When first published, Powers’s fiction met with criticism from Catholics who preferred their priests less worldly and more saintly. The priests in Powers’s fiction are flawed, utterly believable, and most of them somehow, flaws and all, admirable. Here is Father Hackett on the priesthood:
. . . it was still a job—a marrying, burying, sacrificing job, plus whatever good could be done on the side. It was not a crusade. Turn it into one, as some guys were trying to do, and you asked too much of it, of yourself, and of ordinary people, invited nervous breakdowns all around.
Powers had planned a novel about family life, but never got round to writing it. His own family life was richly complicated. In Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life, Katherine A. Powers, the novelist’s eldest daughter, has assembled those of her father’s letters touching on the subject of his family in the hope of suggesting the kind of novel he might have written. The book is excellent on many counts, not least for Powers’s unrelenting charm, even in adversity.
J. F. Powers grew up in a family in which he felt that his father was made to sacrifice his art—he was a talented pianist—to “the secondary things” that marriage and family required of a father and husband: a job that will put food upon the table, home-ownership, settling down in the evening with Time Magazine after yet another dullish day. “The American Tragedy,” he calls it. In a letter to his future wife, he writes: “I am determined that it will not happen to me. Help me.”
Suitable Accommodations is a fit title, for suitable accommodations is what the Powers family, having moved more than twenty times, including two lengthy stays in Ireland, never found. Powers believed that artists shouldn’t have to take regular jobs. On this subject he was intransigent. He was a man of inflexible integrity. The questions these letters pose is that of the cost of integrity, and who is asked to pay the bill?
The unspoken hero of Suitable Accommodations, as its editor points out in an afterword to the book, was Betty Wahl Powers, her mother and Powers’s wife. Betty Wahl Powers not only herself wrote every day—she published an occasional story in the New Yorker and a novel called Rafferty & Co.—but, her daughter writes, “cooked every meal from scratch and sewed most of our clothes; she went to her parents for aid; she scrimped, rationed, and cobbled together the wherewithal for our survival.”
Life chez Powers was no delight for the children. “Growing up in this family is not something I would care to do again,” Katherine Powers writes. “There was so much uncertainty, so much desperation about money, and so very little restraint on my parents’ part in letting their children know how precarious was our existence.” She calls her parents’ marriage a folie a deux, which seems an accurate description.
Getting down to work wasn’t always easy for Powers. Given the chaos of his child-ridden household, he required a separate office, off the premises, in which to write. He would take an occasional teaching job—at St. John’s, Marquette, Michigan—but turned down many others, including an editorship at Commonweal. “And the truth about me is that I just don’t qualify as an ideal husband,” he wrote to Katherine Anne Porter. “Ah, well,” he wrote to Robert Lowell, “let me be a lesson to you. Stay single. That way you can afford to be yourself.” Meanwhile the Powers children—a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth—kept coming.
Powers made a decent score when the New Yorker accepted one or another of his stories. He frequently borrowed money from Father Harvey Egan, a priest to whom some of the most amusing letters in this volume were written. His wife’s parents from time to time allowed him and his large family to move in with them. He received Guggenheim and Rockefeller grants and was made something called a Kenyon Review Fiction Fellow. He put up at various points at Yaddo, the writers colony near Sarasota, which has the added attraction for him, a modest player of the ponies, of a nearby racetrack. But whatever he earned, it was never enough.
“I can’t believe I’ll ever make much on my work,” Powers wrote to Father Egan, to whom he earlier wrote that “whatever else old JF may be, he’s never dealt in sex. But, no, there’s no one saying it, and America’s cleanest writer goes his lonely way.” Reviews of his books tended to be praising. The English critic Walter Allen compared him to Chaucer, which, if one discounts the bawdiness in Chaucer, isn’t bad.
Powers’s fiction was too subtle to acquire a large readership. Yet Morte D’Urban won the National Book Award in 1963, against competing novels by Vladimire Nabokov, Katherine Anne Porter, John Updike, and Dawn Powell. Morte D’Urban is his best book, and, in its quiet way, a great book. As the ad used to say you didn’t have to be Jewish to love Rosen’s Rye Bread, neither, allow me testify, do you have to be Catholic to love the fiction of J. F. Powers.
These letters reveal Powers’s literary tastes as chaste. He did not much care for the writing of Faulkner, nor did he think much of Hemingway. As a Catholic, he was supposed to like the novels of Graham Greene, but did not. Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, he wrote to the novelist Jack Conroy, “make my arse tired.” To the critic Michael Millgate he wrote that he has “just finished not finishing Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter . . . Such books, and Nancy Mitford’s, serve only to impress me with the genius of Evelyn Waugh.”
One should come away from Suitable Accommodations disliking J. F. Powers for what ostensibly was his selfishness in putting his own art ahead of the comfort and welfare of his wife and of the children he brought into the world. In later years, he had his own doubts about the wisdom of doing so, but his wife seems not to have fundamentally disagreed with this decision. He may have been unreliable but he was never unfaithful. “It’s a sad state of affairs,” he writes to her, “when a man’s most carnal thoughts are all about his wife.”
In these letters, Powers shows a winning modesty, neither playing the whining, unappreciated artist nor the man the fates have treated unfairly. Drollery abounds: If an American is ever made Pope, he writes to a friend, he should take the name Bingo. After writing one of the few awkward sentences in the book, in a letter to Charles Shattuck, then the editor of Accent, he writes, “Take that sentence to the cleaners next time you go.”
The letters in Suitable Accommodations end at 1963. Powers went on to live thirty-six more years. He finally settled into a job teaching creative writing and English literature at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, after which his literary production seems to have slowed. Although he called himself “non-political,” Katherine Powers notes that her father viewed the 1960s with “appalled incredulity.” Fortunately, he died before the pedophile scandal among the Catholic priesthood, which would have sickened and enraged him. Changes in the Church could not have pleased him. After all, the older American Catholicism, which he understood so well and captured so vividly in his fiction, helped make J. F. Powers the superb artist he was.
Edward Gibbon
(2015)
We must consider how little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.
—Samuel Johnson, from James Boswell’s Life of Johnson
A pudgy man with a big head, double chin, and pursing mouth, under five feet tall, foppishly overdressed, stilted in conversation, Edward Gibbon was easily the greatest English historian and quite possibly the greatest historian the world has known. How did this preposterous little man—a snob with often ludicrous opinions who was known as he grew older and fatter as Monsieur Pomme de Terre—produce The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a panoramic work of roughly a million and a half words with some 8,000 footnotes, covering 1,300 years of history? More than two centuries after Gibbon wrote it, the entertainment value of his history is as great as it was when it appeared in three volumes between 1776 and 1788, its standing in literature as firmly fixed.
Psychotic tyrants, s
avvy eunuchs, cunning courtesans; brutal barbarian tribal chiefs; battlefields bedewed with blood and strewn with the white bones of human corpses; Byzantine luxuriance; Saracen leaders “never seen to smile except on a day of battle”; ragtag Roman crusaders no less fanatical than the forces they were recruited to fight; Russians, Hungarians, Persians, Moors all engaging in tortures of a rare exquisivity—cutting off noses, ears, tongues, hands; putting out eyes with needles; poisoning husbands; the rope, the rack, the axe all finding full employment—in Gibbon’s pages it all goes whirring by, leaving one in a state of nearly perpetual dazzlement.
Through it all there are the emperors, the central figures of the history—and what a rogue’s gallery they are! Caracalla “was the common enemy of mankind,” a “monster whose life disgraced human nature”; Elagabalus was no “rational voluptuary,” also a transvestite; Maximin, “though a stranger to real wisdom . . . was not devoid of a selfish cunning”; the reigns of Valerian and his son Gallienus provided a 15-year period that “was one uninterrupted series of confusion and calamity”; Maxentius was “a tyrant as contemptible as he was odious”; Valens “was rude without vigor, and feeble without mildness”; Theophilus was “a bold, bad man . . . whose hands were alternately polluted with gold, and blood.” Gibbon writes: “Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperor . . . almost every reign is closed by the same repetition of treason and murder.”
One can’t really hope to take it all in; one follows instead the plangent tale over centuries in its broader lineaments. “The flow of his narrative, the clarity of his prose and the edge of his irony,” wrote C. V. Wedgwood, “still have the power to delight and, although seven generations of scholars have added to or modified our knowledge of the epoch, most of what Gibbon wrote is still valid as history.”
Scholars have noted the shortfalls of Gibbon’s scholarship. François Furet commented that in his history Gibbon “deprived the German people of their basic dignity.” Bernard Lewis contended that Gibbon’s portrait of Muhammad “is still much affected by myths” and “gives expression to his own prejudices and purposes and those of the circles in which he moved.” Steven Runciman claimed that Gibbon’s Greek was weak and that “the spirit of Byzantium eluded him,” while “the splendor of his style and the wit of his satire killed Byzantium studies for nearly a century.” Gibbon himself had second thoughts about beginning his story of Rome’s decline with the Emperor Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, when well before that time Rome had such intemperate and vice-ridden emperors as Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. But in the end all this seems negligible next to his monumental accomplishment.
Is genius possible in the realm of scholarship? It can be if aligned to art. If the historian has the instinct of an artist, he will not confine himself to accurate recounting of facts, causes, and consequences, but will widen his view to personalities, the play of character on the outcome of events, and what all this conveys about human nature. In an early unpublished work, Gibbon wrote: “Every man of genius who writes history infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit.”
Gibbon’s spirit was one of supremely detached skepticism, reinforced by common sense to a high power, with a masterly command of the rich irony that gave forcible expression to both. This spirit derived from the time in which he lived and the peculiar circumstances of his own life.
In his Memoirs of My Life, Gibbon noted, “I know by experience that from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian.” Aspiration is one thing, achievement quite another. What were the accidental determinants that made Edward Gibbon the majestic historian he turned out to be?
Edward Gibbon was a bachelor. He may have been one of nature’s true bachelors, though not at first by choice. Gibbon spent his late adolescence and early adulthood in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland. At the age of 21, he met, courted, and proposed to Suzanne Cuchord, the charming daughter of a Swiss clergyman, but a woman without a dowry. His father forbade the marriage. “I sighed as a lover,” Gibbon wrote in his Memoirs, “I obeyed as a son.”†
Nietzsche said that a married philosopher is a joke. A married historian, productive in the way Gibbon was, is not so much a joke but perhaps an impossibility. One can be the author of a vast historical work of the kind of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was 20 years in the composing, or be happily married, but one is unlikely to bring off both.
Gibbon found himself in Lausanne not by choice but under the lash of his father’s anger. While at Oxford, at 16, he converted to Catholicism. The conversion put paid to his career as a student, for the university did not allow Catholics; nor, at that time, could Catholics hold public employment or sit in Parliament. Gibbon’s father sent him off for reconversion—de-programming, we might call it today—to Switzerland and the successful if tepid recultivation of his Protestantism under a Calvinist clergyman.
He remained in Lausanne for five years, and those years turned him from an Englishman into a European. When he first arrived, he spoke no French. Soon he was translating Latin works into French and French ones into Latin, and keeping a French journal. He met Voltaire, who was not much impressed by him, went to plays, and corresponded with scholars on ancient history and literature. “I had ceased to be an Englishman,” he wrote.
At the flexible period of youth, from the age of sixteen to twenty-one, my opinions, habits, and sentiments were cast in a foreign mold; the faint and distant remembrance of England was almost obliterated; my native language had grown less familiar; and I should cheerfully have accepted the offer of a moderate independent fortune on the terms of perpetual exile.
Money, or rather the want of it, was another crucial ingredient in Gibbon’s life’s work. His grandfather had been a successful merchant, in textiles, who acquired a fortune, then lost it in the South Sea Company bubble, then recouped much of it. His father had neither the business sense nor the resilience of his grandfather, and through social ambitions, pretensions, and mismanagement, squandered much of what had been a considerable fortune. “His gay character and mode of life,” Gibbon, in mild understatement, wrote, “were less adapted to the acquisition than to the expenditure of wealth.” Gibbon was set free financially only after his father died in 1770 when Edward was 33 and came into a diminished inheritance. This short financial leash was his unexpected good fortune. As he wrote in his Memoirs, “I am persuaded that had I been more indigent or more wealthy, I should not have possessed the leisure or the perseverance to prepare and execute my voluminous history.”
Gibbon’s determination to undertake his great work came six years before his father’s death. He had first planned a life of Walter Raleigh, then a history of the liberty of the Swiss, then an account of the Republic of Florence under the Medicis. In 1763, he set out on the classic Englishman’s Grand Tour of Europe. In Rome on the evening of October 15, 1764, he later wrote, “as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter‡ on the ruins of the Capitol,” he decided to dedicate himself to a study of such ruins. Only later did he widen his compass and take on the fall of the entire Roman Empire. The first of his history’s six volumes appeared in 1776, the last in 1788.
Outwardly an account of the defeat of the Roman ideal, the true subject of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is human nature, and, in Gibbon’s recounting, it’s a far from pretty picture. He writes that the study of history proper is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” It was ever thus, and part of Gibbon’s project is to convince his readers of that. “There exists in human nature,” he writes, “a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present time.” The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shows us just how wearily constant human nature has been through time. Gibbon makes his case for this through a series of aphoristic statem
ents, among them:
Avarice is an insatiate and universal passion.
Fear had been the original parent of superstition.
How much swifter is the progress of corruption than its cure.
The most glorious or humble prospects are alike, and soon bounded by the sepulchre.
Of an earthquake:
The historian may content himself with an observation, which seems to be justified by experience, that man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
Of the invention of gunpowder:
If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.
The reigning tone of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is Olympian. The book is written as if by a god looking down on and recording the ambitions, grand or squalid, of human beings in their attempts, virtuous or vice-ridden, to achieve mastery over their destiny.
How today is one to read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I recently did so at the rate of roughly 20 pages a day, early in the morning, over a five-month period. The greatest compliment I can pay it is to say that I regretted finishing it.
Early in his third volume, Gibbon writes:
There are few observers who possess a clear and comprehensive view of the revolutions of society; and who are capable of discovering the nice and secret springs of action, which impel, in the same uniform direction, the blind and capricious passions of a multitude of individuals.
Gibbon was one of those few. He describes military campaigns and discrete battles with impressive concision. (He himself served two years as an officer in the Hampshire militia, chiefly guarding French prisoners of war, which gave him a feeling for the military spirit; to a true writer, no experience is wasted.) No one who has read it will forget his capping sentence after describing the battle of Salice toward the close of the fourth century, where dead soldiers were left on the ground without burial: “Their flesh was greedily devoured by the birds of prey, who, in that age, enjoyed very frequent and delicious feasts . . . ” His hatred of war was genuine. “Military discipline and tactics,” he reminds us, “are about nothing more than the art of destroying the human species.”
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