Wheat that Springeth Green (New
York Review Books Classics) by J.F.
Powers
Deep Insight
During his famous journey through America in 1831, Alexis de
Tocqueville was struck by the peculiar worldliness of religious practice.
Unlike their European counterparts, who specialized in visions of
heaven, American preachers are constantly referring to the earth, and it is
only with great difficulty that they can divert their attention from it. More
than a century later, J.F. Powers built an entire career on this national
tendency. And nowhere did he capture the sacred-and-profane balancing
act with more amusement than in his 1975 novel, Wheat That Springeth
Green. His protagonist, a Great Depression-era child of the Midwest
named Joe Hackett, has early dreams of joining the priesthood: If he
decided to be a priest in a religious order, though, he could live out in the
country, at a college, and have invigorating walks and talks with
students ... and maybe some exciting adventures, and also do good, as

often happened in the Father Finn books (My God! cried the atheist) that
Sister Agatha read to the class at the end of the day. Joe eventually
attends seminary, is ordained, and finds himself appointed as assistant
to a high-octane contemplative, Father Van Slaag. But by the time he
gets his own parish, in 1968, hes become an expert at relegating sanctity
to the back burner. Overweight, agreeably resigned, Joe accepts the fact
that running a parish, any parish, was like riding a cattle car in the
wintertime--you could appreciate the warmth of your dear, dumb friends,
but you never knew when youd be stepped on, or worse. It takes the
arrival of a young, over-earnest curate to jog his idealism back to life.
And in return, he imparts to the younger man his knowledge of the
worldly priesthood--a craft that Powers, no less than de Tocqueville,
refuses to condemn. This exchange, which is gradual and grudging on
both sides, occupies the greater portion of Wheat That Springeth Green.
And the protagonists regeneration, like that alluded to in the title, seems
no less miraculous for being expected. The result is a marvelous, acute
novel, which gives to Joes spiritual rebirth the shape of a classic
American comedy--trials and tribulations, and finally, a happy ending.
--James Marcus
Personal Review: Wheat that Springeth Green (New York
Review Books Classics) by J.F. Powers
The best of the series of books published by The New York Review of
Books are all the works of J.F. Powers, who died in 1989. Powers' novels
and stories are almost entirely concerned with Catholic clerical life in the
midwest. I hadn't read his last novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, and I
was happy to find that the new edition contained an introduction by the
author's daughter, Katherine Powers. Wheat That Springeth Green is
every bit as fine as Morte D'Urban, his first and only other novel written
some 25 years earlier, and a National Book Award winner as well. In its
treatment of character and plot the latter novel is theologically perhaps
even more complex.
Joe's character is cast from the first pages: as a toddler he gets attention
from his parents' friends merely for declaiming at a party "I go to church!"
We also learn of his parents' antipathy towards the parish priest's intoning
on the subject of the "Dollar-a-Sunday Club," an attitude that Joe will
inherit, and which becomes a theme that will be played out in a number of
surprising ways. We also sense something of his aloofness in these first
chapters as well. He doesn't keep up with many friends, but he does seem
to know the value in keeping up appearances: "Joe just smiled at Frances
and everybody, so they couldn't tell how he really felt about being in the
sack race..." Joe is a good athlete, even in grade school, and the race he
really wants, but doesn't get, is the sprint.
Much of the story revolves around Joe's relation to money, so that even an
early adventure (described in nearly pornographic detail) involving his first
adult relations with women is later understood to be subsumed by his
larger pecuniary obsessions. His sexual sins, or at least the memory of

them, turn out to be something of a red herring: at the seminary he asks
his instructor, "Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to
the common man?" a question that (rightly) earns him nothing but mirth
from his fellow seminarians. We are given hints that as Joe grows older he
succeeds in overcoming his youthful scrupulosity. After a stint at
Archdiocesan Charities he is assigned to the parish of St. Frances - a
name shared by his childhood infatuation and a co-traveler in that youthful
adventure. So as far as sex is concerned, there is in his maturity there a
sense that all is right with Joe, if not the world. That this is the case is
dramatically reinforced by the nearly hopeless entanglements of an ex-
seminarian, some of which leads to misplaced retribution that Joe
patiently, even faithfully endures. These episodes are magnificently
structured, displaying in Joe's life a kind of fate that is worked out through
choices made less in freedom than with a concern for propriety and in
service to principles that are neither his own, nor of the church in which, as
he says in other circumstances, he does so much hard time.
Other obstacles to holiness, as perhaps they always must, remain.
Although his basic attitude is good, the reader realizes that the young
Father Hackett has refused one halo in favor of another when he refuses
to toady up to either the priest in his parish or to the archbishop in his
archdiocese. Money matters are everywhere in evidence: the rectory built
by Joe; bribes offered by parishoners; purses collected on behalf of retiring
priests; inheritence; a collection drive that is farmed out to a private firm -
in which Joe will take no part. All this points to beyond the contradiction in
one man's character to a paradox that is funamental to our very being.
How do we care for an abundance which is most fully ours when we least
consider it our own?
Joe's misappropriation of his own nature, and indeed human nature, leads
to a truly heinous transgression in one of the final chapters. That this
transgression is committed and then resolved in secret, without comment
from Joe or even the narrator, points toward a God who is as truly all
merciful as he is unnoticed even by lesser beings working on his behalf. I
would guess that the true thorn in Joe's side is also Powers', and while
reading I several times wondered whether the crux of the story wasn't
inspired by his frustration at watching baskets and plates passed through
the pews, week in and week out, for a lifetime.
Very highly recommended.
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