The Devil Inside

THE PRESENCE OF GRACE (191 pp.)--J. F. Powers--Doubleday ($2.95).

J. F. (for James Farl) Powers, 38, likes to explore a placid world that stirs with life only after some trifling event breaks up the humdrum of routine. It is the parochial world of pastors, curates and their parishioners. The mocked and pitied heroes of Powers' short stories are usually worldly U.S. Roman Catholic priests who have mislaid their sense of vocation in the hubbub of parish politics, bingo socials and Legion of Decency campaigns. Illinois-born and Catholic-reared. Author Powers brings an unsparing eye and a spare style to the subject of priestly frailty, but writes with enough basic compassion to avoid mere anticlericalism. He shares the front rank of present-day U.S. short story writing with such writers as John Cheever and J. D. Salinger, and he surprisingly evokes the same sad dilemma that plagues Cheever's disenchanted Upper East Side Manhattanites and Salinger's poor little rich boys with fractured psyches. The Presence of Grace is really about the absence of love.

Personalizing Peter's Pence. In the lead story, Dawn, Father Udovic finds a packet of trouble in the collection plate. It is an envelope addressed to "The Pope," marked "Personal," gathered up in Father Udovic's campaign "to personalize Peter's Pence" by having the bishop, who is going to Rome, "present the proceeds to the Holy Father personally." For days the innocuous-looking envelope ticks like a time bomb in the bishop's "In" box. Father Udovic finally sends for the letter writer, a laconic little woman who grudgingly reveals that the envelope contains a dollar with her name and address on it in ink. "I mean I don't want somebody else takin' all the credit with the Holy Father!" she explains. Father Udovic recognizes that the woman and he are caught alike in the sin of pride: "It seemed to him, sitting there saying nothing, that they saw each other as two people who'd sinned together on earth might see each other in hell, unchastened even then, only blaming each other for what had happened."

Death of a Favorite and Defection of a Favorite are sardonic studies of ambition in the hinterlands. A Midwest farm-country curate itches for his aged pastor's post as rabidly as if it were a cardinal's red hat. Only after he trips over all his political guide wires does the curate acquire a saving measure of humility. The two tales are notable not only for Powers' quiplash irony ("Scratch a prelate and you'll find a second baseman") but for being told in the first person by the parish house cat, an unlikely but effective observation post from which the humans frequently appear the more feline.

Lampooning the Vulgar. Powers' talent reaches also outside the rectory. In Blue Island a young suburban housewife's get-acquainted coffee pour turns into a cruel social fiasco when an older woman who has posed as a friend suddenly does a commercial spiel on furniture polish in mid-party, and later presses a collapsible mop on the sobbing hostess as a payoff for the captive customers.

When he is not unmasking cruelty, Author Powers takes a Waughspish delight in lampooning vulgarity. The Presence of Grace is about a sociable young curate, Father Fabre, who unwittingly dignifies a liaison between one of his parishioners, Mrs. Mathers, and her non-Catholic paramour, Mr. Pint, by dining with them and Mr. Pint's daughter Velma. The high comic humors of the story and the evening revolve around an old-fashioned ice cream freezer:

" 'I can't be standin' here all day with this cream gettin' soft on me,' Mr. Pint said . . . and sank again to his knees. He resumed cranking . . .

''Your good suit,' said Mrs. Mathers.

She snatched a Better Homes and Gardens from a pile of such magazines and slid it under Mr. Pint's knees.

" 'Sir Walter Reilly,' said Velma, looking at Father Fabre to see if he followed her . . . 'Let me taste it, Dad.'

"Mr. Pint churned up a chunk of ice and batted it down with the heel of his hand. 'By Dad!' he breathed, a little god invoking himself . . . Mrs. Mathers left the room, and returned a moment later whispering that she believed in flushing the toilet before she made coffee. That was the quickest way to bring fresh water into the house."

Demolishing a Window. Comic or sober, Author Powers cannot avoid that slight tinge of spiritual arrogance that is implicit in judging one's co-religionists--Catholic, Protestant or Jew--rather more severely than others, because they have ostensibly had a greater light while the rest of the world presumably flounders around any which way. The unrelaxed tension in Author Powers' stories is the pull of the real against the ideal. In an earlier book, Prince of Darkness, he found a salient image for that tension in a priest eating his breakfast: "He jabbed at the grapefruit before him, his second, demolishing its perfect rose window." Essentially, this is the perennial fall of man before the images of truth, beauty and faith to which he aspires.

J. F. Powers is probably the only U.S. Catholic writer who can describe the devil inside with the authority of a Graham Greene or a Franc,ois Mauriac. He writes as well as they do, and in finding his devil in the homely incidents of everyday life, rather than in adultery, murder and suicide, he is perhaps the truer shocker.

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