An artist is his work. The man dies, the work lives, and we judge his achievement by that.
And before we go one step further, no, J. F. Powers did not write that one about patent leather shoes. That was John R. Powers, another case altogether.
I didn’t see Powers as a religious writer in those days. I saw him as something close to my heart, a man who wrote about men at work. His priests were men who got up each morning and did their jobs, usually with dignity, even when the world seemed to conspire against them. Some were ambitious, some were frustrated, all were likable, even the rascals, even the saints.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But why of priests? Because, I suspect, they served his purposes so well, and there was no question that he knew them. He attended a Franciscan high school in Quincy, Illinois. Some of his best friends became priests. His wife’s brother was a priest. Some of his first published work appeared in the Catholic Worker, a newspaper I vaguely remember from childhood as being a good deal more interesting than the Sunday Visitor. He was for many years associated with the College of Saint Benedict (for women) and Saint John’s University (for men) in Collegeville, Minnesota. He knew and corresponded with many well-known Catholic authors and critics. He was not your ordinary Catholic layman.
Powers had already produced several acclaimed collections of short stories when chapters of Morte D’Urban began appearing in the New Yorker. The book, published by Doubleday, was received with honors–the NBA–and there was even talk of a movie. Powers didn’t like the idea–possibly he had seen Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby playing priests once too often.
When Wilf ships him off to sub for a vacationing pastor, Urban gets to show his stuff, initiating a survey to find out how the other man’s parishioners might feel about a new church. (The older folks–fortunately there aren’t too many–keep asking, “Wouldn’t a new church cost too much?”) Door-to-door he goes. “A dog nipped him, a hamster wet on him, a piece of fruitcake played hell with one of his gold inlays, and always he had to watch where he sat down.” He organizes card parties for the seniors and square dances for the young marrieds, conducts a mission, increases attendance at daily mass by 159 percent, and even sponsors a rock ‘n’ roll concert for the teens. All for naught. After the vacationing pastor drops dead of a heart attack while golfing in the Bahamas, Urban is not offered the position. He isn’t even considered.
Powers wrote much of this book in a bare rented office above a shoe store in Saint Paul, walking to work six days a week with a sandwich in his pocket, seldom finishing more than a page a day. Writing, he said, was a “dirty sweaty job” that he might not have done if he’d had enough income otherwise.
