Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life

by J.F. Powers

  Dear Birdie and All,

  While Betty is doing the dishes, I’ll add a few lines to this letter that we keep neglecting to mail. Today there is a full gale blowing, and my study, which faces the sea, is taking in a certain amount of wind and water: the rain gets in somehow. But the kitchen and playroom are warmer, which may account for the presence there of Betty and the boys. For two days we couldn’t have a fire in the playroom. The wind was wrong, and the place filled up with smoke. So it goes: all difficulties we can put up with but would not want to do so for a lifetime, I think. […]

  We had a good evening with the O’F.’s9 the other night. They both thought that we’d be all right once we got some proper help. That may be. The mornings here are the worst time: getting up the boys, getting off the girls, getting the fires going. There are periods of almost solid comfort—when the wind is right, when the children are occupied or asleep. We are little by little, by hook and crook, making my study a place to hole up in. Here we have the radio, here is the best fireplace for burning turf, and the two chairs are improved by putting foam rubber cushions over the ruptured springs (the foam rubber cushions from two other chairs in the living room). […]

  Thanks again to you and to Nana for all the kind words about the Reporter story. You were and were not in it, Birdie; it is the usual mixture of fact and fiction and should not be read for anything but entertainment. The requirements of art demand that you do violence sometimes to the facts as they took place, or interpret them differently, or make up incidents and conjure up characters that life itself, being such an erratic artist, seldom provides.

  Jim

  HARVEY EGAN

  PHONE=84102

  Ard na Fairrge

  Mount Salus

  Dalkey, County Dublin

  December 13, 1957

  Dear Fr Egan,

  […] Glad to hear—indirectly—that people are reading my books in your waiting rooms. Don’t forget to order plenty of Prince in the Image edition for your vestibule, and tell your friends. Unfortunately, I am not available for autographing parties, but send my best to one and all.

  It is getting dark, around four in the afternoon, and I have the typewriter on a Schweppes case parked in front of the turf fire. This morning I made a stand for the Christmas tree, which is set up in the billiard room. We have bought one string of lights (twelve bulbs instead of the eight we know in the U.S.), a few ornaments, and probably will keep adding more to cover the bareness. Everything we do reminds us that we were awfully free with our hard-earned possessions, having given away our lights, stand, ornaments. I call it detachment. […]

  Sean and Eileen O’Faolain were over last Sunday evening, a good session, and Eileen has been working to find us a maid. It now appears we’ll have one right after Xmas, use fill-ins until then.

  We have been suffering from homesickness (without having a home), Betty and I, that is. The kids seem happy. The girls are gone from 8:30 until 5:00 daily; half day on Saturday; and are doing all right in school, after finding catechism and arithmetic very advanced at first. They wear green outfits and go by train to and from Killiney, where the school is (Convent of the Holy Child Jesus, apparently an order more English than Irish with laywomen—they call them “mistresses”—doing most of the teaching). Under the patronage of the Abp of Dublin (McQuaid). I am smoking Mick McQuaid tobacco.

  For Xmas, I got them badminton racquets, etc., and think it’ll be possible to play in the billiard room (it measures 38 by 14); Hugh a tricycle; Boz a large wooden train, a locomotive, that is, that he can sit on. Boz already has a chain-driven tricycle; Hugh a wheelbarrow. What Boz really wants is cords and plugs, the electrical equipment he had in St Cloud. […]

  Write. Merry Xmas from us all.

  Jim

  CHARLES AND SUSAN SHATTUCK

  Ard na Fairrge

  Mount Salus

  Dalkey, County Dublin

  Xmas 1957

  Dear Chuck and Suzie,

  Thanks for your soothing compliments on the story, Chuck. Nobody’s mean so much to me. This is our address for the next year—it was to have been a three-year lease, but I got cold feet at the prospect—with no other prospects, however. Not at all pleasant to realize I don’t know my own mind: however ignorant I am, I’ve always known that in the past. I have not taken to drink or anything, but I did subscribe to Time magazine, and I’d say that certifies me.

  House large, Georgian, scaly-walled affair, with tremendous views of the sea, we have turf in the fireplaces, and I understand the cottage where Bernard Shaw lived is a block farther up this hill we’re on, but I can’t get up the strength to get up there and look at it. If you lived there, I think I might make it; Cyril Cusack, the actor, lives close by, according to the owners of this house (who have moved into a flat, not caring for the breezes), and is a friend of theirs, and we’ve seen Sean O’Faolain once, but there seems to be a shortage of outgoingness, if that’s a word. I feel like the late Aga Khan toward the end, without his padding. Best to you both.

  Betty and Jim

  DON AND MARY HUMPHREY

  Christmas 1957

  Dear Don and Mary,

  […] A word about Christmas. I think Betty took it harder than I did, being away from home. Now and then I’d think of the old house—which waited all year to be in style, with its red and green—and feel a dart of pain, some scene, some room, some noise or other, gone, gone, gone. But I didn’t encourage myself along these lines, and now Christmas is all over again—for good, I sometimes think, for me. The kids, I think, had a good time in their youth. We managed to get in quite a bit of stuff, toys and games, and tonight we all had dinner together (Betty and I have been eating in my study, not being able to stand the meals with them), and the plum pudding flaming with Jamaica rum in a darkened room was such a success that we had to do it three times. The turkey, unfrozen, was good; mushrooms and chestnuts in the dressing; and so on. I mention it because, as I said to Betty, I don’t often have such a meal, not as often as I used to, hence my comparative thinness. I am still soft, Don—never fear—but I am thin-soft. Christmas, however, didn’t really come. The weather has something to do with it: in the forties and fifties, some sun, some rain, some fog, some sun, and so on. Church was harrowing, very crowded, and constant coming and going to the Communion rail, no sermon, one song; not just uninspiring but depressing, like a bargain basement with more people than bargains.

  I went out looking for an office the other day, in the next town, Dun Laoghaire, or Kingstown, as it used to be, and ran into a literary house agent, or auctioneer, as they’re called here. He had a letter from Bernard Shaw on the wall of his office (having sold Shaw’s cottage in Dalkey). We have an appointment for next week to look at a room over a bookmaker’s premises, the bookmaker (P. Byrne) being the landlord—which could be expensive in the long run, I suppose.

  All for now, Don. I don’t have much incentive to write. We did receive one card (Palmquists) from the Movement and were glad to get it.

  All for now.

  Jim

  Next day, Boxing Day. One year ago tonight we had our gala party. How long ago that seems now. Celebrated today at Leopardstown with Sean O’Faolain, who has a car and drove us to the races. Afterward tea and cake at his house and conversation, mostly about America. […]

  The next day (Dec. 27). I’m having trouble getting to the post office (which anyway was closed yesterday) with this, but I am glad. For this morning we hit the jackpot: letters and enclosures from Hyneses and O’Connells. I placed them unread at my right hand as I ate a good breakfast of bacon, oatmeal, fruit bread, and tea. Then I retired to my study, and bit by bit—taking about an hour—I got through them, savoring every line. Jody, using two mediums, made it all very vivid to us. And how I’d like to hear Em on Rome. His letter is full of it, and I am almost sold on going there—as a surprising result. I keep hoping, Don, that you’ll somehow be able to make it over here this fall. All for now: I must get back to the letters, ple
nty of juice and deep-down goodness in them yet. My blessings, then, upon you one and all.

  JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL

  December 28, 1957

  Dear Joe and Jody,

  Here it is Saturday night with everybody gone to bed but me and the radio and the turf fire. […] I am smarting from a card I rec’d today from my friend Haskins (who spoke up for the common man last summer, you may remember, one evening at our house), who, referring to my Christmas story in The New Yorker,10 says: “A potboiler, no?” Such blindness, coupled with such impertinence, is hard to take. […] One just doesn’t take up with such people, but having done so long ago, one doesn’t just write them off. What one would like to do is cut off their balls, lovingly, that is, and shake their hand in friendship … […]

  Glad to hear Don made it out. There is something very good about Don coming, unannounced out of the night in winter. He used to scratch at the screen in my study. On the other hand, there’s something awful about Don not showing up after announcing he’s coming over, and never a word of explanation. So look out for that.

  And now to Jody. We got a terrific lift out of her part of the letter, both the account of an evening in the Movement and her sketches. I call that talent, literary or not; the lovely still life. I do hope she continues along this line. I want the whole damn gallery. We had a letter from Em in the same mail with yours, and I find I can’t get enough of that photo of him and the pope. I keep looking at it; pornography was never so sweet in my youth. Pope and Anti-Pope, I call it, or More Popish Than the Pope. We can all be proud of Em, and I meant to tell him so in my next letter, which will be coming very soon. Don’t think I haven’t lamented to Betty that we had to be away from the scene this fall. The Movement is really jumping. I hope you aren’t so blind that you can’t see that. You are very fortunate to be living in this time in that place … […] Now I must close.

  Jim

  That winter, the weather was said to be the worst in Ireland in sixty years. Drafty, high ceilinged, and absent “a little thing called central heating,” Ard na Fairrge possessed a deadly chill such as Jim and Betty (and the children) had never experienced.

  FRED AND ROMY PETTERS

  Ard na Fairrge

  Mount Salus

  Dalkey, County Dublin

  [early January] 1958

  Dear Fred and Romy,

  We were so glad to hear from you, and I know I thought many times of your living room during the Christmastime, of the trees I’d seen there and the one you probably had. It will be a sad day for you, if it ever comes, when you have to do with a commercial tree. […]

  This is a Saturday afternoon with a gale blowing, the sea looking like a picture in an old book of photographs, rough, grey, the only things missing a destroyer or two and a U-boat. […] Betty has taken the last week pretty hard, the cold, I mean. It has been down to 25, which is quite an ordeal here, worse than 25 below in Minnesota—for, you see, we are heating by fireplace and in rooms with 12-foot ceilings (the one in the front hallway is as high as the house). Fortunately for all concerned, I don’t have to get up as early as the others in the morning, when it’s chilliest. […]

  Yes, Fred, do write and tell us of “a suitable house”—you know there isn’t one. We do miss you all, as I keep saying, have raised you all to your proper heroic proportions as dear friends and gentle people in our imaginations, but there are differences between us, after all, the biggest one being that we are out and you are in—I won’t go into the matter of which is better: there are disadvantages on both sides. But we are out in the picturesque cold. We don’t know what we’ll do. Best to you both, and please write.

  Jim

  JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL

  Ard na Fairrge

  Mount Salus

  Dalkey, County Dublin

  January 4, 1958

  Dear Joe and Jody,

  I must have a clock in my head like the Great Arcano, Master of Pace, for here it is Saturday night again and my thoughts turn toward you all, not that I haven’t thought of you from time to time in the last week … I wasn’t in the mood until tonight—and perhaps the mood is due to these little bottles of Mackeson’s stout that I am consuming against the morrow, which is Sunday, always a tough day for me, even without a sermon—I haven’t heard a sermon yet this time in Ireland, always drawing a curate, and they are, evidently, only trusted to read the announcements. Not a bad idea. It goes part of the way in the right direction. I don’t get those attacks of Sunday Sickness that I used to get. Now you understand why, in my nonviolent fashion, I have always opposed the vernacular. I did listen to Macmillan, the prime minister, earlier this evening, and so, you might say, I’ve had it—and in English at that—for this week.

  We are all pretty much as you would have found us last week, all but me in bed, the radio going, an Italian station, Radio Moscow having closed down. Listening to RM is like getting KUOM for me: obviously extremely decent people announcing, a note of concern in their voices, as if to say, you poor bastard, but we’re for you, we’re giving you this good high-class fare, not without stimulating lectures and news coverage and folk songs. I haven’t listened to RM much this time but must try to remember where it comes in. I used to like to hear them bragging about their dam, when we were here the last time. I wonder whatever happened to that little old dam, the biggest little old best dam in the world. I suppose it’s Sputnik now. […]

  Jim

  DON AND MARY HUMPHREY

  Ard na Fairrge

  January 31, 1958

  Dear Don and Mary,

  […] I do wish you could see something of the country; the furniture, silver, architecture, and what strikes me as the most impressive thing about Ireland: its stone walls, just everywhere you look, walls: man-hours that didn’t go up in smoke or pass away somehow but are still here to be seen, marching into each other and off into the country endlessly. I have thought many times of building a wall, and perhaps I am peculiarly sensitive to what’s involved; this vast achievement, much of it make-work in famine times, but a lot of it going right down into the sea and sound as if laid by God himself.

  No word lately from any correspondent in the Movement. I would like to hear from someone of course, but I am not the mental case I was about it some weeks ago. Something died in me then. I look out at the cold, cold sea, and I realize it’s going to be that way from now on, cold, cold, for old JF whether it’s the sea or the land, Ireland or America. I had a bad accident last night. Half rising out of my easy chair to kill off a madrigal singer on the radio, I slipped somehow and came down on the side of the chair, the armrest (not well padded) injuring my ribs near my heart. Quite painful still, and I’m not as fast as I was at my tuning (the radio). But otherwise we are all more or less well—and you might say I was wounded in action. How about cutting loose with another letter, Mary? We enjoyed your last very much—and that goes for one and all in the Movement. How about a group picture?

  Jim

  Journal, February 13, 1958

  Reading J. B. Morton’s Belloc and enjoying it. Must remember it when I begin next—family life—novel. For the high spirits—spirits, song, walks, people, conversation—which remind me how it was supposed to be when we got married … Hynes, if he ever really had this idea, confused it with the 4-H Club. But it needs handling in a book—and I think Flesh is the place for it. It will give the beginning—as a flashback—the foundation for contrast—that the book needs. And I want to do it. It gives me pleasure—sad pleasure—to think of it—this style we didn’t keep up and even forgot—at least I did until I read the book last night. My theory is that marriage kills it or it becomes something else*—that Belloc made it work because he had no wife later. That may be the secret of George’s success, too—at this.

  21

  The office is in Dublin, on Westland Row

  February 26, 1958–July 23, 1958

  Jane (Boz and Hugh in background), Greystones beach

  Jim rented an office in Dublin
, which improved his spirits, although not his ability to write much aside from letters. He spent his time away from home reading newspapers, studying racing forms, fixing up his office, wandering around Dublin, attending estate auctions, and ministering to his purchases: rubbing unguents into leather-bound books and cases, gluing furniture, and pursuing woodworm with a hypodermic needle primed with poison.

  HARVEY EGAN

  Ard na Fairrge

  Mount Salus

  Dalkey, County Dublin

  February 26, 1958

  Dear Fr Egan,

  […] I have put off replying to your last with the intention of writing my first letter from my new office to you, as I did last year about this time from my office in St Cloud. I have been in possession of the office since the 22nd of the month, but not established there because I haven’t been able to find the furniture. I sat through a whole auction unable to buy anything I wanted last Thursday. Today, however, I got the writing table—actually a dressing table—and a rug. I still lack a chair but hope to find one tomorrow in Dublin. I want a chair that I can rest in as well as work in: you might say that’s the story of my life as a writer. Tonight I attended a night auction in Dun Laoghaire and got no chair but something I wanted without seeing its purpose clearly. A writing box, so called; brass bound, about the size of an overnight bag, wood, with a desk-like surface in it that unfolds; thirty shillings; and engraved on a brass plate on the outside: “Major Talbot.” I have discovered that I take inordinate pleasure in auctions, even when I can’t afford to participate actively. I like to look at this old furniture; nothing, I think, shows better how far we’ve sunk in the last two or three hundred years.

  The office is in Dublin, on Westland Row, a few doors from where Oscar Wilde was born in 1854, a business district now, near the railroad station that serves the line that runs through Dalkey. I am on the top floor, back, with one window looking out in the direction of Trinity College; the top floor being the fourth and quite a climb. The previous tenant, a manufacturer’s agent by the name of MacEgan, has a partner by the name of Egan, and they have moved down to the ground floor (just too much for them, the climb with their sample cases). The rent: £5 a month. This is about a third less than the going rate, and I am there with the understanding that I vacate if a proper tenant is found. I think this unlikely, with times so hard here. It’s aesthetically the Dublin equivalent of my St Cloud hole. I have done practically nothing since coming to Ireland. The chips will be down from now on—or else.