A Priest's Trial by Piety
PORTE, JOEL
A Priest's Trial by Piety THE ENCOUNTER By Crawford Power Avon. 304 pp. $.95. Reviewed by JOEL PORTE Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University; author, "Emerson and...
...As Father Cawder is offered the chance to see himself in Diamond, we must admit the possibility of encountering ourselves in the priest...
...It is as if Power had set out to work simultaneously in the traditions of Hawthorne and Camus...
...But despite the sharply detailed evocation of aimless, unheroic contemporary life in Maryland, Trenton and Philadelphia, and the hint of nameless forces working within the protagonist which may bring him to a horribly predetermined end, this is ultimately not a work of naturalistic realism...
...Father Cawder is bitterly aware of what he is, but-and here lies his significance as our human paradigm-no one can say for certain what he may become...
...author, "Emerson and Thoreau" After 15 years of obscurity, Crawford Power's compelling and finely crafted first novel has returned-let us hope to stay...
...If Power had allowed Father Cawder to step before the curtain and appeal to the reader directly, the words might be the priest's own...
...Alyosha Karamazov learns to accept the world, and kisses the earth in token of love...
...Power does not allow himself to fall into this trap...
...But Father Cawder is never willing to admit that Diamond, the "diving fool," the man who descends, is his true spiritual double...
...it is an emotional lie...
...Father Cawder's encounter with Diamond, Stella, and Marina embodies the major human confrontation in the book and also bears the burden of its allegorical intent...
...He perfectly exemplifies that Augustinian strain of piety so characteristic of 17th century American religious life...
...Have pity on me and heal me, for you see that I have become a problem to myself, and this is the ailment from which I suffer...
...Thoroughly modern in his relentless subjectivity and self-probing, Father Cawder holds out the promise of unexpected variety for our current American literary pantheon...
...That far Father Cawder is willing to go...
...Father Cawder rushes off in undisguised loathing, unwilling to allow a movement of sympathy which would imply even imaginative complicity...
...He treats his protagonist with compassion...
...The words are those of Saint Augustine...
...He insists on taking the priest into his confidence...
...Its terms frighten and repel him...
...Love is possible, even when he is devoid of it...
...Piety may drive Father Cawder to wear a steel chain beneath his ribs for four months, but when he realizes that his penance has only nourished pride, he repudiates the supposedly pious act...
...He would let grace fall on an acrobat according to His pleasure...
...but for Father Cawder, and the rest of us, there is no regeneration possible without it...
...For alongside the now familiar figure of the Jewish victim-hero (Herzog, who feels too much), Power has added the complementary figure of the Catholic priest as an archetype of emotional alienation-man separated from his human feelings and responses...
...Against this overweaning parable or dream he kept one last argument...
...He cannot bring himself to accept a common spiritual destiny with, and possibly even dependence on, the sensual and degraded carnival pair...
...What is made horribly clear about Father Cawder's repulsion is that it is built on covert, unacceptable fascination...
...Through God's grace, or man's persistence, something further may follow...
...But Father Cawder is too proud to reveal his suffering to others...
...If he finds himself acting out of pride, it is not only an offense to God...
...Father Cawder's piety is not simply, as Irving Howe insists, a sin consisting in "nothing but a constant concern with God...
...And the danger is that his ailmentabysmal need masquerading as immaculate sufficiency-may so repel us as to move us not to pity but to hatred of him...
...The coming of the carnival to Lulworth, Maryland, bringing with it the fateful high-diver, Diamond, and his pathetically lustful sweetheart, Stella, was prefigured to Father Cawder in a dream: Why might it not be by divine intervention that they came...
...As their names suggest, they represent the creation-earth, sky, and sea-the common, precious setting ordained for the drama of human salvation...
...While it may be said that Father Cawder is almost evil in his piety, this is true only in the sense in which Saul Bellow's Herzog is "evil" in his confusion...
...But unlike Dimmesdale, who ultimately finds regeneration in the public humiliation of admitting his connection with the adulteress, Hester, and acknowledging his bastard, Pearl, Father Cawder never ceases despising his humanity...
...He is a firm believer in the absolute sovereignty of God, and he has an abysmal sense of his own sinfulness-his utter emptiness compared to the majestic fullness of God...
...But what is missing from the scheme for Father Cawder is the indispensable third element: an active belief in the possibility of regeneration...
...He was not willing to submit to its terms...
...But Father Cawder defends himself against her with anger...
...All three are, in Father Cawder's view, human trash-inextricably bound to the flesh, with its weaknesses and needs...
...Like Camus' Sisyphus, his value lies in his affirmation of meaning in the face of an overwhelming sense of futility...
...The white gauze of her blouse, parting over her pointed breasts, rose and fell with her breathing...
...Much the same thing happens with Diamond...
...The priest insists on transcending, or ignoring, his humanity, refusing to agree with Heraclitus and Eliot that the way down and the way up are one...
...He thinks "that on a visit to a priest" she might "have decently clothed herself...
...Those who feel no charity in themselves will not be moved by my words...
...The story of Father Cawder, a stiff and sanctimonious Catholic priest who develops an obsession over a carnival acrobat and his girl, initially suggests such literary antecedents as Norris and Dreiser...
...But, paradoxically, they are also presented as potential vessels of supernatural grace...
...Let those of my readers whose hearts are filled with charity, from which good actions spring, weep with me and weep for me...
...Like Arthur Dimmesdale, the tortured minister of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, who is egotist enough to believe that the whole firmament may be no more "than a fitting page for his soul's history and fate," Father Cawder believes that public events may have been ordered to facilitate the working out of his own spiritual drama...
...He wants Father Cawder to know him and his particular hell before he asks for help, and he is compelled to describe to the priest what it is like to be frantically, desperately in love, obsessed by a woman's body...
...His piety is really his way-and the terms of theology are the only ones he has-of testing his motives and examining his soul...
...And therein lies the trouble...
...The main thrust of the drama is internal...
...Originally published, and largely ignored in 1950, The Encounter has been reintroduced as a paperback under the Avon imprint (as was Henry Roth's Call It Sleep) along with an eloquent appraisal by Irving Howe...
...God does not have respect to persons...
...While Father Cawder feels nothing but his own emptiness, he is sustained by an awareness (he calls it "envy") that others are full...
...Father Cawder accepts God, but not His creation...
...He lacks charity even for himself...
...For an American reader, The Encounter is liable to be a deceptive experience...
...There is a touching irony in the "not willing," for Father Cawder, the fastidious man of God who hates his body and its needs, is really not able to submit to this opportunity for grace...
...For God, Power seems to be saying, the world is not necessary...
...Though without pity for the "bad ends" of Stella and Diamond, he admits in terror that by another's "bloody death he experienced something of his own supersession.' The act of identification has begun...
...Unable to accept his own fascination and her natural desire to appeal, he freezes up and she feels rejected...
...He cannot love God (man viewed sacramentally) and is saved from utter despair only by an irrational but irreducible belief in His existence...
...For although Father Cawder finally acknowledges himself that he is possessed by "fear for his own destruction, the imagined freezing void," although he is convinced that he is "trivial and abominable," fixed through an inability to love that cuts him off from God and man, he still believes it "his duty to live in spite of himself...
...But I beg you, O Lord my God, to look upon me and listen to me...
...the tale veers toward allegory, and the whole is ordered and sustained by an impressive, but not intrusive, frame of theological and moral speculation...
...When Stella-still inexplicably adolescent, delicate and attractive despite her backgroundcomes to the priest to enlist his aid in having her daughter Marina placed in a convent school, and perhaps even to ask for guidance herself, she naturally uses her sexuality as part of her human appeal...
...Although he is a Catholic, Father Cawder's sensibility is, as Irving Howe suggests, that of a Puritan...
Vol. 49 • March 1966 • No. 6
