J. F. Powers and Betty Wahl: Irish Americans and Returning Yanks

Abstract

The limited critical attention given J.F. Powers (1917-99) has concentrated on his engagement with Catholicism. Powers also applies Irish American motifs to his fiction. This article analyzes the depiction that Powers and his wife Betty Wahl (1924-88), who left postwar America to live on and off in Ireland, made of the Irish in both their homeland and in America. Powers only once directly addressed his own experience as a sporadic Irish resident, in the final story, “Tinkers,” anthologized in his third and last collection in 1975. Wahl’s writing career proved limited. Her only novel, Rafferty and Co. (1969), semi-fictionalizes the Powers family’s decision to move to Ireland, for a series of extended stays in the 1950s and early 1960s. This article examines these writers’ dramatization of postwar Ireland as expatriate Americans. Powers’ story and Wahl’s novel depict the stresses of living in suburbs south of Dublin while struggling to sustain a countercultural yet conservative idealism. That combination drove the family away from the Midwest, in both fiction and fact, to settle in an economically destitute and patriotically insecure Ireland.