Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963
Page 28
Betty’s aunt, Birdie, and her husband, Al Strobel, made a trip to Ireland. They came as part of a guided tour, which they left for a few days to visit the Powers family and see the new baby.
BIRDIE AND AL STROBEL
29 Westland Row
Dublin
May 31, 1958
Dear Birdie and Al,
[…] You are better off at the Shelbourne than at the Gresham (which caters mostly to Americans and is on O’Connell Street, which has always struck me as being like Broadway, full of little junky shops). There is a whole book about the Shelbourne, by Elizabeth Bowen. We wonder if it’ll be possible to catch sight of you during those first days while you’re still attached to the tour. I thought I might watch for you in the Shelbourne lobby—I wouldn’t actually approach you—so I could at least tell Betty and the children how you were looking. Naturally, I would disguise myself. Anyway, we’re all happy that you’re coming, and looking forward to it. Don’t worry about us putting ourselves out for you. It hadn’t occurred to us to do so. You’ll find plenty of work to do, inside, and Al can work around the yard. You can think of the time with us as a resting-up period for your ensuing travels. Well, I think that’s all, and more, and so I’ll close.
Jim
FRED AND ROMY PETTERS
Ard na Fairrge
June 19, 1958
Dear Fred and Romy,
[…] It is seven in the evening. In the next few minutes, Betty will finish reading a book to the boys, and I’ll go up to the bathroom and shove them around for a while. No, Betty hasn’t had the baby yet. No, not yet. Wait a minute, I’ll look again. No, not yet. When she does, we’ll let someone know in the Movement. I won’t develop this subject further. Except to say that we’re appalled by the prospect. Last year at this time I thought I had trouble. I now think of last year as the English Channel and the year ahead as the Atlantic Ocean. I know, you don’t swim that; but that is what I mean.
We are at home every evening, listening to the radio, reading. I smoke while reading and Betty drinks. That’s about it here. […]
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
June 24, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
It’s in the early a.m., and somebody’s charging batteries, and I can’t play my Telefunken, usually my solace when Betty and the children are in bed. We were glad to hear you have a new typewriter—and to see that you have—and I must say it’s about time. You had the one before this about six months, didn’t you? I suppose it means something: some people wash their hands and some change mates and some change typewriters. Me, well, why go on? […]
Somebody at America sent me that issue with the Prince review in it, and so I saw the Waugh piece: too bad, why America can’t do better, I don’t know; the ghetto mentality, as we in liberal circles used to say. Life here much the same. Betty still with child, but the end shouldn’t be far away. Girls go swimming two or three times a week, as part of physical education, in the sea. They have tennis racquets too. Boz and Hugh go about their business, building, farming, trains, shipping (we see boats of all kinds in the sea below us), and I’ve just come from making Hugh’s bed, which he had stripped down to the springs, only to drop off, and then to wake up, mad at the dirty trick he’d played on himself. Which reminds me that I must teach the children short-sheeting, to round off the evening chaos. […]
JFP Ltd is pretty quiet except in Germany, where, since coming to Ireland, I have had three little books published; the publisher is breaking up my two books and administering them in the form of spitballs. Well, I go down to the office six days a week, sit down, and prowl about Duesterhaus. For the last month I’ve been redoing the rec room—and can’t seem to get the job done. Maybe tomorrow the ice will break (these metaphors I use are an author’s stock-in-trade). A man tried to break in on me today, an agent with a client presumably interested in renting space in the building. Since the agent didn’t seem to know I was there, but since I definitely was, I acted the part of the genuine tenant, a little outraged at this invasion of privacy. I have a deal with the owner of the building (£15 a quarter) for this hole I inhabit but would have to move out if he succeeded in interesting a regular tenant in my space; I have bet against this eventuality, in effect. In view of the luck I’ve been having, however, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if asked to vacate. […] All for now.
Jim
Betty gave birth to Jane Elizabeth Powers on July 2, 1958, at the Leinster Nursing Home in Dublin. Betty’s journal, July 2, 1958: “8¼-pound daughter at 2:30 a.m. The news penetrates to me at one point and oh the relief of it. No pregnancy had felt so tedious, so completely unjust. But she is American, I’m sure now. The last product of the red house and my distress at leaving it.”
ART AND MONA WAHL
Friday morning [July 4, 1958]
Dear Art and Nana,
[…] The baby, by the way, looks very healthy and less gnomelike than I remember the other children looking at this stage. We don’t have a name, since it’s a girl. I had wanted it, if it were a boy, to be Hjalmar. Now I must close, get this to Betty, and get back here to my office. I enjoyed your letter, Nana—the vision of you dashing off to coffees. I think of these last days for Bertie in St Cloud and am glad to be elsewhere; the pace must be terrific. I see Art and Al, like mechanics in the pits, changing wheels in a matter of seconds, while you and Bertie wait impatient to be off to the next coffee, and then the next, and so on. I see you as wearing crash helmets. I shouldn’t bother you with these visions, I know. Incidentally, the boys and girls at home are doing very well under Mrs Kinsella’s supervision. She has a real talent with children. All for now.
Jim
Betty’s Journal, July 4, 1958
Five, five, five. How did it come about? I keep repeating Fr Egan—they are, in the end, the only thing that will have mattered. I believe it; I feel it. And yet they defy peace and order and what of art—of Jim’s if not mine? Are we to make him into just another man who will die, his body rot, his possessions be dispersed, and his immortality all in heaven? God does intend there to be man-made beauty on earth. We are to make order of it all. Order and art.
MICHAEL MILLGATE
Baile Atha Cliath
July 5, 1958
Dear Michael,
First of all, excuse the envelope, but the J. F. Powers Corporation, Westland Row Division, is short of stationery at the moment. I write to tell you that Betty has produced a female child, weight eight and a quarter lbs, date July 2, and that we haven’t decided on a name yet but lean toward Radio Train, as combining the best in both the Irish and American traditions.
Anyway, these have been hectic days, especially for me, traveling back and forth in the middle of the night, supervising our help at home (which has been supplemented by, of all things, a competent woman). Everyone well at home, including Jacobite Echo, the cairn terrier who belongs to the woman who is helping out. […]
I saw Prof. Stanford twice clipping tall grass and said hello. Otherwise there hasn’t been much of that famous brilliant conversation for which we are noted over here.
I wonder how you and Amis got along. All for now, and if you cross over, give my regards to Broadway.
Jim
DON AND MARY HUMPHREY
29 Westland Row
July 17, 1958
Dear Don and Mary,
[…] We had a baptism party Sunday, lots of talk about “little Christians” and the traditional falling down and wetting of pants by children. I wish you could have been here. Speaking of all that, I see where the Hyneses are now able to tell parents how to sanctify vacation time for their children. My impressions are only impressions, of course, but it does seem to me that they are getting out of hand. Going a bit too far, if you know what I mean. I happened to see a brochure advertising a new publication by the Abbey Press in which this is presumably to be published, this sanctifying of vacation time. I also saw a picture of Betty’s brother and of Jack Dwyer—what happened to his tie? I assume he’s ada
pting to his environment. I see my compatriots without ties in the streets here, but most of them do wear a camera. All for now.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Dublin
July 23, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
I was walking around in my office thinking my thoughts with a bottle of Pilsner Urquell (“The Only Genuine Pilsner”), product of Plzen, and a damn bad beer it is, inside me, when I looked up and there, staring downstage, from his place on the wall, was Fr Ed Ramacher3 (in earphones) cranking a television camera, and I thought it might be well if I gave you a little description of my office.
There is one door, formerly black with fingerprints, now clean, and it opens in, and on the inside is one hook, on which hangs my Dunloe “Fills the Gap” raincoat. The floor is wide boards now stained mahogany, by me, because I decided against buying Egan’s linoleum and that left only part of the floor stained. There is a small fireplace, but it isn’t used except for debris: bottle caps, matchboxes, “The Friendly Match,” and tobacco cartons. I have an electric fire with a copper reflector. The fireplace is to my right, the one window to my back, which looks out, west, upon Trinity College and something called “Dental Hospital,” on the sidewalk in front of which I have on occasion seen the blood of patients who didn’t eat enough unbleached wheat. The window is the dormer, or starving artist’s, type; all the roofs visible from it are slate.
I have this old sawed-off washstand for a desk—a really beautiful old finish, like a chestnut horse—and a Victorian tufted chair upholstered in one of the first imitations of leather and on the floor what appears to be an Oriental rug but is really only a bit of dyed burlap; this is under me and desk only. On the floor to my right are a number of empty bottles, witnesses to my cosmopolitan taste: Guinness, Mackeson’s, Younger’s, Ringnes’s. To my left are some old books and priceless manuscript pages (my own) to be used to start fires at home. On the wall I look at, straight ahead, a calendar and Fr Ed; to my right Fr Pinky Doherty smiling at some laypeople of both sexes; to my left Fr Urban pointing a pencil at a photograph of a new building—this is really a man named Dexter M. Keezer, president of McGraw-Hill publishing company, but I cut him out of This Week last year, put collar on him, and he is Fr Urban. He keeps looking over at me. Yes, so I’d better leave you now and get back to Duesterhaus. Thanks for your kind offer in your last; I hope I won’t come to that.
Jim
22
About Don, I haven’t been the same since I read your letter
July 26, 1958–November 29, 1958
Don Humphrey (1912–1958)
Dick Palmquist wrote to say that Don Humphrey had been diagnosed with a tumor in his head.
DICK PALMQUIST
Dublin
July 26, 1958
Dear Dick,
[…] About Don, I haven’t been the same since I read your letter, and know I never shall be, now. I do hope you are right in thinking he has a good chance. I don’t know a thing about such cases—I don’t even know what kind of case Don’s is, beyond that he has a tumor—but I am praying he comes out of it all right. I am sick with this news, for which I nevertheless thank you. I wish you’d keep me informed, since I can’t count on anyone else to do it, the way people are there about writing. Now that you’ve written once, perhaps you can go on doing it. I am tempted to call Mary long-distance, but I fear the consequences: fear it will not be the right time.
Until this morning, I didn’t really know what I intended to do with myself and family, whether we’d return to St Cloud or not. Now I know that if Don pulls through all right, that is what we’ll do. I guess I had thought of him as my best friend but had never realized until this morning how very much he means. I suppose you feel the same way these days, and many other people, to say nothing of his family. I will not pretend that I am hopeful. You can see anyway that I am not. This year has been a bad one. I pray God will redeem it by restoring Don to us and that I for one will get a chance to appreciate him again.
All for now. I know there’s no need for this letter, for this kind of letter, but I am like a man buried in a mine, tapping, going through the motions of hoping—I am hoping.
Jim
Journal, July 26, 1958
This, if it is the end, would go too well with Don’s poor, poor life. This is a tragic life. I pray it is not the end and that he recovers and that we both live as friends again. St Cloud without Don would have very little to offer me. I am already feeling what Don’s death would mean. Such a life, though, figures to end in such a way.
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
August 1, 1958
Dear Joe and Jody,
Very grateful to you for writing so often these last few days, for there is nothing else on my mind but Don. We have been hoping that all this will come to nothing, and though your latest seems to be a step in this direction—I mean I regard it as hopeful that the doctors can discover nothing wrong—I don’t feel much relieved. Too many people, in the last few months, have commented on Don’s appearance. […] How I wish I could go in with you on Tuesday. The picture of him enjoying himself with good food three times a day and visitors like Fr Egan, George, and Bp Cowley, well, that gives me great pleasure. If you should get this letter before you go to Mpls, please tell Don that I say, “Stop it. You’re hoggin’ the stage. First with your great reconversion and now this. Give someone else a chance.” […]
You ask how Ireland is. Well, there was our new baby, then a visit from the Strobels (during which time I rented a car and drove them around some, not my idea of fun), and then came the news about Don. So I go to my office six days of the week, and some days I sit here and brood, hardly turning a hand, and some days I go out to an auction. […]
We are not definitely committed to returning, but I think that is what will happen if, as I say, I can produce the wherewithal. If I should fail, I suppose we might have to stay on here—and neither of us is at all certain we’d be worse off doing so. We do have a house here, although it’s a freezing proposition in the winter, and I do have a life of sorts in Dublin, wandering about, plenty of newspapers, bookstores, auction sales, and, though I haven’t felt easy enough in my mind of late to visit these, theatres and racecourses.
What I mean, Joe, is that it’s more satisfying than dropping in at the bus station in St Cloud to see if they’ve changed the racks. When I think that Don may not be there anymore, the place gets really hard to take. There are a few others—Fred Petters, Dick Palmquist—but they have other sources of pleasure than friends.* And there are you country people, but you all—you as long as you work—have ways and means of scotching discontent that either never worked for me or no longer do. These old eyes, though they are not the eyes of a painter or sculptor, have to be fed too. I think that’s the hardest thing, the thing that’s always hurting me in Stearns County whether I’m conscious of it or not: just having to look at the mess, the landscape, the offenses against architecture (which is a rather grand way of putting it, like accusing dogs of adultery). Ah, well. You know what I mean. Eyestrain, however, is a very great factor, as I define the term here.
All for now. Please keep writing. Best to you both.
Jim
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ard na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
August 21, 1958
Dear Katherine Anne,
[…] It is odd—to me—how as one grows older, memoirs become such an interesting form of writing. When I was young, working in bookstores, I could never understand why they were published at all. The British are great for memoirs, and I must say I never miss reading the reviews of them, of books by people I’ve never heard of usually. Harold Nicolson’s Some People you probably know; fictitious memoirs, a way of getting at people and life that we Americans don’t seem to have tried at all, as a form of fiction, I mean. Perhaps we don’t see enough memoirs to play upon the idea. […]
A few facts. Betty had a baby gir
l on July 2. We call her Jane, for reasons almost entirely euphonious. She is healthy. We plan to return to the U.S.—to what, we don’t know—in November or December. I am in the act of earning our passage back these days—which is precisely where I was last year at this time. It is either that or look for another house here—one we can be warm in when winter comes, a full-time job and probably an impossibility anyway. The children are much better off in school here, I enjoy—as, say, a clam would—Dublin, but there are other considerations. Unfortunately, they do not outweigh the considerations for staying on, nor do those outweigh these for not staying. They balance out perfectly. We will not realize our mistake until we make it, and this, I fear, will continue as long as we live. We won’t be in the least surprised either, each time it happens. We have not here a lasting home, is the text, but there isn’t much satisfaction in that, is there?
Jim
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
August 23, 1958
Dublin
Dear Jody and Joe,
Your last came this morning before I left for the office, where I am now, and we are both very glad to hear that Don is holding on. We did hear from Em, a good letter but rather disturbing too in its description of the New Don (as he was before the stroke), which I guess is what you were saying too, only Em, of course, is well pleased with the results of so much tribulation. That is how I should be too if I thought I were going to die, I know. If Don does recover, though, I think we can count on a certain amount of backsliding—welcome relief, you might say. I would not care if he stopped a long way short of his Sputnik period (which I only heard about) but would not want him an Ade Bethune woodcut either, one-dimensional, illustrating some one virtue.
We also heard from Fr G., who expressed more confidence in Don’s recovery than others have. He seems to be suffering from camp followers at the hospital—“all those people.”
I have heard twice from Leonard, believe it or not, and mean to write him a suitable reply as soon as possible. He feels we have failed him and ourselves by not making a go of our venture in Ireland, and he may be right. I do not like to think of it as a mistake, but that is the word for it. It is also the word for whatever else we might have done at the time we did this. It is the word for coming back again. That is what I am doing to accept the idea that, so far as domestic arrangements are concerned, we cannot bring the fact into accord with the desire. There is too much against us, but still I do not intend to throw in the sponge. I may be seen emptying diapers, but I may be seen too at auctions looking for something to fill up one of the numerous gaps in my life, in the decor of the house I don’t have. […]