by J. F. Powers
Waugh was here in March. Said he came to Minnesota to see me and the Indian reservations. He is also interested in Father Divine. He was all right, and his wife, but it wasn’t anything like the bout I’d anticipated from his books. Suppose that’s life. Drank wine. Still don’t think I care for it, not dago red at ten in the morning. He wanted to know how old you were when I asked if you’d met yet. He wanted to know how old I was too. Seemed relieved to know he’d been younger when he pub’d his first book. I may be wrong about that, but that was all I could make out of it. The other day I rec’d a beautiful edition “edited” by him of Msgr Knox’s sermons.
I met R. P. Warren at a party in January or February, very fine, up to what you and everybody always said about him, though we didn’t see a lot of each other. It was a party for John Dos Passos given by the descendants of the Washburns, the flour people, and I was there, I know, as a prop, as were all the others who might conceivably qualify as writers. How about a catering service for such parties that would fly out some writers from New York, like seafood? Just an idea. I learned one thing that night (many of the other “writers” were off to Mexico or somewhere): a writer ought to own a chain of drugstores.
Pax,
Jim
P.S.—I ought to tell you that in a piece on St Paul I did for Partisan Review, I made use of your prophecy concerning the war between New York and Chicago. I thought of giving you your due in a footnote, but it seemed a little gauche to do so in print, not knowing your mind, so I didn’t. I had to use the idea, needing substance sorely. I hope you don’t mind.
Jim and Betty went to Yaddo at the end of July, leaving Katherine and Mary in St. Cloud with Betty’s sister, Pat.
HARVEY EGAN
Saratoga
Track Good
August 1, 1949
Dear Fr Egan,
Just a few lines to warm up on. We arrived here two days ago. The place is unchanged. We have the same rooms as last time. Today the races begin. It is also Monty Woolley day here. After Mass yesterday I got a Form. It’s going to be a hard day, tough, and I may not bet a race: two two-year-old races and a steeplechase. I was over at the track yesterday morning. Very pretty, the rose and green grandstand, and the men dragging the track to dry it out. […]
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
Wednesday night, August 18, 1949
Dear Fr Egan,
Your letter and five spot rec’d. I am happy to report that you are still breaking even, i.e., beating the game, for I have not risked it yet. I have been three times, losing a little each time. I know you won’t believe that, but there it is anyway. The way it is, so many two-year-old races and the daily hurdles, eliminates opportunity to get ahead. I have to concentrate on the remaining races, and haven’t done badly, but am a lot away from that $90,000 I set for myself. […]
The absolutely big news I have for you is that I dropped Joe H. Palmer a line, and this evening he phoned, and we have an evening planned for here Friday night. I saw him at the yearling sales one night, with his wife, at a distance, and got to thinking I just had to see him. So I risked a note. He sounds on the phone something like he looks: “Hallo, this is Joe Palmer.” Wish you were going to be here. I am not telling the other inmates. They would not know about him anyway and also might not have enough sense to honor him as I intend to. It means I’ll have to get a bottle of bourbon in. He’s from Kentucky. I’d like to ask Jack Conroy (a writer) down (he lives above us), but I don’t want to set him off. He’s been on one toot since coming about a week ago. He is from Moberly, Missouri, originally, but for many years was considered the white hope of the proletarian novel. Nice fellow. Lot of stories. I have not seen a radio since coming here and might be said to be taking the cure.
I see where the Holy Father is routing us contemplatives out of our tunnels, says we’ve got to mix more. How do you feel about that? (I have had two good ones, one paying $33.00, one $27.50, but I had them to show, and those are the win prices.) A fellow selling tip sheets in the grandstand said: “Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” I plan to attend the morning works tomorrow. I sit behind the clockers. There are two sets. Those who work for the track handicapper, and they are Negroes; those who work for the Racing Form and Daily Telegraph, all white. The former are better for dialogue, though the others have their points. They have big binoculars, notebooks, handbooks, encyclopedias, and typewriters. When a horse comes on the track a quarter of a mile away at the gate, up go the binoculars, and that is all they need, just a glance, to tell which one of thousands it is. Would that I were one of them, but, no, I had to be what I am.
We have a place in Milwaukee lined up. Three bedrooms, so we’ll expect you now and then. I’ll tell Joe he is your favorite arthur. (“Arthur” is one of Conroy’s words. When he was famous, after the success of his first book, he sent for all his old friends in Missouri, and they came like a plague of locusts, eating and drinking all before them. It was the habit of their leader to ask at literary parties: Sir, are you a published arthur?)
Fit and ready.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
[late August–early September 1949]
Dear Father Egan,
[…] Saratoga meeting no great success; no great loss (about 12 or 15 dollars, I’d say). Your five went the hardest. I send you the chart. The horse was Greek Song: the bet, as ordered, to place. You can see what he did. I blame the boy for not breaking him right. A cousin of Skoronski, who, you may recall, rides like a Chinaman. The meeting a great success in every other way, though. Had Joe Palmer over here two or three times and his friend Jim Roach, who does the same thing, but not so well, for The NY Times. Joe took us to the track for breakfast one morning, picking up the tab for $7.90 (that was for us three) and also sending us six passes to the clubhouse. You would have liked him. […]
Breezing.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
150 Summit Avenue
September 6, 1949
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] We plan to leave the babies in St Cloud, move them from there to Milwaukee. I have my family’s car, a 1940 convertible, for the trip. We drove up in it, Betty and I, after looking over the place in Milwaukee. It is out in the country. I’m going to need a car to escape it, I fear; the country, that is. It is brand-new, you know, upstairs from the people who’re building it. It is better than we deserve. Things will be tough at first, since we must buy a new gas stove, washing machine, etc. I don’t believe I was led to believe in the necessity for such things in The CW.10 But then there wasn’t much about your housekeeper either, was there? […]
Do you have movies in Beardsley, or lantern slides? We’ll expect to see you on Sunday the 11th. I’m sorry about Greek Song, but that’s the way it goes: some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
Pax …
Jim
11
I’m beyond the point where I think the world is waiting for me as for the sunrise
September 19, 1949–October 7, 1951
Art and Money’s “little rambler house” on the Mississippi, 1951—Mary and Katherine with cousin Michael Bitzan
The Powers family left St. Paul for Milwaukee, where, for two school years, Jim taught creative writing at the Jesuit-run Marquette University. “Betty and I feel sad about leaving St Paul,” Jim wrote to the exiled Egan in Beardsley. “Perhaps, though, we can have a triumphal return someday. Perhaps about the time you have yours.” The family lived on the second floor of a house in a new, treeless neighborhood far from the heart of the city.
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
September 19, 1949
Dear Father Egan,
Monday morning. We have a semblance of order here now. The books are still in boxes. We await another baby bed before the “den” can be cleared out for me. I am in no mood for work yet, however. Yesterday I journeyed—three transfers on the bus—to Borchert Field, where I saw
the Saints go down to defeat, Roy, the Brewer pitcher, giving one hit, Naylor, who would have been the last man to face him. So that means they go to St Paul to finish off the series. I went with Gordon’s old friends, the Hollanders. They are very cynical about the Brewers and Nick Cullop, whose scalp they seek.1 I teach my first class tomorrow afternoon. Do you suppose they would understand if I called it off on account of having to follow the team back to St Paul?
Which reminds me that Life arrived the other night at 11:15 p.m., special delivery: the Waugh story on American Catholics with a picture of JF and Harry in it. My picture is one that Time took two years ago at Yaddo for that review they never ran. I think I look like a queer in it, but perhaps that will boost my sales in that important quarter. The Waugh piece has some good things in it but is cloudy at the end, I think. It is the Sept. 19 number in case you want to pick up a copy—on second thought where in Beardsley will you be able to do that? Fry’s?
Katherine Anne is here buzzing around the typewriter. She is a good girl, as is Mary. Both behaved themselves all the way from St Cloud. We have a secondhand stove, a good bargain. We expect you to stay here whenever you come this way—on your way to and from conventions, the track, etc. I am going to get a special bed for the “den,” where I intend to stock such visitors as yourself. We won’t have it in time for Fr Garrelts next Friday, and there may be some trouble about who sleeps on that lounge we have. He has kicked against that goad in the past. All for now. Let us hear from you.
Jim
This place very bright and, let’s face it, soulless. Deadly nice little houses nearby peopled by souls taken up with new cars and lawn mowers. […]
Two years previously, Jim had written to Betty in a spate of pique: “I should study the mind of the Church which knows the one thing to be got out of marriage is children. The which we are getting. Now, if we only had some veneer furniture and a Studebaker.” The specter of veneer furniture never materialized, but Jim now found himself with a Studebaker, the first of two he was to acquire from the Strobels after they retired them.
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
Monday in the desert, October 11, 1949
Bone pastor,2
[…] There is a monsoon blowing at our little blockhouse today too. We are situated on a prairie. Today is my day for reading MSS—tomorrow being a class day. I’ve just finished one, probably by an ex-seminarian, about a fellow who decides to leave the seminary. My comment, in effect: “Does this character have holes in his head?” Then there was one about a gambler who stole gold from a prospecting Chinaman; my comment: “Whence this materialism?” And so on. It is really, so far, an easy way to earn one’s daily bread. Not what I’ve been used to in recent years, but better than the years before, and I hope I’ll not have to do worse in years to come. Hold that sexton’s job open.
After much financial strife, the reward. I sold a story to The New Yorker. So I am going to buy Strobels’ 1942 Studebaker. I hope to get it at the end of this month—Mr S. should have his new one then—and if so, I might pick up that crackpot3 in St Joe and come see you. Like to see you among your platters.4 We are hard put for a church here. I try to plan it so I’m downtown on Sundays. Out here, well, out here … it’s not the cathedral, just as it isn’t Summit Avenue; raw country, raw people. Between the virgin land and the neon signs, nothing; no history; nothing.
I don’t see anybody at Marquette. I come and go. Very good that way, though I did hope to get in with the chancery crowd here too. They’re freezing me out, though, or else they don’t know I’m alive. Have had the usual invitations to say a few words, though, and turn them down. […]
I went to Chicago Saturday for the day and bought a sport coat at Jerrems—I felt I owed it to my students, always appearing in the same sack; they might think there isn’t money in writing. If I do get to Beardsley, I trust I’ll get to see your friend Popeye. Did you leave him some literature? What is the approach in the country, with no streetcars to leave Catholic publications on? Suppose you thrust it under the hens and the farmers get it when they come for the eggs. […] Write and pray …
Jim
I have a Chinese fellow in one class. He was a general in the last war under Chiang. About the nicest general I ever hope to meet. Only on English for two years, so there are problems, literary problems.
Jim took an increasing interest in the career of Del Flanagan (1928–2003), a middleweight prizefighter born in St. Paul. Del and his brother Glen were known as the Fighting Flanagan Brothers. In his letters to Father Egan, Jim worked up the idea that Del’s woes were akin to his own, eventually calling him “the J. F. Powers of boxing.” The racehorse Greek Song came in for the same treatment.
BETTY POWERS
Milwaukee
ca. December 8, 1949
Dear Betty,
[…] Del Flanagan of St Paul won a big fight in Detroit last night, over Sandy Saddler, the featherweight champion, but as fate would have it, Flanagan was announced from the ring as “from Minneapolis.” Such, you see, are my considerations. […]
Love
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
March 29, 1950
Dear Father Egan,
[…] I trust you saw where the Irish race5 was won by Freebooter, the favorite, ridden by Jimmy Power, a Waterford boy—which is where we, and all Powerses, presumably hail from. A barkeep in Chicago won $70,000. The state gets more than half of it, though, so maybe it’s just as well.
Katherine Anne has taken to sitting in my chair here in the study. I have to sit on the edge of it. It is symbolic, I think, of the years ahead. I’ve had a good, satisfying life, however, strong on purpose, and so I am not reluctant to step down and let the younger ones take over. How is that old grey head of yours? Easter promises to be an ordeal. I have only six days off—is there something wrong with Easter in the Jesuit view? […] Write.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
June 12, 1950
Dear Fr Egan,
Your letters and The Priest came today, and glad to hear from you. Thanks for The Priest, but it’s just pathetic (such ignorance no longer gives me a moment’s pause; I expect it), not as regards Harry6 and me, for we seem to be running as an entry at all the tracks, but just that a man could wade through The Cardinal and not know it was fake from the first page on.7 I tell you, Father, there is much work to be done—but I for one am not going to do it. I’m busy with my handicapping and radio programs every day, yes, and even with what I call my writing.
I had to call Chicago Saturday morning, seeing that Greek Song was going in the Belmont. Placed an across-the-board wager with my father, who in turn placed it with my brother, who in turn placed it with the Syndicate. The inevitable happened, or would seem to be the inevitable with Greek Song. He came with a rush in the stretch but was too late. […] He was fourth by a head; at 35 to one, if I’d collected the show bet, I would be ahead. The jockey rode him like a Chinaman, that’s all I can say. Really do think he got a poor ride. I thought of calling you Saturday morning to find out if you wanted in, but now I’m glad I didn’t. You evidently have little faith in me anyway, as a writer, and if you despaired of me as a handicapper, there wouldn’t be much left, would there?
Father, I am not worried about getting a book out. I would like to have one ready, yes, but I’m beyond the point where I think the world is waiting for me as for the sunrise. I gather you think short stories a preparation for novel writing. That is not true. I’m not trying to exonerate myself. The truth is I’m lazy, and after that, a family man, a teacher of creative writing, and finally I don’t care to get a book out just to get a book out; I’d rather make each one count—and in order to do that, the way I nuts around, it takes time. I know too that there’s no demand for a book such as I can write. I am outside the system, the economics of writing, in that sense. Do you know that I’ve cleared more on the one story for The New Yorker (over $1,500)
than on my book, which did better than any book of stories in its year except Somerset Maugham’s? […] And now, goodbye.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
Monday, July 24, 1950
Dear Fr Egan,
Your letter and The Herald Sun publicity rec’d.8 I may subscribe to The H-S for a month and renew if it’s any good. I am in the market for a good paper. I wonder if The H-S is it. The prospectus is well written. […] I see no mention of racing news in the table of contents. That’s the acid test. They’ll have that old family-life corn, Somebody Winks who has five children and a sense of humor, and they’ll have Health and Books and the rest; but what of the Sport of Kings? Did you know that in the Albany9 Diocese, during August, the paper has a racing supplement, à la the Yoot Section10 in the Visitor? Racing is a Christian sport if Ireland is Christian. The Irish are a strange race, fools and wise men at the same time (I suggest you send that to the Catholic Digest for This Struck Me). […]
I played a little golf last week with my brother-in-law11 (he’s employed at the bomb works in New Mexico) and enjoyed that. I may get some clubs again. There’s a course up the road from here. We played with a manufacturer of toilet seats who happened along and made a nice threesome. I had been shooting an Acushnet Titleist, under the impression that the big pros used them, but the kindly manufacturer, friend of Sam Snead and Gene Sarazen, said they’re all using the Dunlop Maxfli now and had been doing so since Bobby Locke came over a few years ago and burned up the fairways. I know this won’t alter your life much, but it does show you that I’m living.
