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

We are calling the baby Katherine Anne, after you know who. Outside of that I haven’t had much to do with it. […]

You ask me how it feels to be a father. About the same, I think. Except I’ve a few stipulations to read into the rural-life-family-life jive that circulates in these liturgical parts. If you must get married, I say to young people, be sure you can afford a fifteen-room house and servants. That comes as a blow to them. They read The Catholic Worker and all the rest and are accustomed to thinking in terms of Mary and Joseph and the manger. We have the manger, but we are not Mary and Joseph. Anyway, we are not Joseph.

A monk got tired of teaching creative writing at St John’s, so I took the job for the rest of the semester. They are paying me $250, or about $20 an hour. It’s only an hour on Tuesday and an hour on Thursday, about my limit.

I had to write The New Republic and tell them I wasn’t the man to do the piece on Bishop Sheil. It would not have been very inspiring if I did it, and I don’t care to have a controversy with The NR or Catholics on those grounds. Harry Sylvester thought I was being precious in my objections. I say Bishop S. went into labor and race the way Notre Dame went into football under Rockne. Nobody would enjoy that, save perhaps my friends, if I wrote it that way.

Let me hear from you.

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

Avon

Monday night, December 1947

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] Well, the child is baptized, and it is good, as you say, to have a little Christian among us. It gives Betty some company too. I have been weighing the future and believe, since you predict plenty of blood around the nets that night, I’ll journey St Paul — ward on Christmas Day, right after one of those family gatherings in St Cloud. It will serve as a beautiful excuse to leave early. So get those ducats for the 25th. Is there some concordance or Lives of the Saints I could read in the meantime so I’ll be as hep as you are? All I know is the blue line. […]

Peace,

Jim

ROBERT LOWELL

Avon

December 12 [1947]

Dear Cal,

[…] My days are so active here that I don’t get much work done. Now it’s storm windows. Betty is painting them in the kitchen. The temperature in our house, so called, is always around 50. That doesn’t make for much relaxation. I bought a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of rum, a little cheer, but there is no one really to drink it with. Your plan which has us all teaching at one school is charming, but not teaching much. How about Buck and Ted? Can’t you work them into this perfect society? I had a letter today from the president of Bennington offering me a job for the spring quarter, I think it is. I asked Betty if she’d like to go to Vermont. She said she would like to. I like the idea, not settling down there, which isn’t indicated in the letter, I believe, but getting away from here for a while. You know I’ve been here in Stearns County two months now, fighting the elements every minute of it. […] I enclose a new picture of car. Guess what it was saying when I went out and found it like this one morning: Some shit!

Write.

Jim

ROBERT LOWELL

Avon

February 13, 1948

Dear Cal,

[…] I heard from Buck today, and he has recommended me, at Ted’s instigation, to Bennington, but I do not hear. Do not worry so much about that, though. St John’s here owe me $250 but cannot bring themselves to remember, or perhaps I am getting it in prayers. Says Buck: “Champ was here and took New York, Doubleday, and the chickies like Grant took Richmond. He had steak, white wine, and truffles for lunch (thank God I’m not his editor) and was seldom found with a straight elbow during the cocktail hour.” Dear Champ, I knew him well, well, fairly well.

Glad to hear Caroline [Gordon]5 likes my stories. I enjoyed Tate’s piece on the bishop in the current Western Review , having reread The Crack-Up the night before and scenes from Gatsby . For some reason I can’t penetrate into Tender Is the Night . And got through first James the other night, “Lesson of the Master,” and think it quite wonderful, the main problem of the writer always.

Yes, it is too bad about the Living Gallery.6 I’ve seen pictures of the foundress, a thin little sister wasting away under the decisions she must make and the attack of un-housebroken authors like Harry Sylvester, and now you come along with perhaps the worst blow of all.7 So far as I know the only other living author not primarily a librarian she had was Waugh. I don’t know what I’d say if asked. […]

Pax,

Jim

Regards to Ezra and Mrs Pound. (I sent the list of names for advance copies, the Italian translation, of my book to my agent, asking counsel, and he replied for God’s sake let’s stay clear of Pound’s old fascist colleagues — Ezra had sent me a list of Italians who’d be able to “introduce” my book properly over there.)

ROBERT LOWELL

Bad Avon8

February 18, 1948

Dear Cal,

[…] I ought to tell you that work was completed today on our drainage system. I have been digging a trench, in which I have been hoping to put sewer pipe, building fires to melt the ice, chopping the ice, looking at the ice, and now it is all over, and the mud is drying on my galoshes. I see that the foregoing gives the wrong impression, the impression of achievement. What I meant to say was that I gave the damned thing up. The pipe is stacked outside our door. We await the thaws of spring …

Thanks for the James list; I appreciate not having to wade into his collected stories cold turkey. I am more skeptical than ever of Faulkner. Several weeks ago I read his story “Spotted Horses,” described as one of the funniest in the language by Cowley in the Portable I have,9 and though I liked spots very much, the whole thing is not for me.* I get tired trying to put his sentences together, not just for sense and transition, but to get some idea of the effect he had in mind … I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the other night — my first Conrad, incidentally, having been killed off in previous attempts — and I was reminded, especially in the action scenes on the steamboat, of Faulkner, the confusion of the language. I have a secret theory, not that, just a feeling, that action is better and easier when described not in chronological, realistic terms but as impression, with here and there a realistic effect. Faulkner does that. So does Conrad. It enables the prose writer to use poetry. I don’t feel it’s legitimate, though — at least now I don’t — and I don’t want to try it for fear I’d find it easy, the sloppy way, and I don’t intend to try it. I see, on rereading this, I am trying to make it all sound reasonable. The truth is I feel it is not a matter I can be reasonable about. I do not care for Faulkner — spots, yes, the story “A Rose for Emily,” for instance — as I don’t care for Hemingway. In these apostolic parts I am always meeting people who think Graham Greene wonderful. It is the same thing, only I do not mind so much being in disagreement with the Greene-ites … Enough for now.

Pax,

Jim

Weary of the rigors of living without running water in a damp half cellar in the woods, Jim and Betty started looking for an apartment in St. Paul — which is to say, they put out the call to their various friends.

HARVEY EGAN

Avon, Minnesota

1948

Wish to rent apt in Cathedral district. Writers, smoke, drink, have baby, but no narcotics. Consider exchanging same for uninhabitable woodland retreat near monastery. Fairly desperate.

Catholic couple wishes to rent apt in Cathedral dist. Have baby, own furniture, Mixmaster. Best ecclesiastical reference. Reasonable.