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