Perfection
of the Life or of the Work?:
James
Farl Powers, Illinois Writer
(c) Copyright by Kathleen Spaltro (2018)
All Rights Reserved
One of the greatest masters of the
American short story—unknown to most American readers but well-known to his
peers as "a writer's writer"—J.F. Powers was born in Jacksonville,
raised in Rockford, Quincy, and Chicago. The Library of Congress subject
headings for his Collected Stories
denote Powers's recurrent topics: Middle
West—Religious life and customs—Fiction; Middle West—Social life and
customs—Fiction; Catholics—Fiction; Clergy—Fiction. Powers's stories and
two novels mostly portrayed Roman Catholic American priests and their
relationships with one another. For Powers, as for Anthony Trollope in his
Barsetshire series about Church of England clergy in the cathedral city of
Barchester, this is a humorous subject. Perhaps you don't think so? You are
wrong. Trollope and Powers both make me laugh out loud in their depiction of
the interpersonal relationships of clergy in very hierarchical churches. Powers
masterfully portrays irritation, boredom, fear, toadying, and other assorted
very human behaviors as men interact with other men who may be in the same
profession but whom they don't like much.
Clerical Conflict
Likewise, the interpersonal
conflicts between Church of England clergymen of varying ranks constitute most
of the plot of Anthony Trollope's delightful novel Barchester Towers, one of the 47 novels Trollope wrote in the time
he spared from his very busy 33 years as a civil servant in the British postal
service. Another novel in the series, The
Last Chronicle of Barset, concerns a very poor and learned clergyman,
Josiah Crawley, who stands accused of stealing a cheque. At once neurotic and
noble, annoying and impressive, Crawley is a complex, self-defeating,
obstinate, yet brave and dignified man. While I love Trollope's Barchester Towers as a comic
masterpiece, I can see that The Last
Chronicle of Barset surpasses even Barchester
Towers as a great novel of portraiture: "No one ever on seeing Mr.
Crawley took him to be a happy man, or a weak man, or an ignorant man, or a
wise man."
Trollope holds his own with the
greatest of novelists writing in English. A minor genius who plumbed the same
topics, Frederick Rolfe ("Baron Corvo") might provide another context
within which to assess Powers. Although expelled from two seminaries, Rolfe
insisted that he had a vocation to the Roman Catholic priesthood. In his novel Hadrian VII—an astonishingly prophetic forecast
of the modern papacy, Rolfe portrays
himself as George Arthur Rose, whose vocation was denied and then
spectacularly, if belatedly, recognized. After 20 years of frustration, prelates
come to apologize to Rose, and not long afterwards his persistent quest of his
vocation gains attention in a blocked papal conclave that then selects Rose to
be Pope. The newly elected Hadrian VII expresses his view that "The
clergy are more than less human; and they certainly are not even the pick of
humanity": "They mean well: but
their whole aim and object seems to be to serve God by conciliating
Mammon." Rolfe shares this central theme with both Trollope and Powers.
Trying
to serve God by conciliating Mammon is the theme of many of Powers's stories, as
well as of his first novel, Morte
d'Urban, and his long-delayed second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green.
Trollope was financially successful,
industrious, and pragmatic. Rolfe was unsuccessful, industrious, and
impractical. Powers was unsuccessful, spasmodically industrious, and impractical.
All three focused their fiction on the lives and careers of clergymen. Trollope
made a solid financial success of his novels about infighting among
clergy: "I never saw anything like
you clergymen," says a female
character, the daughter, wife, and sister-in-law of a warden, a canon, and an archdeacon, "you
are always thinking of fighting each other." Powers's choice of subject
matter does not really seem to explain his financial difficulties, which were
not eased even by winning the National Book Award in 1963 for Morte d'Urban. Nor does choice of topic
seem to explain Rolfe's financial failure.
Perfectionism
Temperament seems a more likely
culprit—in Rolfe's case, paranoia coupled with a thoroughly narcissistic sense
of entitlement: "I have not a
friend in the world to help me.… even though the quality and quantity of my
work are admired, and predictions daily are made of the brilliant commercial
success which will attend my stuff sooner or later, no one ever yet has conceived
the idea of investing money in me to keep me alive to do more work and win that
commercial success." Actually, many people kindly tried to help Rolfe, but
"Rolfe saw himself as a permanently picturesque figure oppressed by a
circle of enemies jealous of his talents or exhibiting their own meanness. It
was his compensation for the maddening sense of failure, for his poverty, for
his inability to dominate circumstances as he desired."
While Trollope had a temperament that
aided him to success, Rolfe alienated even his friends—partly because
(according to a former friend) he "had
only the vaguest sense of realities." "He had so many gifts, and
industry above all; but what he had to sell found no price in the
market-place," his biographer A.J.A. Symons concluded. "His brilliant
books, expressed in prose as exquisite as the hand and as brightly coloured as
the inks with which it was written, brought him trivial sums and no security….
Behind his fury and lack of financial scruple, behind his inconvenient insistence
on the artist’s right to live at the expense of others, behind the excesses
into which his repressed nature tempted him, there remains an intense soul
which maintained its faith, and expressed its aspirations in many excellent
words and works."
Trollope was financially
successful, as well artistically prolific and notoriously industrious. Lacking
the commercial success won by Trollope, Rolfe resembled Trollope in unceasing
industry. Unlike Rolfe, Powers was intermittently industrious. Like Rolfe,
Powers "had only the vaguest sense of realities." His daughter Jane
commented, "he was so hopelessly
impractical."
Comparing Rolfe with Powers
pinpoints a crucial difference: while both were unsuccessful financially, Powers
was often unproductive and time-wasting. His perfectionism seems to have seeded
his persistent procrastination, which tried his long-suffering wife's patience
as Betty Powers stabilized the family's finances during their long marriage (1946–1988)
while maintaining a belief in his genius. "Are we to make him into just another
man who will die, his body rot, his possessions be dispersed, and his
immortality all in heaven?," Betty Powers asked her journal. "God
does intend there to be man-made beauty on earth. We are to make order of it
all. Order and art." In his last conversation with his dying wife, his eldest child, Katherine A. Powers, has
revealed, "Jim said he spent that
time telling her how sorry he was for giving her such a hard life and no home. He
never really recovered from her death…."
Powers's intermittent
industriousness, his habits of procrastinating and wasting time, may have
resulted in part from a perfectionism born of the very motive that impelled
him: his sense of vocation. As Katherine
A. Powers has remembered, "For him, art was as much a spiritual vocation
as the priesthood--a more exalted one even….But art, by contrast to the
priesthood, allowed no compromise.... My father, however, felt that daily life
could only be a distraction from his calling. Tragically, in the years that he
struggled to write Wheat, he was
often lost in a wilderness of petty detail and procrastination, wasting hours
repairing and polishing his shoes, rubbing emollients into his leather-bound
books, battling bats, mice, and squirrels in the house, and gophers under the
sun; caulking windows, spackling cracks and holes, gluing, taping, and tapping
in tacks." Believing that art was his God-given vocation may have so
heightened his anxieties and standards to a breaking point that this belief
(which sometimes generated perfect stories) often paralyzed artistic creation
in the name of perfection.
This could seem like (and
sometimes was) laziness or narcissism but was often self-paralysis probably worsened
by recurrent financial failure. A 1959 diary entry by Powers notes, "I now
see our whole married life as a search for a home, and every child making the
need more pressing and the prospects less likely... I hope this will be the
last harvest I will reap of the failure of Betty to educate her parents and
others in the meaning of her calling and mine (as writers, artists) and the few
prerogatives attending same." Powers had warned his future bride in 1945, "The
jobs I had, in bookstores and the rest, were never honest. Not for me. Should a
giraffe have to dig dandelions or a worm fly a kite?"
Often refusing to turn from his
writing to more renumerative work, Powers also often refused to write. Thus,
his and Betty Powers's belief in his vocation entwined to create what Katherine Powers called "the black
comedy of children, five all told, great poverty, bad luck, and balked
creativity." Her other comments plainly set out the human cost of living
with his genius: "Growing up in this family is not something I would care
to do again. There was so much uncertainty, so much desperation about money,
and so very little restraint on my parents' part in letting their children know
how precarious our existence was."
This prolonged procrastination is
hard to defend, given that Powers also often refused offers of paid work and
allowed his family to subsist on the generosity of others. Rolfe, who starved
in spectacular fashion during his last years in Venice, at least was a childless
bachelor. Bernard Shaw pinpointed this failure of parental responsibility: "As
long as a man has a right to risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he
needs only courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he
forfeits that right when he marries….Women, for the sake of their children and
parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached women would
endure."
Although distinguished by the deep
respect of more famous authors for his eminence as a short-story writer, Powers
never achieved much commercial success. Were the residential instability and
the unceasing financial stress on his wife and children, as well as on Powers
himself, inherent in his stubborn devotion to writing as his God-given
vocation, or were his personal characteristics at fault as he chose the
perfection of his work over the perfection of his life? Powers did indeed
choose perfection of his work over perfection of his life. Only his wife and
five children have the right to forgive or excuse that choice. At the same time,
as
a minor American writer with great gifts, Powers became a major practitioner of
the short story in such brilliant pieces as "The Forks," "The
Valiant Woman," and "Prince of Darkness." Unlike fellow American
masters of the short story Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever, Powers also
wrote readable, well-executed novels.
I enjoy his comic sense of the
discrepancy between religious vocation and the realities of the lives of
secular priests. I respect his deep faith, which advocated a pacifism that sent
him to prison for being a conscientious objector. I just wish that the human
cost to his family of his vocation had not been so great.
The intellect of man
is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
—William Butler Yeats
For
Further Reading
The Stories of J.F. Powers,
Morte d'Urban, and Wheat
That Springeth Green [with an introduction by Katherine A. Powers] are
available from New York Review Books. Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and The
Last Chronicle of Barset are available in many editions.
Powers,
Katherine A. (Ed.). Suitable
Accommodations, An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942–1963. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Rolfe,
Frederick (Frederick Baron Corvo). Hadrian
VII. New York: Dover, 1969. Reprint
of 1904 edition.
Scoble,
Robert. The Corvo Cult: The History of an Obsession. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2014.
Symons,
A.J.A. The Quest for Corvo. New York:
Macmillan, 1934.
Capsule
Biography of J.F. Powers
Born in Jacksonville, Illinois on
8 July 1917. [Father (James A.), also born in Jacksonville in 1883, worked for
many years as a manager for Swift and Company in Jacksonville, Rockford, and
Quincy, Illinois.] In the late 1920s, attended St. Peter's School in Rockford,
taught by Sisters of Loretto. From 1931-34, attended Quincy College Academy in
Quincy, taught by Franciscans. In the mid-1930s, moved to Chicago—sold books at
Marshall Field's, drove a Packard as a chauffeur. In the late 1930s, attended
evening classes at Northwestern
University's Chicago campus, including a writing seminar taught by Bergen
Evans. By 1940, employed as a Research Assistant for the Works Progress Administration's
Illinois Historical Records Survey. Sold books at Brentano's but was fired for
refusing to buy war bonds. As a writer for Catholic
Worker, agreed with Dorothy Day's pacifism and was arrested in 1943 for not
appearing for induction. Eventually sentenced to three years in prison and
served 13 months in Sandstone, Minnesota, before parole in late 1944.Worked as
hospital orderly (St. Joseph's Hospital) in St. Paul as a condition of early release.
Briefly taught at St. John's University, Collegeville,
Minnesota in 1947 (after 1975, was Regents Professor of English and
writer-in-residence at St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict until
1993), at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, 1949-51; at University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1956-57; at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts,
1965-66. Awarded American
Academy grant, 1948; Guggenheim fellowship, 1948; Rockefeller fellowships,
1954, 1957, 1967; National Book Award, 1963. Lived with his wife in 20
residences in the United States and Ireland. Died in 1999.
Illinois addresses included Jacksonville, 1917, 812 Grove Street.
1920, 119 East Morton Avenue. 1924, 503 S. Prairie. Rockford, 1926, 1111 Grant Avenue. 1927, 947 N. Church. 1928, 2305
N. Court. 1929, 1811 Melrose. 1930, 1910 Douglas Street. Quincy, 1930, 1658 1/2 Jersey Street. 1931, 730 N. 24th Street. Chicago, 1940, 4453 N. Paulina.
