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

Chicago

December 31, 1946

Dear Betty,

Tuesday morning. Rec’d your letter written Sunday night, the sad one, and was glad to get it, but sorry to hear you feel so low. I don’t know what to say — and am sending this special so you’ll have it about as soon as the one I wrote yesterday, the bad one. I don’t understand what you feel so bad about. Aside from my not being there, that is, and even that is not too clear. We have no place to live. We should have all our strife over again if I were there now, living with your relatives. You know that. I am pretty much the same. Hemmed in and haunted here, yes, but not landlocked. I can get out of the house and go somewhere, see somebody, though not many anymore. I saw Colonel Blimp , an English movie, last night, alone. Then went over on North Clark in a couple of joints and watched some stripteasers while I had three bottles of beer. Then I got on the streetcar and came home. […]

And now, my love, I leave you … loving you.

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Chicago

January 2, 1947

Dear Betty,

Your brief letter written last Monday night arrived this morning. I was glad to get it, though it was a very dismal account of your life there. Something seems to be missing, and you say it’s me — but I am not so sure it wouldn’t be that way if I were there. Well, we’ll see. I have more or less decided to do a certain story and would like to finish it before leaving Chicago. It should not take so long. It would seem that we need some money. I don’t feel I can begin the novel with so much poverty lurking about us. I hear nothing about “The Valiant Woman,”4 and you say nothing about your stuff. I wrote a note to Cunningham at Collier’s and mentioned your story. If I can write this story, and write it right, it might go somewhere. Then we could get a car and have a few bucks, say, enough to carry us into March or April. […]

Much love,

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Chicago

January 4, 1947

Dear Betty,

Two letters from you today, none yesterday. Very glad to have them both. I am sorry I caused you so much concern by not writing. I only stopped writing, as you ought to know now, when I didn’t hear from you for several days. If I had not heard from you today, I would not have written either. I am in the dark on your sorrow, why you should go about weeping, and hope you aren’t going to fulfill all of Harry’s worst warnings. I do know it was many, many times worse for you, losing the baby, to say nothing of the pain you suffered. I do not feel so bad. I would feel shakier than I do, about money, if we had a baby. In that respect I am relieved. If that makes me a pagan or something, that’s too bad. […]

Is it my ice skates you want me to send? If the word in your letter is “skates,” it is a new form — but I intended to bring them or send them. I am a very fine skater, both plain and fancy, and daresay there is no one quite like me. But surely you suspected that. I should very much like to whang Emerson Hynes, that eminent rural lifer, across the shins with a hockey stick. Enjoyed your account of Harry in the eyes of Sr Remberta5 and others. You must not, and I suppose you are the last one who would, contribute any little facts on Harry that we picked up in our stay at Brewster. […]

Tell me more about the Stearns County scene. Does it seem the same? Does it seem worse? Better? Tell me, for a change where this subject is concerned, the truth. Can we actually live there? What do we burn in our stove in Avon? Wood? Coal — if so, do you have any ordered? I mention it now, knowing how slow everything and everybody moves. Also, I love you very much. Would like to be near you, very near. Would like to call you some names. There is nobody here like that but Mickey, and he is sometimes a cross patch. Are you gaining, losing, weight? Are your breasts swollen yet? Are you going around in bobby socks, with your knees sticking out, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Bobbsey girls? Or are you a big girl now? Now, you just sit down and answer all the questions in this letter, and I ought to have a good one. Thanks for the special of this morning. How did you bring yourself to do it? You might have hoped, as last week, that somehow, someway, I would get it without sending it special, and I would be mad, the letter would arrive Monday, and you would be wide-eyed and wondering when I didn’t write. Much love. Hold tight.

Your

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Chicago

Tuesday morning, 10:00 a.m.,

January 7, 1947

Dear Betty,

Your long letter rec’d today. […] Well, you get into quite a few things in this letter. It gives me a good picture at last of the Avon situation. I am especially pleased to note your enthusiasm for carrying water, coal, excrement, etc., and hope I can keep up with you. You even put a Catholic Worker interpretation on it. Obviously, in Brewster, we were not under that illusion, for things certainly did pile up there and we had none of the carrying to do that we both look forward to in Avon. Surely you don’t mind if I amuse myself with this, do you? I am not surprised. I had expected to have to do worse things, and still do. […]

I love you.

Jim

THANKS FOR THE CHOCOLATE BARS! They were enjoyed by one and all. Better get some for Avon. I prefer them over Hershey’s. I don’t know what to do with the $10 you sent. My libido is very high, but you would not want me to use it for that, would you?

Jim and Betty moved into the newly constructed house in the Avon woods in January 1947. Betty, at least, had high hopes for the rural life, intending, among other things, to keep bees, going so far as to acquire a bee veil and smoker. The house was a rudimentary dwelling, a one-story structure built into the earth with a tar-paper “roof” and no running water. Jim and Betty — and, eventually, I, Katherine — lived in it for periods in 1947 and 1948. The couple also bought a car. “My cross grows heavier,” Jim wrote to Kerker Quinn. “We have taken unto ourselves a 1931 Chevrolet.”

CHARLES SHATTUCK

Avon, Minnesota

The Wee Hours, April 3, 1947

Dear Chuck,

[…] Haven’t done much since getting back in Minnesota. I weigh a theory now and then which goes like this: this country is not housebroken (perhaps St Paul is the only place in Minnesota which is), and the savage spirits still lurk in the trees and lakes and they do not like this writing going on, and so it is harder than usual to get things on paper right, the spirits always getting in the way. Who will tame the wilderness with prose? […]

Pax,

Jim

Now I am going to drink a bottle of bock in your honor.

Robert Lowell, Yaddo, 1947

Jim’s first book, the short-story collection Prince of Darkness , was published by Doubleday in the spring of 1947. Jim and Betty (who was expecting a child at the end of October) went to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat at Saratoga Springs, New York, arriving on July 1. The weeks that followed approached an idyll for Jim as he made friends with a number of men who shared his taste for male camaraderie, literature, and high-wire conversation. Chief among them were the poets Robert Lowell, known as Cal and, at times, Rattleass (from Boston, Mass.); and Theodore Roethke, “a big long fat man who needs a lot of stoking,” sometimes called Champ or Beast (of Bennington); Harvey C. Webster, from the University of Louisville, sometimes called Clocker because he, like Jim, was a devotee of the track; Bucklin Moon, Jim’s editor at Doubleday; and the writer Arna Bontemps.