“America’s Cleanest Writer Goes His Lonely Way”: The Letters of J. F. Powers

October 1, 2013 - The New Yorker

Posted by Adam Gopnik

With the sudden appearance of a “liberal” Pope—albeit a liberal Pope who is, as many exasperated Catholics have pointed out, just as strong as ever on Church teachings on abortion and homosexuality, just less inclined to fetishize them before other, more urgent ones—there may be no more serendipitous moment to be thinking again about the writer J. F. Powers. Powers was an American Catholic whose stories decorated these pages for many years, and who has been brought back into the spotlight by the appearance of a new collection of his letters, “Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Edited by one of his five children, Katherine A. Powers, the book provides a wonderful picture of a now lost type: the radical-liberal Catholic of the forties and fifties, whose allegiance to the rules of the Church (all those children!) was part and parcel of his allegiance to what would now seem an extravagant, not to say extremist, egalitarian politics. Katherine Powers rightly calls this “the nearly forgotten American Catholic countercultural religious and social ferment of the mid-twentieth century.”

Powers’s name resonates for few readers today; Joseph Bottum, writing in the Catholic journal First Things, called him “the greatest of the writers in the 1950s American Catholic renaissance, and the most faded.” Powers specialized in small comic sketches of the worldly vanities and transcendental longings of parish priests and friars, mostly in Minnesota, and was a sort of cross between Chekhov and Garrison Keillor. He was, for quite a while, very well-regarded. His novel “Morte D’Urban” beat out Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” for the National Book Award in 1963, and he was, for many years, a mainstay of the New Yorker’s fiction pages. His tales had a Trollopean sensibility: he accepted the necessity of the divine institution, without unduly sanctifying its officials. Small rivalries (I recall one good story in which a priest with a valet engenders the envy of his colleagues) and little epiphanies (as in the beautiful ending of the story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” in which a dying friar loses his pet canary in a snowstorm ) were his subjects.
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