More Powers to Ya!

John Derbyshire also wrote a thoughtful essay about Powers's work in 1999. (The archived link doesn't load, so I'm sending you to a cache. Be patient, it takes a while to load.) It's very different from Bottum's because Derbyshire is English and not a Catholic, but he still appreciated Powers. This passage complicates Bottum's reasoning about Powers being too clerical for the modern reader:

Peter De Vries thought that Powers was not really a religious writer at all. I don’t agree, but I see what he means. There are no angels in Powers, no miracles, no sudden shafts of light breaking through overcast skies. The supernatural, in fact, is entirely absent. The world of Powers's books is the world we all inhabit: the world of bills and assessments, of irksome duties, comforting habits and tiny pleasures, of tiresome colleagues we have no choice but to get along with, of dead-wood subordinates who must be found something to do and cloth-eared superiors making all the wrong decisions. The work of these priests resembles very closely, in fact, the work most middle-class Americans do in corporate offices or public bureaucracies.

Sounds about right to me.

The novel for which Powers won the National Book Award, Morte D'Urban, is very funny, unlike "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does," but in its final chapters it too becomes a moving treatment of mortality, perhaps a more moving one because it comes so suddenly. Father Urban is another great character because he's very likeable, but his single-minded desire to raise funds is troubling, and unlike Didymus he doesn't seem to have much of a spiritual side. The novel suggets that Powers was really troubled by the place of money in the Church and priestly life, a problem to which he returns in his final novel, Wheat The Springeth Green. (Note to self: start a literate Catholic rock band, the Smiths meet Jars of Clay meet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Name it Wheat That Springeth Graham Greene. Speaking of Christian rock, here's a link in case the allusion in this post's title is too obscure, which I really hope it is.)

Some other bits from Derbyshire's essay that make me appreciate Powers even more:

If he is ever canonized, Powers could serve as the patron saint of slow writers. Katherine [his daughter] said, “He had powers of procrastination that went far beyond the merely amateur.”...Powers took infinite pains with his work. He deplored writing that was careless or inflated, or even just verbose. He did not like the great English novelists of the last century because he thought they used too many words to say what they wanted to say. God, said Powers, has demanding standards. “We couldn’t have art unless there were some higher authority that says, ‘Yes, that’s right’. God gave us that mentality, that kind of judgment. I don’t think God likes crap in art.”

I can't help but think of Chris Ofili when I read that last line.

Read More...

Summary only...

Some Thoughts on J.F. Powers

Most discussions of great Catholic fiction writers of the 20^th century revolve around Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, yadda yadda yadda. They really should also include J.F. Powers. In the 50s and 60s especially, he was the man, winning the National Book Award in 1962. (The winner the previous year was The Moviegoer by Percy the Papist.) Though he’s still celebrated by fiction writers (and not just Catholic ones), few others read him. Joseph Bottum (who praised him at last year’s Mahwah workshop) offers this reason for J.F. Powers’s lack of staying power:

His specialty was scenes of clerical life, especially at mid-century, especially in the bleak, wind-swept parish houses of the Midwest. And the major reason for the fading of J.F. Powers is the decline of his topic once the reforms of Vatican II took hold—or rather, once what was perceived in America to be the “spirit” of Vatican II had destroyed the setting of his fiction. Powers had a uniquely talented eye for the little negotiations, compromises, and squabbles of bachelors living together—but such things cannot in themselves carry a story. What gave his fiction its force was the contrast between those little foibles of priestly life and the constantly looming reality of what a priest actually does in the sacraments.

That seems as good an explanation as any. In the piece (and at last year’s workshop) Bottum praised the story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does.” He’s right to say that it “can stand beside anything by Flannery O’Connor,” and that it is a very “moving interior description of dying.” It’s about a lot of other things, including the concern of the main character (a Benedictine named Didymus) that he does not sacrifice enough, and the consequences of his attempts to compensate. And like many of O’Connor’s best characters (very few of whom are explicitly Catholic), Didymus struggles with pride. There’s a great moment when he wonders whether he’s right to have chosen to teach geometry when other vocations were more obviously humble.

Was Didymus wrong in teaching geometry out of personal preference and perhaps—if this was so he was—out of pride? Had the spiritual worth of his labor been vitiated because of that? He did not think so, no. No, he taught geometry because it was useful and eternally true, like his theology, and though of a lower order of truth it escaped the common fate of theology and the humanities, perverted through the ages in the mouths of dunderheads and fools.

He also worries that the three vows of the Franciscan order just aren’t difficult enough: poverty in the modern world “was no heavy cross,” and chastity and obedience were no longer difficult for him in his old age. So when he received a letter informing him that his brother (also a monk) was dying, Didymus to resist his desire to visit him. “Therein, he thought, the keeping of the vows having become an easy habit for him, was his opportunity—he thought! It was plain and there was sacrifice and it would be hard. So he had not gone.” Of course he regrets his decision. When he learns that his brother has died, he goes to the chapel to pray…and falls asleep. (The scene is explicitly compared to the apostles falling asleep in the Gethsemane, but without being heavy handed.)

After this, the story becomes more about Didymus’s own mortality. As a result of what his doctor diagnoses as just “one of those things,” he is confined to a wheelchair, and concludes that the confinement was God punishing him for having “gloried too much” in not visiting his brother: “The intention—that was all important, and he, he feared, had done the right thing for the wrong reason. He had noticed something of the faker in himself before.” He also ruminates on how to deal with his sickness: “Humbly he wished to get well and to be able to walk. But it this was a punishment, was not prayer to lift it declining to see the divine point?...By some mistake, he protested, he had been placed in a position vital with meaning and precedents inescapably Christian. But was the man for it? Unsure of himself, he was afraid to go on trial.”

It’s an incredibly rich story (and beautifully written, though too many sentences begin with adverbs), and I could go on with examples of the depth, complexity, and frustrations of Didymus’s faith. He’s a great character because he’s both very devout and very flawed. Most of Powers’s best characters are like this, including Father Burner (more on him in later posts, I hope) and Father Urban of Morte D’Urban.

Fortunately, his short stories and two novels are back in print, in nice-looking but very fragile editions published by the New York Review of Books.

Read More...

Summary only...

Mark S. on Difficult Poetry

This contribution comes from fellow Mahwahvian Mark S. It's a good one:

In an article recently published in Slate, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky takes issue with what he calls "the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less 'difficult,'" arguing that difficulty constitutes a significant part of the pleasure which poetry brings, and citing a number of poems which illustrate this idea. I think he is a little bit right, but a little more wrong.

No doubt, the general decline in literacy in recent years has made comprehending the sophisticated structures of poetry increasingly difficult to the common reader. I wish I could find the precise statistic, but I remember reading somewhere that the length of the average English sentence has decreased 60% since the early twentieth century, and all one has to do is read the periodic sentences of Burke or Gibbon to see how much complexity the English language has lost over the years. I find even relatively simple works like the ballads of Wordsworth or the epigrams of Housman are equally impenetrable to my students as the grandest passage in Milton, so there is a serious case to be made that the contemporary reading public simply does not possess the necessary linguistic tools to appreciate fine poetry.

On the other hand, I think it is equally unquestionable that modern poetry can be characterized by a unique reliance on obscurity. Tolstoy was one of the first to call attention to this phenomenon, complaining that "haziness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness...(are) elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic art" and that "obscurity (is) elevated into a dogma among the new poets." And since obscurity remains a common feature of poetry right up to our time, the modern reader also has a case to make against the difficulty of contemporary poetry.

It might be helpful to distinguish between two types of obscurity in poetry, what might be called verbal obscurity and conceptual obscurity. Verbal obscurity might be defined as a lack of clarity caused by an intricate syntactical structure or exotic diction. So for instance, an example of verbal obscurity would be the following lines from Shelley: "there are spread / On the blue surface of thine aery surge,/ Like the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith's height / The locks of the approaching storm." Here, the subject and verb are separated by five lines of phrases, and the image of the Maenad is, at least to the modern reader, not immediately recognizable. On the other hand, conceptual obscurity might be defined as a lack of clarity resulting from the indecipherability of a line's reference, such as Eliot's "behaving as the wind behaves / no nearer" or Dylan Thomas' "I must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of corn." Here, I would contend, even once we recognize the syntactical structure of the line and the significance of individual words, the proposition of the sentence has no real reference to the world of objects or ideas, or, perhaps more precisely, the sentence makes no real proposition.

Both types of obscurity may be vicious, but, to my mind, conceptual obscurity is always so; verbal obscurity can sometimes accompany real technical virtuosity and so be conducive to artistic pleasure in the way that Pinsky asserts. The difficulty that results from verbal obscurity may be fairly said, at least on occasion, to be the responsibility of the reader, but the difficulty that results from conceptual obscurity is generally the fault of the poet. And since it's practice has relied so heavily on conceptual obscurity, the serious reader does have a legitimate complaint to make against modern poetry.

Read More...

Summary only...

Get Over Yourself

As the second annual St. Robert Southwell Literary Workshop approaches, here’s a tip for the new class on how to avoid Baer attacks. Nothing is more likely to bring out the claws and fangs than a maudlin, self-absorbed confessional poem. The Mahwahvian Movement prefers the iamb to “I am.” (This poetic dictate has Biblical precedent, as Christ once said to an aspiring poet, “It is you who say iamb.”)

Dr. Baer is not the only so-called New Formalist with this aversion to confessional poetry. In an interview from The Formalist a few years back, Dana Gioia complained of confessional poems “that were, in some sense, sexual self-advertisements of [the authors] as sensitive, caring lovers. I always found that distasteful and dishonest. I strongly dislike any kind of self-congratulatory, moralizing poetry in which the author advertises his own moral perfection. Yet that type of poetry is still quite common. It’s a kind of new didacticism with a narcissistic bent.”

Anyone who has every taken a creative writing course will know that this anti-solipsistic perspective is rare nowadays, but there is great precedent for it. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot insists that “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Even in the romantic period, which our friend Helen C. White complains is to blame for excessive individualism, saw a couple of great defenses of un-confessional poetic theory. The most famous one is John Keats’s claim that his “poetical character…is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character….A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for—and filling—some other body.”

A similar remark comes from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, which takes exception to the “absurd self-elevation” of Coleridge and Wordsworth in particular. As opposed to their solipsism, most men of genius, living or dead, rarely write about themselves.

It would seem that in truly great souls all feeling of self-importance, in its narrower sense, must be incompatible with the consciousness of a mighty achievement. The idea of the mere faculty or power is absorbed as it were in the idea of the work performed. That work stands out in its glory from the mind of its Creator; and in the contemplation of it, he forgets that he himself was the cause of its existence, or feels only a dim but sublime association between himself and the object of his admiration.

For more recent and very entertaining critiques of the solipsism of modern writing, particularly poetry, check out The Reaper Essays.

Read More...

Summary only...

Why Don't We Write About Science?

Earlier in the week, we posted remarks by Archbishop Chaput about the threats that science and technology pose to our spiritual lives. Helen C. White recognized some of these same dangers, but she believed that there was also a danger in over-reacting against science. In 1944, she wrote about "the role of poetry in a world of science, naturally submerged for the present in a world of war."

It is a topic on which humanists have in general been understandably somewhat on the defensive. The achievements of science have been so genuinely impressive and demonstrable that it is hardly surprising that a materialistic age, avid of short-cuts around the labors of thought, should have concluded that here was the answer to man’s ancient quest. There is no question that the popular faith in the omni-competence of science has been excessive, but Catholics of all people should know the perils of meeting superstition with iconoclasm.

In the next paragraph she actually criticizes Spirit, the poetry journal for which she's writing this essay. Apparently she thinks that the poets writing in it are wrong to ignore science as a subject:

Science as a method has its undoubted place if it is not taken for the only method, and its discoveries are endlessly stimulating not only to the appetite for fact, but to the imagination as well. I have often wondered if the great scholastic doctor who transformed Aristotle from a menace to a buttress of the faith would not have known how to meet modern science in a larger and more confident Spirit than some of his contemporary followers. And I cannot imagine Dante maintaining such a complete immunity to some of the most dramatic constructs of the contemporary mind as do most of the poets of Spirit.

One of the reasons religious writers are "immune" from science is that, unlike when Dante was writing, science is now perceived to be contrary to a belief in God. This is obviously a flawed perception, but it's prevalent. (On a recent sitcom, a character is asked whether he believes in God, and he replies, "No I don't believe in God. I believe in science." If Extras doesn't reflect the state of society, what does?!) And it holds for both sides of the debate -- Catholics, and I think most Christians, have perhaps un-intentionally bought into the God-versus-Science dichotomy. This is the "iconoclasm" she mentions in the first paragraph. We tend to think of science exclusively as a force against our faith and human dignity, something to be fought rather than what Helen C. White is promoting, a positive stimulant for the imagination.

To be fair, though, this imaginative blind-spot isn't unique to Christian writers. As she's suggesting in the first sentence above, it's "the humanities vs. science" as much as it is "religion vs. science." So maybe it stems from how we're educated -- perhaps our educations are so specialized now that the sort of person interested in writing can go through life never having to really engage with any scientific ideas. And when humanities courses do explore science, it's always in negative terms (the threat of the nuclear bomb, but not the development of penicillin).

Then again, maybe we want to avoid the humiliation of having our books in the Science Fiction section of Barnes & Noble.

Read More...

Summary only...

On Tradition

I'll just let Helen C. White speak for herself when she discusses “the value of a knowledge of literary tradition for the poet.”

Tradition gives a poet perspective, standards; it gives him discipline. The contemporary poet needs to be reminded of this for, like most contemporary men, he shares the contemporary illusion that the present has a reality, a validity that never was and probably never will be again. This is instinctive, I suspect, to untutored humanity. But the poet is not instinctive and untutored man or, if he is, there is no need of his remaining so. For in the works of his predecessors he has access to a sympathy and a support which his own immediate world may not always afford him.

The past is not a prison house to which he dare not return. It is the treasury of the past experience of men from which any intelligent man may draw. It is an arsenal of techniques, of imaginative resources, of hints and suggestions, of insights, and warnings, and reassurances, from which the man not imprisoned in his own moment may draw at will. Its vitality is his own surest pledge of future sympathy and helpfulness. For tradition is the continuing and deepening and widening stream of human experience. Not to enter into its mighty current is to be becalmed in a backwater, however turbulent. Not to be aware of its existence is to live and to die without ever entering into one’s human inheritance and to leave the world poorer than one found it. Tradition should be presented to the poet, then, not as something monitory or disciplinary but as something creative and fructifying and dynamic. It is that dynamic, creative function of tradition that should be stressed. And the loyalty to be invoked is not to the past but to the future.

For more along these lines, read T.S. Eliot's essay if you haven't already.

Read More...

Summary only...

Helen C. White, Part 2

During another interesting passage from the introduction to Drink from the Rock, White compares the writing of poetry to prayer, both “how they are alike and the ways in which they are different.”

For the first, they belong to the same realm, to the realm of contemplation. Both are based on the recognition of a reality in which truth and beauty have, to put it as generally as possible, very intimate relations. From the point of view of Spirit both are concerned primarily with the God Who is to be worshipped both in truth and beauty.

Her reference to “truth and beauty” recalls the final lines to Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, / ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats wasn't working from a Christian framework; the charge is probably even greaterwhen truth and beauty are meant to represent God and His creation. But that's Maturin territory, and I should probably save that for later.

As for the differences she identifies:

But the techniques of prayer and poetry are different, and their objectives are different. A great prayer may be a great poem, as the hymns of the Church like the Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater so well demonstrate. But two separate and distinct kinds of excellence have gone in their making.

I wish she said more about what kinds of excellence go into each, but I suppose one difference relates to the fact that a prayer can be a powerful, efficacious prayer without being original or even eloquent -- the spirit of the prayer-giver is what makes the difference. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than an earnest unoriginal poet.

Not only are there similarities between poetry and prayer, but poetry can also benefit from prayer. And I don't mean that one can become a great poet by begging God for help breaking through writer's block. The form of prayer can inspire great poetic innovations...In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, Ian Ker argues pretty convincingly that Hopkins's sprung rhythm was influenced by the litany.

(Pedants among you will have noticed that when I quoted Keats, I closed the internal quotation at “truth beauty” -- there is some controversy as to whether the quotation should actually run through the end of the poem, so that the urn, not the speaker, says “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Either way, a loquacious vase.)

Read More...

Summary only...