J. F. Powers
Wheat That Springeth Green
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
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.
KATHERINE A. POWERS’s column on books and writers ran for many years in The Boston Globe and now appears in The Barnes & Noble Review under the title “A Reading Life. ” She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life — The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963, forthcoming in 2013.
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INTRODUCTION
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift. .
ECCLESIASTES, IX, 11
THE ORIGINAL TITLE given by my father to this, his second and final novel — a work that took almost twenty-five years to finish — was The Sack Race.
It was called that in the ancient contract he signed with Knopf and in notes and story lines and countless manuscript versions. Though dropped from the title, a sack race remains a pivotal event in the book and serves, too, as a metaphor for the priesthood. In the novel, as in Ecclesiastes, the race does not go to the swift, while much of the action does indeed take place “under the sun”—the sweat and heat of summer being synonymous with the human condition in my father’s mind.
It was in reference to The Sack Race that, year after year, this master of the art of tinkering and procrastination wrote a penitential letter of regret to Robert Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf. (He kept the folded drafts of these annual notes clipped together in his desk drawer as a scourge. ) At some point, though, out of this great weight of paper, time, and inertia, the book was born again as Wheat That Springeth Green.
He found the phrase — the title and last line of a medieval carol — while paging through a hymnal and was struck by the rightness of the words. The hymn’s message, too, was a powerful antidote to despondency. In the years he was working on the novel, he passed from being a middle-aged man with bright prospects to one of threescore and ten; and while, perversely, he found it inconceivable that he himself would die, he marked the death of his mother and his father, and witnessed the dying torments of his wife. These events shocked him to the core.
Written over an increasingly dark time, Wheat That Springeth Green was shaped by my father’s growing conviction of the progressive and irredeemable absurdity of things. He was a connoisseur of the dull, the mediocre and the second-rate, and of the disingenuous and fraudulent, but now it seemed that their dominion was truly come. Stupidity, obliviousness, and credulousness had taken over. The quality of food, drink, tobacco, transportation, conversation, religious practice, and art was in sharp decline. And people die: they just check out, are gone, leaving a whole bunch of junk behind.
