Bartleby on the Prairie, cont.

“No one ever so doggedly persevered in a nonvocation.”

That’s Garry Wills on J.F. Powers in the New York Review of Books, in a piece which suggests that the conciliar generation of writers has come full circle — with its strongest younger member, now a wise elder, openly deriding a writer who was held up as an exemplar of Catholic writing at mid-century.

For years Commonweal's job postings have dangled the most civilized perk offered by any magazine: a four-day work week. Lately Commonweal's unfailingly useful Friday-morning roundup email has made clear what the magazine’s editors spend the fifth day (and the sixth and the seventh) doing: reading.

Last weekend they were reading the New York Review of Books, and so I joined them, beginning with Wills’s piece (subscribers only) about Powers’s letters, published in a book called Suitable Accommodations.

My own long essay about Powers, “Bartleby on the Prairie,” was published in Harper’s. Raised as I was not to speak ill of the dead, I sought to judge Powers not as a husband and father, but as a writer:

With a few short stories in print, Powers was already determined to shun any worldly pursuit that might rival his writing. On this he would be firm, even stiffnecked, refusing steady work for the next twenty years. The sight of his own father applying himself doggedly to lousy work had left him determined not to make the same mistake. Prison life hardened in him the conviction that he would not be a cog in any machine. And his confidence in his talent—in Catholic terms, his vocation, or calling to a particular kind of holy service—made him loath to destroy it through misuse or neglect …

By thirty, he was a Bartleby on the prairie: a man in a room with a pen, relishing his independence, however crabbed, as evidence that he was still on the proper path.

Wills (more power to him) is beset by no such scruple. No, he lays out the selfishness, the sense of entitlement, and the contemptus mundi that runs poisonously through Powers’ correspondence:

Powers was unhappy with his marriage and his children, and regularly broke away from them at holidays to go elsewhere with his priest friends. Gloomily following the church’s ban on contraceptives, he used the unpredictable “rhythm” method of birth control, with expectable results. Trying to avoid having ten or twelve children, he ended up with five, and dreaded each new pregnancy. Of these serial threats he wrote things like “her pregnancy. That, as you might guess, was the last straw, and we’re appalled by the prospect.”

Powers disliked the church as he found it. He disliked the family life the church’s teachings brought on him. And he disliked the writer’s life that it got him into – a narrow vein of stories about priests, and an unfulfilled contract for a novel about the church at a time when the church was changing profoundly.

Wills wonders why Powers stayed in the church, and why he kept writing about it. Myself, I wonder what Powers’ narrowness and stubbornness and contempt for the world spelled for the rest of us:

Powers’ refusal to follow his material into the present had real consequences for Catholic writing in this country. In the years that followed, the Catholic priesthood would change in ways that challenged the imagination. Priests would marry nuns. Priests would run for Congress. Priests would pour human blood on draft files in government offices. Priests would consecrate baguettes, bagels, hoagie rolls, or pitas instead of wafers. Priests would grow beards and let their dogs scamper on the altar. Just when the story of Catholics in America turned broadly comic, this gifted comic artist turned away from it; he seemed a literary fugitive, a writer gone missing when he was needed most.

Suitable Accommodations has gotten wide attention: Christopher Beha in Bookforum, James Marcus in the Los Angeles Times — both appreciative and admiring, if I recall right. In the New Yorker's book blog Adam Gopnik – who rivals Wills in vigorous literary productivity – wonders why the work of “America’s Cleanest Writer” has gone out of favor.

In my essay I put forward one crucial reason:

With time, the lightness of Powers’ work, always a drawback in my estimation, has come to seem an offense. Just when his books were reissued, the scandal of priestly sexual abuse was brought to light, and the news of many hundreds of sex crimes committed by priests over the decades made Powers’ stories of clerical bumblers and connivers seem blinkered and naïve. His fiction is as detailed an account of the everyday lives of priests at mid-century as could be found outside a prosecutor’s office; but of priests’ sexual lives, or longings, or sins, or crimes, he had had little to say.

Wills’ tough-minded conclusion to his essay cuts both ways:

His stunted priests are surrogates for his own stalled life, as Lowell realized and these letters confirm. No one ever so doggedly persevered in a nonvocation.

Does he mean that Powers had no calling to the priesthood, or no calling to literature? Both, I think.

My own conclusion is that Powers did all right by his literary gifts, considering his foul temperament and his straitened circumstances. But I think too that in his case the string of posterity is running out.

• 5 October 2013
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