Wheat That Springeth Green. - book reviews

National Review, March 10, 1989 by John Wauck

Wheat That Springeth Green, by J.F Powers (Knopf, 335 pp., $18.95)

J.F. POWERS is not a prolific writer. in Up until last year, he had produced, in a forty-year career, one novel and three slim collections of stories. Nor is he a writer of great variety. "Powers's stories," wrote Flannery O'Connor in 1958, "can be divided into two kinds-those that deal with the Catholic clergy and those that don't. 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 remains a fair assessment. But what Powers's fiction lacks in quantity and diversity, it has made up for in quality, for he has mostly played to his strengths and stuck to priests. His 1962 novel Morte d'Urban-a subtle comedy about a year in the life of Father Urban Roche, a worldly priest driven to an ambiguous sort of holiness-demonstrated what Powers's first collection of stories, The Prince of Darkness, had suggested. The author's mastery of the clerical perspective, his dead-on ear for priestly dialogue, his quiet wit, and his flair for creating sublime farce all prompted high expectations for Powers's future.

The 26-year gestation of his second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, was interrupted only by the publication in 1975 of another collection of short pieces. Like its predecessor, the new novel tells the story of a Catholic priest in Powers's native Midwest. But unlike Urban Roche, Powers's new hero, Father Joe Hackett, starts outafter a crude and implausible minage ii trois in his neighbor's garage at the age of 15-in hot pursuit of a quite unworldly sanctity. Aspiring to a life of contemplation, he becomes in his seminary the leader of a band of likeminded "spiritual athletes," and even takes to wearing a hair shirt.

Ironically, it is his first. parish assignment that punctures his illusions: the demands of parish work and the daunting holiness of his pastor cause Joe to despair of sanctity. He gives himself up to the social demands of his parishioners. Before long he is regularly waking up unsure of exactly when and how he got home.

After a stint as an archdiocesan bureaucrat, he finally gets his own parish (a coup) and a groovy, guitar-playing, Volkswagen-driving curate named Bill (a disappointment). After obligatory frictions, however, the two become friends, and the rest of the novel is the story of Joe's very gradual return to spiritual health.

In the course of the story, perhaps to grind an axe or two gently before signing off, the 71-year-old Powers allows himself, through the mouth of Joe, two formal sermonettes: one on the impossibility of 'Just war"; the other on what ails today's Catholic Church. The unexpected way in which Powers handles these two issues reveals him to be one of those liberals, nearly extinct by now, who do not allow their politics to change their view of the nature and purpose of the Church. A distrust of money and bourgeois America colors much of Powers's view of Midwestern life; he describes one monument to mammon at the local Badger shopping mall as if it were a sickening mockery of Catholic paintings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: "the Great Badger itself, a forty-foot idol-its enlarged, exposed red neon heart beating faintly in the sunlight." Yet, for a socially sensitive pacifist, Joe has some harsh things to say about the tenor of post-Vatican II Catholicism: "All this talk of community, communicating, and so on-it was just whistling in the dark. Life's not a cookout by Bruegel and Elder and people know it."

Powers's prose is low-key and economical (he's the sort of writer who slips important plot developments into parenthetical phrases), and the laughs are never loud; his is an art of cumulative comedy. His portrait of parish life is as accurate as ever, though complicated now by the changes of Vatican II. Novelists always face a special challenge in priests-a group of men, neither relatives nor necessarily friends, thrown together not just to do a job but to be and think and feel according to an exacting ideal of personal holiness. Priestly talk can be tortuous. When the proper Christian responses are so familiar that they need hardly be articulated, the normal trajectory of accusation, denial, forgiveness, self-criticism, and rapprochement can be as instantaneous as it sometimes is in marriage. But those genuine Christian responses remain so difficult that one is never sure that they really occur. It is a subtle sort of spiritual one-upsmanship that Powers describes: rectories filled with vague resentments that surface in oblique verbal assaults, possibly innocuous remarks that seem to dare the target to take offense, making him doubt his own charity rather than the charity of the remark.

But the real concern of Wheat That Springeth Green is how a trail of failures, near-misses, compromises with evil, and occasional victories vitiated by self-congratulation can add up to a noble life. As Joe puts it to Bill, the priestly life is "not a hundred-yard dash. Not a mile run. . . . It's a sack race." Indeed, although Joe does enjoy a rather sudden release from his drinking problem and rejuvenation toward the end of the novel, his real transformation comes from realizing that it isn't contemplative ecstasy or warm faith but rather humiliating troubles, petty failures, and willing sacrifice that will ultimately forge his sanctification and salvation. The Holy "Cross" is literally the last word of the bookthe bottom line.