Mordant Wit

The dominant conflict in Powers’s letters is between Art and Money—the improbable but real first names of his in-laws. Powers felt his own mother had ruined the life of his father, who “supported her instead of accepting offers he had to go to Europe and study piano,” and was determined not to make the same sacrifice. Powers preferred to suffer financial disasters and real hardships instead of taking a salaried job to support his wife and to support their five children. He could not understand his children and called them “the final turn of the screw.” I once asked him what it was like to reject the use of contraceptives when he was so impoverished. Assuming a Brooklyn accent, he replied, “It was moida!”

Powers’s character was paradoxical: naïve and sophisticated, provincial and worldly, croyant and skeptical, somber and funny. A friend of Eugene McCarthy, he was politically liberal but opposed the reforms of Vatican ii. He craved success, yet gave up trying for it after he’d failed to reap the expected rewards when his novel Morte D’Urban beat Nabokov’s Pale Fire and won the National Book Award in 1963. When I invited him to talk at my university for $1,500, he said his appearance was as unlikely as his going to Tibet.

Powers secretly craved the good life: fine whisky, grand dinners, Georgian furniture (acquired at auction), expensive automobiles, and leisurely days at the racetrack. But he lived like a hair-shirt ascetic and relished the harsh life in Minnesota: fifteen degrees below zero, tar-paper roof, frigid house, rusted car, orange-crate bookshelves, kneeling (as in prayer) to do laundry in the bathtub. His family, who didn’t share his tastes, had to endure these hardships. He was always desperate to escape St. Cloud, Minnesota, but wound up staying there till the end of his life. When I suggested lunch in town, he countered with, “What did I ever do to you?” This self-scourging life was leavened in his letters with self-mocking wit. He feared he’d become “a has-been without ever having really been”; lamented the sad state of affairs when his “most carnal thoughts are all about his wife”; and announced, when preparing to give a party, that he’d even flushed the toilet.

His hero James Joyce, the main influence on his work, was far worse off than Powers. Joyce had longer teaching hours for less pay, a wife whose family had no money and who couldn’t earn any herself, extreme difficulty in publishing his work, a dozen eye operations that left him half-blind, and no lucrative fellowships. Joyce was supported by his brother and patrons like Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach, Powers by his father-in-law and a generous priest.

Powers was half-German—his maternal grandparents were named Routzong and Zilberstorff—and his mother was a Catholic convert, but he always emphasized his Irish origins. Germans were practical, he thought; Irish, dreamy. It would be interesting to contrast his portrayal of German priests (Father Burner) and places (Duesterhaus) with their Irish colleagues and residences.

Powers became disillusioned, however, living in Ireland four separate times, amid the abject poverty and “rotten religion”; yet he continued to accept the sentimental myths about “the land of saints and scholars.” He also loved, in a rare contented passage, “having my morning coffee before the fire, unfolding my Irish Times, listening to music from the bbc and from my stomach, full of good bacon and toast and marmalade; or at Leopardstown Racecourse; or walking . . . around looking at the 18th century.” Four of his children, when adults, chose to live in Ireland.

Similarly Powers clung desperately to his faith while satirizing the grievous faults of his fictional Catholic priests, who often combined the evils of corporate employees with a notable lack of Christian principles: laziness, self-indulgence, drunkenness, materialism, careerism, venality, and bullying of low-paid...