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

I am hoping we’ll be able to keep warmer this winter than last. This winter will probably be worse, too … Everybody remarked last night how wonderful you were, pregnant, so bouncy, so glow in the eye, so bloom on the cheek. And I had to say I had not noticed it, but I guess I had without putting it in words. I do remember how pretty and sad you looked in that restaurant where we had our last supper … It seemed a terrible shame to leave you, to remember the things, some of them, I’d said to you, and worse, the nice things I’d only thought and not said to you … Enough. I’m getting out of hand … I love you … Betty.

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Yaddo

Saturday, 6:00 p.m., September 20, 1947

Dear Betty,

[…] I had a great long talk about doctors and analysts and the world condition today at lunch with Clocker and O’Connor Barrett. I found that Barrett and I have the same outlook, the rather unmentionable one which says that about all an artist can do is his work; that the goals of the cooperators, communists, and other reformers are not new goals at all; that it would be a lot better use of the language if they would state that they are bent on a petty, stuffy little crusade and not the great soul-stirring one their literature seems to describe, patching, not creating. Last night Elizabeth14 sat in the main room after dinner and went into Yaddo history, including a great ice storm, and it was fairly interesting. […]

Still no word about our well, or any real news about the rural lifers, in your letters, which are good but omit these things as though it were almost a conspiracy to keep me breathless, waiting. Why don’t you go to the telephone and call somebody up? Or won’t your dad take you out to Hyneses some Sunday? Or won’t the Meades talk over the phone? I hear the gong. I love you. Write.

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Yaddo

September 22, 1947

Dear Betty,

Dullish short letter from you yesterday, Sunday, and nothing this morning, but I guess I must love you just the same, consider it with your other faults as nothing against your virtues. […]

Yesterday The NY Times ran that stuff about me in People Who Read and Write and Fornicate, getting my initials wrong and, it would seem, cutting out a vital message about priests and doctors. At least the paragraph on me is headed “Priests and Doctors,” but there’s nothing about either one. I imagine it was my famous thesis about doctors nowadays having the eminence that priests had in the past that was cut. […]

Do try to get to Hyneses soon. I am anxious to know if Zahn and Leonard15 will be around to temper the monotony this winter. […]

I must prepare to meet the Stearnsers. With the prospect of more expense on the car, I am almost absolutely resigned to not going to Washington.16 You do see the dilemma for me, though, don’t you? When I hear from you that Pat is spending a thousand dollars for furniture and you are trying to get a cabinet for our baby for five … if we are two in one flesh, we are not yet two in one spirit. It is not your fault at this point … you are a woman in a world you never made, and not to be blamed for wanting things you ought to have, for being brave … about things I guess I’d hoped you wd not feel you’d have to be brave about to do without … I don’t know what you can do now. I suppose I thought I’d made it clear there’d be times like these. Maybe you can make a lot of money. Perhaps you’d counted on that, and that’s where the trouble is. Is it so bad, though, that you have to be brave? You have said many times that you didn’t want to marry Elmer or the dentist … Excuse this reverie. I’m really sorry I wrote this last bit. I don’t believe in it. It is the same thing Buck’s wife gets him saying. I think the thing in women that gets men feeling guilty in this way is bad. I think such women have married the wrong men. I think it’s their own fault.

Love……

Jim

ROBERT LOWELL

Yaddo

Thursday [September 25, 1947]

Dear Cal,

Glad to hear from you, only wishing I might have seen you two “leftists” (Harry S.17 and you) together in New York, or anywhere for that matter. […]

The car — you would want to know how the car is, wouldn’t you? The car was given six new spark plugs, fresh oil, and air in the tires. For almost a week it ran like a dream. Then it rebelled. […] I had counted, until then, on driving through the Alleghenies, down from Elmira, where I am paying a call, and on into the nation’s capital, there to see a friend and you — I am doing a paper on the percentage of Latin words, rather of English words of Latin origin, to be found in the work of Theodore Roethke, as against Walter Savage Landor, and I understand that you are very helpful in such matters. But, no, alas, I must needs take the shortest road home (Chicago). Now that I have your schedule, I see it might have been possible to drive you to the Middle West. You would have liked that? In any case it would have been nice driving you about the nation’s capital, letting it be seen right away that you were not without friends of substance … I thought the limerick (Powers, sours, races, paces, hours) unkind …18

I heard from [Robert] Fitzgerald (not Fitsgerald, or do you mean it that way?). He enclosed the review he wrote which might have been if I’d been newsworthy or whatever it is they look for in a writer … […] Just Agnes Hart, Edw. Maisel, and Joe and me left — and Agnes Smedley, but she doesn’t seem to be my type and vice versa. These are tough times for a clerical fascist. Agnes is writing the life of a one-eyed Chinese general; he is what she calls “an amazing man.” God bless you.

Pax,

Jim

BETTY POWERS

Yaddo

Friday morning, September 26, 1947

Dear Betty,

[…] Well, today is my last here, and I’m afraid I hadn’t anticipated the feeling I have about leaving. I don’t want to. I can’t think very straight either. I’d expected to work right through until the time I left, but my state of mind won’t allow it today. I guess you must have felt that way … about working, I mean, on the last day. Nice old place here, I’ve enjoyed it so much, even now, though summer was better when everybody was here, and I hate to leave. I do leave, however, tomorrow morning: Mary Townsend is having my sandwiches put in a bag. So much for leave-taking … […]

I guess the St John’s games are something, as you say, and I hope we’ll get to one together since you like that. Maybe the last one in October if the baby comes around the middle and we can get someone to take care of the baby … oh, God, with that statement I realize again that we are moving into another category. Do not talk about not wanting the baby. You will have it; you will want it; so will I. […]

Now, my last letter from Yaddo, with love. Keep happy. If you have any cravings which can be satisfied under ten dollars, let me know, or go ahead and get it yourself.

Jim

Jim left Yaddo and drove to Elmira, New York, to visit Ted LeBerthon, who was in the midst of a nervous breakdown. He then drove to Washington, visiting John Haskins and Robert Lowell. He drove Lowell to Gambier, Ohio, to Kenyon College, after which the two traveled on to Chicago.

BETTY POWERS

2115 F Street, N.W.

Washington 7, D.C.

September 29, 1947

Dear Betty,

First chance I’ve had to write to you on the way — and I will have wired you my whereabouts by the time this arrives. As I mean to say in the wire, the car was running so well, and the situation in Elmira looked so bad, so unpropitious to camaraderie, I decided to go to Washington. I studied the roads in that tour book and found the hills or mountains are not so much, as in fact they aren’t. The thing that was bad, which they did not mention, was the condition of much of the road. Good stretches, then bad stretches. However, the car is doing wonderfully, and I know you will understand my decision to make the trip after all — after deciding I wouldn’t. I intend to see Lowell while here, perhaps this morning, and may get a little more information on the Guggenheim — let that, I think, be justification for my coming if you can’t feel good about camaraderie — and I know I’m making you hate that word, if you don’t already. […] It is Monday morning. I love you.