J.F. Powers, Masterful Short Story Writer of the Middle West

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.

Artistic Vocation

              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.