J. Powers - Suitable Accommodations - An Autobiographical Story of Family Life - The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963

I love you this morning.

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

December 5, 1945

My dear Betty,

I am up — it’s almost two — and have read your little letter and am very glad to find there’s nothing wrong. Sometimes it takes people two or three days to think things over, and I had been wondering if there’d been any cause for regrets. Had I done something all wrong? I’ve also been down for a quart of milk and six sweet rolls; the coffee is cooking now. In a few minutes I’ll sit down to one of my famous home-cooked meals — which I hope you didn’t find too rugged. I guess not, if you’ve not lost any weight. I am virtually recovered today. Yesterday I was still groggy from Monday night.

About the stars — why is it I’m a butterfly, and what does that mean? I am afraid it means the same old thing — fly-by-night, which is getting to be my middle name, and I had always thought, and thought others thought, I was fairly stable and all that. I can’t put my finger on just what it is, whether it’s because I don’t intend to sell insurance or work in a bank or because I wouldn’t dress up and play war with the rest of the fellows, or because I am a writer (if I am a writer) or what the hell it is. Anyway, I am getting touchy on the subject. Perhaps there is this much truth in it: I am worried about making a living, as I confessed to you again and again, because I won’t go about it in the ordinary way — eight hours out of my life daily so that the system may prosper and the crapshooters running it.

But I don’t think you want me to do that. If you do, it would be well to say so now. It is not something you can bring me around to in the name of “reform.” I have no intention of letting you go, but if you have that idea (and I can’t believe you have), I want you to get rid of it — else it will be worse than the War of Roses. My mother strove for years and years, with all things in her favor (five-day notices fluttering on the door), and she never won. I got little jobs, but she never won, and now she knows it. And, furthermore, I think it’s indecent of Sister Mariella, and whoever else thinks so, that you should marry some dumb farmer who’ll “make you a good husband”—for which I read “bull.” It is because of such arrangements that we have war and strife: people getting the barn painted and letting the living room moulder away with a vase of wax flowers and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. There is much truth in the line about if you have a loaf of bread, sell it and buy hyacinths for your soul. I am not really talking to you when I write this, I think and hope I’m not. I am only if in my nearsightedness I have missed the little signs that my regeneration includes prostitution on a job masking itself as “honest labor.” The jobs I had, in bookstores and the rest, were never honest. Not for me. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions or a worm fly a kite? Now I see I’ve run into a corner I never meant to get into and the whole idea here is one I know you and I don’t disagree on. I think I must just be threatening myself. […]

I got a fine letter from that unpredictable lady La Mariella (she does so many good things and says so many bad things — yes, the farmer business again). She sent a photo of a house, a long description of it, and even posed as a possibility that Don might teach a little at St B.’s, as the Reverend M. has been wanting to enlarge the art dept. I sent all this data on to Fr G., and I know he’ll go over to Don’s tonight and make him very happy with it.

It doesn’t take much of an opportunity to give Don all he needs (he caught deer with barbed wire fence when his family was living on the Catholic Worker Farm, Aitkin, Minn., and not just for fun, for they were hungry). I told you how he caught that chicken, remember? Sister M. mentions the possibility of Don finding work with an antique repairer in St Cloud (there’s only one, evidently, and it takes months to get things repaired). That’s what Don is doing now, for money. If he could live in this house (it’s owned by the postmistress, a Miss Uhte) and teach a little and work a little and paint a lot — that would be wonderful. He is the greatest Catholic painter since El Greco. He is a wood-carver, sculptor, and chalice maker (and ring maker). For money he has repaired antiques, worked in a foundry as a molder, carpentry, and in fact anything that has the vaguest connection with the plastic arts and crafts. His wife is a churchgoer in the worst Irish sense. She is very fine also, not much on housecleaning, however; she’d rather go to church. She looms rugs. And now I come to the part in this letter where I want to tell you:

I love you. […] Pax,

Jim

BETTY WAHL

150 Summit Avenue

December 7, 1945

Dear Betty,

Friday, noon […]

And, returning to your letter of yesterday, don’t go telling Sr Mariella stuff, even in jest, like you’re going to be a stenographer and let me be great. We have to watch ourselves, else I am never going to be able to redeem myself in their eyes and stop being … a butterfly. I will, as you suggest, watch my greens. I ate an apple this morning, which is a green, isn’t it? I do not have time to be lugging lettuce and stuff like that up here and getting it combed down on a plate. I will wait for you to do that. By the way, since I’ve just thought it, I’ll mention it: I will make you a suit of lettuce underwear, cool, succulent, to match your skin. Your aunt seems to know all.1 All my worries about properly impressing your family are beginning to center on her. If I can get past her, I think, I’m in. […]

I love you.

Jim

CHARLES SHATTUCK

150 Summit Avenue

Saint Paul, Minnesota

December 7, 1945

Dear Chuck,

[…] I am living on the sixth floor of the Marlborough, once the showpiece of St Paul, on Fitzgerald’s famous Summit Avenue — which he calls Crest in his notes — and it is falling to pieces, but I like it that way, high ceilings, wide doors, everywhere space being wasted, and my window gives me a look at the city, the countryside beyond on a clear day, and I like that too, as I believe I contracted a slight case of claustrophobia that year or so I was out of circulation. I have a phonograph and a coffeepot. I go from Ravel to Respighi to Rimski-Korsakov and back again. I get up when I feel like it, and sometimes when I don’t feel like it, and eat what I care to cook, which means usually coffee, rolls, hamburger, or soup.

I am within walking distance (easy) to the library and post office; spitting distance to the cathedral, the most formidable one I’ve seen; and equally close to the ghosty houses that Fitzgerald was so impressed by and me too. It is a funny thing: 599 Summit, where he wrote This Side of Paradise , is solid smoky vermilion stone like so many of the other old places along Summit, but — and a Freudian could do a thesis here — it is the first place which is cut into several apartments, a hard man would even call them “flats,” and so he was right up against what he couldn’t penetrate, the one colored kid in the schoolroom, and I guess that’s why he was always so acutely aware of the society he was never an integral part of and could write about it as though he were, but which he’d have to have been decayed inside to have been and hence would have lacked the energy to do anything about except yawn. (Take that sentence to the cleaners next time you go.)

Continuing with my report on myself, which nobody asked to hear, including you, I am also in love. I met a girl at St Benedict’s when I was up there a few weeks ago, a girl whose novel in manuscript Sr Mariella had sent me to read. She is a beautiful, simple writer, and I think you would like her writing. […] I expect we will be married in May. In September we expect to retire into the woods in the vicinity of St John’s and St Benedict’s. […]