THE CHURCH OF J. F. POWER
Wymard, Eleanor B
THE CHURCH OF J. F. POWERS ELEANOR B. WYMARD Look How the Fish Live J. F. POWERS Knopf, $696 J. F. Powers has written thirty-nine stories and one novel, Morte D'Urban (National Book Award,...
...Hahn didn't appreciate the implications...
...embraces eternity...
...When conversation turns to celibacy, Joe, with unwitting smugness, says, "And when you consider we work at it [celibacy] full time, unlike the laity-well, it makes you wonder, doesn't it...
...For Powers, the ironies, perplexities, and paradoxes of the human situation ultimately seem to make some sense and achieve some order only if viewed from a vantage point that embraces eternity...
...Monsignor Gau...
...Nature...
...Hahn had ever said in his presence...
...When the father of "Look How the Fish Live" realizes his own imposition of aft order upon existence, he concludes that neither can he be passive...
...Simpson, the newly ordained curate in "One of Them" (1975), "stopped looking for the action, and sometimes settled down [to read] Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion: With Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries, by Monsignor Knox (a convert), and shook his head at the hysteria in the Church then, as he did at the hysteria in the Church now, thinking, Plus ca change the more it's the same...
...As the day for the dedication of the new cathedral approaches, Bishop Dul-linger, realizing his subserviency to the newly appointed chancellor, Father Gau, removes from his wall a dusty chart outlining the hierarchical structure of the diocese: .. .bishop at die top of the tree, vicar-general below him, then chancellor, and then to the right, on the right branch, clergy in general, and to the left, on the left branch, sisters or religious, as they were designated on the chart, and finally, down the middle, on the trunk of the tree, the laity...
...Hahn, neighbors, stroll by and comment on the effectiveness of an insecticide for mosquitoes...
...What does Vatican II mean then to the art and theme of Powers...
...This was the most remarkable thing Mr...
...The tension of "The Keystone," however, is not simply the conflict between Bishop Dullinger and Monsignor Gau...
...He'd like to put a few questions to God...
...Such understatement, Powers would claim, makes for "stronger beer...
...When the father persists, "I'm sick of it all...
...The father ponders quietly, however: Who was left...
...The essential issue of the story involves the price the Church has paid for existing within a tight system of structured promotions which brew internal dissension and power struggles...
...The artificiality of the Cathedral of Oster-gothenburg is a metaphor for a Church that mimics a medieval culture but fails to respond to the challenge that new stones be carved for today...
...Placed first in the collection, the title story, "Look How the Fish Live" (1957), is a religious fable expressing the basic tenet of Powers' theme...
...Implied in Powers' title, "Priestly Fellowship," is an expose of the Church as human organization in juxtaposition to the Church as Mystical Body, the ideal brotherhood of all men united in the fatherhood of God...
...It wasn't surprising, for all problems were at bottom theological...
...When he had the chart down...
...One afternoon he buys an antique ship's lamp for "over the front door of the house they might have in America someday...
...had more or less discouraged the idea...
...To say that Powers sees no hope in the institutional Catholic Church is not to assert that he sacrifices faith in the Word...
...He looked at the man with interest...
...So he plants a headstone on the grave of the dove and hopes that the cat may someday trip...
...But of course Mr...
...Twenty years before that, however, J. F. Powers was a prophet of that Council, for his concern has always been with the eccentricities of a Church turned inward...
...Insects, birds, and animals of all kinds...
...Hahn wants to kill the cat that killed the bird...
...Violence is potentially unchained when Mr...
...After the bird is killed by a cat and the father buries it, Mr...
...The protagonist interrupts: "I'm sick of it all...
...The tonal theme of "the Keystone" expresses the fear that the Church faces the curious danger of becoming an empty Gothic shell unless it tries to relate Revelation more meaningfully to the problems of contemporary life...
...The Keystone" (1963), coinciding with Vatican II, directly protests that the time has waned for good-humored tolerance of an inflexible ecclesiastical organization, for Powers is clearly critical of die institutional Church...
...The horror of Bishop Dul-linger's dream to build a cathedral in the twentieth century city of man lies in the ignorance shared by the hierarchy, architects, contractors, and laborers who do not recognize that they are compromising the uniqueness of their own worship by camouflaging the fresh forms of today under the manufactured guises of another age...
...In search of "Priestly Fellowship" (1969), Father Joe encouraged Bill, his new assistant, to invite some seminary friends for a Sunday night buffet, but one of them is Conklin, a seminary drop-out...
...To gain some sense of Powers' vision in this new collection, it is important to consider the original dates of publication of some of the pivotal short stories, especially in relationship to Vatican II...
...Powers hits directly at their celibacy as the reason for their alienation and loneliness...
...Who was left...
...As an artist, then, Powers is not in the Joycean tradition, a priest of the imagination creating his own independent order...
...THE CHURCH OF J. F. POWERS ELEANOR B. WYMARD Look How the Fish Live J. F. POWERS Knopf, $696 J. F. Powers has written thirty-nine stories and one novel, Morte D'Urban (National Book Award, 1963), since 1943, a banner year when he published not only "lions, Harts, Leaping Does," the story which brought him national recognition, but also three little known didactic narratives in The Catholic Worker...
...Although never again so obviously stated, this germinal concept goads Powers' mature writing with compelling purpose, revealing the central unity and vital spirit of his creativity...
...The structural arrangement of these ten pieces-seven short stories, a three-act practical joke, and "two cautionary tales"-also reveals Powers' judgment that religious values in America need to be deepened and revitalized...
...The archetypal symbol from 1 Peter, 2:4-8, refers to Christ as the keystone among the "living stones," that is, all life, the good and evil of reality...
...The unnamed father is the spokesman Powers' repeated theme that, although the order of life is inscrutable, man, by using his uniquely human powers, can question his existence and thereby come to a realization of, not only his flnitude, but also his freedom...
...Bishop Dullinger's scrapping of the diocesan hierarchial chart is not the act of a man with insight, but the gesture of one who feels useless and lonely because he no longer has need to examine his conscience daily according to "Good Rules for Businessmen...
...Although Powers has been attacked and defended for his attitudes toward the Roman Catholic priest, the spiritual orientation of his fiction neither rises nor falls on his portrayal of the inner sanctum of the rectory...
...The role of Powers, as man and artist, is to discover and interpret that order, occasionally stubbing his toe and shouting angrily at enigmas he cannot understand, simply because it is the nature of human beings to behave so...
...The father has never been "soft" toward the small animals who h've in the yard, but on this particular day he ruminates about the "balance of nature" when he returns home to find his children trying to nurse a forgotten baby dove, while the mother dove sits "unconcerned" in a tree and soon flies away...
...Hahn smiled...
...According to Powers, the clergy, despite hopes and promises, are not yet confronting the awesome mystery of salvation, for they still reduce the pain of living to the superficial grievances of the rectory...
...Although the narrative action is slight, the plot is complex because it brings new awareness to the protagonist, an unnamed father of a family brood living in a rambling frame house surrounded by a yard which is "four city lots and full of trees, a small forest and game preserve in the old part of town...
...The irony of Conklin's response, "It did me," is lost on Bill...
...In the latter, as an angry young man, Powers oversimplifies the complex relationship between belief and literature with the blatant statement, "the upholstery of Christianity has held up better than the idea and practice...
...God, though, knowing his thoughts, knew his questions, and the world was already in possession of all the answers that would be forthcoming from God...
...he carried it around for awhile . . . [then] he rolled it up gently, and put it in the trunk of the car with the little model of the new cathedral...
...It provides simply an external structure for his pursuing the deeper problem that our generation is condemning itself to un-fulfillment by ceasing to search for Mystery and Truth...
...Where the keystone should have been there was just a crack...
...children . . . women . . . and men," Mr...
...In "The Keystone" Powers is concerned that a Church which neglects the cultivation of aesthetic and intellectual excellence, neglects, too, the pursuit and expression of truth...
...Look How the Fish Live begins and ends with stories of family life...
...and Mrs...
...instead, he traces the order of life to God...
...In May, 1963, the publication date of The Keystone," Vatican II was already underway...
...after all, it is the nature of the cat to pursue the bird...
...Guilty and tense because "he could not provide his loved ones with a lasting home," the writer-father, not getting on with a play he wants to write about a "family of campers, possibly Germans . . . who make the mistake of pulling into a bivouac of tinkers for the night," roams the streets of Dublin collecting snatches of dialogue and buying small surprises for his children...
...Mr...
...By exposing the frailty of the Church's human ways, Powers urges a necessary return to the essential Christian mysteries, blinded by mores, rubrics, and now, by strobe lights...
...In the case of the newly ordained, Incarnation, Redemption, and Resurrection are communicated by vestibule posters screaming LOVE, PEACE, and JOY...
...Hahn exclaims, "That doesn't leave much, does it...
...In the last one, "Tinkers" (1975), the unnamed father, "America's thriftiest living author," is living in Ireland with his wife and seven children...
...The inhumanity of the Tectory is painful: pastors live for days without knowing a curate's name, and stay forever in their bedrooms at the bead of the stairs, sealed off from the problems of the microcosmic parish...
...A man had to accept his God-given limitations...
...But the keystone is missing in the new cathedral because it is a hybrid form, proposed, designed, and executed by those ignorant of Christ's message to make all things new in him...
...But Simpson is no visionary: his idea of action is to canvass the office and boiler room in search, not of mystery, but of answer-in this case, the literal key to the door of the parish house...
...Look how the fish live...
...There'd be too many of those doves if things like that didn't happen...
...Who was left...
...Although Powers' rectory is basically unchanged since Vatican II, the atmosphere, however, is noticeably charged: Women were now allowed to take up the collection at Holy Sepulchre, and strobe lights had been, ordered for the sanctuary . . . and Potter and his pastor . . . were hoping to get Holy Sepulchre changed to Holy Resting Place as less off-putting to the churchless...
...The Bishop of Ostergothenburg, only in his retirement, lives to bring "good news...
...Powers seeks to reveal truth as it exists in the created order of things: his task is not to impose new order, but to explore pattern and design as they are subject to a higher perspective...
...As the tension in the household builds between husband and wife, father and children, a current of sympathy paradoxically binds them to-gather, a spirit unknown in the many loveless parish houses...
...Although the vocabulary has changed, .Powers' clergy are still absorbed in trivia...
...The clerical stories in Look How the Fish Live are a scathing indictment that the Church has simply changed its upholstery...
...At one time, for example, Bishop Dullinger had "given some thought to building the cathedral out of fieldstones . . . just as they came from the hand of God and were collected by farmers from their fields...
...Certainly the building of a cathedral- minus the keystone of the arches-is the central symbol of the story, but the real issue is the very nature of the monstrosity...
...The missing keystone in the arches of the new cathedral is, then, the central symbol of the story: "In the middle of every arch there were two stones...
...In Look How the Fish Live (Knopf, 1975), Powers continues to expose the "upholstery of Ghristianity" to real light, as he tries, with edgy patience, to make some sense out of a condition that is, indeed, very human...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 6
