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

The American Church hierarchy viewed Detachment’s rejection of the world as dangerous, as verging on heresy (Jansenism, in fact), and also opposed its insistence on pacifism. Nonetheless — and in part as a consequence — the movement had a powerful appeal to the contrarian Jim, not on its terms altogether, but on his own. He approved of its nay-saying, its criticism of American materialism and militarism, and its rebuke to complacent middle-class Catholics, who, for all their manifest religiosity, put “business sense” first.

At the prompting of the recently ordained Garrelts, Jim attended a retreat in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, led by Father Louis Farina, a pacifist and Detacher, that affected him deeply and strengthened his resolve to refuse military service. His chief concern was the effect this decision would have on his parents, whose friends and neighbors were sure to pillory them for their son’s anti-Americanism and supposed cowardice. As a Catholic, Jim was denied the status of conscientious objector on the grounds that the teachings of the Church permit killing in a “just war.” He was arrested after failing to appear for induction into the army in April 1943 and spent three days in the Cook County Jail before being released on a thousand-dollar bond. He was later indicted by a grand jury and sentenced to three years in prison.

Before beginning his sentence, Jim attended another retreat, this for priests (where he passed as a seminarian), at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. It was led by the powerful preacher Father John Hugo, another influential Detacher, pacifist, and pioneer in reforming the liturgy and religious practices. Thus began the association with St. John’s Abbey and University that influenced the rest of his life.

Jim served thirteen months in the federal penitentiary at Sandstone, Minnesota, before being paroled. In years to come, he covered up his prison sentence because of the pain it had caused his parents and his wife’s relatives. Indeed, we, his children, only learned about it in 1959 when my sister Mary was mocked by a schoolmate for having a “jailbird” as a father.

While he was inside, Jim’s first story, “He Don’t Plant Cotton,” was published in Accent , a literary magazine of high standing. It was also in prison that Jim’s obsession with the relationship between the artist and his house appears to have begun, for among his fellow prisoners were two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, both incarcerated for refusing military service. One of them, Jack Howe, drew up a plan for a farm that Jim seemed to consider the answer to life on earth. His letter to his sister extolling it makes curious reading to one who knew him in later life. The farm would not only be a communal endeavor but also involve animal husbandry and a good deal of manual labor, none of which were much in Jim’s line. It never advanced beyond drawings and talk.

After his parole in late 1944, and as a condition of his release from prison, Jim was assigned a job as a hospital orderly in St. Paul, Minnesota, living first at the hospital itself and later in a St. Paul residential hotel, the Marlborough, “an old red stone dump creaking with age and old women.” Some months later, in November 1945, he met Betty Wahl, whose manuscript of a novel had been sent to him for his views by her teacher, a nun who considered Betty her star student. Jim and Betty became engaged within two days and were married less than six months later, having visited each other only five times after the first meeting. Instead, they corresponded almost every day before they were married.

Jim’s letters to Betty touch on many things, though above all on his love for her and on how and where they will live. They are filled with optimism for the most part — and foreshadow doom, especially on the housing front, the matter of making a living, and Jim’s denunciation of “business sense.” Though there is already talk of Ireland, the couple decided they would live in rural Minnesota near St. John’s. To that end, Betty’s father gave them money to buy land in Avon, a few miles from Collegeville, where his work crew built the beginnings of a house, a barely habitable dugout that lacked running water. There, out in the woods, the couple, and eventually one baby, lived from early 1947 until mid-1948.

The region was a hotbed of Catholic reform movements, of people returning to the land and speaking ecstatically about big families, community, liturgical reform, and Catholic art. Thus, in a bantering way, Jim called the circle of friends who lived in the geographical and spiritual environs of St. John’s “the Movement” and, on occasion, “the rural lifers,” and the area itself, “Big Missal Country.” Later, when the Powerses went away (only to return again and again), these friends became key correspondents. Confident that they would appreciate his subtle, undermining wit, Jim wrote some of his funniest letters to them, much of the humor drawing on how the lofty ideals of the Movement were so flattened by reality. His appetite for storytelling is everywhere evident, and as he wrote these letters, the members of the Movement became not only correspondents but literary creations — as did Jim himself and his family. That family was, in the end, Jim and Betty and their children: Katherine (myself), Mary, then yet another James, whom we called Boz, Hugh, and Jane.

In his letters to his friends, Jim dwelled on the failure of his own life to pan out as he thought it would and should. He presented himself as a man struggling — though not always terribly hard — in a world that didn’t understand or appreciate him. His disappointment and discontent are notes that sound throughout the correspondence, often enough with a comic timbre, as he worked up the theme of life mowing him down. He often adopted a tone of macabre relish for the hopelessness of his situation: the absence of a house, the presence of many children and a desperate wife, the amount of time he had to spend on the mechanics of life, the piddling nature of his daily doings, and his longing for and lack of camaraderie.

“We have here no lasting home” was his constant refrain, drawing, with feigned smugness, on Christian teaching and, perhaps with irony, on the title of the first novel of his onetime friend the Catholic writer Joe Dever ( No Lasting Home , 1947). In any case, the phrase always had the torque of a joke, for the Powerses were forever on the move, leaving some houses out of the urge to quit the country (whichever one it happened to be at the time), leaving other houses because they were taken by eminent domain or sold out from under them. But Jim also meant the statement as a summary of his essential belief: that life on earth doesn’t make sense and that when you understood that, you understood reality. Still, for a person who held that the world is an obstacle-strewn journey toward one’s proper home (heaven), he was more than ordinarily affronted by hardship and adversity, to say nothing of mediocrity and dullness. He was no stoic, and he took it all personally.

Of the handful of Jim’s published stories that were not about priests, two were based on misfortunes in housing his family: “Look How the Fish Live” and “Tinkers.” The problem of finding “suitable accommodations” for the Powers family was always with us and always impossible to solve, but not only because of bad breaks and no money. While Jim prided himself on having a clear, unillusioned perception of how things really worked, when it came to adapting to reality, he was not one for making suitable accommodations himself.

The world outside the house, whichever one he happened to be living in, became increasingly untenable to him, and his vision of the ideal house became ever more one of an asylum, a place safe from the contagion of the world and the line of complacency it peddled. As he retreated, the family he had once seen as having thwarted his calling as an artist became his model society — all the more so after most of its members had left and the idea could flourish unchecked by reality. In 1979 he wrote to me, then thirty-one and living, as were his other children, far away: “You referred to Boz’s plan for me to make a lot of money so we can move back to Ireland. He may be right. I see it as idealism, but what else would work for our family? A big house not too far from Dublin, Jane weaving and dyeing in one room, Hugh philosophizing and botanizing in another, Boz and family in one wing, Mary etching in one tower, Katherine reading in another, Mama in the garden, Daddy with The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph in his study.”