by J. F. Powers
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] I saw the Miss America pageant from Atlantic City last night on TV, and I must say it has become a noble affair. It used to be girls in bathing suits, but now it’s talent, personality, character, like a lodge induction. I hope they put it on film and that this will be shown in England—they think they’re so smart in these matters, coronations, and the like. There was one rather close tie-in with Philco, when the new Miss America entered the sacristy after her coronation, but I think this will be eliminated in the years to come. […]
Pictures of the new archbishop13 reveal (to me) the possibility of pride and ambition. Of course he’s young. […]
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
Monday morning, 1956
Dear Fr Egan,
I called my agent’s hand, and he had me. I had expected he would reply at once, and that much was correct, but he didn’t send the money; he still talks of … well, I enclose his letter rec’d this morning. So if you still have that little envelope, I’d love to see it.
Also heard from Michigan again, and they want me to reconsider.14 At the moment, I am. Just one semester, and then we’ll go home … […]
I also heard from an MM15 by the name of Cosgrove.* He is in Formosa and wants to know what makes me tick. He says I should move into other fields.
Jim
What I mean in the first paragraph is that if my agent had advanced from his own till what is on the way from England, and had also told me that he wouldn’t expect his 10% on Doubleday advances, I would hold still. I was badly out in my calculations, but this certainly confirms me in wanting out.
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
June 21, 1956
Dear Fr Egan,
Your note and check rec’d this morning, and the letter has found its way downtown already. I have the lawn mower back, new tires and sharpened, all ready to roll, but now it’s raining, and I can see the grass growing away. Tomorrow it’ll be a battle between us, the grass and me, a battle I don’t mind when better equipped than I’ve been this year. I love the smell of cut grass, and I imagine you do, too. […]
I was relieved when I read in your note that you thought I’d do better to take Michigan’s money before Doubleday’s. Probably I’ll take both—unless the story at The New Yorker succeeds there—but this morning I wrote to Michigan and said, with two qualifications, I’d be happy to take the job for the first semester: the two being (a) that I have nothing to do with poetry, (b) that the days come together so I could get home often and keep up my police work with the children. It will be for only a little over four months. We will hire a woman to work mornings here, which will give Betty some time to finish her book, and I will get some privacy in Michigan, I trust, to continue my gentle chronicles. The Mitchells will be here for a good part of the time, so Betty will have someone else in the house at night, a matter of some importance to her. And we will buy necessities we’ve been doing without, coasting then down another long hill, I imagine, into another teaching job, and so on. I can’t believe I’ll ever make much on my work. I see I am running 10th and last in America’s book log for June; 9th in May. I guess the boy had to drop back a little and is taking me up on the outside. Stayer, needs goo.17 He’d better go to the whip. Ridin’ like a Chinaman, that Falque.
What do the beautiful changes among the hierarchy mean to you?18 How can you lose, okay.
See you, then, on the Wolverine out of the LaSalle Street Station, or the Twilight out of the IC.19 Here, I’ll get this round. Well, the next one then.
Keep in touch.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
June 25, 1956
Dear Fr Egan,
Hope you’re no longer here (at the hospital) but that this follows you back to Beardsley, or to the second week of the retreat if there is one. Don’t forget, if you should miss out in your diocese, there is always New York state (and Saratoga in August).
Oh, yes. This is from the English advance.20 It actually came.
I am on my way over to see Hump now. He went to a picnic yesterday out at Hyneses, and according to Mary, whom I’ve seen in the meantime, everything went all right except for one argument Tom had with Arleen, who maintained that our bishop is not as bad as were Stalin and Hitler in their day.
Again, thanks for the lift.
Jim
Thomas Merton, visiting St. John’s, came to dinner at “the small ancient red wooden house,” as he put it in his Journals. He saw Jim as “a mixture of dryness and spontaneity, a thin, sensitive person whose vocation is to go through many unbearable experiences.”
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
July 30, 1956
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] Now, this is top secret, though everyone knows about it. Father Louis, OCSO,21 at the mental health institute at St John’s, was here for dinner with companion (a doctor, also OCSO) and Betty’s brother,22 who was used as a go-between, rec’d permission to attend at last moment. He was the one who kept stressing, in telephone calls with Betty, need for secrecy; I suppose they fear the newspaper publicity. But who should ring me up from downtown on Friday, the day of the dinner here, but one R. M. Keefe,23 who now looks like two of the same. Well, Betty was worried that it would seem that I was protecting myself, and worried at the impression Dick would make, he being so fun loving, but in fact it was a good thing. He got along fine with the doctor, and it was a good evening. I liked Fr Louis quite a lot. He is now novice master and said he’d like to get someone like Dick now and then instead of what he’s getting. You realize, I trust, that this whole affair was not my idea but his. I gather that he is still being tempted to turn Carthusian. He hadn’t read Grace, though he’s bought five copies of Prince, he said, and so I sent him a copy with a quotation from St Bernard, who, in my humble opinion, is the best writer among the saints, admittedly few, I’ve read. I gave it to him in the original Latin, which should be safe enough, providing I don’t ever see him again. You know I’ve never been much of a Latinist; inter alia (there was a horse by that name in Ireland) was about as far as I got.
Tonight, after dark I am to attack a hive of wasps who have taken up residence in the wall of that bay window in the kitchen. I have devised a trap made of screen into which, providing I can get it over the hole in the house wall, I expect the wasps to fly. Then I will do them in with DDT and also shoot some into the wall where the hive presumably is. I wish you were here because I must dress in veil and padding to do the job, fearing stings. Whereas you, Father …
Boz will have his eye operated on Wednesday morning, August 8, and I’d be very grateful if you’d remember him then and on the days following. Please tell Sister Eugene Marie, who, I suspect, stands in well with heaven.
All for now.
Jim
Egan was finally released from exile in Beardsley and assigned to St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis as chaplain. Jim, unable to resist the tawdry spectacle of the summer’s political conventions, bought a TV.
HARVEY EGAN
509 First Avenue South
August 24, 1956
Dear Fr Egan,
Glad to hear from you, and think you’re in your element: cancer, newspapers hot from the press, TV channels clear, and most of all freed from your maintenance work, heating, caulking, watering, etc. Allow me, then, in the light of all this, to congratulate you on your new assignment.
I visited Mpls last week on a buying trip: tea, clothing for Betty and children, typewriter for Betty, and so on. There wasn’t time for what we did, and so I didn’t call you, but I’ll be seeing you at Schiek’s or somewhere in the weeks to come. We have been buying everything in sight. A new refrigerator (the old one was still running, a 1936 model); a foam rubber mattress; and TV. Yes, the pressure built up to a terrific pitch for a few days before the Dems convened, and I went into a flurry of research—as usual
CU24 and the other outfit had nothing to say. So I went by hearsay and the look of the cabinet and bought a Spartan, a table model. It is doing well by us, with a thirty-foot antenna. We’ve seen some good movies, mostly English: Pickwick Papers, The Man in the White Suit, Carrington V.C., and others. I enjoyed the Dems; their opponents, what a bore, and what a flop Stassen turned out to be. I thought Eisenhower’s speech good, though, as those things go. Did you hear Clement’s?25 I see in Newsweek where Red Smith said the Democrats (using Clement) hit the Republicans with the jawbone of an ass.
Yes, as you would know from above, The New Yorker bought the story, and it should appear sometime this fall.26 I was exhausted from revising it (and it still isn’t ready) and haven’t done any work for two weeks. Pretty soon Ken McCormick will be back from Europe and will be asking how’s the novel coming. I am beginning to regret my decision to teach at Michigan and hope I can make it count as time in the desert, peace and quiet, and get some of my work done that I wouldn’t find possible here. […]
Write.
Jim
18
The Man Downstairs is entertaining tonight. Pansy and Dwight are quiet
September 25, 1956–January 12, 1957
Red house in winter
Jim left for Ann Arbor in September for a semester of teaching at the University of Michigan. He rented the apartment of the scholar and literary critic Austin Warren, who was on leave from the university. The adjoining apartment was occupied by a couple, Pansy and Dwight, whose goings-on—and those of the metal hangers in their closet—were clearly audible to Jim, who was as fascinated as he was annoyed by the situation.
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Tuesday, September 25, 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] The woman who cleans was here today, worked three hours, and really worked. I haven’t seen a woman clean like that for years and years. She is colored. She will also do my laundry. She seems nice, very worried about Austin, called him “a poor old man,” and she’s in her sixties, I’ll bet; Austin is 57, was born 1899 at Waltham, Mass., according to a note in one of his books. […]
I sent Boz a little book yesterday, one of those little Potter ones that he should be able to understand and the girls can read it. It is about six in the evening now, and I’ll go out and mail this. I am hungry but can think of nothing I want. Except you, of course.
Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
September 26, 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] The apartment is very nice. Its defects are that you can hear through the walls, and the bed in the same room with the kitchen. The living room is very nice, though crawling with books, ikons, pictures, which has a depressing effect on me, makes me feel anything but well-read. There is also a table with candlesticks, a piece of marble, a crucifix, a Roman breviary on it; it looks like an altar. Mr Rice1 isn’t sure what Mr Warren does with this, some kind of service, he thinks. Austin’s name is on the mailbox downstairs, but up here, on the second floor, there is a little card on the door that says: “Oratory of SS Basil & Gregory.” Apparently, Austin has been getting more and more … uh, ecclesiastical, as the landlord put it. He is Greek. Austin has joined the Greek Orthodox Church, I understand. […]
Mr Rice is a nice man, making a study of science fiction because he hates its implications so much, he says. He grouses about all the new buildings—for social work, he says, and says he’s only lately been able to accept the idea that the university in this country is—I forget his phrase, but he means what you might think. I haven’t yet got around to inviting him to leave the country, but he seems a very promising prospect.
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Thursday morning, 11:00 a.m.,
September 27, 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] I attended a faculty meeting yesterday—just the men teaching English 31, 32, and 45, or something—and how like the one I once attended at Marquette. This time it was Mr Carr; there it was Chub Archer. It just takes forever, mince, mince, and hardly a word intelligible. […] I have one MS to read, but more coming in, some to be dropped off here at the house. One fellow is coming to see me here for a conference, since he works day and night, having three jobs: bass in a jazz band, injecting monkeys with narcotics at the university (they are trying to find a cure for drugs), and writing news for a local radio station. He also has one of those waterfall mustaches (“waterfall” is original with me—I think—and I hope you know what kind of mustache I mean). Some woman called last night and in a kind of hillbilly voice asked if she could get in one of my classes. I of course referred her to Mr Bader,2 but in the course of the conversation she asked how I liked Ann Arbor, calling it “our fair city,” and then proceeded to tell me where to drive, to see this and that, flowers and best view of “all Ann Arbor,” and to all of this I feebly assented—except that she’ll have to see Mr Bader. She sounds prolific, is doing a Civil War novel—spare us, O Lord. […]
Much love,
Jim (Austin’s ballpoint)
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
October 10, 1956
Dear Betty,
Wednesday, no letter from you, one from K. A. Porter, and that was my mail. […] K. A. Porter wonders why Austin didn’t rent his place to her when she was here. She lived at the Union and sat on the side of her bed, she says, with a chair for her typewriter, and no one would bring her a cup of coffee in the morning. She stood in line with her tray for meals. I had heard, from Mr Rice, I believe, that she didn’t want to do any housework and that was why she stayed there. […]
I am listening to the World Series. Looks bad for the Brooks. Well, as you can see, I am brimming over with nothing to say today, but I trust you’ll appreciate getting a letter, even this one. I write it with some effort. Much love—and kisses for the boys and girls.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Sunday evening, October 14, 1956
Dear Betty […]
The people in the adjoining apartment are entertaining again tonight. Real slow, unscintillating dinners they give. It has been good for me to hear how people live, as I do living next to them. The other day—it was during the World Series—he came in with the paper and said: “Well, well, Yogi Berra got another home run—and Skowron too. Say.” Which sounds like the beginning of a play for which no one is expected to be on time. Now I’ll close, and hope there’s a letter from you in the morning.
Monday morning. Dear Betty, he continued the next day. […] As to your letter, it’s a very wise one. I’m surprised how wise you are about the necessity of living in genteel poverty if one is a writer in these times. It is true, and I know it, but I don’t think I have formulated it as you have, in a law. It is one, though, and people like KAP3 try to go against it. And the worst thing is what they think is worth it, the junk they buy, or tell themselves when they are paying too much for something in a good store. […] All for now. Much love. […]
Jim
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
October 30, 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] I had from Victor4 a transcript of the Critics program. Parts of it are snipped out by the BBC if they think such matter shouldn’t be perpetuated: apparently, where someone gets too critical, or nasty. But I seem to do all right with all the critics except the one for films, a woman by the name of Lockhart.5 She opposes the others, and in the end, after Walter Allen likens my work to Chaucer’s, saying you have to go that far back to find something like it (which of course soothes my soul), the Lockhart woman cries out that she prefers the Father Brown stories or Don Camillo! I will
be surprised indeed if she isn’t one of the Faithful. Her tone is the very one of the Catholic reviewers over here who, wounded, cry out righteously and then, thinking to hurt their persecutor, try to play down my achievement as a writer. I will send the transcript to you in a day or so; I am still studying it. […]
I saw an item in The Times (London) to the effect that E. Waugh, the author, had sold his place Piers Court, where he had lived for 19 years; nothing else, except that it had been on the market from the first of the year. I dropped a line to Anne Fremantle thinking maybe she could tell me the meaning of this, worried that his hearing voices might be a factor in this strange removal.6 I had regarded Waugh as established there till death did him and Piers Court part. It seems a rootless thing to do, for him. […] I miss you all, and you most of all.
Love and kisses,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Halloween, 11:00 p.m., 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] I have been listening to the lousy news from the Middle East.7 I must say I am confused. I would not have believed such a thing of the British or French—and resent such blah-blah experts as Randolph Churchill, who cables Beaverbrook’s press that Americans really admire the Anglo-French move but are waiting until the election is over to show it. The British do hatch a terrible kind of ass, it seems to me: people like R. Churchill and Nancy Mitford.
A card in my mailbox at the English office today—The Michigan Daily asking me to state my preference for president. I put down Stevenson, with some misgivings. Of course I wasn’t asked to sign my name. I should’ve written in something funny, I guess: Card. Spellman. […]
Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
507 Church Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan
November 2, 1956
Dear Betty,
[…] I came home and got the United Nations session8 on a New Orleans station and listened to that until about 3:00 a.m. I am still shocked at the tactics of Great Britain. If, as seems likely today, Russia is marching back into Hungary—so what? I believe this is the end of the United Nations, even the theory of it. It seems incredible that Israel, Great Britain, and France should be the immediate causes; the executioners. I listened to the Israeli ambassador, and he was very convincing about the sabotage and violence along the borders, the constant raids, but … the but was still there when he was through. I don’t see how, if the Egyptians are defeated militarily, as they presumably are already, the Israelis expect to survive in the Middle East. They are outnumbered, greatly, and this conflict should make everything, bad in the past, only worse. Of course the canal will be lost to Nasser, and that is the objective most likely to succeed: the Anglo-French objective. It seems to me the Israelis have made a terrible blunder and will pay and pay from now on. Ah, well, why go on about it? It only confirms me in my own attitude toward government and politics. It also makes Ireland look better than England as a place to settle. Of course England is split, but apparently only on political lines, or so we learn. I did hear that the Abp of Canterbury opposed the Eden government on this. […]
