Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963
Page 9
So glad you like the house. So sorry the water and electricity aren’t coming around. Don’t get yourself frustrated over that. I don’t have any idea how much money we have—though it’s safe to say not much—but again I think we ought to pay people, I mean the plumber, for services rendered. I thought so after other occasions of charity, and so did you, if I remember. I miss you very much, Betty. You must know that. I am hoping, but despairing, that our life in the future will not be aggravated as it has been in the past. I trust you got my wire, Merry Christmas, Betty, this afternoon and knew it meant more than that. You know how you have to put it in a wire and will realize it was that which kept me from saying more. I say it now. I love you. Do not be downhearted. Remember some of the things we have learned together about us.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
December 31, 1946
Dear Betty,
Tuesday morning. Rec’d your letter written Sunday night, the sad one, and was glad to get it, but sorry to hear you feel so low. I don’t know what to say—and am sending this special so you’ll have it about as soon as the one I wrote yesterday, the bad one. I don’t understand what you feel so bad about. Aside from my not being there, that is, and even that is not too clear. We have no place to live. We should have all our strife over again if I were there now, living with your relatives. You know that. I am pretty much the same. Hemmed in and haunted here, yes, but not landlocked. I can get out of the house and go somewhere, see somebody, though not many anymore. I saw Colonel Blimp, an English movie, last night, alone. Then went over on North Clark in a couple of joints and watched some stripteasers while I had three bottles of beer. Then I got on the streetcar and came home. […]
And now, my love, I leave you … loving you.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
January 2, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your brief letter written last Monday night arrived this morning. I was glad to get it, though it was a very dismal account of your life there. Something seems to be missing, and you say it’s me—but I am not so sure it wouldn’t be that way if I were there. Well, we’ll see. I have more or less decided to do a certain story and would like to finish it before leaving Chicago. It should not take so long. It would seem that we need some money. I don’t feel I can begin the novel with so much poverty lurking about us. I hear nothing about “The Valiant Woman,”4 and you say nothing about your stuff. I wrote a note to Cunningham at Collier’s and mentioned your story. If I can write this story, and write it right, it might go somewhere. Then we could get a car and have a few bucks, say, enough to carry us into March or April. […]
Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
January 4, 1947
Dear Betty,
Two letters from you today, none yesterday. Very glad to have them both. I am sorry I caused you so much concern by not writing. I only stopped writing, as you ought to know now, when I didn’t hear from you for several days. If I had not heard from you today, I would not have written either. I am in the dark on your sorrow, why you should go about weeping, and hope you aren’t going to fulfill all of Harry’s worst warnings. I do know it was many, many times worse for you, losing the baby, to say nothing of the pain you suffered. I do not feel so bad. I would feel shakier than I do, about money, if we had a baby. In that respect I am relieved. If that makes me a pagan or something, that’s too bad. […]
Is it my ice skates you want me to send? If the word in your letter is “skates,” it is a new form—but I intended to bring them or send them. I am a very fine skater, both plain and fancy, and daresay there is no one quite like me. But surely you suspected that. I should very much like to whang Emerson Hynes, that eminent rural lifer, across the shins with a hockey stick. Enjoyed your account of Harry in the eyes of Sr Remberta5 and others. You must not, and I suppose you are the last one who would, contribute any little facts on Harry that we picked up in our stay at Brewster. […]
Tell me more about the Stearns County scene. Does it seem the same? Does it seem worse? Better? Tell me, for a change where this subject is concerned, the truth. Can we actually live there? What do we burn in our stove in Avon? Wood? Coal—if so, do you have any ordered? I mention it now, knowing how slow everything and everybody moves. Also, I love you very much. Would like to be near you, very near. Would like to call you some names. There is nobody here like that but Mickey, and he is sometimes a cross patch. Are you gaining, losing, weight? Are your breasts swollen yet? Are you going around in bobby socks, with your knees sticking out, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Bobbsey girls? Or are you a big girl now? Now, you just sit down and answer all the questions in this letter, and I ought to have a good one. Thanks for the special of this morning. How did you bring yourself to do it? You might have hoped, as last week, that somehow, someway, I would get it without sending it special, and I would be mad, the letter would arrive Monday, and you would be wide-eyed and wondering when I didn’t write. Much love. Hold tight.
Your
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
Tuesday morning, 10:00 a.m.,
January 7, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your long letter rec’d today. […] Well, you get into quite a few things in this letter. It gives me a good picture at last of the Avon situation. I am especially pleased to note your enthusiasm for carrying water, coal, excrement, etc., and hope I can keep up with you. You even put a Catholic Worker interpretation on it. Obviously, in Brewster, we were not under that illusion, for things certainly did pile up there and we had none of the carrying to do that we both look forward to in Avon. Surely you don’t mind if I amuse myself with this, do you? I am not surprised. I had expected to have to do worse things, and still do. […]
I love you.
Jim
THANKS FOR THE CHOCOLATE BARS! They were enjoyed by one and all. Better get some for Avon. I prefer them over Hershey’s. I don’t know what to do with the $10 you sent. My libido is very high, but you would not want me to use it for that, would you?
Jim and Betty moved into the newly constructed house in the Avon woods in January 1947. Betty, at least, had high hopes for the rural life, intending, among other things, to keep bees, going so far as to acquire a bee veil and smoker. The house was a rudimentary dwelling, a one-story structure built into the earth with a tar-paper “roof” and no running water. Jim and Betty—and, eventually, I, Katherine—lived in it for periods in 1947 and 1948. The couple also bought a car. “My cross grows heavier,” Jim wrote to Kerker Quinn. “We have taken unto ourselves a 1931 Chevrolet.”
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Avon, Minnesota
The Wee Hours, April 3, 1947
Dear Chuck,
[…] Haven’t done much since getting back in Minnesota. I weigh a theory now and then which goes like this: this country is not housebroken (perhaps St Paul is the only place in Minnesota which is), and the savage spirits still lurk in the trees and lakes and they do not like this writing going on, and so it is harder than usual to get things on paper right, the spirits always getting in the way. Who will tame the wilderness with prose? […]
Pax,
Jim
Now I am going to drink a bottle of bock in your honor.
7
Camaraderie
July 9, 1947–October 14, 1947
Robert Lowell, Yaddo, 1947
Jim’s first book, the short-story collection Prince of Darkness, was published by Doubleday in the spring of 1947. Jim and Betty (who was expecting a child at the end of October) went to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat at Saratoga Springs, New York, arriving on July 1. The weeks that followed approached an idyll for Jim as he made friends with a number of men who shared his taste for male camaraderie, literature, and high-wire conversation. Chief among them were the poets Robert Lowell, known as Cal and, at times, Rattleass (from Boston, Mass.); and Th
eodore Roethke, “a big long fat man who needs a lot of stoking,” sometimes called Champ or Beast (of Bennington); Harvey C. Webster, from the University of Louisville, sometimes called Clocker because he, like Jim, was a devotee of the track; Bucklin Moon, Jim’s editor at Doubleday; and the writer Arna Bontemps.
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
July 9, 1947
Mon pere,
Your letter and two spot rec’d. Saratoga does not open until August, and so I’ll try to keep your deposit until then. I like your system: an 8–1 bet in the fourth, then a 3–1 in the fifth. If that does not produce results, I do not know what will. Well, we arrived here without a bit of trouble, not even a flat, and our merry Chev rolled all the way without a cough. Chevrolet builds great cars! Since coming here, we’ve not done a lot of work, though some, and there are no excuses for not working. It is not an amusement center; everybody is working on a book or painting a picture or chiseling a bust, and production means survival once we leave this haven of rest, and so there isn’t much loafing—at least if there is, everyone is careful to do it in private. We have a couple of big rooms and a bath but use just one. It’s two or three times as big as our house in Avon. We have breakfast from 8:15 to 9:15, lunch in our rooms (they pack it) at any time, and dinner at 6:30. Food is very good, about the best I’ve had, except in certain rectories. Among the notables are JF, his wife, Marguerite Young, Robert Lowell, Owen Dodson, Bucklin Moon, Arna Bontemps, Michael Seide. Others, but I doubt that they’d mean much to you. I see mostly Moon and Theodore Roethke: we form the non-intellectual center. But do some fishing with Lowell. The little lakes are full of bass. Went to Mass Sunday and heard an intelligible sermon.
Emerson sent me Riley Hughes’s review from Columbia; it was quite flattering to me; not so to Harry Sylvester.1 Emerson wonders if it will make for strife between the authors. No doubt, but then Harry is selling, and I am not, and there should be some consolation for him in that. There are 25,000 copies of his book in print now. Mine, Moon tells me, is doing much better than expected but is still under 2,000, I think. Book business is very bad, and of course short stories always go to the post with two strikes against them. Thanks for sending the Best Sellers review. I thought it rather spotty for them. Favorable enough, but not very well done. For instance, there is no character in my book guilty, so far as I’m concerned, of gluttony; certainly not Fr Burner, or the priest in “The Lord’s Day.”
I’ve been thinking a lot of places since coming here and have just about decided that St Paul is the place for me. It is about right, it’s old, it’s not too big, I have what friends I have there, and perhaps I could make it my Dublin. As Dick Keefe told me, “Jim, you’re a city man.” So, if there’s any chance for peace in the future, I think I’ll concentrate on insinuating myself into St Paul. The bomb is the big but. No one here seems to have much hope. Lowell (he’s a convert, you know, an ex-con like me, for being a CO) says it’s pacifism or nothing, says we must become pacifists. I say I don’t know, maybe we should become travelers. But where is the big question then. Geographically, I prefer the East to the Middle West. The country doesn’t go on and on forever; there are more trees and hills. Well, well, I know you don’t hold still for much of that kind of talk. This is a huge old pile, in the Summit Avenue manner, only bigger, and is crammed with junk: statues, bishops’ chairs, ugly pictures, miniatures, fountains, books, etc., possibly the biggest heap of its sort for many miles. I rather like it, though. Enough for this time … pax.
Jim […]
See Monty Woolley, the actor with the beard, all the time in one bar, waiting for a live one or somebody he can insult. They say he’s queer as a crutch.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Yaddo
July?, 1947
Dear Chuck,
A line to let you know how things are in these parts. We’ve been here since the first of July, drove it all the way with no trouble with my runabout, which I believe you have a picture of. And now that we have it here, the runabout, I am quite the most popular person; Yaddo lies more than a mile out of town, and the bars, of course, are in the town. My most regular passengers are Buck Moon, Theodore Roethke (“The Beast of Bennington”), Robert Lowell. The first two are most regular, sometimes go without me, and Lowell is usually likewise broke, though it’s more oversight with him; he forgets to cash checks. […] There are some Brooklyn painters, and they are awful. Also a few analysts posing as writers, also awful. We play croquet evenings, quite the bloodiest thing I’ve been mixed up in since I gave up Pollyanna, the Glad Game.2 […] Ruth Domino3 is sort of a fixture here—at least she puts out the mail and has charge of library books—but I do not know much about her, except her accent is German. Lowell says she was investigated by the FBI last spring for being a Communist, but then so many of us have been investigated by the FBI, even you. […]
Pax,
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
July 23, 1947
Dear Father Egan,
[…] Lowell apparently is having his dark days. He says he is “not a practicing Catholic,” but I will not give him the satisfaction of asking why not. Something to do with his marriage. His wife is Jean Stafford, author of Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion (Harcourt, Brace), but she is or was a Catholic before him. I figure characters like Lowell and myself flourish without direct apostolic work. The bark is always there. He knows it. He can climb on whenever he gets tired enough. Pamphlets and all that are out with his kind. He is a very nice guy. It’s just a matter of time. Enough. Pax.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
August 20, 1947
Dear Fr Egan,
Yes, there you are, lounging around, living the good life, and here I am up to my neck in handicapping and creative labors. I am grateful to you for all the reviews. […] Who is Rev. E. J. Drummond, SJ, PhD? Is he the dean of the graduate school, Marquette University? Is it true that perhaps my hand is not as yet sure in the handling of complex symbols? What are complex symbols? Can I find them in the Racing Form? I am at sea. Should I look up Fortunata Caliri4 in New York and get taken around? What would Betty say? All in all it’s very funny, and I only wish there were more such reviews. I would not like to be panned, the way Harry is being, at least not for the same reasons, but I do enjoy being dissected by these English teachers. […]
Haven’t been to the track. Last time over saw Stymie beaten by outsider, Rico Monte, the Argentine beetle. This town, when we enter it, is full of New York touts and torpedoes and their women. Go in for a beer now and then, Michelob; “Glass a Mick, Jack.” Seldom see or recognize the better classes, though we did see Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics lady, and Harry Warner, of Warner Bros Pictures, the other night at the horse auction. Harry paid $44,000 for a yearling filly by War Admiral out of Betsy Ross II (please pass that info on to Fr Casey). […]
They postponed the drawing on the Buick at St Clement’s here. We have a ticket. The lady who “does” our rooms says Father said everything was going so well he thought they’d extend the carnival a few days, postpone the drawing, and besides it rained Saturday night. You should have his job. He sits out on the sidewalk downtown with the Buick and helps the eighth-grade girls make change. I hope we win, not that we need a new car.
Pax,
Jim
Jim and Betty left Yaddo for New York City on September 2. Betty took the train for Minnesota on September 4. Jim returned to Yaddo on September 5.
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
September 5, 1947, Friday afternoon,
a few minutes after returning
Dear Betty,
I don’t quite know where you must be now, probably in Chicago, or coming into Chicago, or about to leave Chicago. It is around 2:30 here. I had an egg sandwich, clam chowder, and a piece of pie downtown before getting a cab and coming out; all at remarkable low prices. It was raining this morning when I went to Grand Central, as it was ye
sterday evening when we went, and so I took a cab, though I’d thought of walking. Well, after I came back from taking you to the train last night, I was pretty sad and tired. I took a bath and napped until Buck came, which was almost ten. Then we talked for a while, went out for a beer, only one, at Jimmy Ryan’s, a jive joint on 52nd Street, and walked up Broadway, which was truly awful in the heat, though I wish I’d thought of taking you there—just for the horror of it. […]
The effect of your things on the clothesline over the bathtub in the closet is … not good, little memories of the summer gone by. So, along with the now comparatively mild ghosts of Buck and Champ and Lowell, there is you. I am living in a haunted house. I do not expect to see anyone I want to see here in September. I expect to work. I feel that I must. I also won’t be able to find the distractions I did when you were here. […] And now, before I take my bath, let me tell you—you always forget—I love you. Do not be sad. Get to work. Take it easy. I hope you’ll be staying at Bertie’s but am addressing this otherwise because I don’t know B.’s address.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
Saturday, September 6, 1947
Mon pere,
[…] I expect to leave here around the last of September. It was possible for me to stay, and I began to wonder why I should return to Stearns County. As you see, I found no good reason for it. It has thinned out here, though, the old crowd I ran with no longer here: Buck Moon; Theodore Roethke; Rattleass Lowell … We were wined and dined in the grand manner this time in New York. Cocktail party, the Saturday Review, Life magazine, New Republic, NY Times Book Section people all there; yes, they all asked about you. Luncheon at 21 and Giovanni’s; dinner at Cherio’s. We stayed at the Algonquin at Doubleday’s expense. “Red” Lewis5 was there, another Stearns County boy.