by J. F. Powers
JFP
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
October 23, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
A line to let you know I rec’d your letter and the MS today. I have just finished the first chapter and without going any further would be willing to bet on the book and with more certainty on future books from Miss Wahl. The title, I think, is very bad: the first paragraph likewise. But after that it rides right along. […] There is a very rare honesty, it seems to me, about the first chapter. I am even a little awestruck by it. […] I like especially the ease with which Miss Wahl writes. Shattuck (of Accent) would love it. I have a private opinion ease comes easier with women. […] A woman I know, the mother of a close friend, works as a saleslady in a department store. She used to run out and rub the back of a hunchback, calling him “old huncher,” for good luck. I was fascinated with the idea of it, or not only the idea (the cruelty of it lurking at several removes) but this particular woman involved in it, but the more I said it in various ways to myself the further I got away from the art of the thing. […]
Best,
Jim
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 1, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
I think I ought to tell you the weekend of the 11th looks likely. […] I will say I think the book ought and—which is more—will be published. I would offer the services of my agents28 if Miss Wahl would care to have them. […] But we can talk about that too. I should want (if my criticism is to be abided by, and I am not sure I wish it so) to go through every chapter. Such things as the candle making, the Sister who presides there, should be the case more often in this book. I feel something about the place (St Benedict’s) is very wonderful and unique and deserves more going into than it gets. But, as before, more anon.
Best. Pax.
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 6, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
[…] I have been negotiating with buses and trains and nuns. […] It might be easier for all of us for you to leave the convent and for Miss Wahl to run away from home. […]
Pax.
Jim finally met Betty Wahl on Saturday, November 10, 1945, and proposed marriage to her two days later. She accepted.
2
With you it will be like being ten years old again
November 12, 1945–November 29, 1945
Betty Wahl
Jim
Jim and Betty’s engagement produced hundreds of letters. Jim’s were filled with love and yearning, even Betty’s way of saying grace before meals stirred him: “You say it with more beauty than anyone I’ve ever seen. It is perfect when you say it, like a dog digging a hole with his muzzle.” The engagement also brought Jim more frequently to the environs of St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a place awash with Catholic reform. Jim called the region “Big Missal Country,” a witty reference to the prayer book whose use was ardently promoted by liturgical reformers. Jim already had an association with the place through his radical and reforming Catholic friends whom he called “the Movement.” Chief among them was Emerson Hynes, who taught sociology at St. John’s and was, with his wife, Arleen, a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements. Though Jim was fond of these people, he took an increasingly dyspeptic view of most of their causes, especially the emphasis on the family, which made him shudder, and the movement to increase the liturgical role of the laity, which he liked to call anticlericalism.
HARVEY EGAN
St Paul, California1
November 12, 1945
Dear Pere,
[…] I spent the weekend with Sister Mariella at St Benedict’s. I am filled with what I choose to call Benedictinism. I saw Emerson Hynes and wife one night (Sunday), and my faith was shaken. T. à Kempis2 is now no longer with us. I had thought he enjoyed an irremovable position. Much to talk about with you.
I have the road more or less prepared for you to enter into their midst.
I met the girl whose novel I was reading for Sister Mariella. I think I will marry her. That, too, to discuss. […]
Pax,
JF
Don Humphrey, another member of the Movement, now enters the letters. An artist, sculptor, and chalice maker, he had also participated in the Catholic Worker movement. At this time he was living in poverty and precarious circumstances with his large family in the Twin Cities area. Jim found the best sort of camaraderie in Humphrey and was appalled by his predicament as a man of great artistic talent whose life was blighted, as Jim saw it, by too many children and no money.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 15, 1945
Dear Betty,
This is Thursday, and as I compute it, I should have had a letter from you today. Anyway, I got up at eleven this morning, in case it should be in the morning mail, and again at 2:30 this afternoon in case … and so already I am beginning to worry about you. I am standing on this corner, and you do not come. I do not think you are sick, and of course what I really know is that perhaps I could not reasonably expect to hear from you until tomorrow, even if you wrote on Wednesday, as you said you would. I have already had two dreams of you, not what you might think, but along Zane Greyish lines: someone is always getting in the way who has to be destroyed, and what happens then, when the happy ending should begin, I never know.
I also test you in this way: I think at all hours of the day do I want to marry you now. I do this when you might (or I might from my past experience) think the answer would be no, as in the morning, when many of my best-laid plans have stacked up to nothing, ideas and lines for stories written the night before. But the answer is always Yes. It is a little surprising to me each time it is, though a little less each time, of my having taken such a hard view of myself and the idea of holy matrimony for so long. So that is the way it is … if you are as you were and have not changed your mind or come to your senses—having seen through me and what a stinker I am, which happened to be one thing I admitted to, as then it always means the opposite. I am not sure of you. I remember looking at you and feeling that I could almost see you making and unmaking up your mind. I don’t know why, in either case, granting the other. I ask myself what I would do if you did change your mind, and I know that it would probably not be disastrous, unless you call living one’s life out as I have so far, a bachelor, disastrous. In this event I am glad I did not get to know you any better than I did, which incidentally required a deal of restraint on my part, which restraint you may not appreciate in the nature of things. But which you would have if it had been missing and one of those little nuns had come upon the scene with her head full of wholesomeness.
I have been out buying oysters and milk and rolls, and now, with the warmed-up coffee from Ted’s lunch, I will eat. It would be good to raise oysters, mushrooms, and cranberries on a farm. Ted and Harrigan (editor, Catholic Digest) have just gone to Harrigan’s for a farewell dinner. Ted is leaving tomorrow night. Our relationship has been blissful since my return. I think he was actually glad to see me. I told him about you, and he was glad about that (he read the first chapter of your novel and your piece on Catholic education which the Digest considered for republication and maybe still does) in a way I find curious. He is of the opinion I need someone like you, believing I will go wacky otherwise, meaning what he regards as “perfectionism” in writing leading to that. But now I think I’ll leave this letter where it is for today, hoping for tomorrow.
Saturday. I am up again this morning, and how very, very glad I was to get your letter (and how could I write to you when I hadn’t your address; but I did write to you, as see the foregoing, only not mailing it). […] But now there is your letter, and you say you love me, once directly and once, at the end, glancingly, and I am very happy about that. No, it is twice directly. That is better. I have read your letter four times already. HG
, I am given the light to understand now, is Holy Ghost. At first it puzzled me. I am, descending to the level of important things which really don’t matter, but are better the way you say they are, happy your family is losing its peculiar antagonism to me.3
I love you, Betty. It is the first time, I know now, I ever loved anybody. But even if I’d never met you, this I know: I had never loved anybody the way one is supposed to. So you are the first one. Do not catch pneumonia and die. God is against these things; for some reason really known to him and the cause for much dull absurdity on the part of the theologians, he does not want them to last. But, God, I say, this is different—and not just different in the ridiculous way I knew people thought their affairs, because theirs, were different. This is different, I feel, in an absolute sense. […]
I want you to do two things in this letter: (a) send me your telephone number; (b) send me a dime store ring which fits you. I am going to get Don Humphrey to make a ring. I am going to Robbinsdale4 tomorrow to see him and Fr Garrelts. I will tell them, as I know I’ve told too many already, Sylvester in Guatemala among them, that we are to be married. When, at the very earliest, could you come to St Paul? Ma mere is coming next week. I was thinking last night, providing you still loved me, we could go to Chicago maybe in Jan. or Feb. Tell me.
I love you, Betty.
Jim
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 17, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
I have put off thanking you for everything in writing because I remember you were to be in two or three places and very busy this week or the one coming or both. I had my first letter from Betty today—after meeting the mailman for two or three days. It was a very nice letter, and I have read it too often already. […] I have told everyone I’ve seen or written to since my return how you do things at St Benedict’s. I use the poetic method. For instance, I tell my mother you scrub the kitchen three times a day and two nuns went blind making St George and the Dragon. […]
Fr Egan has invited me over for Thanksgiving: it will be interesting to see what kind of table Detachismus sets on that day. I must tell him about St Benedict’s and Betty. I called Fr Garrelts (tomorrow I’m going to Robbinsdale), and I actually felt sorry for him, as I do for myself, as I was … before Betty. […] Pax —Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 20, 1945
My dear Betty,
[…] Summer is terrible here, and my job is worse (I sweat lakes), but with you it will be like being ten years old again. And we can plot our getaway for the months we’ll have to stay here. It is two blocks to the cathedral. There is Summit Avenue to take walks on. I have no friends in St Paul, but in Robbinsdale is Fr Garrelts (Fr Egan is in St Paul; you will like him) and Mr Chapman (who shuddered the other night when I saw him at the way the Irish are talking up Spellman for pope—“a terrible farce”). Fr Garrelts wants to see you, and so does Don Humphrey and his wife. Don will make the rings. It may be a funny engagement ring, as I do not think I can buy a stone and wouldn’t if I could at a jeweler’s. […]
November 20. 8:00 p.m. I was supposed to be taking a nap for the last hour. I find it easier to be up with the lights on. I see things around the room to pick up, records, pipes, the typewriter. In the dark I see you. But you are not there. So it is very discouraging and in the long run promises to be an ordeal. I am glad that you suggested an earlier marriage. It will be like getting out of jail sooner. […]
November 21, […]
9:30 in the evening. I have just finished the rough draft of the story I mentioned yesterday. It will be short, 3,000 words; I had the basic idea from Sr Mariella. I will dedicate it to her, but only as SM, as it would probably fix her for good. I call it “The Lord’s Day,” and it is about nuns who have to count the collections on Sunday afternoon in the priest’s house.5 Do not say anything about it to Sr Mariella. I promised her I would write it, but I did not think I’d get at it so soon. I am thinking of you all the time. I do not know whether I’d get more done if you were here or not here. In either case you are an obstacle to work. […]
Tomorrow Thanksgiving dinner at Madge Egan’s (Fr Egan’s mother); Fr Garrelts and others to be present. We will all be in our truest American manner. I intend to make heavy references to the Pilgrim fathers (I’m sure Fr Egan has never thought of them as anything but heretics). […]
I have a story in process about an old man who thinks that it is too bad, feeling the way he does about his wife, who has died. If we were married, I would better know how he really feels. I will have to follow my instincts, as it is. I hope my mother comes this week, so that you can come next or next or both. She is interested to know about you. She has a better perspective than perhaps you do on what it means when I say I intend to marry a girl. She knows I have never said it before. I am sure you will love her—I do not say that loosely or hopefully—I know you will. What is best in me I have from my mother, not that my father is second-rate. No, I mean that what faculty—admittedly underdeveloped—I have for listening and keeping my mouth shut I have from her. That is one of the very big things I see in you that I love and realize the absolute unique beauty of. […] Now it is almost time to put on my silly white suit and leave. I love you and am sorry if I am getting tiresome with that line. […]
Jim
BETTY WAHL
November 25, 1945
Dear Elizabeth Alice of the Sea Green Eyes,
I am taking my Royal (on loan from Egan Enterprises) in hand and endeavoring a reply to your wonderful letter rec’d this day. My mother is just to my left, on the davenport, mending things and sewing on buttons. She says, quote: “You certainly have been neglected.” We are running out of buttons (myself, I am a plain dealer and use safety pins). […]
It was most encouraging to hear that your father has been all those things. It is the first time I’ve felt good about him. You see, I know from experience I never have trouble with people who have been hoboes and so forth. Now I am watching out for your mother: a schoolteacher, whoa. […]
Now, because you have asked for it, I will tell you about me. I was born of poor and honest parents, Irish on my father’s side (County Waterford, the southernmost part of Ireland, where the name Powers, if you look it up in the Ecclesiastical Directory, is still the biggest one there, bishops, college presidents, bartenders, all have it), but his mother’s name was Ansberry and she came from Liverpool, and I do not know if that means there’s some English, but I think not, as Liverpool, a slummy place, is highly Irish and she was most definitely Catholic.
She was the woman who ruined my father’s life, I hold. He supported her instead of accepting offers he had to go to Europe and study piano (he was considered a prodigy about Jacksonville—where I was born, in Illinois—practicing the piano nine and ten hours a day, working in a music store as a player of any and all music sold there at the age of twelve. We have some of his old exercises yet; they are pages more black than white with notes). It is another curse of the Irish to throw themselves away on an aging mother or not to marry because there isn’t enough money coming in and brother John, who should undertake his share, is a first-class bastard. I am not making it up: my father had a brother John. I remember him as a tall, dark man with button shoes, gold teeth, and a large brown handful of silver from which he would select a quarter, say, and give it to you. Ten days later you would hear that he was in Boston or Spokane. He wore serge, and sometimes I think I have some of him in me.
My dad’s father came here from Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, and worked in the gashouse in Jacksonville. I know very little of him, except that he was probably taken in as my father was after him. Many children, seven or eight, and a large dog who would bite the wrong people by the name of “Guess.” What’s his name? I remember my father telling me as a child, people would ask. “Guess,” they would reply. Joke. So much for my father’s side: many unmarried children on that side, maiden li
terary aunts like my aunt Kate, who read to me as a child; my aunt Mame, still alive, who is being forced out of the house she did huge washings in for fifty years; my aunt Annie, dead, a Catherine of Russia type, a real dictator and organizer, who ran a grocery store with an iron hand and who would give her customers hell every morning if they didn’t order enough over the telephone. She liked me. In fact, they all liked me, because I liked them. My sister never did: she thought they were kind of crude. They were.
Turning to my mother’s side, we leave the Holy Roman Catholic Church and enter the Old Time Religion, the Methodists.6 Her mother is now living in Chicago with my father and mother and is now senile, the widow of three or four husbands, a dear old lady who should never have left the small town. She tries to go to the Methodist church in our neighborhood in Chicago, and everyone is nice, the minister shakes her hand after services, but they don’t sing right. She wants everybody to join in, and they let one woman do most of it. My mother’s father was a farmer and painter; we have some of his work, which isn’t bad at all (I’ll show it to you when we go to Chicago together). He, her father, had nice hair, just like mine, my grandmother thinks. My mother went to college, a rare thing in our families, and did a little gentle sketching. She is a gentle woman.
My father had dance bands before they were married (he had them to make money; I think he hated that kind of music) and worked for Swift and Company. He became a manager and got the idea he was a sure-enough business genius. It was dispelled in 1934. Since that time, until the war and he got this paper-shuffling job, times were tough. Now he takes pride in this job which must go the way of all war efforts. It is too bad he becomes engrossed in secondary things. I subscribed him to Time. He likes it. If he sits down at the piano now (which is all out of tune), he fumbles around, and it hurts him worse than anyone. So he gets up and sits down to Time [magazine]. The American Tragedy. I think I see what happened. I am determined it shall not happen to me. Help me.
