by J.F. Powers
Of the handful of Jim’s published stories that were not about priests, two were based on misfortunes in housing his family: “Look How the Fish Live” and “Tinkers.” The problem of finding “suitable accommodations” for the Powers family was always with us and always impossible to solve, but not only because of bad breaks and no money. While Jim prided himself on having a clear, unillusioned perception of how things really worked, when it came to adapting to reality, he was not one for making suitable accommodations himself.
The world outside the house, whichever one he happened to be living in, became increasingly untenable to him, and his vision of the ideal house became ever more one of an asylum, a place safe from the contagion of the world and the line of complacency it peddled. As he retreated, the family he had once seen as having thwarted his calling as an artist became his model society—all the more so after most of its members had left and the idea could flourish unchecked by reality. In 1979 he wrote to me, then thirty-one and living, as were his other children, far away: “You referred to Boz’s plan for me to make a lot of money so we can move back to Ireland. He may be right. I see it as idealism, but what else would work for our family? A big house not too far from Dublin, Jane weaving and dyeing in one room, Hugh philosophizing and botanizing in another, Boz and family in one wing, Mary etching in one tower, Katherine reading in another, Mama in the garden, Daddy with The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph in his study.”
To which scheme I say to myself now, as I did then: Oh, dear.
* * *
Jim’s letters are assertions of comic might against the absurdity, as he saw it, of his existence. He wrote them in part to stave off chaos, to give reality a shape of his own creation, however dark. As it happens, the last communication between my parents was conducted—in a manner of speaking—in writing and was another attempt to fend off the unbearable. On the morning Betty died (at home, wasted by cancer, unstintingly cared for by Jim), he asked her what she would like for breakfast. She just shook her head. He went off and returned with a pencil and checklist with entries for “Eggs” and “Liver.” He left; came back; no checkmark. He took the list away and returned with it, having added “Kisses.” She smiled faintly and again shook her head. He left it with her, and when he returned again, she had marked “Liver.” This struck him, as I have no doubt it was meant to by Betty, partner and butt of his dark sense of humor, as perfect in its intransigence and bleak comedy.
Betty died a couple hours later. Jim said he spent that time telling her how sorry he was for having given her such a hard life and no home. He never really recovered from her death, though he lived for another eleven years, alone, and long enough to be forced to leave another house slated for destruction.
A Note on the Text
I have selected the letters and journal extracts that make up the text of this book from thousands of letters and several personal journals with the aim of keeping the focus on JFP’s life. I have cut letters and passages that are not necessary to the story, including a large number concerning JFP’s deliberations and negotiations with editors and publishers.
Passages cut from the letters are indicated by this: […]. Passages cut from the italicized interstitial material are indicated by ellipses alone.
I have created consistency in such matters as capitalization and corrected the very few spelling mistakes. I have added some additional paragraph breaks as JFP often sacrificed format to postage economy. I have also retained JFP’s preference for the British custom of using no period after an abbreviation if the last letter of the abbreviation is the same as the last letter of the word being abbreviated—for example, “Mr,” “Mrs,” “Fr,” “Sr,” and “Dr.”
1
Fortunately, I am under no obligation to earn a living wage
September 8, 1942–November 6, 1945
Letter from prison
In 1942, when this story begins, Jim was twenty-five years old and living in Chicago with his parents in their apartment at 4453 North Paulina Street. He had a job at the wholesale book company A. C. McClurg and was also writing. His story “He Don’t Plant Cotton” (whose characters were based on the jazz musicians Baby Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and Lonnie Johnson) was accepted by Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature. The magazine had been founded in 1940 by Kerker Quinn in concert with six other editors, including Charles Shattuck, who became Jim’s most helpful editor and critic.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
4453 North Paulina Street
Chicago
September 8, 1942
Dear Mr Shattuck,
Naturally, I’m very pleased that the editors of Accent like “He Don’t Plant Cotton” well enough to publish it.1 […]
Concerning the who’s who data, this will be my first published story. Aside from the fact that I am 25 and live in Chicago, there is nothing I wish mentioned about me: because those facts, paltry and insignificant, are at least accomplished.
Off the record, I work for a wholesale book company. In fact I might even be what the Publishers Weekly and booksellers refer fondly to as “a bookman,” but the bestseller wars have left me, in spite of my tender years, battered and scarred beyond finding much solace in that hallowed term, smacking of crafts and guilds though it does.
In italics, I want to get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write. I am not working on a novel now.
I do not think my years are tender. Time passing haunts me even more than Space intervening.
Thanks once more. I am hoping you will be able to publish the story soon.
Sincerely,
J. F. Powers
Jim applied for the status of conscientious objector in November 1940 but was classified 1-A in September 1942. His great friend from his Quincy College Academy days, George Garrelts, ordained a priest in September 1942, was a strong supporter of Jim’s decision to resist military service. After a failed appeal, Jim did not present himself for induction on April 3, 1943. Arrested two weeks later, he spent three days in the Cook County Jail before being released on a thousand-dollar bond. He was indicted by a grand jury on May 6, 1943, and on September 30, 1943, was sentenced to three years at Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota. He served thirteen months before being paroled.
While inside, Jim was allowed to write two letters a week. He worked in the hospital and, to some extent, on his own writing. Unlikely though it was, and thanks to the friends he made there, prison gave Jim a sense of what life might be for an artist. Among his fellow inmates were a number of cultivated, idealistic men who were also conscientious objectors. Among them were John Marshall, with whom he wrote and produced a play, and two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, Jack Howe and Davy Davison. Howe drew up a plan of a farm for Jim that represented to him a more intellectual and cultivated expression of the ideals of the Catholic Worker movement.
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
May 22, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] You make your life in New England2 sound attractive—even to me. At times I’ve thought my place to be there. But most of the time I’ve wondered if there is any place for me except in some branch of the government service. There is a justice, hardly poetic, in the way I find myself tied up in destiny with millions of people when what I want most is to be separated from them. […]
The weather is nice and I’m tempted to get out of the dormitory, but when I do, there’s only a sandy lot surrounded by concrete walls—and so monotony has the upper hand always. There is no grass. A while ago I saw somebody playing with a small snake. There it was lying in the sand, pushed about by prison shoes, and I guess it will die eventually. It can’t get out either. […]
Write when you feel like it—and love.
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
June 11, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] This is Sunday in Sandstone, and it has rained intermittently all da
y. […] The letters from Mother and Daddy brought sad news also—Eric Swenson is dead and Russ Alonzo’s brother, whom I hardly remember … Well, I don’t know what to say about these things. I can only hope these boys thought they were engaged in good work. If so, it’s not so bad, as we must all die sooner or later and it is a privilege to die for something meaningful—however funny that sounds. As Father George says, it is very strange how such fuss is made about certain saints who died for the love of God, the hardships and martyrdom they thrust upon themselves, and yet when millions die for—they don’t know what, most of them—it is not wondered at, except secretly by many afraid to speak out. […]
Wm Fifield,3 […] who wrote to me several weeks ago, mentioning that a nun plans to use “Lions”4 in an anthology she’s editing,5 writes again that he is a CO and understands my situation. I had written to him, explaining my inability to write a long letter. […]
Love,
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
June 25, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
This is Sunday again, and it’s hot. […] Despite the play and story I’ve done since coming here, it is impossible to work. Absolute absence of privacy and solitude and silence—makes James a disgusted boy. And then when a day like this comes along, I can’t even escape my own body, which sweats and twists under the heat. That is why I hate summer and why I am happy whenever it is raining and grey. I look out the window now, see across the dusty yards, and there on benches the inmates sit and talk and doze. For all my indolence, I have no talent for that sort of thing. I guess it is the equivalent in my mind of the way Mother and Daddy used to sit out on the back porch. How to spend a lifetime in an evening. […]
Fr George writes of the nice lady parishioner who came to see him about her soul and, more immediately, her finances. She wanted him to recommend a good investment. He recommended the poor. She appealed to common sense. Fr George told her she’d better come back and see the pastor. I’m rather dazed to hear the sermons at your church are strange and different and literate. What a relief it must be for you not to hear about picnics and carnivals. […]
Love,
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
July 21, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] I just finished a letter to Mother and Daddy in which I told them my ideas about political conventions and farms for the future. The farm is more than usually on my mind because I saw the complete plans the night before last. About six or seven cottages, a twin building joined by a walk: place to eat in one (including a fireplace, huge and “roaring”) and a little theatre in the other (including projection room for movies, mostly “foreign”). Finally, a barn. A barn such as I cd not have imagined and which even now I can hardly understand, for the architect (one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s young geniuses)6 understands the needs and whims of chickens, hogs, horses, cows, and all the rest. The entire project would cost between $50 and $60,000. Which I am told is less than the same number of buildings wd cost if they were (which they aren’t) ugly and cheap. I know of course you are wondering what we get to drink here that makes me talk loosely about that much money. It is not so much, considering my literary prospects (not what I’ll make from books, but the people I’ll meet). Anyway, that’s the setup. Something beyond a pension to work for. I’m wheeling and dealing where I can. […]
The sky is beautiful today—peace, it’s wonderful—and I can’t remember the sky being like this anywhere else. A different feature daily. I was thinking today (while watching the clouds) how far I’ve traveled from the canoe trips I took with Ramona7 around the Chain of Lakes. I told you she got married January 1943, but did I tell you that she expected a baby in November? Well, she’s all taken care of, and it’s a good thing, I’m thinking, for me. She never meant what she said about being different. It took Fr George to detect that a long time ago: the first time he met her.8 […] Listened to the convention tonight and lost a bag of cookies on Wallace.9
Love,
Jim (Powers)
MARIELLA GABLE
Sandstone
August 1, 1944
Dear Sister Mariella,
The authorities have graciously permitted me to write a special purpose letter to you.
I was very happy to hear that you wish to use my work and feel indebted to William Fifield and Harry Sylvester for bringing it to your attention. […]
Since leaving Chicago, escorted by a U.S. marshal, I have been doing time at Sandstone prison in Minnesota. The “rap”: failure to report for induction, or conscientious objection to war. For me, the project and prison have been gifts from heaven, periodically bewildering as such, but essentially blessings. I have had the honor of living among men of goodwill in these places, a few of the uncelebrated, if not unknown, victims of peace and war in our age “of moderate virtue and of moderate vice.”10
[…]
In Christ,
J. F. Powers
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
August 4, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] I have hopes for a merrier Xmas this year than last: I’m assured on all sides the war will be over and it is very probable I’ll be out on parole and settled, as it were, by then. As a matter of fact, if Washington okays my parole, I may make it by September. […]
Fr George is (or recently was) in Oakmont for a retreat, and a fellow here is going to Oakmont next week to work for Fr Farina.11 Took a lot of accounting at Creighton University and came here as a Catholic CO and now knows accounting is as far from his heart as murder, and will donate his life to such work as Fr Farina and the CW movement entails.
You ask about the farm of the future. You are right: there will be no advertising or insurance men about (unless of course they have mended their ways). You are wrong: there will be no arty people passing through in the summer as though it were Wisconsin Dells. Who lives there lives there. No part time. It will not be a tourist camp. We will get our living from the earth. A living is not so much as the light companies and grocers try to make city people think. It will be a risk of course. I’m dead sure “risk” is the magic word. The condition of the cities is due to the fact that people will not risk anything to live. They would rather die for not living—it is a slow process like an all-day sucker.12 A slow process, even if it isn’t any good. If you’ll watch the forthcoming Life magazines, you’ll see some specimens of F. L. Wright’s work. It will be an article on “Broadacre City,” Mr Wright’s dream city. My farm is the work of a fellow whom Mr Wright called “the finest draughtsman he ever met.”13 […] And now, once more, my love to both of you.
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
August 18, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] The weather here is cool again, and the trees in the distant bluffs are changing color, just beginning to, and I am told the summer has practically spent itself. I am glad. […] I read “Renner,”14 and it doesn’t sound as bad as I was afraid it might—I’ve changed here: am not so quick to see tragedy where I did. I used to give the businessmen a rough go, and the mistake was in limiting such treatment too much to them. The innocents I find are ever harder to find than before. I am thinking of alleged pacifist societies and related groups. More than before I realize that pacifism alone is no use. It is an essential part of Christianity: there is the root—not in pacifism or labor unions or education. This means, then, I was somewhat taken in by “do-good” organizations; it does not mean the business boys, the common sensers, get off any easier. Being here has matured me. There are people and types of endeavor—architecture, for instance, which I was hardly conscious of. And they all have their way out for humanity. […]
Love,
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
&n
bsp; Sandstone
September 1, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] I’m writing this letter from the barbershop, where I’m waiting my turn. There are three chairs, and tonight the library and hospital workers get theirs. […] Sometimes I feel I must have checked my brain and responsibility (to myself) at the front gate when I came in and they were mailed home with my clothes. I won’t ask again about Bill’s deferment, but only hope he stays unmolested where he is. There are train tracks within whistling distance, and when they sound in the night, and the dogs bark, you know you’re in jail. […]
Love,
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
October 8, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
Sunday, about 9:00 in the morning, and I’m sitting at a big long table in the dayroom, listening to some wonderful Negro spiritual singing. […]
We must pray that Dick survives and that Mother and Daddy are spared further sorrows.15 I feel my parole will take a weight off their minds, despite my assurances that I was and am all right here, which is the truth. They were never able to believe that, I always suspected. When you were home, did you feel that they worried about my being here much? Did the neighbors make them feel embarrassed? Now the spirituals have stopped and it is white hymn singing, which, as far as I’m concerned, is something else. This is a chill bleak day, the trees in the distance are many colors and I should very much like to walk through them. […]
