Father Cawder's Story

THE ENCOUNTER (310 pp.) -- Crawford Power -- Sloane ($3).

In recent novels the clergyman with the troubled conscience appears almost as often as the young advertising man with an itch to compose literature. Anglican Chaplain Choyce in Leslie Greener's No Time to Look Back (see Recent & Readable) is such a man. So are some of the central figures in recent works of such Roman Catholic writers as J. F. Powers (Prince of Darkness) and Harry Sylvester (All Your Idols), who portray this kind of priest so movingly that their work is a rebuke to a popular bestseller theory, i.e., that the life of renunciation is jolly as a clambake, soothing as a tepid bath.

To the small group of novels dealing with such themes this week was added The Encounter, the story of a priest's harsh but successful struggle against spiritual pride. Its author, Baltimore-born Crawford Power, an architect turned novelist, writes of priests, nuns and parishioners with both vigor and delicacy.

"The Great Diamond." As The Encounter begins, Father Cawder is glumly refusing a gift of pew cushions from a wealthy widow in his Maryland parish. The incident reveals the man: he suspects comfort as the devil's lure, believes the essence of faith is self-denial. Yet, while Father Cawder lives by his ascetic creed, he tortures himself with the suspicion that his attitude is rooted in vanity.

The challenge that takes him out of his narrow parochial routine comes in a dream: he feels urged to visit a carnival performer known as "The Great Diamond," whose name he has seen on a poster. He finds a ratty little man living with a dissolute young girl. The girl asks Father Cawder to find a place in a convent for her illegitimate child; when he upbraids her, she flounces out.

On reflection, Father Cawder senses his defeat: he has denied the lowly. Though the carnival has left town, he starts in laborious search of Diamond and Stella, determined to persuade them that Christian charity is for them too. Before he is through, the priest has waded through a world of sordid crime and violent death. But Father Cawder has learned the force of the words he had once mechanically spoken to Diamond: "It's no part of a priest's business to pass on people like a judge. A priest has no means of doing so even if he wished; only God sees people as they are."

Genuine Priest. Novelist Power, 41, is not yet an expert craftsman. When he reports Father Cawder's metaphysical probings, his writing often goes dead and resembles a religious disputation more than a novel. When he should be driving his story to its climax, he lets it creep along. As recompense he offers some marvels of observation: the tawdry circus carnival, the chatter of unworldly nuns, and Father Cawder himself in all his miserable genuineness. Father Cawder may never become a cardinal--nor The Encounter ever match The Cardinal in sales--but Author Power has told a good, unsentimental story.

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