if 'Morte D'Urban' was about human beings first, and only incidentally about priests, Powers said, 'I would say so. But I write about priests for reasons of irony and comedy and philosophy. They officially are committed to both worlds in the way that most people officially are not. This makes for stronger beer. ... So I just start with a priest, with a man with one foot in each world.'"

Powers and his wife, Elizabeth "Betty" Wahl, a fiction writer in her own right, had five children together. Daughter Katherine Anne Powers (named after Powers' friend and fellow writer Katherine Anne Porter) carries on the family business as book reviewer and columnist for The Boston Globe.

She observes that her father "had the highest regard for the priesthood and considered it a sacred and demanding calling. He did notice, however, that priests themselves are human beings and act like human beings with all that implies."

The priests' life -- how they ate, where they slept, what they did in their spare time -- was, for Powers, intriguing enough to want to tell about in stories.

"He was less interested in the sins of priests than he was in the gray area that abounds when men attempt to further both spiritual and secular ends, balancing holiness and fundraising, in other words," she said.

Paradoxical view

Another colleague of Powers' at Saint John's, Benedictine Father J.P. Earls was English department chair during Powers' time there. He points out that the priesthood provided Powers fertile ground for irony.

He wrote about priests, Father Earls noted, as St. Paul wrote about the apostles (2 Cor 4:7), "people with a lofty calling giving themselves over to the most niggling and pedestrian pursuits -- showing the 'earthen vessels' in which these apostles carry the resplendent glory of the Gospel to be made not of clay but of a particularly durable and impenetrable concrete."

This same sense of the ordinary carries over to all aspects of Powers' stories -- most memorably in his upper Midwestern settings. According to Katherine Anne Powers, the setting of her father's novels is "crucial" to understanding his stories.

"The 'ordinariness' of the Midwest is part of what struck (him) as the bizarreness of life on earth -- its banality," she said.

The characters in Powers' flatland, Father Earl adds, find their literary descendants in the popular tales of Lake Wobegon on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" radio show.

"We [Midwesterners] are proud of our mediocrity," he noted. "What is the introduction Garrison Keillor uses for the Lake Wobegon stories? A place where 'all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.' This 'Lake Wobegon effect' is paradoxical. If all are above average, then they are all average."

This sort of paradox is entrenched in Powers' understanding of fiction. In his short story "Prince of Darkness," Father Burner is a mediocre curate hoping for a parish of his own and an amateur photographer who produces old-fashioned tintypes. His brother priests know him as the "prince of darkness" after his pastor criticizes him for spending too much time in his darkroom.

But unlike the true Prince of Darkness, Father Burner wavers between God and devil, unable to settle on either as his true master. In fact, he lives for neither eternal glory nor eternal damnation, as the story reveals, but only for the time-bound middle ground of materialism. For Powers, though, it is the here and now which offers the possibility of salvation.

Father Burner "glanced at his watch, but neglected to notice the time. The new gold strap got his eye. The watch itself, a priceless pyx, held the hour (time is money) sacred, like a host. He had chosen it for an ordination gift rather than the usual chalice. It took the kind of courage he had to go against the grain there."

His venal adoration of his watch itself suggests the hope that will see him through this world to the next.

Novelist as prophet

"Prince of Darkness" is vintage Powers -- by overturning the holy and the ordinary, the story gives the reader pause to appreciate the proper place and purpose of both. Given Powers' ability to trick these things out, Bottum hopes that readers will again pick up his work as a much-needed antidote in a secularized American culture.

"In an era that is now widely perceived to have overpraised the clergy and overvalued them, Powers spoke to their flaws," he explains. "Now, the fact that human beings in our own age undervalue the clergy and disbelieve in the supernatural office, things have kind of flipped."

Powers' all too human priests, Bottum says, provide a significant clue to a culture that has lost its belief in the supernatural.

"J.F. Powers is writing about the actual balance that exists between the ordinary and the extraordinary," he says. "But the age we live in is not ready to see the truth of it until that balance is restored to us in the clear sense of the extraordinary."

Indeed, Katherine Anne Powers sees her father's fiction as extraordinary. There is to it, she says, something that rings true in season and out.

"My father was interested in what it meant to be a Catholic writer," she says, "and for him that meant telling the truth -- through which the Truth would, or at least could, be glimpsed."

Works of J.F. Powers

1947: "The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories"

1962: "Morte D'Urban" -- novel

1969: "The Presence of Grace"

1975: "Look How the Fish Live"

1988: "Wheat that Springeth Green" -- novel

Joseph O'Brien writes from Wisconsin.