Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963
Page 29
Leopardstown races today—Saturday—but I won’t be there. October, I think. In October, maybe I’ll feel more like it, I think. I am suffering from dry rot. I saw a fellow out the train window this morning whom I’d met at Sean O’Faolain’s last winter—a novelist named Mervyn Wall whom I really liked—and he was getting on the train I was on, but I couldn’t summon up the feeling to go and sit with him. I suppose for the same reason that I seldom have a drink at home: I don’t want to set the stage, strike up the band, for nothing.
Now, when I was younger … I was blinder.
No, we didn’t see Bucky1 or his dome. It was on radio—Bucky chatting. He doesn’t speak English—runs his words together like John Foster Dulles and pretty much sounds like a Consumers Union report: “snowload,” etc. I’d say he comes halfway between F. L. Wright and the tool section in Sears’s basement (before it burned)—achievementwise, to use what may well be one of his words.
Jim
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
August 23, 1958
Dear Doyles,
I was raking through the debris here on the desk in the study, looking for a piece of paper so I could write to you, and what should I find but this letter already begun by another hand. Let me say, in passing, so that you’ll better comprehend the foregoing sentence, that this desk is used almost exclusively by the woman of the house, a published arthur in her own right, my candidate for the Christian Mother of the Year, among other things. She is now slumbering overhead, among her troops, and I am listening to the BBC—the Light Programme, getting this week’s top twenty. In this way, I keep faith with you all out there. To your letter then, Leon. (Why, I asked myself a moment ago, does no one call Leonard Leon?) […]
Sometimes I think I ought to get together another collection of phonograph records and keep adding to them; same with books; same with everything, and keep busy that way. Takes money, though. Sometimes I think I should start collecting money, keep adding to it, keep busy that way—and in that way broaden my circle of friends, people of kindred interests. Perhaps you’d care to join me in this. […]
The home life is such that one often doesn’t care to venture out, one feels he might be picked up, for blinking, flinching involuntarily, as if he were an escapee from an asylum rather than a good Christian Family type suffering from FF (Family Fatigue), which, by the way, is not going to go away but get worse and worse. Some of those white rats just don’t answer any bell, in the end I imagine. With my office in Dublin, I escape a lot of this; I have to if I am to make a living; but I get a good shaking up before I leave in the morning and the first thing when I come home. Much of this wouldn’t be true for a lot of other people, but I am not a lot of other people,* unfortunately—or fortunately if I am to go on unlike a lot of other people, making it as a writer, that is. But what the hell, Leon. I’ve told you enough. And much, much more than is necessary, since in a way I’m talking about your life. It’s true I don’t have to play pals with a lot of people I buy things from—people I don’t know don’t call me “Jim” here—and Dublin, for all its dirt, is much easier on the eyes than any place I’ve seen in America. […]
Jim
Don Humphrey died 5:30 a.m., August 26, 1958.
Betty’s Journal, August 26, 1958
Don died today … I am struck by the wastefulness of nature—can understand sea creatures laying millions of eggs so that most can be lost, but an artist like Don at the beginning of his career doesn’t seem expendable. I felt of him much as I feel of Jim, destined by providence to fulfill role of artist, Don as accessory to priesthood, Jim as divinely inspired gadfly. Providence has always intervened in our favor at last minute in material matters, felt Calvinistically that a sign of being chosen. But this shakes my confidence.
DICK PALMQUIST
Dublin
August 30, 1958
Dear Dick,
[…] We learned of Don’s death with such feelings as you do not have to imagine. This has been the worst thing to happen to me, so far, and I know it is worse for Mary and the family—and worst of all for Don, looking at his life from this world, where he did accomplish much but only a small fraction of what he might have, with his gifts. Needless to say, his reward here was even more out of proportion. If his death was due to chemicals used in plating chalices, then that is indeed the final irony. That is my opinion, and I leave it to the others (of whom I’m sure there are many) to speak of how happy he must be in heaven. That I don’t doubt, but what happened here on earth was just too bad, and I for one will not forget it, and in this I know I am not alone.
All best wishes.
Jim
Don Humphrey was buried at Jacobs Prairie, fifteen miles from his home in St. Cloud. The reason for this inconvenience was that some years before he had carved the altar lectern and font for St. James, the church there. As sole payment he had been promised three grave sites in the cemetery. The new priest attempted to renege on the agreement, but the Humphrey family prevailed.
HARVEY EGAN
Dublin
September 5, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
Your letter came this morning at breakfast (tea, toast, scrambled eggs, prunes), and then Betty, it being a sunny day, took the boys to Greystones for haircuts, a job I need myself but cannot free myself to get. From my work, that is. This story-chapter will either ring the bell as I have seldom rung it before, or—it won’t. Anyway, I am working without a net, so to speak, and am grateful for your offer, as before. I wake up in the morning, and gradually remembering who I am and what lies before me and all around me, namely responsibilities, I start to moan. It is not that erratic, blowing noise that you used to do in Beardsley (picked up from Fr Nolan, you said), which by the way I do a certain amount of here in my office, but a low, steady moaning, such as a man with an arrow in his ass (back in history) might make. Do you ever have that? Yes? Well, then you know what I mean.
Thanks for your account of the funeral. I had one from L. Doyle, very good, but not, of course, from the sanctuary side, where life is somehow headier.
I was glad to read (in L. Doyle first) that you and George and Bp Cowley and Fr Casey were there. Jacobs Prairie, though, that was more iron in the soul, not that St Cloud would’ve been better; where Don died, what was done thereafter didn’t matter, though it was a lot of work for friends and family. One would be better off going down at sea. Yes, I must do something about my will—though I find that word preposterous in my case.
All for now. They’re playing my music (“The Daring Young Man”), and I must go. Coming! Coming! […]
Jim
[…] Out to buy some Parmesan cheese for tonight’s spaghetti and was almost run down on Duke Street by the Earl of Longford, who was coming down the sidewalk with his wife; they look like Hardy and Laurel; but that’s one thing you don’t see too much of around St Cloud, earls and countesses, it occurs to me. A fellow needs a bit of that, and once he gets a taste of it …
LEONARD DOYLE
29 Westland Row
Dublin
October 7, 1958
Dear Len,
[…] We read about Fr Peyton’s crusade2 in your diocese, thanks to your thoughtfulness in sending the news story, and though I don’t take this particular aspect of our religion as hard as some people do, it did give us a jolt. The part that gets me is the sudden appearance of people you wouldn’t have thought it of, in the lineup. There was quite a lot of that in Nazi Germany, I believe. I am thinking of working up a prelate whose motto would be “I Love a Parade.” How would you put that into Latin? I remember a discussion which took place at my house a few years ago, when two priests were discussing the work of Fr Peyton, not very enthusiastically. Finally, one said: “Do you suppose he’s even a Christian?” Oh, I liked the storm troopers coming to your house to collect your pledge. It’s hard to be cool at such times, but that’s the correct attitude, I believe. Of course, a beard helps too, keeps people off balance. […]
Coolish thes
e days in my office. I have on my electric fire, but it isn’t very noticeable. Likewise at home. We always seem to land in places where little has been done about such problems, and we have the option of fixing matters up for the short time allotted to us in any one place on earth (by destiny, I mean) or shivering through it.
I have always felt pretty sure of myself, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live, or at least where I didn’t want to live. But the irony now is that this is no longer true. In the course of one day I change back and forth a hundred times, calling myself a fool to consider leaving Ireland and a fool to consider staying. Betty is doing the same thing. And so we are little help to each other. Fortunately, the children don’t seem to care what we do. They fondly imagine that the moment they walk in, if we do return, when everybody is glad to see them, that moment will go on and on. We, Betty and I, at least know about that.
Jim
Jim and Betty, homesick and discontented in the usual way, decided to return to the United States.
HARVEY EGAN
Ard na Fairrge
Dalkey
October 21, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
Sitting here torn between reading the next installment of Monty’s war memoirs3 and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (the latter in its original Left Book Club edition, which I bought secondhand for sixpence), I happened to see an auction catalog on the table, and I then continued a discussion I’d been having with myself earlier: whether ’tis better to hope that we’ll not only hear favorably but suddenly from The New Yorker or to get in immediate touch with Mendota4 in case the Oriental rugs illustrated in the catalog are worth having and can be had at our price. […]
The auction is next week, the rugs going off on Wednesday, but one need not have the total amount (a 25% deposit is required at time articles are knocked down) until the end of the week. If the rugs (and there are other items of interest to a householder) should run around fifty or sixty pounds, as I imagine they will, and we should get two of them, we would be pushed to the wall in the fiscal department. I maybe ought to tell you more. I am finessing from nothing. Fifty in the St Cloud bank, which is just rotting—not enough to send for—and $33 in my pocket (as personal identification in case of accidents), and forty or fifty pounds, more or less, in the bank here. But should the story be acceptable to The New Yorker, we would be back in the bazaars in a big way; if it shouldn’t, it would be Doubleday, a source untapped for years, though available, and austerity—I would be in the bad position of drawing four or five hundred a month and having to produce accordingly on the novel. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, if one is settled down with one’s appliances and house around one, but if one is setting out for the New World with one’s wife and family, one needs what we used to call “getaway money.” So there you have it. A plan of many flaws, not the least of which is the intention to buy Oriental rugs while crossing the Delaware, as it were. […]
We have made a deposit on the Hanseatic (German ship), formerly the Empress of Scotland, but we have misgivings even now. Betty was badly shaken when her aunt wrote about a place on a half lot, with oil heater in the living room, and said she could just see us in it—with the emphasis (we thought) on us. Mighty nice here now, with the wind off somewhere else, the fire making itself felt in the fireplace, the radio tuned to a German station, light opera. A gay company at my table […]
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Dublin
November 1, 1958
Dear Fr Egan,
Bullion received, with thanks. Hectic days, these, with so much to do—which I won’t go into. Except that these last weeks, if I continue at the present pace, will be entirely wasted so far as immortal literature is concerned. However, I am going to make a great effort to salvage some time for it. Not easy when one has to think of everything, as I do.
What really takes the bounce out of me is the thoroughly unpromising housing situation to which we return. Art Wahl, some months ago, offered Betty—let’s be accurate—ten thousand to be applied on a house if we returned to Stearns. That is really all we’re holding, the only card. I had thought, a year ago, that we would just make it to Ireland (sane, that is), and would crawl ashore and lie gasping in the sand, but that we would be at our destination. Now it seems that this lies back in the other direction (yes, I know in which direction it really is, but let’s try to keep it in the park, huh?).
I confess the temptation to stay on still flits through my mind (about once an hour), but things have gone pretty far. People like us, with so many children, should stay at home, where our vulnerability wouldn’t be so noticeable. I mean a man can keep working the sand up around his head, and surrounded by others doing the same thing, nobody is going to come right out and say: Hey, fellas, our asses are all out. But that is the feeling I have more and more. I used to think that the worst thing about Don Humphrey’s parenthood was the indignity of it: something would happen in the neighborhood (a neighbor complaining about his cesspool or dry well, as he called it), and it would be crystal clear for a moment that he was considered a Jeeter Lester,5 really the sort of fellow who shouldn’t have moved to town. All this with reference to the house Betty’s aunt picked out for us in St Cloud: oil burner in living room, no basement (just a dirt pit), three bedrooms (one with no window), bathroom back of the kitchen, and half a lot (nine feet from the alley on one side, twelve feet to the neighbors on the other, the house itself that distance, I mean). This doesn’t mean I want you to look for a place, at least not yet. I am just trying to convey my feelings these days. (It should be said that Betty’s father nixed the house I’ve just mentioned.)
Meanwhile, I went to another auction (the one in Co. Offaly wasn’t worth the long drive) and came away with six “lots,” as we say in the trade: two old prints, a carving set, two Sheraton trays, and a Sheraton barometer: everything we’ll need to set up housekeeping, as you can see. Lovely to look at, though, especially the barometer, which is inlaid with shell designs and of course doesn’t work. By the time this reaches you, Gene McC. will be in or out. Time says he’s running ahead of Thye in the polls but that “knowing Minnesotans” expect Thye to squeeze through.6
I am not picking ’em, since I assured my mother Siri would be the next pope; I just told her, as though there was no doubt of it, thinking it would be more telling that way.7
Jim
I tried to tell the girls you were in line for the papacy, but they were indignant at the idea. “He’s not grand enough!” “He’s not even a bishop!”
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
Dalkey
November 29, 1:00 a.m., 1958
Dear Cho and Yody,8
The last night in the old house, down to the furniture and lighting we found here, and finishing off the dregs, and Hughie, whose bed has gone on before him, crying out from the foreign couch, and Betty finally going off under a heavy load of John Power and Son Gold Label; me, I’ve had the last of the Black and White. I smoked a cigar earlier, dug out in the course of packing. I have the radio tuned to a German station. I wonder what it’ll think of WJON, for we are taking it with us—leaving little behind, the baby’s Moses basket and two siphons of soda, some corrugated cardboard (kind packers like), some coal, some logs, some turf, and so on.
We have been through all this before, but this is the worst time yet. Too much stuff, too many people. We have two little leather tags, and I found myself switching the little cards around tonight—rather, Betty did, and thought it all too ironic. On one side the cards say J. F. Powers, Greystones, Co. Wicklow, Ireland; on the other, c/o A. Wahl, North River Rd, St Cloud, Minn. The latter is showing now—among other things. We have eleven packing cases, five trunks, and a number of smaller pieces. Fortunately, there is a worldwide shipping slump, and the rates are low. We may live in our packing cases, some of which are quite roomy. It now appears that the potty will have to be transported separately. […] If it were wrapped in brown paper, it wouldn’t be noticeable, we tell each oth
er. How fair-minded can you get? Em and Arleen, yes, but they are immortal.
Sean O’Faolain was over earlier to bid us goodbye. He has been a great friend to us here, and he and his wife are sorry to see us go. But this is a feeling I cannot convey: setting forth under great difficulties and yet wondering how, if we did it again, we might do better, did return to Ireland, I mean. Whatever we do, though, in the future, it’ll be with less furniture.
Tomorrow we take the Cork Express for Cork, stay there overnight, and embark at Cobh the next morning for the New World. We are fortunate to be sailing on the SS Hanseatic, which derives her name from the Hanseatic League, a medieval association of friendly German and other European towns. Externally, the Hanseatic presents a striking appearance … a modern bow and cruiser-type stern (kind men like) and black hull (I’m black and I’m evil and I did not make myself) with white superstructure (natch) topped by two modern streamlined funnels. Each class has an attractive Children’s Playroom. The “Alster Club,” which extends the full width of the ship, will be one of the favorite gathering places for tourist-class passengers. In the attractive St. Pauli Tavern tourist-class passengers will find the gay spirit of a stroll on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. Here conviviality will reign in an exceptionally enjoyable atmosphere. For pleasant days and nights at sea the Hanseatic is your ship. Deck games, movies, dances, concerts, gang shags, entertainment, children’s parties, fancy dress balls, and other events are included in the diversified program, which is arranged for the enjoyment of all, young and old alike. CFM groups meet under ideal conditions. Imbued with the spirit of Old Hanse, the sterling qualities of all the German personnel bespeak reliability. Taking pride in their jobs and the efficient performance of9