by J.F. Powers
I went to the public schools first, had my first fights for girls, which I won incidentally, and in the third grade transferred to Catholic schools when we moved to Rockford. So on to the seventh grade, when I went back to the public school—it was the day of the purple and green felt hats and “Did you ever hear Pete go tweet, tweet, tweet on his piccolo?” You were six years old then, I was thirteen, smoking cigarettes and kissing girls after school. A year later I found out about masturbation. A year later a Franciscan came to the Catholic school, where I was making my first retreat, and made us all as clean as a hound’s tooth. I submerged myself in the athletic life of the place. I had a fight and got my nose broke. I became a basketball star. I also played football. At the end of the year we decided to have a yearbook (my senior year), and I was not chosen to be editor. I did not want to be and, if I had, could not have been. Already I was beginning rather to want to be the dark horse in any enterprise, someone with no office or commitments who would do something daring or impossible and save the day. It is funny now.
I graduated and went to Chicago, where my family had been living for a year. It was hell after Quincy, after leisurely beers (we drank a lot of beer for high-school boys in Quincy), and nothing more serious than typing class or Washington Irving, the only writer I liked then that I could like now, I think. A couple of times I was almost a success. I always wasn’t, though, when they finally hired somebody. I went to a public school (college) and quit at the half year to drive a big Packard for a bastard through the South and Southwest. I stayed in dollar hotels, a different one nightly, except for weeks in San Antonio and El Paso, when I would drink too much. I was put in jail in San Antonio, picked up one morning when I was returning from taking the car to be washed. They held me for a half hour when they found out I was from Chicago. The bastard I worked for was at the St Anthony Hotel, the biggest and best, but they preferred to call Chicago. When they decided to let me go, I told them I might be about on the next day and if they didn’t have anything to do then—again—they could pick me up again. For this I got the rest of the morning in jail. It was my first jail: scrawlings on the wall, two racetrack touts not telling the truth about themselves when I was so naive as to ask, cold white macaroni on a sallow tin plate. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez. Here I lost my virginity. I was nineteen.
I came back to Chicago in the spring. It was terrible still. I worked for Marshall Field’s in the book section and met my first homosexuals. I enjoy their company today, so long as the situation is clear to them. I began to read, though while traveling I would look for my material on Sinclair Lewis in every town I’d pass through, and discovered Huxley, Aldington, and then, moving backward, Huysmans, Symons, Verlaine, Baudelaire. I took French lessons privately for two years because I wanted particularly to read Baudelaire. I got a job as an editor on Historical Records, WPA. I fell in love, or roughly speaking, did, with a Romanian girl. She taught me some things. It was the first time I felt that it might be good to know a woman who would worry about whether it was raining or missing a class (I was going to Northwestern at nights). But I spurned such pedestrian stuff. I wanted wine, women, and song—but not domestic wine, married women (married to me), and the best songs, I felt, had been made up at the time of Villon. I was a nice case of nonsense, I suppose. We parted. I met another girl who was more a woman. But I don’t think I’ll follow this any further … it is not good, I see, to go into these deals until we know each other better and perhaps never at all. I know I don’t care to know about your affairs or whatever you call them.
Presently I am in love with you, as I have been with nobody else, as indeed I thought not possible for me, and as for other people being in love, I knew what they were all about. I love you, Betty. Please love me accordingly. It has taken me a long time to come to you. I have taken the long way around, and I have missed several turns. I am glad I missed them. I believe there is no one else in the world but you for me. I do not care what Uncle Em or the Catholic Church knows about mating males and females. You are for me. I hope I am for you. There is no other way. You could kill someone if you told me now you no longer loved me. That is the way it is. Je t’adore is not wrong when I say it to you. I do. […]
Love,
Jim
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
November 26, 1945
Dear Marsh,
Your letter rec’d, filed, and now in process of being preserved for posterity. Enjoyed your sample of the professor of anatomy, a dull business, methinks. How can I keep from looking down on doctors? I see little of them now that I work at night, but when I do, I think how meek and humble and poor fare for satire are priests compared to them. Doctors have the world by the balls as priests must have had it in the Middle Ages. A priest asked me why the St Joseph’s nuns were so cold toward priests. I had to pretend incredulity and ignorance. I could not tell them that their priests wear white, have plenty of jack, and roll into the place in tweeds in the morning. I am trusting that you will rise above all this. What I mean, I guess, is that they make such an individual deal out of being a doctor (as though they were artists) when they are popped out of the medical factories like horseflies in August. You know all this, and I am not talking to you. I am just a little irritated, I suppose, to have to carry beer in a saloon the sign out front of which I don’t care for. September, let us pray, I’ll be a free man. […]
I have met a girl I intend to marry in May or June. She is a writer, unpublished except for the college magazine, contests—Americanism, what I like about it—and Atlantic Monthly essay contests. She has written a beautiful novel. She is as fine as, say, you are, and I hope I won’t be too crude for her. Catholic, of course, my priestly connections would never permit me to entertain heresy on such a permanent basis as marriage. […]
Harry Sylvester is coming back from Guatemala in the spring to teach a seminar at St Benedict’s (where Sister Mariella is head of the English department); Emerson Hynes, a rural lifer and a fine fellow despite all that, and a couple of other interesting people are bedded down in the vicinity (Back to Benedict). I expect my wife to be more popular than I’ll ever be. That may sound like murder at a distance, but she is also a UChristian of the sort I’ve never come against before. I mean she is without being ugly, and so isn’t of necessity. Likes Dante. Me, I like Grain Belt, a friendly beer.
Pax. Write.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 28, 1945
My dear Betty,
[…] Well, when I got up today, I found the toilet lying on its side like a wounded horse and the floor up in chunks all over the bathroom. It seems something broke, or has been broke for quite a while, causing water to drip down below. But since, as the plumber put it, I am not home much, the former occupants didn’t mind a minimum of dripping, but now someone new lives downstairs, and they don’t like dripping, even a minimum of it. I guess they’re stuck up. […]
I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 29, 1945
My dear Elizabeth Alice,
[…] I have a large case of whiskers presently but can’t get into the bathroom for the plumber and his toys, which are all over the place. No, Betty, we will “never have our first fight.” I am counting on you to prevent that by seeing the ultimate truth in whatever opinion I hold on anything—such as pajamas. Why are you so stuck on pajamas? It makes me uncomfortable to think of you sleeping in pajamas and whatever else you wear, as implied. I think of LeBerthon in his ski suit. I am open to persuasion, however, but you will have to prove it to me along approved debating lines. Think of the poets, probably even Dante, I can summon to my side of the question. You will have only Edgar Guest and Longfellow (who slept in his beard, which is not the same thing) on your side. The angels—do you think they use pajamas?
I am sorry you prefer Fuzzwick to my middle name. I do not know wh
at that means. I wonder if you could be contemplating violence where my dignity is concerned. Do you intend to make of me one of those hapless American males with a funny name, such as Blondie’s husband, Dagwood? Beware, young woman, if so. It will go hard with you, and Mother Church will back me up, you know that, where discipline is involved, she is on the man’s side (that is what Don Humphrey likes about it and what Mary Humphrey doesn’t like). Now I am going to cut this off. I enclose a key to the apartment instead of putting it under the door. You keep it until you need it in May or June. Also some more mail—to show you what a big demand there is for authentic JFP on the market. (Actually, I am worried, but hope to lay up a few stories this winter, like squirrels bury nuts.)
I love you.
Jim
3
Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions?
December 4, 1945–January 26, 1946
Father Harvey Egan (“Dear Pere … you can get your checkbook out any day now.”)
Betty paid her first visit to Jim in St. Paul. She came by train from St. Cloud and spent a couple of days with him in relative chastity. In his letters, Jim began his campaign to drive home to her that he really did not intend to take a job. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly concerned about Don Humphrey’s situation of near homelessness and ever more disgusted by the failure of those who had the wherewithal to support him to come through with the goods.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 4, 1945
A few minutes before seven the next morning.
Dear Betty,
A line to let you know I love you. I am feeling terrible this morning, and a couple of times last night I wondered if I would make it. I was deadly tired when you left. I guess I was tired when you were here but didn’t know it with you to be near. In a few minutes I’ll take a bath and go to bed. I will take this, and Fr Egan’s letters, which I forgot to mail, downstairs first, though. I hope when we’re married and living here you won’t have such a tremendous effect on me, that it won’t seem too much like hell to leave you and go through the motions I have to at the hospital. I know you must be worn out too today and hope you will sleep. You did look pale when I left you or you left me last night. You must be healthy if you are going to carry your cross, which is me, successfully.
I love you this morning.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 5, 1945
My dear Betty,
I am up—it’s almost two—and have read your little letter and am very glad to find there’s nothing wrong. Sometimes it takes people two or three days to think things over, and I had been wondering if there’d been any cause for regrets. Had I done something all wrong? I’ve also been down for a quart of milk and six sweet rolls; the coffee is cooking now. In a few minutes I’ll sit down to one of my famous home-cooked meals—which I hope you didn’t find too rugged. I guess not, if you’ve not lost any weight. I am virtually recovered today. Yesterday I was still groggy from Monday night.
About the stars—why is it I’m a butterfly, and what does that mean? I am afraid it means the same old thing—fly-by-night, which is getting to be my middle name, and I had always thought, and thought others thought, I was fairly stable and all that. I can’t put my finger on just what it is, whether it’s because I don’t intend to sell insurance or work in a bank or because I wouldn’t dress up and play war with the rest of the fellows, or because I am a writer (if I am a writer) or what the hell it is. Anyway, I am getting touchy on the subject. Perhaps there is this much truth in it: I am worried about making a living, as I confessed to you again and again, because I won’t go about it in the ordinary way—eight hours out of my life daily so that the system may prosper and the crapshooters running it.
But I don’t think you want me to do that. If you do, it would be well to say so now. It is not something you can bring me around to in the name of “reform.” I have no intention of letting you go, but if you have that idea (and I can’t believe you have), I want you to get rid of it—else it will be worse than the War of Roses. My mother strove for years and years, with all things in her favor (five-day notices fluttering on the door), and she never won. I got little jobs, but she never won, and now she knows it. And, furthermore, I think it’s indecent of Sister Mariella, and whoever else thinks so, that you should marry some dumb farmer who’ll “make you a good husband”—for which I read “bull.” It is because of such arrangements that we have war and strife: people getting the barn painted and letting the living room moulder away with a vase of wax flowers and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. There is much truth in the line about if you have a loaf of bread, sell it and buy hyacinths for your soul. I am not really talking to you when I write this, I think and hope I’m not. I am only if in my nearsightedness I have missed the little signs that my regeneration includes prostitution on a job masking itself as “honest labor.” The jobs I had, in bookstores and the rest, were never honest. Not for me. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions or a worm fly a kite? Now I see I’ve run into a corner I never meant to get into and the whole idea here is one I know you and I don’t disagree on. I think I must just be threatening myself. […]
I got a fine letter from that unpredictable lady La Mariella (she does so many good things and says so many bad things—yes, the farmer business again). She sent a photo of a house, a long description of it, and even posed as a possibility that Don might teach a little at St B.’s, as the Reverend M. has been wanting to enlarge the art dept. I sent all this data on to Fr G., and I know he’ll go over to Don’s tonight and make him very happy with it.
It doesn’t take much of an opportunity to give Don all he needs (he caught deer with barbed wire fence when his family was living on the Catholic Worker Farm, Aitkin, Minn., and not just for fun, for they were hungry). I told you how he caught that chicken, remember? Sister M. mentions the possibility of Don finding work with an antique repairer in St Cloud (there’s only one, evidently, and it takes months to get things repaired). That’s what Don is doing now, for money. If he could live in this house (it’s owned by the postmistress, a Miss Uhte) and teach a little and work a little and paint a lot—that would be wonderful. He is the greatest Catholic painter since El Greco. He is a wood-carver, sculptor, and chalice maker (and ring maker). For money he has repaired antiques, worked in a foundry as a molder, carpentry, and in fact anything that has the vaguest connection with the plastic arts and crafts. His wife is a churchgoer in the worst Irish sense. She is very fine also, not much on housecleaning, however; she’d rather go to church. She looms rugs. And now I come to the part in this letter where I want to tell you:
I love you. […] Pax,
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 7, 1945
Dear Betty,
Friday, noon […]
And, returning to your letter of yesterday, don’t go telling Sr Mariella stuff, even in jest, like you’re going to be a stenographer and let me be great. We have to watch ourselves, else I am never going to be able to redeem myself in their eyes and stop being … a butterfly. I will, as you suggest, watch my greens. I ate an apple this morning, which is a green, isn’t it? I do not have time to be lugging lettuce and stuff like that up here and getting it combed down on a plate. I will wait for you to do that. By the way, since I’ve just thought it, I’ll mention it: I will make you a suit of lettuce underwear, cool, succulent, to match your skin. Your aunt seems to know all.1 All my worries about properly impressing your family are beginning to center on her. If I can get past her, I think, I’m in. […]
I love you.
Jim
CHARLES SHATTUCK
150 Summit Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota
December 7, 1945
Dear Chuck,
[…] I am living on the sixth floor of the Marlborough, once the showpiece of St Paul, on Fitzgerald’s famous Summit Avenue—which
he calls Crest in his notes—and it is falling to pieces, but I like it that way, high ceilings, wide doors, everywhere space being wasted, and my window gives me a look at the city, the countryside beyond on a clear day, and I like that too, as I believe I contracted a slight case of claustrophobia that year or so I was out of circulation. I have a phonograph and a coffeepot. I go from Ravel to Respighi to Rimski-Korsakov and back again. I get up when I feel like it, and sometimes when I don’t feel like it, and eat what I care to cook, which means usually coffee, rolls, hamburger, or soup.
I am within walking distance (easy) to the library and post office; spitting distance to the cathedral, the most formidable one I’ve seen; and equally close to the ghosty houses that Fitzgerald was so impressed by and me too. It is a funny thing: 599 Summit, where he wrote This Side of Paradise, is solid smoky vermilion stone like so many of the other old places along Summit, but—and a Freudian could do a thesis here—it is the first place which is cut into several apartments, a hard man would even call them “flats,” and so he was right up against what he couldn’t penetrate, the one colored kid in the schoolroom, and I guess that’s why he was always so acutely aware of the society he was never an integral part of and could write about it as though he were, but which he’d have to have been decayed inside to have been and hence would have lacked the energy to do anything about except yawn. (Take that sentence to the cleaners next time you go.)
Continuing with my report on myself, which nobody asked to hear, including you, I am also in love. I met a girl at St Benedict’s when I was up there a few weeks ago, a girl whose novel in manuscript Sr Mariella had sent me to read. She is a beautiful, simple writer, and I think you would like her writing. […] I expect we will be married in May. In September we expect to retire into the woods in the vicinity of St John’s and St Benedict’s. […]
