A writer of many gifts and man of many foibles, J. F. Powers possessed an indelible voice, an unerring ear, a quintessentially American sense of independence, and a gnarly Irish Catholic fatalism. In “Look How the Fish Live,” his 1975 story about a petulant father called on by his importuning children to save a doomed bird, Powers’ protagonist ponders the seemingly random cruelty of nature. What explanation could there be for the pervasive violence and waste present, absurdly, even in the most domesticated suburban back yard? What or who was responsible? It can only be God, the father concludes. Powers allows him to ruminate further: “It wasn’t surprising, for all problems were at bottom theological. He’d like to put a few questions to God. God, though, knowing his thoughts, knew his questions, and the world was already in possession of all the answers that would be forthcoming from God.”
Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
480 pages
$12.98
Powers had a reputation for irascibility, and that reputation is richly confirmed by the correspondence collected in Suitable Accommodations. There is as much growl in his writing as there is wit, and there is a surfeit of that. A short-story writer of brilliance, he was admired by several generations of readers—especially Catholics, for he wrote almost exclusively about Catholic priests. Powers staked out the everyday conflicts and absurdities of rectory and parish life in the Midwest (mostly Minnesota) in the way Faulkner annexed Yoknapatawpha County or Woody Allen the Upper East Side. He knew the territory, and he knew how to turn the ephemeral nature of experience into something more lasting. Writing to a friend who had detected herself in one of his stories, Powers explained how fiction gets written. “You were and were not in it,” he wrote. “The requirements of art demand that you do violence sometimes to the facts as they took place, or interpret them differently, or make up incidents and conjure up characters that life itself, being such an erratic artist, seldom provides.”
The editor of this volume, Katherine Powers, is the writer’s daughter, and her introduction and afterword make clear that she has inherited a large measure both of her father’s exacting and unsentimental eye and of his elegance as a writer. In putting together this selection, her stated ambition was to create from the letters a kind of substitute for the novel of domestic travail her father was always threatening to write. Much of the energy and material for that novel, she suggests, was poured into letters to “Jim’s” many devoted friends, some of them familiar names (Abigail and Eugene McCarthy, Theodore Roethke) but most not. Powers was involved, if tangentially, with several obscure radical Catholic social movements, including the Liturgical and the Catholic Rural Life movements as well as a group calling itself the Detachers. Educated by Franciscans, he was drawn to the idea of voluntary poverty, although—as he would be the first to admit—this probably had as much to do with laziness as with anticipation of the Parousia.
Needless to say, it is the rare collection of letters that a novel makes, and Suitable Accommodations, while surely of great interest to Powers fans, is often mundane, repetitious, and guarded in its revelations. Little narrative momentum builds in what is essentially a series of routine, if amusing, dispatches about routine matters, with only occasional references to the craft of writing itself. One longs to hear back from Powers’ correspondents, whether his wife, or Robert Lowell, Evelyn Waugh, or his early editor Charles Shattuck, or from Harvey Egan, a priest, financial mainstay, and Powers’ most frequent correspondent.
Katherine Powers writes that while she achieved a “certain amount of peace” with the memory of a difficult father in arranging this collection, “the feeling aroused by the whole twenty-one-year run of them was one of overwhelming, inalterable sadness.” Readers will pick up on that sadness. The impecunious Powers asked a lot of his family, especially of his wife, Betty, responsible for every conceivable domestic duty in running a threadbare household with five young children underfoot. Betty was evidently a gifted writer in her own right, but subordinated her literary ambitions to those of her husband. She was a senior at St. Benedict’s College in Minnesota when a religious sister sent Betty’s novel to Powers for comment. Powers, in the final months of community-service parole work after a stint in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II, was impressed by the novel and utterly smitten by the author. A fervent correspondence ensued, with the ardent suitor by turns issuing declarations of love as well as instruction on how the future couple would live. “I am worried about making a living,” he warns her, “because I won’t go about it in the ordinary way—eight hours out of my life daily so that the system may prosper and the crapshooters running it.” And: “I don’t intend to sell insurance or work in a bank.” Such adamancy notwithstanding, Powers proposed to Betty two days after they met in November of 1945. The whirlwind romance gives hint of the writer’s heedlessness but also of the power of his personality.
From the evidence of these letters, Powers appears to have been remarkably incurious about his children’s lives—rarely mentioning them except when casting himself as the beleaguered breadwinner, and almost never writing to them. The family was constantly on the move, including four stays in Ireland, where Powers’ meager income could be stretched and his disdain for America’s crass commercial culture indulged. He remained determined not to be trapped in a job that would keep him from his writing. Yet he was also easily distracted—by horseracing, by professional sports of all kinds, even by furniture auctions. And while Powers might have been a fearless conscientious objector, a determined opponent of the “system,” contemptuous of the fabled “business sense” of his fellow Americans, and a passionate believer in art for truth’s sake, he was also a man with the most traditional notions of how responsibilities—and privileges—were properly divided at home. If they were lucky enough to afford it, the only room of one’s own in the family’s peripatetic existence would be vouchsafed for Jim. For men of his time such an attitude was not surprising, but still seems damning in retrospect.
Repeatedly in these letters Powers complains about the family’s inability to find a “lasting home” (thus the title of this book), a rootlessness that ran in tandem with what his daughter calls “his essential belief: that life on earth doesn’t make sense and that when you understood that, you understood reality.” Her father, Katherine Powers writes, was “hopelessly impractical” and habitually mired in an unhappy combination of thwarted sincerity and suspicion: “He was no stoic, and he took it all personally.” Amid the ongoing struggle with his writing and finances, Powers increasingly looked to his family as a refuge and a safe harbor. “As he retreated, the family he had once seen as having thwarted his calling as an artist became his model society—all the more so after most of its members had left and the idea could flourish unchecked by reality,” Katherine writes with poignant irony. Powers died in 1999 at the age of eighty-two, having published three collections of stories, many of which appeared in the The New Yorker, and two novels, Morte D’Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green. Morte D’Urban won the National Book Award in 1963, but failed to bring the sales and financial security for which its author had desperately hoped.
Near the end of this long book, an entry from Powers’ journal in April 1962 is interpolated between letters detailing his hopes for the impending publication of Morte D’Urban. The writer complains about a visitor who, like many others, feels “the facts of life and art are two different things and is out of touch with both.” Powers himself seems to have been out of touch with the facts of life, at least as most of us mortgage owners know them. Yet his best writing reminds us that what is real about art is also what is true about life. Every poem, Robert Frost famously insisted, is but a momentary stay against confusion—as Powers wrote to his friend, life itself will always prove the most erratic of artists. The Powers household had more than its share of confusion, for its head seems to have felt more acutely than most that he was indeed a stranger in a strange land. He was at least right about that. For all problems are, at bottom, theological.
Paul Baumann is editor of Commonweal.
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