Remembering J. F. Powers
James Farl (J. F.) Powers died on this date, June 12, in 1999. He was 81.
Powers was a writer of short stories, including five collections, and three novels, primarily focused on the lives of Catholic priests during a time of great change in the Church. Granted, it’s a narrow theme, but one that Powers, a layman with a surprisingly clear grasp of the challenges and rewards of clerical life as well as the ontology that doesn't change with ordination, excels at, animating his characters with large doses of humor, wonderful dialogue, and scenes of suspense, and surprise.
It’s been several years since I’ve read any of his work, and almost as long since I’ve heard his name mentioned. He had fallen into obscurity in the past, only to be briefly revived. I hope appreciation for his writing surfaces again. I'm encouraging it.
New York Review Classics is still publishing two of his novels, Morte D’Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green (I enjoyed them both) as well as a collection of his short stories titled, appropriately, The Stories of J. F. Powers.
His Morte D’Urban won a National Book Award in 1963. If you haven’t read Powers, you might start there. The fictitious Father Urban is a character with an “expansive vision of the spiritual life and high tolerance for moral ambiguity”—a sometimes disorderly member of a religious order: the Order of St. Clement—he is “a creation of great complexity, he is polite, not insistent with his dealings with his fellow priests even though his sense of things is at variance. He wants to expand the range of the Church, he’s even a bit of a Rotarian, but experience has taught him that [as we read in the novel] ‘the Catholic Church is not quite to be rated second only to Standard Oil in efficiency, as Time had reported a few years back.’”1
Interestingly, Powers early stories first found a home in his friend Dorothy Day’s “Catholic Worker” newspaper in the early 1940s, later in “The New Yorker,” “Esquire,” and elsewhere.
I still have Morte D’Urban on my bookshelf—I’m moving it to the “read again” pile.
Eliz. Hardwick’s Introduction to Morte D’Urban (NY Books, 2000).
As you keep unearthing these gems, I can only be grateful. Every gem adds to my list to complete before .... Thanks for another decade!
Wonderful that you are resurrecting these semi-forgotten authors and other obscure figures. I remember reading Wheat that Springeth Green many years ago when I first converted. Suburban priest… I also remember liking it, and it would be interesting to read it now, when my understanding of the faith has grown a bit.