PDF Morte D'Urban New York Review Books Classics JF Powers Elizabeth Hardwick 9780940322233 Books

Product details Series New York Review Books Classics Paperback 336 pages Publisher NYRB Classics; First Thus edition (May 31, 2000) Language English ISBN-10 0940322234

Morte D'Urban New York Review Books Classics JF Powers Elizabeth Hardwick 9780940322233 Books Reviews

• This is a classic novel set in the early 1960's. It is a closely observed examination of daily life with the feel of "50's" American culture seen from the perspective of a worldly Catholic priest. The story revolves around a Catholic "father" in a fictional religious order. The tone is slyly tongue-in-cheek with the incidents only slightly exaggerated for comic effect. The studies of the small group of men in the isolated cloister is especially telling. The interactions among them are very well drawn and their personalities come through. The main character , Father Urban, also interacts with larger elements in society with good effect. This is not a novel of explosions and car crashes. It is a gentle, well-drawn portrait of an era and of timeless human tendencies.
• JF Powers' MORTE D'URBAN, the winner of the National Book Award for 1963, has featured among the favorite books of several other writers and one can see why. This gentle comedy about a Catholic priest in the fifties is a descendant of works like Sinclair Lewis' BABBITT or ELMER GANTRY, but is told in the much quieter Midwestern manner of John Williams' STONER, another sleeper of a novel that has gradually acquired an admiring readership. It is a book to read slowly, though unfortunately my circumstances forced me to go faster than I should have liked, so this is a less detailed review than most.
  
  Father Urban is a priest in his early fifties, working out of Chicago as an itinerant preacher, going out to communities throughout the Plains States to stir up their congregations in five-day missions. Pragmatic, ambitious, and instinctively good with people, he is a perfect example of that energetic secularism one sometimes encounters among Catholic clergy, and he definitely loves the good things in life; my comparison to George F. Babbitt is not irrelevant. By courting wealthy donors, he manages to bring a good deal of money into the Clementine Order (a fictitious group "unique only in that they were noted for nothing at all"). But the Father Provincial sends him to a broken-down retreat center at Duesterhaus in Minnesota (another joke "duester" is the German for "gloomy"). There, he is subject to the petty concerns of his penny-pinching superior, Father Wilf, who is concerned only with redecorating the building in depressing colors and issuing recruiting pamphlets of such banality that it is a wonder they attract anybody. Urban manages a few achievements even here, including temporary work at a local parish and attracting funding for an addition that would attract a better class of retreatant. But though Powers comic accumulation of small detail is amusing throughout, it began to seem just a matter of watching Urban's trajectory sink towards the death implied by the title, accompanied by the gradual loss of his original energy. When I finished, I would have given the book three stars.
  
  But then the discussion in our book club pointed out another side that I had largely missed. Counterbalancing this decline of Urban's secular drive, there is a rise in his spiritual awareness he begins as a go-getter; he ends as a true priest. This is subtly handled; the novel is not written as a religious tract. Nonetheless, once you start reading it in this way, you can see all kinds of symbolism (analogies with the three temptations of Christ, for instance) that support this view of its intent. Powers' success came from writing partly for audiences that would applaud all that was UN-priestly in Father Urban. A bit like Graham Greene, in effect. But, also like Greene, he nonetheless managed to testify quietly to those qualities that count most in making a good man.
  
  Elizabeth Hardwick's otherwise fine introduction should be read as only an Afterword.
• At first, I wondered how someone could write so convincingly about a Catholic priest without having been one himself; I know nothing about the author J. F. Powers. And, I have no way of knowing if a reader who was not raised Catholic will be familiar with the references to the Church and its hierarchy, or with the differences among the priests' Orders, or with the style or culture peculiar to the Catholic Church. The key to the structure of Morte d'Urban--and to the very existence of such a novel--is that it's set in the 1950s when Americans' lives were changing after World War II toward habits of conspicuous consumption. And the Catholic Church hierarchy knew it had to change, too, in response to these lifestyle developments in its primary "customers," the new kind of Catholics emerging after the war years.
  
  Author J. F. Powers illustrated these changes perfectly when he has the fictitious Order of St. Clement realize that if they are to attract wealthy Catholics to their summer retreat, they will have to build a golf course at St. Clement's Hill. And it's significant that Powers has his main character, Father Urban, be the kind of cultured person who (after the 1960s) no longer experienced a religious calling, or for whom the Church no longer had a place Urban plays a professional game of golf, he has a taste for fine dining, fine cars, intelligent conversation, articulate speech-making--in short, the cultural pluses which his Italian or French counterparts would have taken for granted.
  
  It's important, too, that Powers has his Father Urban be 54, tall, handsome, and athletic. Church-goers with money have expectations of such a priest which, as one character says, can lead to a "comedy of errors." Billy Cosgrove, Sylvia Bean, and Sally Thwaites all have expectations of their urbane Urban; and all have flaws, or faults of manners, or misguided ways of being in the world, which lead them into conflict with Father Urban's sense of integrity, of discernment, and of proper conduct.
  
  To say this is a moral novel would be too simplistic. In a way, the book is not a comedy at all, but a tale of cultural decline, of missed connections. This novel shows how people become alienated from one another because they lack knowledge of humanity, the sort that Father Urban has. It is Urban's fate to be a misunderstood messenger when what would have most suited his temperament was to be the sort of Old World, cultured priest like his mentor Father Placidus. Confined to the isolation of Minnesota, those serving God must face their earthly limitations--hopefully with as much style and savoir faire as Father Urban.
• While the story follows a worldly priest in his transformation into a humble and suffering man of God, the story has broad implications about mankind's general condition. It is a masterfully wrought piece of literature, edifying to experience.