Not a wasted word.

The Stories of
J.F. Powers
J.F. Powers
New York Review of Books Classics,
$14.95, 570 pp.

Morte D'Urban
J.F. Powers
New York Review of Books Classics,
$12.95, 336 pp

Wheat that
Springeth Green
J.F. Powers
New York Review of Books Classics,
$12.95, 327 pp.

We all owe the people at New York Review of Books Classics a great debt of thanks. They have brought all of J.F. Powers back into print. Powers (1917-99) wrote mainly (but not exclusively) about the Catholic clergy, and my uncle, a Catholic priest, was convinced that Powers must have had clerical spies who filled him in on what life was really like in rectories.

My uncle had reason to wonder about this. He was the pastor of the only Catholic church in Jacksonville, Illinois, Powers's hometown. His parish, Our Saviour's, was Powers's own when Powers was a boy, and my uncle's predecessor, Dean Francis Formaz, may well be the model for Monsignor Morez in Morte D'Urban. When Formaz died he left a will that deeded the church a sum of money for the construction of a new church building, but the money was available on one condition, one straight out of Powers: The church built with his money must be called "The Dean Formaz Church of Our Saviour."

My uncle could not abide the thought that a church built on his watch would give Formaz a higher billing than Jesus, and lawyers informed him that the will was iron-clad. So my uncle's solution--one Powers would like, I think--was to place the name of the church on the cornerstone of the new building, and he planted a small, dense forest of shrubs directly in front of it.

"Harvey Roche (later Father Urban) was born in that part of Illinois which more and more identifies itself with Abraham Lincoln but has its taproot in the South, Protestants were very sure of themselves there." So begins a chapter in Morte D'Urban, one of two novels Powers wrote, and he has my part of downstate Illinois dead right. That Protestant assurance was much stronger in the days of Powers's youth than it is now. Close to the time of his birth a pamphlet called "Hell at Midnight in Springfield" managed to combine anti-Catholicism, racism, and prohibitionism, warning citizens of the state capitol (thirty miles from Powers's home) against the evils of Romanism, liquor, and black men.

I mention this because a sense of the Catholic difference pervades Powers's writing, while at the same time his priests negotiate the same car dealerships, liquor stores, and furniture shops as their Midwestern Protestant neighbors. Powers wrote most of his best stories before Vatican II changed the face of the church, a change he was not particularly happy with, perhaps because that sense of Catholic difference was diluted. His stories, nevertheless, hold up; they work as well today as when they were first published.

Flannery O'Connor was a fan, though she qualified her praise: "Powers's stories can be divided into two kinds--those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don't," she wrote to Cecil Dawkins. "Those that deal with the clergy are as good as any stories being written by anybody; those that don't are not so good."

That's generally true, though there are exceptions (for example, the story "Look How the Fish Live," about a father, his children, and their compassion for a dying bird, among other things). His two novels, Morte D'Urban and Wheat that Springeth Green, are about priests. They are good, Morte D'Urban especially so, but Powers is at the top of his form in the stories.

Early in his career Powers won an O. Henry award for "The Valiant Woman," one of his best. Father Firman is saddled with Mrs. Stoner, the widow of a miner who is his nightmare of a housekeeper. Powers's description of their life together makes most bad marriages seem enviable: "She hid his books, kept him from smoking, picked his friends (usually the pastors of her colleagues), bawled out people for calling after dark, had no humor except at cards, and then it was grim, very grim, and she sat hatchet-faced every morning at Mass. But she went to Mass, which was all that kept the church from being empty some mornings. She did annoying things all day long. She said annoying things into the night. She said she had given him the best years of her life. Had she? Perhaps--for the miner had her only a year."

He doesn't waste a word here, or anywhere. In "Prince of Darkness," Powers gives us Father Burner, a worldly priest, totally without a spiritual life, who resents the fact that his seminary classmates have all been made pastors, while he is moved as an assistant from parish to parish. At the story's start he is being courted by an insurance salesman: "'The Plan, Father,' Mr. Tracy lifted his seersucker trousers by the creases, crossed his two-toned shoes, and rolled warmly forward. 'Father...'

"Father Burner met his look briefly. He was wary of the fatherers. A backslider he could handle, it was the old story, but a red-hot believer, especially a talkative one, could be a devilish nuisance. This kind might be driven away only by prayer and fasting, and he was not adept at either."

Powers takes us through a day with this remarkably unsympathetic and self-absorbed man, to his meeting with the archbishop in the evening that will, he hopes, lead to his being named a pastor at last. It is a funny and chilling story, one of Powers's best.

It has been said that there is little about the spiritual life in Powers's stories, but that is true only if you are looking for something fairly heavy and obvious--a description of the experience of prayer, or something mystical. The conflict between what the church claims and the mundane settings in which it must make its claims can be found throughout. In one of his earliest and most moving stories, "Lions, Hearts, and Leaping Does," Powers offers us the understanding of a dying Franciscan friar, and it is this vision that pervades all of Powers: "He wanted nothing for himself at last. This may have been the first time he found his will amenable to the Divine. He had never been less himself and more the saint. Yet now, so close to sublimity, or perhaps only tempted to believe so (the Devil is most wily at the deathbed), he was beset by the grossest distractions. They were to be expected, he knew, as indelible in the order of things: the bingo game going on under the Cross for the seamless garment of the Son of Man: everywhere the sign of contradiction, and always. When would he cease to be surprised by it? Incidents repeated themselves, twined, parted, faded away, came back clear, and would not be prayed out of mind. He watched himself mounting the pulpit of a metropolitan church, heralded by the pastor as the renowned Franciscan friar sent by God in His goodness to preach this novena--like to say a little prayer to test the microphone, Father?--and later reading through the petitions to Our Blessed Mother, cynically tabulating the pleas for a Catholic boyfriend, drunkenness banished, the sale of real estate and coming furiously upon one: 'that I'm not pregnant.' And at the same church on Good Friday carrying the crucifix along the Communion rail for people to kiss, giving them the indulgence, and afterwards in the sacristy wiping the lipstick of the faithful from the image of Christ crucified."

Powers, more than any other writer I can think of, shows us at the same time both the depth of sadness and the comedy revealed by a belief in the Incarnation.

John Garvey is an Orthodox priest and a longtime columnist for Commonweal.