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

Pax,

Jim

I was born on November 11, 1947. Jim and Betty stayed in St. Cloud for a while, Betty with her parents and Jim with the Strobels, Betty’s aunt, Birdie, and her husband, Al.

GEORGE GARRELTS

St Cloud

Martinmas, November 11, 1947

George,

It’s a girl … nine lbs and fourteen ounces. Very damned grueling, the whole business, really too much for a man to take. Slogan of the day, bandied from nun to nurse, and back again: she’ll never remember this when it’s all over. I guess the idea is not to discourage the male, lest the race die out. Tell Fr Egan, will you? I think he ought to know, and I don’t feel up to even a note like this. Katherine Anne will be the name, I think.

Pax,

James

HARVEY EGAN

St Cloud

Sunday morning, November 16, 1947

Dear Father Egan,

[…] I wrote Fr G. the other day, the day the baby was born, and asked him to relay the news to you. I trust he did. If he didn’t, it was a girl. So we can’t call it Harvey very well. We are calling it Katherine Anne, after Miss Porter and my dead aunt Kate. The baby was born on St Martin’s Day. “Martinmas” is the title of Betty’s story in the November 15 New Yorker , in case you want to look it up at the library. Tomorrow, I believe, Betty is coming home — home to the Wahls’. I am staying here, at the Strobels’—their house is bigger, more luxurious, my style — but not for long. I expect to visit the Cities any day. Research is calling me. […]

I am being felt out by St John’s to teach creative writing. Can’t make up my mind. Don’t go much for the teaching part, but do feel it’d give me a chance to use the library and meet the boys (not the students). […]

Jim

Jim took over a creative writing class at St. John’s for an instructor who had left mid-semester.

HARVEY EGAN

St Cloud

November 1947

Mon pere,

Rec’d yours yesterday on one of my jaunts up-country — you know of course that I keep a place in the country, a sort of hunting and fishing and praying retreat — and am happy that you thought to suggest the name Catherine Ann. The only thing is we are going to call it Katherine Anne. I have just come from the upper regions of the Wahl house, it is early in the morning, but already they are working on it, giving it a bath, etc. Add to all this the past week and I have had a snootful. Are you sure I am too old to get in at Nazareth Hall?1 I don’t know a lot of Latin, but always got good marks in English and with the vernacular on XXXX (no XXXXXXX eraser in the whole damned house; it was never blessed, I’m sure) the way, maybe I’d be just what they’d be looking for. I am also a close friend of R. M. Keefe, who did a lot of time at Mundelein,2 so may be said to know the ropes. I realize that I would have to give up “my writing,” as they say in panel discussions, but then that seems to be outmoded no matter how you look at it. Here, if I stay here, it is just a matter of time before I am clerking at the Schmid General Store in Avon or, if I would prefer the city, at Linneman’s in St Joe.3

I see that it snowed again last night. Well, it’ll have to do worse than that to keep me off the highway this week. I think it’ll be Thursday now. I am driving Don in too. I am going out to Avon and live by myself, beginning today. I’ve got the oil burner to keep me warm … and privacy. I may stay a week in St Paul and Mpls, so figure out where I can stay cheap and be able to work. I don’t mean the rectory. I intend to be around longer than that. A man’s got to breathe, don’t I?

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

Rural Life

Avon

Thursday evening, November 1947

Dear Fr Egan,

Al Jolson is singing on the radio now, and naturally my thoughts turn to you. Very glad to have your note and the enclosure … but why is it that the Sign keeps picking on me? Why is it that Mrs Lamb doesn’t like me? (Al says at his time of life he likes beautiful music.) Very cool here in Stearns County, around 50 in our house, degrees, not people. I am still meeting my class. It is pretty much of a snap, though I do have to watch myself that I don’t take them too seriously and get them sore at the stuff they turn in. […]

We like to go to St John’s [Abbey Church] because there is no lay participation, or I do. I am only slowly getting the idea that I am surrounded by people who are working night and day for things like the dialogue Mass. Imagine my dismay at the discrepancy between the party line and my own feelings in these matters. However, it’s only feelings with me, not theory. Big party last Sunday night at the Cottons’: Zahn, Hyneses, Gene McCarthy, Nugents (Canadians come to live the good life in Stearns County), Gills (she’s the former Rosemary Jensen), L. Doyle (he’s the translator of the forthcoming Rule of St Benedict done in Easy Essays form) and Betty Finegan (she’s going to be L. Doyle’s wife, and that is news), and the Powerses (she’s the Dante scholar; he’s the former track man at Saratoga).

I am certainly considering your invitation to Laurel Avenue but will let you know for sure, and when, if. Fr G. was here last week, staying overnight, seeing us all, enjoying the winter sports (spitting at the stove), and I wish you’d find the time and enthusiasm to visit us, anytime. Dick Keefe will be the godfather by proxy.

Buck Moon at Doubleday announces from Florida, where he is resting up with his folks, that there’s a new Fr Murphy4 in the house and it makes Forever Amber sound like “The Three Bears.” I hope so. It ought to rip the book-reviewing boys and girls wide open in certain pious places. Buck is sending me a first-edition copy when published bound in the hide of a Black Protestant, so he says. He says all the Doubleday hands were wondering where they’d take Fr M. the last time he hit the big town, and Buck finally said, 21 of course. The others thought 21 might be too worldly. When they all arrived there, risking it, it turned out that all the waiters in the place knew Fr M., his favorite food. Enough for now. You’ll be hearing from me. You might send me a hockey schedule so I’ll know when to come.

Pax,

Jim

ROBERT LOWELL

Wednesday, November 26 [1947]

Dear Cal,

[…] Well, we had a baby, a girl, on November 11, Armistice Day, but even more significantly St Martin’s Day, or Martinmas, which is the title of Betty’s story in The New Yorker for November 15. She’s heard from a few publishers already. Is it all right, since they are looking for novels, to mention yours?

Got a kick out of your description of goings-on in Davenport, especially likening the priests to Buck and Champ. That struck me as exactly right; they are that way, the Roman clergy — the only clergy today that is, perhaps accounting for the vitality of the Church, to say nothing of its blindness, its honest blindness.

Do not hear from Champ, indeed did not expect to, but I guess Buck would like a word. Be sure and see him if you’re in New York. There were a couple of days here, hell and high water days, when I was virtually off for the East. I had an offer of a job as editor at Commonweal , the one Broderick gave up for The New Yorker , but I saw it would take me away from my book, the St Paul book, and withstood the temptation. Then, too, it was not clear what I could do there, beyond seeing that a few books got properly reviewed. I didn’t want to get away from St Paul, find myself like Marguerite and Elizabeth Hardwick adrift in the great city at the mercy of it all.

The baby is crying like hell now. I am not liking it one bit and do not expect to grow used to it. What a foul fiend I am to have for a father.

I enjoy Ezra’s little messages. The last one: See here Darkness, don’t tell me you’re just a blue eye’d boy who sold one to a mag … I guess he’s right about that lowbrow stuff. But then I’ve come quite a way. It was the sort of thing I’d been given to believe in the Thirties, when I came of age, that stories were made of. And of course it’s the kind of thing Ezra set his sails against at the beginning.