by J.F. Powers
Jim
Jim had become friends at Ann Arbor with Michael Millgate, then a teaching fellow, later a biographer, critic, and teacher.
MICHAEL MILLGATE
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud
March 28, 1957
Dear Michael,
[…] I am writing this from my new office in downtown St Cloud. […] I have no telephone, though things are really hopping here, what with lighting my pipe and going to the toilet and scratching myself. I am in the same building with the Girl Scouts, not a going concern in St Cloud, where the Camp Fire Girls dominate, with two attorneys, and something called the Western Adjustment and Inspection Company. I keep thinking this is just the spot for a small mail-order rubber-goods and pornography business and that I am the man for it.
I have just finished Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which I enjoyed, and have just finished not finishing Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter. It took me half the book to find out that it is worthless. Such books, and Nancy Mitford’s, serve only to impress me with the genius of Evelyn Waugh. When they are bad, they are horrid.
Also Sean O’Faolain’s book on modern writers, I’ve been going through. He does the job that has been needed on Faulkner and that no American, presumably, knows enough to do. It doesn’t take much to make us pious. […]
That horse whose name you were trying to remember that night at my place was Freebooter, I think. I have nothing for the National tomorrow, and if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do about it. Very frustrating, life with the Lutherans. […]
Jim Powers
KERKER QUINN
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
March 28, 1957
Dear Kerker,
[…] Jacksonville was obsessed with basketball, but I did have a nice hour in the cemetery and several hours with the old priest who baptized me and who hadn’t seen me since but who has followed my career as a writer closely. Quincy was worse. I spent five hours there, three in loneliness and two with the mother of an old friend. And so much for that.
Thanks again for your hospitality, and please let Chuck and Suzie know I appreciate that bash they put on for me.
Jim
And please tell Chuck that with a few choice words he ended my career, at least for a while, as a playwright.
Jim and Betty were told that St. Cloud State College would be taking the old red house by eminent domain. It was to be demolished and the land converted into a parking lot. Jim’s story “Look How the Fish Live” is based on this. Around the same time, Jim suffered a severe attack of appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital, where he had an emergency appendectomy, the worst ordeal known to man, in his view.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud
May 2, 1957
Dear Katherine Anne,
[…] We must soon move. We have hated it here in St Cloud, but we have loved being in this old house, which is now 101 years old, the oldest in town, painted red, barn red, with green trim, and owned by two maiden ladies, one of whom is failing in health and the other is living in California. First, ten days ago, an appraiser visited us, with no explanations except that he’d been sent by the owners’ insurance agent. I wrote and rec’d reassurances that the house would be retained for some time to come. Ultimately, it would be consumed by the Teachers College across the street (they have made dormitories out of two imposing residences since we’ve lived here), and there is always something in the newspapers about their needing money to expand. Recently, the “Teachers” part of the name has been dropped, which makes it St Cloud State College, more in line with its true purpose, though preparing teachers is still an important part of its work, and this change is expected to aid faculty members in getting their books published—I am paraphrasing the press.
Well, yesterday we heard that Jan. ’58 might be the latest we could occupy the house. This, in effect, with two children in school, means we’ll have to move and be somewhere else in the fall. We are hoping it will somehow be put off, that we can stay here another school year, but it is not likely: there is the career of a young college president to be considered too (he is also president of the local chamber of commerce); the more he builds, the more likely he is to get the call to a better pulpit, say, Iowa State, and so on up the ladder. Of course I am prejudiced. If one could believe that what is going on across the street is education, it would be different. But here are country boys and girls continuing their high-school life, never, I think, encountering the idea of a university, or anything like it, in their entire education.
Well, we aren’t the only ones soon to be ousted. The squirrels, both red and grey, go about their business with no thought of anything but their stomachs and next winter. There must be between ten and twenty squirrels resident on the property (the red ones were in the walls of the house until I came and fought them back and sank wire in concrete around all the porches, stoning, trapping, shooting, a man possessed for one whole summer). So much for that. We expect we’ll take a terrible beating on appliances and furniture when we move, for we’ll sell most of it. Probably we’ll try Ireland again.
I rented an office downtown a couple of months ago and have been doing very well with my work there in the afternoons. I found that I could work then. I had got the idea that the only time was night for me, but this was due in great part to children, I know now.
I haven’t been going down to the office since Saturday, though, for on Sunday I had to go to the hospital and have my appendix removed. I returned home on Tuesday and am still feeling the stitches and also the surprise and indignity of it: I have been lucky in the past, escaping the everyday illnesses and accidents. So my step is slow these days, and the Old World is ahead of me, and at times I don’t feel up to it, to going abroad with four children, two more than last time, when I was five or six years younger, and settling down again. Still, I know it’s the right thing to do. It is a terrible fact that there is no one I know and respect who, living here, in Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, or anywhere else, isn’t unhappy, an exile already, and becoming more and more of one as American society changes for the worse. All kinds of problems abroad, of course, but at least the children can get an education before it’s too late: however much I wouldn’t want mine to suffer needlessly, I would like to see them educated. Betty, who thinks she is more attached to things here than I am but sees the folly of remaining, has printed a card and put it over the doorway in the kitchen, to steady her. It reads:
In exitu Israel de Egypto,
domus Jacob
de populo barbaro
[…]
Jim
Journal, May 31, 1957
DECAY: Old men, who a few years ago were wearing light canary and green and blue and white sport shirts of transparent nylon, I see this year are wearing caps of same hues. Bet they’re nylon. Have strap in back like a wool cap. Wonder if they would wear a sign saying, “I’m an old Jackass.” Give sign as premium as they used to give you a bat or ball when you bought a new suit at Myers Brothers.
Before leaving St. Cloud for Ireland, the Powers family traveled by train to Albuquerque to visit Jim’s parents, his brother and sister, and their families. It was a bitter, unhappy time.
MICHAEL MILLGATE
June 3, 1957
Dear Michael,
[…] Your coming trip sounds brutal to me, but then you are young and can always console yourself with the thought that you’re just passing through. Perhaps I’m unusually sensitive at the moment: we—Betty and I and the four children—are going to Albuquerque later this month, by train: what a way to die! My mother and father, brother and sister, live there. I hate the Southwest, the dust and disorder. Priestley, in Journey Down a Rainbow, is right.
Sorry you can’t make it to St Cloud, but I think it may be just as well. Our life is breaking up here. The old house we live in is doomed, the lovely grounds probably scheduled t
o be a parking lot, all this part of St Cloud Teachers College’s expansion program. We must get out by January 1958, but have decided our flight should not be in winter, and have booked passage on the Britannic leaving New York on October 3; next stop Cobh. We hope to rent a house with at least five bedrooms, not far from Dublin and on the sea if possible. I am formulating my ad for The Irish Times: Immigrant returning requires … […] I had it planned that I should finish my novel and then go to Ireland. I love my little office. But it’s not to be, and I must try to dissect the corpus of my novel for a story or two and still not kill the thing. This is old stuff for me, and I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do it again.
All for now, then, Michael. I hope to see you in Ireland. I don’t know what my address will be there, but will drop you a line when we find a place. In any case, I am always to be found in the ten-shilling enclosure at Leopardstown Racecourse. A pint of plain is your only man.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
July 8, 1957
Dear Fr Egan,
Today I am 40, and so far no signs of life beginning. However, I was born around 5:00 p.m., as I understand it, and it’s only about two now. Greetings, in any case. […]
Now about this long journey to Albuquerque—don’t ever do it. Very rough going on the Rock Island, failure of air-conditioning partway coming back, proximity of the little people hard to take, seeing what they eat and read, and returning on the Super Chief, which ain’t nothing but a train except for the Turquoise Room and sweaty odors wafting through the sleeping cars. For the best in travel, I suggest the Enterprise, first class, running between Cork-Dublin-Belfast. You know I often eat a Clark Bar at 4:00 p.m., taking it with a glass of cold water, and called in vain for some on the Super Chief. In Ireland, I switch to Cadbury’s Turkish Delight.
Suffering from the heat here, though we now have something approaching welcome relief. I spend my time at home waxing my trunks and remind myself of Noah somehow preparing for the Flood. We have three trunks and can use at least two more of the type (wardrobe); I find them at the Goodwill. I have washed off all the stickers except one: Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo.
I’ve said nothing about the main thing here: mosquitoes, the worst in the memory of men. I have bought a spray you pump up, have enough DDT coming to provide 400 gallons of fluid, and now, on top of this, we are having a professional do the place with one of those big machines. That was one thing, the one thing, about New Mexico: sitting out under the stars and not being bitten by anything. But I feel a little effete mentioning mosquitoes to you, for though you resent insects, you are still a Minnesotan—and I get the impression it’s sort of chicken or something to give mosquitoes too much thought. But as it says on the first bottle of spray I bought: “Who enjoys your yard, you or the mosquitoes?” This struck me as a very powerful line, one upon which to act. But the bottle is all gone (and at $2.50 a quart), and I step very lively as I pass between house and garage; the children are kept indoors. […] I must do justice to the mosquito in literature, for it plays a large part in our life here.
But I ramble. I trust you are finding your new assignment pleasant.3 I imagine by now, a week there, you’ve got the place pretty well organized. Always a few things to iron out when you first take over, isn’t that right? Now, I don’t know how you fathers do it, but here’s how I do it …
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
St Cloud
August 1, 1957
Dear Fr Egan,
No office today; too hot. […] Del4 has had it, from me. I sympathized with manager Glickman when he said, “Listen, Flanagan…” […] All for now.
Jim
20
Scabrous Georgian, noble views of the sea, turf in the fireplaces
October 14, 1957–February 13, 1958
Hugh and Jim, Port of New York, 1957
The six-day voyage on the Britannic was brutal, thanks to storms and high seas on the North Atlantic, seasickness, and the Asiatic flu. Jim and Betty arrived in Ireland in bad shape, mentally and physically. While still in the United States, they had arranged to rent St. Stephens, a furnished house in Greystones, for the time it would take to find a permanent place.
BIRDIE AND AL STROBEL; BERTHA SEBERGER
Ireland
12:40 a.m., October 14, 1957
St Cloud
6:40 p.m., October 13, 1957
Dear Bertie, Al, G’ma,
Here we are with our dying fire, into our second bottle of Canadian Club (compliments of Doubleday & Company), and I’ve just finished, with much help from Betty, my ad for The Irish Times, which I’ll be dropping off tomorrow when I go to Dublin.
Wanted to rent house in possible surroundings for long period by unpopular author and family. Greystones to Dublin. 5/6 bedrooms. Cooker, immersion. View of sea? Require furniture, expect to have to collect it, but would consider furnished house if this would not mean eyesores, radiogram veneers, contemporary. State rent and other interesting details in first letter.
Well, there it is. It is calculated to catch the eye of that exceptional person who would not ordinarily reply to a blind ad but who, on reading this one, would suddenly decide to move out and rent it to us. […]
As you can imagine from this, we are not in the best of spirits—I speak loosely—and whatever happens from here on can’t help being better. We have had hard times ever since we left the Britannic, and the last two days on it, with each of the kids being sick with the flu and finally Betty in Cork, where we stayed another day, not according to plan, so she could recover. Even now, everyone isn’t well, Hugh and Boz still very much off their feed. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for three days on account of Hugh—the first night in Cork he started off in bed with me and then tired of me, as men will, I’m told, and I ended up on the floor between two comforters, short ones at that, with my head sticking out one end and my feet the other. (Betty, should your question concern her, was in the other twin bed, and very narrow twin beds they were, about what we’d call an army cot.) And so it goes. […]
Jim
You amaze us with your salesmanship. I refer to the way you’ve been selling our things. I am most impressed by the sale of the watercooler. I am the only person I know who would be tempted by it. […]
MICHAEL MILLGATE
St Stephens, Victoria Road
Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland
October 23, 1957
Dear Michael,
Hoped by now that I’d be writing from a more permanent address, but we are still at the above, having arrived here on the 12th, with no prospect of improving ourselves. […] I have more or less despaired of finding what I had in mind: a small Georgian residence in surroundings and view of the sea. I just sit here with the Telefunken. I celebrated Trafalgar Day on the Light yesterday, the return of the queen to London, and today listened to Victor Silvester and His Ballroom Orchestra, an old favorite of mine (he makes Guy Lombardo sound like Count Basie). And of course it’s nice having The Observer and Sunday Times right after Mass on Sunday. Beauty we have too, the sea—snot green under the sun today—and Bray Head and the Sugar Loaf Mts. Stilton cheese and Double Diamond in this Crown Colony and Jersey cream. But … but this isn’t it, Michael, and I’m not inviting you over. We would like to see you here when and if we find the place. (Betty is off seeing an agent now who advertises that he covers the waterfront. Words, words.) Let us hear from you.
Jim
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
St Stephens, Victoria Road
Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland
October 29, 1957
Dear Leonard and Betty,
Betty has given you a good picture of our life here. I can mention two more positive items. Haircuts are two bob (two shillings or 28¢); 1⁄6 (one shilling, sixpence) for lads like Boz. Do you want me to get an estimate on bearded gentlemen? The other thing is Jersey cream and Irish oatmeal. I ha
ven’t made oatmeal a feature of my life in the past, but here I look forward to it. Of course radio you know about, the highbrow 3rd Programme on BBC, of course, but I have a weakness for such music from “Grand Hotel, the Palm Court,” which means “Tell Me Pretty Maiden” and “I Leave My Heart in an English Garden,” medleys from Gilbert and Sullivan, “Zigeuner,” and such, just the thing for the middle-aged tea toper …
I am full of questions about the Movement. I do hope you’ll draw closer to it, Leonard, and not be the outsider you were, appearing only rarely at the smaller gatherings. Make a practice of dropping in on the Humphreys and O’Connells and others I want the latest on. Think of yourself as a routeman or roundsman, as the expression is here. If necessary, go to work for Jewel Tea or Watkins Products. You may not sell a lot, but you will get around regularly, and no one need know your real business—which is news, news, news! About payment, well, you name it. Maybe legman is the term for what I want you to be. Especially Don needs close covering. He’s tricky, as everybody knows. Even when I was there on the spot, too much escaped me, and unless Mary is involved in the opposite point of view—unless it is to her personal advantage that the truth come out—you can expect little help from that quarter. Then, too, where you are concerned, she is inclined to be skittish, if you know what I mean. You are familiar, I hope, with the theory some of us hold that women are both fascinated and horrified by you. Mary is not the only one so affected; your wife is another; and there are others nearby. In fact, I can’t think of a single one who doesn’t qualify. You are the lion in that little jungle. There is a sudden stillness when you come nigh. My reports, such as they are, on Don haven’t been much. I learn he is limping about; I learn he has worked Sputnik into his repertoire. The latter I had known instinctively. I still don’t know what it is, what it’s for, only that it somehow serves Don’s ends on earth …
