J.F. Powers R.I.P.
Greeley, Andrew M.
Andrew M. Greeley J.F. POWERS R.I.P. Catholic storyteller On a Sunday afternoon in the mid 1960s, I turned on the Chicago fine-arts station in my car radio and heard a gently amused voice...
...I disagree...
...Catholic storyteller On a Sunday afternoon in the mid 1960s, I turned on the Chicago fine-arts station in my car radio and heard a gently amused voice discussing J. F. Powers's novel Morte D'Urban...
...Here was indeed a Catholic storyteller in an era when the wise Catholic critics of both the right and the left were saying that there could be no such thing...
...We will never again pick up a New Yorker, hoping against hope to find one of his stories...
...Powers is a Catholic storyteller not merely because he wrote about priests or about midwestern Catholicism but because he was acutely aware of the presence of grace and cared deeply about the salvation of his characters (as do his colleague at Saint John's University Jon Hassler and the English novelist David Lodge...
...He must have lived in a rectory, it was suggested...
...Yet we must permit storytellers to work at their own pace, and rejoice that we have those five volumes which so brilliantly record the presence of grace in the Catholicism of the middle of the century...
...My nephew Dan Durkin took a one-on-one course on short-story writing from Powers, and on hearing of his death wrote: "I have no doubt his spirit still shuffles, pauses, leans in the dusty attic tower of Benet Hall...
...His final stories captured perfectly the effort of men trying to convince themselves that nothing had really changed when in fact everything had changed...
...I hung on every word...
...Now hardly anyone would claim that all three writers were not uniquely Catholic, storytellers in the tradition of what David Tracy has dubbed the analogical imagination, an imagination which as Powers hinted in the title of one of his collections, is aware of "the presence of grace...
...He was a legend among the Johnies (as the students at Collegeville are called...
...He worked in a room over Benet Hall with a large glass window, out of which he stared at the campus, on some days from dawn to dusk, searching for just the right word...
...Commonweal 10 July 16,1999...
...I had read each of Powers's stories as soon as they appeared and was delighted that both the man and his words seemed to confirm what I felt about the stories...
...I have no doubt if you want to listen, in the quiet, you'll still hear the soft slow click of his IBM Selectric...
...We will miss him...
...Some say that Powers lost touch with the clergy of the years after Vatican II...
...How, it was often asked, did Powers know so much about priests...
...Their success came just at the time that self-critics within the Catholic community were lamenting the lack of (Irish) Catholic cultural achievements...
...He has now achieved the salvation he wanted for all his characters: He is in the presence of Grace...
...Or perhaps priests who were his friends told him tales out of school...
...Moreover, around Saint John's there were plenty of pieces to pick up...
...Even his character Urban, shallow ecclesiastical operator that he is, cannot escape the transforming touch of grace...
...He was a Catholic to his fingertips, gentle and kind, whimsical and melancholy, and tough enough to do time in Sandstone Prison as a conscientious objector during World War II...
...Powers had us down cold and was perhaps too kind to us...
...Some of Powers's early stories were about a city very much like Chicago (and a parish very much like Our Lady of Lourdes on Ashland Avenue), but his milieu eventually became that of the upper tier of states, the Catholicism of Saint John's Abbey, of the "Clementine" fathers, of Eugene McCarthy and Colman Barry and Godfrey Diekmann, of the dioceses (as he called them) of Duesterhaus and Ostrogothenberg, of the Strafe brothers and their paper The Drover...
...My guess is that his priests were creatures of a vivid, sympathetic, and unerring imagination, and that Powers worked with bits and pieces of clerical everyday life that he would pick up, as it were, on the fly...
...He told us how he missed Urban now that the story was finally written...
...It was soon obvious that the voice belonged to the author...
...D The Reverend Andrew M. Greeley is a novelist from Chicago...
...That interview flashed through my imagination when I heard of Powers's death on June 12...
...He was the last of the great trinity of mid-century (Irish) Catholic storytellers that broke through the barriers of the American literary world in those years, Edwin O'Connor, with his prize-winning novels, and Flannery O'Connor, with her highly acclaimed short stories, being the other two...
...One might lament that Powers's oeuvre is so small, only five slender volumes...
...He seemed a man very like the stories he wrote—wry, sad, funny, wistful, and hopeful...
...Sometimes, it was said, he needed a whole week to write a single sentence...
...However, he wanted us, like Urban, to be touched by grace...
Vol. 126 • July 1999 • No. 13
