`Mighty Scarce'

I recently wrote about books that make me laugh and forgot to put the works of J.F. Powers on the list. He’s a writer fated to remain invisible because readers and critics have fatally pigeonholed him as a “Catholic writer,” he returns repeatedly to the subject of priests while never descending into salaciousness, his stories are comic without being nihilistic, and, I suspect, because his prose is painstakingly exact and never flamboyant. His masters were Joyce and Waugh, and his approach might fairly be described as comic realism. His stories occasionally remind me of V.S. Pritchett’s, but are funnier. When an interviewer in 1959 asked Flannery O’Connor, “Is humor as scarce as seriousness in Catholic writing?” she answered, “Mighty scarce it is; but there is J.F. Powers with both.” In her essay “Catholic Novelists,” collected in Manners and Morals, O’Connor said this of his work:

“The Catholics that Mr. Powers writes about are seen by him with a terrible accuracy. They are vulgar, ignorant, greedy, and fearfully drab, and all these qualities have an unmistakable Catholic social flavor. Mr. Powers doesn’t write about such Catholics because he wants to embarrass the church; he writes about them because, by the grace of God, he can’t write about any other kind. A writer writes about what he is able to make believable.”

The good ones do, that is. O’Connor’s final point will, no doubt, rile the avant-garde contingent but the element of believability is essential to writing, especially in fiction. It’s a quality shared by writers as various as Zola, Chandler and Borges, and Powers had the gift of instilling conviction in readers. His landscape is recognizably mid-century Midwestern, and his humor is rooted in characters and the way they speak. His priests are not prodigies of spirituality. They’re like us, in fact, only more so. As I can attest, you need not be Catholic to love his work.

After Powers’ death in 1999, New York Review Books returned all of his work to print: The Stories of J.F. Powers, Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green. Powers was not prolific, in part because he was the sort of writer who agonized over the best use of a comma. The writer Jon Hassler quoted Powers as saying, “I know a page is satisfactory when it doesn't make me throw up any more,” and the effort shows in his prose, with its Waugh-like precision and stringency. His two novels have been faulted for being stitched-together short stories, though the same accusation has been thrown, unconvincingly, at Faulkner. Both wrote some of the best stories in the language, including, in Powers’ case, “The Presence of Grace,” “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” and a late story without a priest, “Look How the Fish Live.” And some of the funniest. Here’s a brief sample, selected at random from “Zeal”:

“`I suppose you know Macaulay’s England, Bishop.’”

“`No.’ There was something to be gained by a frank admission of ignorance when it was assumed anyway.”