Morte D'Urban

  J. F. POWERS (1917–1999) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, and studied at Northwestern University while holding a variety of jobs in Chicago and working on his writing. He published his first stories in The Catholic Worker and, as a pacifist, spent thirteen months in prison during World War II. Powers was the author of three collections of short stories and two novels—Morte D’Urban, which won the National Book Award, and Wheat That Springeth Green—all of which have been reissued by New York Review Books. He lived in Ireland and the United States and taught for many years at St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

  ELIZABETH HARDWICK (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature, and The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick.

  MORTE D’URBAN

  J. F. Powers

  Introduction by

  ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © J. F. Powers 1956, 1957, 1960, 1962

  Introduction copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Hardwick

  All rights reserved.

  Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of J. F. Powers

  First published by Doubleday, 1962.

  Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats and of Simon & Schuster, Inc. lines from “A Prayer

  for My Daughter” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1953 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Cover photograph: Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Powers, J. F. (James Farl), 1917–

  Morte D’Urban / by J. F. Powers.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-94032-223-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Catholic Church—United States—Clergy—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.O84 M67 2000

  813’.54 21—dc 21

  99-045446

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-660-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  MORTE D'URBAN

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Epigraph

  Overture

  1. The Green Banana

  2. A Grand Place, This

  3. Anon

  4. Gray Days

  5. A Couple of Nights Before Christmas

  6. Sailing Against the Wind

  7. The Most a Man Can Do

  8. Second Only to Standard Oil

  9. Dear Billy:

  10. Twenty-four Hours in a Strange Diocese

  11. Wrens and Starlings

  12. God Writes . . .

  13. . . . A Bad Hand

  14. Belleisle

  15. One of Our Best Men

  Dirge

  INTRODUCTION

  J. F. POWERS’S Morte D’Urban creates an American scene of striking individuality: Roman Catholic priests in a woebegone village in Minnesota. That is the general subject and setting, but the outstanding quality and vividness of the novel is in the composition, the mastery of detail, the wit of the teller, the placing of the characters, each in his fore-ordained spot in the Church hierarchy. The clash of innate disposition with the surrounding blanket of the special vocation gives rise to comic misadventures, disappointments, competitions within the lightly cloistered world each of the priests has entered with the solemnity of his choice of vocation.

  Father Urban, born Harvey Roche in Abe Lincoln’s Illinois, a Catholic surrounded by Protestants who thought the country “handed down to them by the Pilgrims, George Washington, and others, and that they were taking a risk in letting you live in it.” The you, the risk, was Catholics with their fancy vestments, their intoning in Latin, burning incense, and throwing holy water around. The young Harvey Roche, while acting as chauffeur for a renowned, modern, extroverted priest, Father Placidus, is inspired not only to take his own vows but to cherish the memory of Father Placidus by an inclination for the worldly pleasures and plums of position the old Father had annexed for himself in his practice of the vocation. That is, staying in good hotels while traveling, bending a glass in first-class restaurants, taking in a performance of Mlle. Modiste, organizing boys’ choirs and basketball teams; altogether cutting a benign and pleasant figure in the world.

  Father Urban has risen in the rather unimpressive Order of St Clement in Chicago by a whirl of traveling and preaching around the country. He is a star on the religion circuit, an ambitious man who expects, when his turn comes about, to be made head of the Chicago branch of the Order. He has ideas for the future of the group; ideas practical on the one hand and intellectually serious on the other hand. “It seemed to him that the Order of St Clement labored under the curse of mediocrity, and had done so almost from the beginning. . . . The Clementines were unique in that they were noted for nothing at all.”

  Instead, Father Boniface, the reigning priest in Chicago, has other plans for Father Urban, whom he doesn’t much like.

  Men like Father Boniface talked of “beefing up” the Order, but Father Urban had another idea—to raise the tone by packing the Novitiate with exceptional men. He had overshot the mark on occasion—two of his recruits had proved to be homosexual and one homicidal. . . . But there were three or four lads out at the Novitiate, superior lads hanging on for dear life in difficult surroundings. What hope Father Urban had for the Order was in them, and in a few others younger than himself but safely ordained, and in himself.

  Father Boniface would see about that, if such is the way to express it. In any case, Father Urban, who is on his way to give one of his rousing appearances in St Paul, is handed a letter relieving him of his traveling and dramatic proselytizing and assigning him to the newest “white elephant,” a foundation near Duesterhaus, Minnesota. That is the plot. The demotion is called “giving the green banana.”

  The St Clement community in the cold, windy, inhospitable Duesterhaus is poor, inefficient, penny-pinching, occupied with housekeeping and house-mending chores in a rickety old building, not long ago used as the local poorhouse. Matters under intense discussion will be whether to make a person-to-person call or to save on a station call. Housed there with Father Urban are a number of brilliantly imagined, resolutely unimaginative, characters who will be his companions in the practice of his difficult calling.

  Chief among these is Father Wilfrid, called Wilf. In his pedantic way, Wilf has organized the days as an endless chore of painting bits here and there, worrying about varnishing the floors, about too much use of electricity even for a kitchen appliance which itself is an unnecessary extravagance in his view. Wilf has no heart for the utility of calling a floor-sander or for getting the help of a local electrician when the power goes off, as it often does.

  The weeks and months go by with the priest
s to make out or make do as if they had come across the plains in the time of the covered wagon. Father Urban offers hesitant practical suggestions which are drowned in a pedantry of thrift likely soon to incur expense. He receives a few speaking invitations, one to appear at the annual Poinsettia Smorgasbord, a non-Catholic audience which will discuss “Putting Christ Back into Christmas.” The matter of the infallibility of the Pope comes up with the coffee and Father Urban tosses off the assurance that infallibility does not include being able to predict rain. The genial public appearance is covered in the local papers and pronounced a success, but there is no mention of it by Father Wilf even though he has been much concerned to make the community take notice of the Order. Perhaps a worm of jealousy in the rock-strewn soil.

  The priests are in no way unworthy of their calling. What Powers brings to them is their humanity, their little tics of personality that do not vanish with ordination. Father Wilfrid is a sort of countertheme to Father Urban. Wilf is fussy, occupied with particulars, thrifty, a natural manager of petty detail, which in fact is a good deal of the business of the Order. Father Urban is a creation of great complexity; he is polite, not insistent in his dealings with his fellow priests even though his sense of things is at variance. He wants to expand the range of the Church; he’s even a bit of a Rotarian, but experience has taught him that the Catholic Church is not quite to be “rated second only to Standard Oil in efficiency, as Time had reported a few years back.”

  He has dealt in his soul with two secular, rich Catholics who will form part of the plot in the obscure clerical landscape. One, a man named Billy Cosgrove, has inadvertently made the acquaintance of Father Urban and thereby the Order. He’s a curious, frenetic fellow of almost unaccountable generosity. When he sees the modest, run-down Novitiate in Chicago, he arranges on the spot for removal to better quarters. In Duesterhaus, the Order’s rusty old truck offends him and on the spot he buys them a new car. When he discovers, at a remote lodge, that his favorite piano has been sold, he has a new one trucked in that night. Father Urban is from the first appalled by Billy, but his offerings, which will include a bit of land and the making of a golf course, can scarcely be denied. The golf course is to attract retreatants who like a bit of pleasure and exercise with their spiritual renewal.

  The golf course, which will go along its mossy green way, plays an almost satanic role in Father Urban’s life. As a master golfer, he is brought to play with a cantankerous Bishop, who is not nearly as deft with the game as he believes himself to be. Conflict there on the green. One of the Bishop’s mis-hit balls delivers a serious injury to Father Urban’s head. On a fishing expedition, Billy Cosgrove, annoyed by Father Urban’s mild rebuke for atrocious behavior, pushes him overboard and takes off to leave him to fend for himself. Billy stops payment on the new car, undermines the lease on the new quarters in Chicago—indeed, takes back all his mad acts of giving. Mrs Thwaite, the other possible big donor for the Order, mistreats her young Irish serving girl by beating her at dominoes and taking the girl’s losses out of her wages, thereby leaving her destitute. Father Urban’s woes, spiritual and physical, accumulate just as he is at last given his heart’s wish to be called back to his beloved Chicago and elevated to the long-cherished position of Provincial of the Order. Back to the Pump Room for flaming shishkabob and wine with a visiting dignitary.

  But it is too late. He has been shaken by life. The world is confusion and contradiction, simplicity and connivance; his sophistication has been at every point overwhelmed by expediency, by the compliance intrinsic to his role. His headaches arrive and depart like sections of the Twentieth Century Limited. What began as a comedy of manners—clerical manners—has turned into a sad morality drama. He who had traveled with such aplomb out of Chicago as a valuable spokesman with a national reputation has lost the energy and assurance for his new post. In the end, he comes to think of the icy, wind-swept, down-at-the-heels backwater Duesterhaus, Minnesota, as his rightful home.

  Morte D’Urban won the National Book Award for 1963. Many, myself among them, can remember J. F. Powers’s first appearance when his story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does” was published in Accent, a small literary magazine, in 1943. It was clear that he was a special, notable talent, one who brought an angular, fresh, and important new voice to American letters. Powers was born in Minnesota and born into the Catholic Church. He’s an American cradle-Catholic writer, forever down-home alert to the plodding demands made on an ancient church in a new, go-go country. In that way his work differs from the brilliant, somewhat prideful annunciations of convert writers like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Powers’s characters are hardy, sometimes hard, locals who do not bring to mind the lady of the manor and her toadying vicar in the novels of Trollope’s Anglican Church. Father Urban is the son of American roots. It has been said of Mexico that it is too far from God and too close to the United States. Father Urban is too far from Rome and too close to rural Minnesota. And that is the inspiration of this most valuable and lasting American novel.

  —ELIZABETH HARDWICK

  MORTE D’URBAN

  For my Mother and Father

  I THANK THE librarians at the St Cloud (Minnesota) Public Library for their help, as I do a few unworldly friends (who shall be nameless) for theirs. I also thank past benefactors: Mr Henry Allen Moe and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; the National Institute of Arts and Letters; Mrs Elizabeth Ames and Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, N.Y.); the Rockefeller Foundation; the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and the Kenyon Review. Parts of this novel first appeared, in a different form, in The Critic, Esquire, the Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. Needless to say, all characters in the book are fictitious, the views expressed by some of them are not necessarily those of the Catholic Church or the author, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. I myself am the founder of the Order of St Clement and likewise may be held responsible for the Dalmatians and the Dolomites, to say nothing of the dioceses of Great Plains and Ostergothenburg. The noble lines in the ceremony near the end of the book come from St Bernard of Clairvaux.

  —J. F. P.

  The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another . . .

  —J.M. BARRIE

  FIRST I HAVE to tell you something about our Father Provincial. In the Chicago province of the Order of St Clement there are well over a hundred priests and brothers—all accountable to him. Yes, including yours truly. And he in turn is accountable to somebody else, and so it goes, right on up to the Holy Father, who, of course, is accountable to Somebody Else. Now about our Father Provincial. One man may have a weakness for new cars, another for old cars, and so on. You all know what I mean. Well, our Father Provincial’s weakness, it seems, is for bees. We’ve always had chickens and ducks and geese at the Novitiate, sheep, cattle, and pigs. We may even have a horse or two—just about everything you could think of at the Novitiate, except bees. “But Father,” I said to our Father Provincial the other day, “do you mean to tell me I’m to go out and say to these good people: ‘For nineteen cents a day, my friends, you can clothe, feed, and educate a young man for the priesthood’?” “That is so, Father Urban,” he said. “We have the figures to prove it.” How do we do it? you ask. My words exactly to our Father Provincial. “Well, Father Urban,” he said, “you know we now have our own bees.” No, go right ahead and laugh, good people. I felt like laughing myself at the time. But the fact is we can do it. And if we can do it, you can do it. For nineteen cents a day, my friends. Tax deductible. By the way, should you want them later, you’ll find pledge cards and pencils in the pew beside you.

  OVERTURE

  IT HAD BEEN a lucky day for the Order of St Clement the day Mr Billy Cosgrove entered the sacristy of a suburban church after Mass and shook the hand of Father Urban. Billy, a powerful-looking man in his late fifties, hairy of wrist and sunburned (from golf and sailing, Father Urban would discover), had warmly praised the sermon—in which Father
Urban had roared and whispered and crooned about Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola and Clement of Blois and Louis of France and Edward of England and Charles of the Holy Roman Empire —it was he who, you might say, owned and operated Europe but who, in the end, desired only the society of monks—it was he who rehearsed his own funeral, lay down in his coffin, joined in the prayers for the repose of his soul, mingled his tears with those of his attendants—it was he who rose from his coffin in good health, retired to his chambers, and was seized by a fever from which he very soon died . . . and the wonder was that Father Urban could go on in this high he-who manner without minimizing in the least the importance of becoming a penny-ante benefactor of the Order of St Clement.

  Billy, however, left the sacristy without saying anything about a contribution, no pledge card bore his name, and the collection baskets produced no surprises. Father Urban might easily have forgotten him. But on the following Saturday, at South Bend, after the Southern Cal–Notre Dame game, Billy turned up again—it was he who hailed Father Urban from a gray Rolls-Royce limousine. Father Urban left his companions, a couple of novices of the better sort, and rode back to Chicago with Billy and his companions, two men of Billy’s age (and Father Urban’s), with the look of executives about them. They were not drunk, but they had been drinking, and Father Urban, riding up in front with the chauffeur, found it difficult to enter into the conversation. About all he could learn of Billy was that he lived on the North Shore and was having trouble with the wood he was burning in his fireplaces. This was enough, though.

  A few days later, Billy dropped in at the old Loop offices of the Order. Father Urban had been hoping to see him again, but he was sorry that it had to happen there. The old building occupied by the Clementines had been in receivership for years and looked it—looked condemned, in fact. The Clementines were on the fifth floor. The previous tenant, a publisher of “sexual-science” books, had prospered and moved, but the frosted glass doors still bore the words President, Sales, Editorial, Legal, and Dr Fish. That nothing had been done about these words, and that nothing like painting or washing had been done in all the time of their tenancy, was now a matter of pride with some of his colleagues, Father Urban told Billy. “But frankly, Mr Cosgrove, I think we’re overstating the case for poverty.”