Published November 14, 2021
By Kathleen Spaltro
After living in at
least 11 Illinois residences in the first 23 years of his life, including 1658
1/2 Jersey Street and 730 N. 24th Street in Quincy, short story writer and novelist
J.F. Powers was always to experience this residential instability even as a
husband and father of five who received prestigious grants and awards. Although
deeply respected by more famous authors such as Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, and
Mary Gordon, for his eminence as a short-story writer, Powers never achieved
commercial success. Was the unceasing financial stress on his wife and
children, as well as on Powers himself, inherent in his stubborn devotion to
writing as his God-given vocation, or were his personal characteristics at
fault as he chose the perfection of his work over the perfection of his life?
Was Powers’ subject matter the obstacle?
Powers’ stories and
two novels mostly portray American Roman Catholic priests and their
relationships with one another. For Powers, this is a humorous subject. He portrayed irritation, boredom,
fear, and other assorted human behaviors as men interact with other men they do
not like who may be in the same profession. The Library of Congress subject
headings for his
Collected Stories
denote Powers’ recurrent topics:
Middle
West—Religious life and customs—Fiction; Middle West—Social life and
customs—Fiction; Catholics—Fiction; Clergy—Fiction
James Farl
Powers, known as J. F. Powers, was born in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1917. His
father James worked for Swift and Company, which had offices in Jacksonville,
Quincy, and Rockford. The Powers boy showed
his artistic aptitude early on, appearing in junior high school plays. From
1931 to 1935, J. F. attended Quincy College Academy, a Catholic high school
taught by Franciscans in Quincy, where he was a member of the football and
basketball teams. Quincy College Academy ceased to exist when it merged with
Notre Dame Academy in 1940.
Powers’ time in
Quincy was short as the family moved frequently due to his father’s job with
Swift and Company. After a move to Chicago, he worked at Marshall Field’s department
store and attended classes at Northwestern University. Powers was influenced by
the activist Dorothy Day and wrote for her publication,
The Catholic Worker.
During World War II, he became a pacifist. He did not appear for his
induction into the Army and was arrested and jailed in 1943.
Powers’ won the
National Book Award in 1963 for
Morte d’ Urban
, his comic novel about a charming priest.
Winning that award did not improve his
financial situation. Powers was often unproductive and time-wasting. His
perfectionism seems to have seeded his persistent procrastination, which tried
his long-suffering wife’s patience. Betty Powers stabilized the family’s
finances during their long marriage (1946–1988) while maintaining a belief in
his genius. “Are we to make him into just another man who will die, his
body rot, his possessions be dispersed, and his immortality all in heaven?”
Betty asked in her journal. “God does intend there to be man-made beauty
on earth. We are to make order of it all.” Powers eldest child, Katherine has
revealed that in his last conversation with his dying wife, “he spent that
time telling her how sorry he was for giving her such a hard life and no home. He
never really recovered from her death….”
Powers’
intermittent industry, his habits of procrastinating, may have resulted in part
from a perfectionism born of the very motive that impelled him: his sense of vocation. As Katherine
remembered in her book,
Suitable Accommodations
, “For him, art was
as much a spiritual vocation as the priesthood–a more exalted one even….But
art, by contrast to the priesthood, allowed no compromise…. My father,
however, felt that daily life could only be a distraction from his calling.
Tragically, … he was often lost in a
wilderness of petty detail and procrastination, wasting hours repairing and
polishing his shoes, rubbing emollients into his leather-bound books, battling
bats, mice, and squirrels in the house, and gophers under the sun; caulking windows,
spackling cracks and holes, gluing, taping, and tapping in tacks.”
This could seem
like laziness but was often self-paralysis worsened by recurrent financial
failure. A 1959 diary entry by Powers notes, “I now see our whole married life
as a search for a home, and every child making the need more pressing and the
prospects less likely… I hope this will be the last harvest I will reap of the
failure of Betty to educate her parents and others in the meaning of her calling
and mine (as writers, artists) and the few prerogatives attending same.”
Powers had warned his future bride in 1945, “The jobs I had, in bookstores
and the rest, were never honest. Not for me. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions,
or a worm fly a kite?”
Often refusing to turn from his writing to more remunerative work,
Powers also refused to write. Thus, his and Betty belief in his vocation entwined
to create what Katherine called “the black comedy of children, five all
told, great poverty, bad luck, and balked creativity.” Her other comments
plainly set out the human cost of living with his genius: “Growing up in
this family is not something I would care to do again. There was so much
uncertainty, so much desperation about money, and so very little restraint on
my parents’ part in letting their children know how precarious our existence
was.”
Powers frequent rejection of offers of paid work left his family
to subsist on the generosity of others. Powers
choose perfection in his work over perfection in his life. Only his wife and
five children have the right to forgive or excuse that choice. At the same time,
as a minor American writer with great gifts, Powers became a major practitioner in
the genre of the short story in such brilliant pieces as “The Forks,”
“The Valiant Woman,” and “Prince of Darkness.” Powers died in
1999.
Sources
“25 Members of Academy Grid Squad
Honored.”
Quincy Herald Whig
,
December 13, 1933, 3.
“Critics Praise James Powers” Short Stories.”
Quincy
Herald Whig
, June 5, 1947, 20.
“Former Quincyans Plan Reunion in Washington.”
Quincy Herald Whig
, November 11, 1962, C2.
“Notre Dame Academy Is To House High School
For Both Boys and Girls.”
Quincy Herald Whig
, May 5, 1940, 18.
Powers, Kathrine a. (ed).
Suitable
Accommodations, An Autobiographical Story of Family Life
:
The Letters of J.
F. Powers, 1942-1963
. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2013.
“St. Peter Grade Graduates Are Given
Diplomas.”
Quincy Herald Whig
, June 14, 1931, 14.
“St. Peter School Children Appear in Clever
Plays.”
Quincy Herald Whig,
January 22, 1931, 4.
