by J.F. Powers
All at once, with a date set for my departure, I find myself engaged in counting the days—an old practice among jailbirds. I have, of this writing, 23 days and a “get,” which means “get up.” I’ll leave on the 9:39 train on the morning of November 1—All Saints’ Day—a Wednesday. I’ll be paid $50 a month at St Joseph’s16 and furnished with a room and meals. That isn’t bad—especially the room. Not waking up in the morning in the midst of a multitude. Pray for Dick.
Love,
James (Powers) 1939
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
October 19, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] This is the best time of the year for me, and I’m glad to think I’ll see and smell some of it this year. I’m writing this on my lunch hour, birch trees stick up in the distance like white whiskers. The sky is dull grey and blue. […] How I wish I had my typewriter, or the right to use one, when I look at my handwriting. Now a train is whistling across the frozen plains, and of course I’m put in mind of November. Till I hear from you again—Happy Days.
James (Powers) 1939
Jim was paroled on November 1, 1944, and, as a condition of his release, was assigned a job as an orderly at St. Joseph’s Hospital, St. Paul, Minnesota. At first his duties included work in the morgue, an assignment he found unbearable; later he was given the job of sterilizing instruments on the night shift.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
St Joseph’s Hospital
St Paul, Minnesota
November 3, 1944
Dear Mr Shattuck,
This will be a note, no more, to let you know I am out in the world again. I was paroled to this hospital November 1, All Saints’ Day. You wouldn’t think the government had such a feel for the liturgy. I am in my room in an adjoining building known as the Boys’ Dormitory. So far the majority of the Boys are still in the throes of having solemnized Pay Day. That’s the way one nun explained it to me. They are maintenance men and so forth and like the Middle Ages, the strange, maimed flock that always attaches itself to Catholic institutions. Civil Service wd never stand for them. When they find out I am a conscientious objector, they will either canonize or slaughter me …
[…]
Had to move a still sweaty stiff, fat too, around in the autopsy room yesterday. Wish T. S. Eliot might have been there. I will probably settle down to work in the operating rooms and orderly. Today I worked from seven to three, which leaves a good hunk of the day to me. Marred today by necessity to report to Police (as I’m one convicted of a felony), and it’s funny to see them trying to take the questions and fingerprinting and photography seriously, all the rigmarole designed to keep society safe. […]
Will send you something if I can write something. I may have ossified under censorship and indolence. […]
Jim Powers
JOHN MARSHALL
St Joseph’s Hospital
St Paul, Minnesota
[Late 1944 or early 1945]
Dear Marsh,
Friday evening and I have just received your card. […] I have just been lying here on my bed, waiting for a certain bug to bite me again (presently, I don’t know where he is on my person) and considering the nature of the religious who run places like this hospital: the latter train of thought precipitated by what we had, or didn’t have for supper tonight. I ate a piece of bread and a glass of milk and left the scene of the crime. Fortunately, I am under no obligation to earn a living wage and can go out and eat a meal when this happens (this week, four times). […] Write to me again, especially when you run out of postcards. And God—not the God of institutions—may He bless you.
Jim
JOHN MARSHALL
St Joseph’s Hospital
St Paul, Minnesota
April 9, 1945
Dear Marsh,
I rec’d yours this morning and derive some consolation from your misery, as it seemed to take the edge off mine. You at least are a young man and have your life before you. Me, I am growing old and fast. I am moreover like a fish thrown up on a sandbank and left to lie there in the sun. I am speaking of the jolly hospital and, as Private Carr wd say, the fucking medical profession. Don’t say a word against the fucking medical profession! All of which means things are beginning to catch up with me. The sunniness is gone out of my mien (remember?). Last Thursday and again Saturday (supposed to be my “day off”) I worked till nigh on midnight cleaning up the morgue after the fucking medical profession. My sands are running out. I am not writing.
More and more I am considering the uselessness of trying to sandwich in a little sense in all this nonsense. There is no room for writing in my days and nights. The only extracurricular vocation open to me is that of the alcoholic. One could be drunk fairly regularly and get by. There are provisions for that. But when one is trying to set down something in writing and it grieves one’s soul to see how it comes out, and then just when some of the awfulness, through work and revision, is going out of it, there comes the call to the post room.17 What then? I am in love with the idea of nihilism and tolerable of unions. The first settles this hash for good, and the other comes to hard terms with it. I have thought of working a transfer somewhere, not that I’m sure it isn’t this way everywhere and always, but I know it’s a forlorn project. I have only my reasons. I can’t think of a single one of theirs—and them’s the ones that count. […]
I have letters from editors wanting things, and I can’t get time to produce them. The time I get is hardly enough to type them. I am becoming a has-been without ever having really been. Now, I don’t want to mislead you into thinking I actually think my chips are all cashed in, but I do want you to know, as I’m beginning to, this spare-time creation ain’t what I cracked it up to be in jail. Peace. Write.
Jim
JOHN MARSHALL
St Joseph’s Hospital
St Paul, Minnesota
April 27, 1945
Dear Marsh,
A line from the hospital. No enemas, etc., at the moment. […] I am simply moldering. I am constantly tired. I walked down to the river after supper tonight. It is good down there. Things can be seen for miles: trains, limestone cliffs, the river losing and finding itself in the sun. But I haven’t the power to do more than fall on a bench and listen and look in a daze not of my own making. I wonder if I am physically deficient—or whether indolence has reached the tertiary state with me. […]
I think if I had nothing to do—no work—I’d be all right. But I must say that it seems strange that I am not up to sweating for my daily bread like the others. God, it is often said, gives what he intends to take away, and only enough of whatever it is to go around. It seems now that I am only getting enough—to the last drop—to get me through the days. I find, on rereading this, I’m pouring out my heart to you. It all comes, probably, from the fact that I’m not writing anything these days. I don’t feel quite the cad I did a few months ago; then, it seemed, I had a little time. Now I have none which doesn’t suffer from the effect of rising and retiring. In and out of bed. A bug in a glass. […]
Pax,
Jim
Jim found a girlfriend in a young woman, just out of high school, who also worked at the hospital. “Hugs and kisses, nothing else,” she reported in a letter after Jim’s death. “He coaxed me into giving him my high-school ring—I had just graduated. I left for nurses’ training in September. […] He never returned the ring.”
JOHN MARSHALL
St Joseph’s Hospital
St Paul, Minnesota
June 18, 1945
Dear Marsh,
Rec’d your letter today and was very happy to have it. I should have answered your previous one before this, but it was so full of things hard to write about and I kept thinking there’d come a day. There didn’t, so I must simply say, as we say in the Men’s Dining Room here, It’s rough and tough and hard to stay with. You are indeed a very sensitive and complicated person, as even somebody like Domrese18 could see, and
the world is made to smash you if you are that and not some more things besides. Since you are some more things, you will be all right, I think. In fact I think I should be in the same boat if I were so fortunate, or unfortunate, as to be knee-deep in quail, the way you are.
I had my first chance, the first that was really right from all angles and especially the physical, in the last two or three weeks, but I put my foot down, thus hamstringing the moment for the comforts of the long view. I see myself a little better now and do not sally forth with quite the abandon, with only a heavy cargo of fine expressions which usually came to something else in the minds of my loved ones, but that was all right then as I kept hammering away at what I meant, which was usually something about beauty or life’s tough and why not make the most of it, and all the time I was getting my carnal share. But my problems are not over by any means in that respect. I page through Harper’s Bazaar and see several women each month I’d seriously consider settling down with if they weren’t just in Harper’s Bazaar,19 so you can see I am still entertaining the idea of crossing over.
But now to other things. Quite a few people like the CW 20 stuff, and quite a few don’t; it splits up into those who think of me as the fine young writer of fine short stories and those who welcome a little propaganda from any quarter and don’t know much about the other. But I, as you suspect, know what I’m doing. Watch the CW as I have another coming and it’s got its boots laced way up to here. After all I am, as I always maintained, a simple soul and simply don’t want my sons (if I can get my wife out of Harper’s Bazaar) to be a fuckin’ soldier.
I am moving into other quarters. To the Marlborough. That is an old red stone dump creaking with age and old women where I will have two rooms, so to speak, by the grace of God and a piece of molding bisecting them, and a toilet I can call my own as well as a bathtub that sits out in one of the rooms with a lid on it. Sounds like (that letter) a fine setup for an old deflowerer of Quaker womanhood like yourself, the one-balled fury. It is a block from the cathedral, but truth to tell I don’t intend to do much about that. The view is the thing, looking out over the City of St Paul and farther over the river and into the distant sun-swept hills. When I told Weinstein21 this, he said ah ha at last you are set up in the approved Esquire style. Then—sound of distant trumpets—I begin to write. […] See you around. Let me hear from you.
Jim
For a few months, Jim shared his place at the Marlborough on Summit Avenue in St. Paul with Ted LeBerthon, a newspaperman, critic, and writer who was involved with the Catholic Worker movement.
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
St Paul, Minnesota
July 9, 1945
Dear Marsh,
[…]
Your schedule literally knocks me out, just to scan through. How can you do it? I do not mean to express only amazement but curiosity. I want to know for my own sake. I find myself constantly weary, dropping in and out of bed in a way I never did before. I mean before the Stone. I was talking to a fellow who was hot on B Complex, but you know how lukewarm I am about anything in packages or via machinery, like your shortwave set. If I get some of this B Complex, it will be like going in to buy some condoms, that painful—which by the way I managed to do only once, in Juarez, and I was not moving only under my own power at the time. So you might, from what you know of my case, put a couple of dogs on it and let me know how it turns out. I have a lot of work to do and will never make it in my present condition. […]
Now it is 10:30 in the evening, and I must go down the hill to the hospital. My American Sterilizer is waiting on a park bench for me. I work nights now, you know. 11–7. Get a couple of hours sitting or reading in. No posts.22 Few people. Little food. Some heat. Also deliver ice at sunup. I am a familiar figure with my ice and tongs. I can’t recall whether I told you I had moved: two rooms with a view.
Jim
Father Harvey Egan became Jim’s greatest correspondent and an extraordinarily generous literary patron. He was also an industrious writer and sender of pamphlets, the subjects of which changed with his own galloping enthusiasms. Like Garrelts, Egan was, at this time, a zealous Detacher; that is to say, both priests were adherents of the rigorously ascetic movement known as Detachment.23 Still, Egan’s embrace of this persuasion did not affect his passion for baseball, horse racing, boxing, and hockey.
HARVEY EGAN
The Marlborough
Just off Leicester Square
Old St Paul’s
July 25, 1945
Dear Reverend,
I’m going to give you one more chance before taking my cause to a higher authority. I am not ignorant of the sender of a series of cryptic missives received by me or my servants. The single, dread word “Detacher” is enough. I will not pretend to be unaffected. I am, as it would be foolish to deny, a man with a past. But I have paid my debt to society once, nay, a hundredfold, for I was in the beginning, as I am now, and ever shall be, an innocent man. I was, in fine, a Jansenist, a great follower of Baius,24 Quesnel,25 and the Saints26 (Lanahan Blanks Blues, 3–0), yes, I guess I had my fun and there’s still the piper to pay. But you are not the piper, Reverend Sir, and if it is not clear that I wish to put all that you and your ill-starred ilk represent behind me, then, forsooth, as I say, I shall seek out justice from the highest authority in the land. I have already sought action from a prelate I imagined to be your superior (he lives up the street from me), but my letter has been returned, initialed it is true, but saying only, “No longer with us. Try the Methodists or Presbyterians. Sorry.” If you are, as His Excellency seems to believe, now with these other sects, the next threatening note or sign I have from you or any other practitioner of Detachismus will send me scurrying after protection, peace, and justice (else this war be mockery!), yes, I’ll not stop short of Harry27 himself. I have spoken. Take heed.
J.a.S.S.W.F.O.I.T.
Just a Simple Soul Who Found Out in Time.
P.S. To think I once thought butter sinful!
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
(the home of happy feet)
September 13, 1945
Dear Marsh,
I am tearing this off in the wee hours of the morning. You came to mind as I entered the realm of X-ray, cystoscopy, diathermy. […] As for your private life, in some lamentable respects, it resembles my own, and I think I’ll just skip that. I can go to confession. I don’t know what you can do … wait it out, I suppose. I use that sometimes myself, instead of confession, as confession in some circumstances strikes me as the easy way out (a way to miss the meaning, destroy the chance of changing through experience); too much so. I do not believe I’ll get married, ever. If so, it will be like lightning. I do not expect to be hit by that either. And I will not even go so far as to say, on the other hand, you never know … I see too much too soon in women to get very far along.
Recently, I’ve had glimmers of what a challenge it would be honestly to try to be a saint; glimmers in all the darkness, one or two or three. I am not much tempted, in what I imagine to be the classical sense (St Anthony), but all it comes to is “something to do” instead of cheering or barking, a chance to wag my tail over something one degree more than nothing. Sometimes I enjoy music more (do you know Ravel, La Valse?), but music is a sometimes thing. Sex, on the other hand, always affords that minor lift—or the idea at bottom does, if not it itself. The small pleasure of pulling one’s fingers out of the dike; the sorrow soon after; the struggle to get the dike in shape again. Tick, tock, night, day, night … if the square root of death is one hour, you know it is not so long, life, and every hour in between is, if you could only let yourself see it, you would get up and leave this interminable double feature after the thousandth time you saw it. Write.
Jim
Elizabeth “Betty” Wahl had graduated that spring from the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, four miles from St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota. She had been Sister Mariella Gable’s pr
ize student and was now living at home with her parents in nearby St. Cloud, working as a bookkeeper for her father Art Wahl’s construction company. She was also writing a novel under the tutelage of Sister Mariella, who eventually asked Jim to read the manuscript and come up to St. Benedict’s to discuss it. One cannot help seeing matchmaking on Gable’s part and starry-eyed aspiration on Betty’s. Twenty-one years old, romantic, and worshipful, Betty considered the ideal marriage to be union with the mind, body, and soul of a great artist. As for Jim, he was clearly in the mood to be hit by lightning.
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
October 15, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
[…] I shall be pleased to read Miss Wahl’s book, only asking that you send it on and give me until, say, sometime in early November to get it read and up there to talk about it, as you suggest. […] I am conscious of the possible irony in my criticizing the work of someone who has turned out 70,000 words at 21, words which you must not think badly of. But we shall see. I guess I might have more to my credit if I’d been born a girl or as I am with money enough so I wouldn’t have to work at the nonsense I always have had to, or if the call to the colors hadn’t gone out when I was ripe for them, or, as Ted LeBerthon says, if my aunt had whiskers she’d be my uncle. I am amused that you found me a “stripling.” I wish I were five years younger at least. […] Ted LeBerthon, who now lives with me on the sixth floor of this old brownstone ghost of a building, is 53, and most of the time it seems to be the other way around. We can still lie awake at night (Sundays, when I don’t work, anyway) and talk. It is something I used to do as a child and again in high school (the chances of our team in the state tournament) and also when I graduated and hit Chicago (Pater, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Symons). But I don’t think I’ll want to talk in bed when I’m 53. […]
