Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life
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Jim
HARVEY EGAN
December 26, 1961
Dear Fr Egan,
I got your note, and thanks, but I wasn’t myself for a few days, including yesterday; nothing serious, just not able to take nourishment, and had my hands full chauffeuring Betty and the children up and down the river.13 […] The last I saw (on Xmas Eve), people were circling around other people with flashbulbs and cameras, and that was all I saw yesterday when I called for Betty and the kids (I stayed in the car). “Ever think of pornography?” I said to them out of the side of my mouth on the first night. […]
I heard our bishop’s midnight Mass address last night on radio (a playback): pretty strong stuff. He figures the nation’s leaders, and not only this nation’s leaders but other nations’ leaders, are about ready to take the Bethlehem lesson to heart, having tried everything else, and if not now, then in centuries to come. By the way, he traded in the baby-blue Cad for a black Continental … […]
Word reaches me that Fr Godfrey14 was hard-hit by Pope John’s words on vernacular (or Latin), set “us” back fifty years.15 “Send ’em Worship! Send ’em Worship!” he cried, meaning Time magazine, and not Pope John, oddly enough. Ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. This pronouncement (of Pope John’s) changes nothing in my book. Could it be that I, of all people, am in touch with the mind of the Church?
Jim
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
February 1, 1962
Dear Leonard and Betty,
Your letter rec’d and passed on to the O’Connells. I feel that it requires an answer of some sort—that you ought to be kept in touch with the situation here. But, as we say in the spiritual life, you can’t give what you don’t have yourself, and I am not in touch myself. The truth is, of course, there’s nothing to be in touch with. But for what it’s worth:
Mary Humphrey, at Fr Fehrenbacher’s behest, had an evening at which, as it turned out, we not only got to meet a Hindoo but got to hear him lecture—for about an hour and a half, immediately after which I gave Betty the high sign and we got the hell out of the house. When we arrived, Mary was on the phone (you won’t like it, Susie told me when I inquired what was going on), calling The St Cloud Times, saying she had an Indian from India and an Indian from Onamia, and wouldn’t the paper like to photograph them together? Yes, a little while later, in comes Myron Hall and acts as though he expects everything will stop (by everything I mean the lecture) so he can get his picture. It didn’t stop, and I shook his hand (quickly) on the way out as I was leaving and expressed sympathy, for he had to sit there an hour with his camera hanging out before he could consummate his business. So much for that: the worst deal I’ve been exposed to, of its sort, and that is saying something. […]
Jim
In February, the production company MCA (Music Corporation of America) offered Jim a thousand dollars for a seven-year option on his short story “Defection of a Favorite” for a segment in its Going My Way TV series. Jim turned it down, saying he wanted control and a percentage of the profits. MCA doubled the offer to two thousand dollars and reduced the time to three years. Jim turned it down.
Journal, February 26, 1962
P. 545 Dictionary: firefly, any of several winged beetles whose abdomen glows with a phosphorescent light; the larvae and wingless females are called glowworms. Would be good description of women and children in family-life novel.
Journal, February 27, 1962
15 below 0. Car trouble, coming as it usually does, it seems—when we’re scraping the bottom. New battery, new spark plugs, and possibly more. This is a bad time—and I don’t see how we’ll get through it unless money comes from out of the blue … I feel completely out of touch with sources of possible income—and very close to sources of expense: car, rent, food, and so on. No mail again.
Journal, February 28, 1962
29 below 0. Had to call tow truck again this morning … Pinch is really on—in several ways: my work, my finances, my future. This has been a mean month.
The galleys of Morte D’Urban arrived on March 21, 1962.
CHARLES AND SUSAN SHATTUCK
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
April 3, 1962
Dear Chuck and Suzie,
[…] I often think that if I’d had someone like you to push me around, editorially, I might have accomplished much more, but then I can see it wouldn’t have been much of a life for you. Anyway, let me say, now that Accent’s gone16 (something I didn’t know until I went to St Louis), that I am very grateful to you, Chuck, for your help and all-around kindness—at which point I think of that tar I tracked into your house on my first visit to Urbana and of the big party you gave for me on my last visit, and thank you, too, Suzie.
Yes, I too am glad the novel’s over. I was through with it last December but had to take my place in line at Doubleday. A couple of other big authors ahead of me, Dick Nixon and Herman Wouk, were pushing the presses to the limit. It was not, […] I was told, that they were better known than JFP, but just happened to be there ahead of him. Well, the book has some rough places in it, such as it wouldn’t have if you’d seen it, or if more of it had been published in The New Yorker, but I am not unhappy with it. I feel pretty sure it’s immortal—just how immortal is the question. […] Just*
Jim
26
The day was like other days, with the author napping on the floor in the middle of the afternoon
April 12, 1962–September 1962
Jim and Morte D’Urban
Journal, April 12, 1962
Could I, by next year at this time, be working on family-life novel?
Jim and Betty went to Minneapolis to hear Robert Lowell read at the Walker Art Gallery (Walker Art Center) and spent an evening with him, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Berryman, Allen Tate, James Wright, and others.
ROBERT LOWELL
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
April 21, 1962
Dear Cal,
Very good of you to write and to say such nice things about my work: it is not as good as you say, of course, but as you or Ted1 (I don’t remember which one) once said, after a long discussion of Faulkner and K. A. Porter, What the hell—it’s only prose. […]
Betty and I both thought you read very well—I love that somewhat wheedling tone you use when taking the voice of the people as in “Skunk Hour”—and your comments were quite printable: I wonder, though, as I tried to tell you, how many can savor that sort of thing, not that you can do anything about it and many people, to bring them together, I mean. I wonder if you know how you sound and look in such a gathering as the one at the Walker Gallery, very foreign, I imagine: Betty remarked how alike the people and the pictures were. I can’t get used to seeing people wearing blue jeans, and in shirtsleeves, and I think it’s going out, thank God. I see one of those bastards, with a beard, and tricked out like that, and give thanks I’m not teaching creative writing. That is what I’ll have to do, though, if the book doesn’t do well. I have even thought of going out on tour, playing the Catholic college circuit, exhibiting myself as Tom Thumb, or the Biggest Horse in the World, lecturing on Evelyn Waugh, the Prairie Years, Graham Greene, A Crash Program for God, and Luke Hart, Friend of Prelates. That is all I’ve been able to work out in my mind, so far (and Luke, by the way, is Supreme Navigator, or something of the sort, of the Knights of Columbus).
Everything depends on the success of the book—our getting out of here, the kids getting an education, and so on, everything—but I wonder. I had hoped that with a novel I could have a different feeling about Doubleday, for instance. I get ecstatic notes every month or so, but no replies to my questions concerning typography, revisions, and money, and then more ecstatic notes. I would like to ask, again, if the changes I made on the galleys will be carried out (a ridiculous question, you might think), but I can’t; I break down and sit
staring into space. I am on a desert island, and I am down to my last bottle: I don’t know whether to send my last message today, tomorrow, or maybe next month. Oh, well, but that is my state of mind. […]
About a blurb, Cal, nice of you, or mighty white of you, as Father Urban says in the book. (I have Fr U. get into a small car accident and have his car repaired at Cal’s Body Shop, which I thought might appeal to you: I don’t know why.) But you haven’t read the book, and you might not like it all together, and if you wrote a blurb and I sent it to Doubleday, they would lose it or use it on somebody else’s novel, and so I’ll send you a copy of the book when it’s ready, and if you feel moved, and not just from kindness, at that time, we’ll see.
Let us hear from you again, and, yes, if I come to New York, I’ll stay at your place. My best to Elizabeth and Harriet, and tell them to stop picking on each other.
Jim
Journal, April 25, 1962
Visit from a Joan Thomas at the house this morning, author of ten novels, with agents, creative writing courses, and so on—unpublished—and wanted me to help her … Needed money, she said, and seemed to think it could be got from publishers. I said she was fortunate not to have children—and she quickly assured me that children are a blessing. It all added up. She said Fr Casey is her “spiritual director.” She is one of those, I think, who feel the facts of life and art are two different things and is out of touch with both.
Jim had struggled for weeks trying to write a review of Gordon Zahn’s German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control (Sheed & Ward, 1962) and found himself contemplating again the German character, one of his preoccupations.
Journal, May 12, 1962
Wondering if I could someday (if I live long enough) write a War and Peace novel about the 2nd World War, with the main characters Germans, rise of the Nazis and fall of what good there was in German politics—very little, I think. I must try to understand the position of the army—a holy order of men, to the Germans, it seems. In a world of bullies, may God bless ours—is all it comes down to, I think. Fear, fear, fear.
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
[May 1962]
St Cloud
Dear Leonard and Betty (if I may be so bold),
[…] St Cloud State is spreading out. It has played hell with what was the best part of town, and though the editor of The St Cloud Times keeps talking about the increase in payroll, it does seem too bad. Still, very few people realize it, and the student body must be humored, which I guess is the best reason to do away with trees and greenery, to make the terrain more and more like where the students come from. There is now a turnstile in the library, for checking users in and out, and that has made me reluctant to be seen there (I used to go there and read Publishers Weekly and Variety).
I did a review of Gordon’s book for The Reporter, but it was, after being set up in galley proof, returned to me: it was believed I was being too hard on the German hierarchy, a grand bunch of fellows if ever there was one, and there were many, in Hitler’s Germany. Review then went to the Saturday Review, on Gordon’s suggestion, and was returned to me with a printed rejection, the first of those I’ve had in fifteen years or so. I am now thinking of submitting it to Fr Egan for his church bulletin. Very frustrating to one of our best loved, to say nothing of immortal, authors.
What else? My book is scheduled for September 21,2 is not, so far as I know, being sought by major book clubs, the movies, or Broadway. […]
Jim
JACK CONROY
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
July 23, 1962
Dear Jack,
Glad to hear from you. I did get your jeering postcard from Moberly. I was never one to underestimate the strength and cunning of the Greyhounds, but then the Hawks, when the backfield was sober, weren’t so bad in their day. Myself, I was never a student of Quincy College* but only of the Academy (we were known as the Little Hawks), and so did not play against the Greyhounds. I have shed blood in Missouri, though, in three sports, baseball, football, and basketball—in Hannibal and Monroe City. Actually, I never did very well in Missouri, come to think of it—or, come to think of it, anywhere else. Oh, a star, yes, but nothing like the star I am in our literary firmament. About my book, I don’t know whether it’ll win, lose by a short head, or run way out of the money. For the last year, I thought I’d really pulled it off—done almost as well as I’d hoped I would—but lately I’ve begun to doubt it. Maybe it’s too odd a world I describe, to go over big. I don’t know. […] Just — Jim
HARVEY EGAN
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
July 27, 1962
Dear Fr Egan,
Glad to hear you like the book—gladder perhaps than you would think, for though I would still back it against your “Pass this one” or “Not today,” I would prefer to bet with you. In the past week, I have had several good signs, word of a favorable comment from Evelyn Waugh, which Doubleday will doubtless be using; a nice long paragraph in Publishers Weekly, in their forecast department, although it does say the book is too underplayed for mass appeal; and your comment. At least it will not be left at the post, the book. I’ll simply tell No boy (my jockey) to see that the horse doesn’t get bumped at the start and boxed in at the eight pole. Anyway, your note made me feel pretty good.
The seats for the Yankees look good to me. How far will Roger Maris be standing from Mickey Mantle? That is what Hughie asked me today (he wants to see Maris, he says, more than Mantle). We have a new bat autographed by Mickey, but it seems to be a little heavy for the boys, and so I’ve just purchased another, autographed by somebody who calls himself Crackerjack. […] Katherine should’ve been a boy as she has a lot of power at the plate. As for me, my arm is pretty well gone, but I have a lot of savvy and am getting by on that and luck. […]
Jim
EVELYN WAUGH
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
August 14, 1962
Dear Mr Waugh,
I didn’t realize you’d been sent galleys and am all the more grateful for the favorable comment.3 No, I haven’t been on Christian-name terms with you in the past, and, to answer your question, it was the bishop’s ball that broke Fr Urban’s old spirit. I hope you don’t mean I should’ve gone into the medical aspects of his case—injuries to the head (and spine) are very hard to diagnose, and though this would have been easy enough in fiction, I preferred to skip it. Perhaps you mean more than that. As I saw it, and see it, the change in Fr Urban had to come from without—a rude wind. Perhaps the book loses by it, the involuntary quality of the change, but otherwise there could have been none in Fr Urban, in my hands. I’m afraid you’re right about my being more of a short-story writer than a novelist. I know I don’t like to think of taking on another novel, though I must. Some of my devoted readers among the clergy have been after me to try a nonclerical book, and maybe I will. […] Best wishes.
Morte D’Urban was published by Doubleday on September 14, 1962.
JACK CONROY
412 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
September 18, 1962
Dear Jack,
Thanks for sending on your review (and the one from the Tribune, about which I won’t say more). You were good to me, Jack, and you wrote a beautiful, creative review, doing everything you could for me in the space and doing it so that it was a pleasure to read as writing. […] The Mpls Tribune man slugged me good on Sunday: I think he regarded the book as a threat to earnestness in business and the arts in Mpls, and humor with a capital H, as in HA HA, and so he called it banal, said I eschewed “rugged plot”—what the hell, I wouldn’t mention it, but people see me on the street here and look away as if I’d been taken in adultery with a chicken. The Sunday Visitor, Catholic weekly, the other organ of book reviewing that enters St Cloud, also blasted me. […]
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
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br /> Between the Bookends
September 1962
Publication day was marked by two events, a phone call at 4:00 a.m. from Johnny Berryman, poet, critic, University of Minnesota professor teaching this year at Brown, in his cups, and reading the book, and saying he’d phoned (from Providence) to tell me that a night letter was coming, which did, in fact, arrive. The day itself was like other days, with the author napping on the floor in the middle of the afternoon, and then in the evening there was a surprise party preceded by any number of telltale clues, Betty not going to bed at her usual time, having her hair combed, and wearing shoes, plus the porch light being on, and somebody had even flushed the toilet. A gay evening, Guinness mixed with beer. Today no mail at all, and so it goes. I am much cheered by your predictions of success and would still not bet against the book, but let’s face it, it’s being slammed into the rails on the turns. Still nothing from The New Yorker, and so I’m not moving from my cabin door. Sometimes I think I’m dead—ever get that feeling? All for now.
Jim
27
As a winner, let me say you can’t win, not on this course
October 23, 1962–August 29, 1963
Jim and Leon Edel, National Book Award ceremony, 1963