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

To which scheme I say to myself now, as I did then: Oh, dear.

* * *

Jim’s letters are assertions of comic might against the absurdity, as he saw it, of his existence. He wrote them in part to stave off chaos, to give reality a shape of his own creation, however dark. As it happens, the last communication between my parents was conducted — in a manner of speaking — in writing and was another attempt to fend off the unbearable. On the morning Betty died (at home, wasted by cancer, unstintingly cared for by Jim), he asked her what she would like for breakfast. She just shook her head. He went off and returned with a pencil and checklist with entries for “Eggs” and “Liver.” He left; came back; no checkmark. He took the list away and returned with it, having added “Kisses.” She smiled faintly and again shook her head. He left it with her, and when he returned again, she had marked “Liver.” This struck him, as I have no doubt it was meant to by Betty, partner and butt of his dark sense of humor, as perfect in its intransigence and bleak comedy.

Betty died a couple hours later. Jim said he spent that time telling her how sorry he was for having given her such a hard life and no home. He never really recovered from her death, though he lived for another eleven years, alone, and long enough to be forced to leave another house slated for destruction.

I have selected the letters and journal extracts that make up the text of this book from thousands of letters and several personal journals with the aim of keeping the focus on JFP’s life. I have cut letters and passages that are not necessary to the story, including a large number concerning JFP’s deliberations and negotiations with editors and publishers.

Passages cut from the letters are indicated by this: […]. Passages cut from the italicized interstitial material are indicated by ellipses alone.

I have created consistency in such matters as capitalization and corrected the very few spelling mistakes. I have added some additional paragraph breaks as JFP often sacrificed format to postage economy. I have also retained JFP’s preference for the British custom of using no period after an abbreviation if the last letter of the abbreviation is the same as the last letter of the word being abbreviated — for example, “Mr,” “Mrs,” “Fr,” “Sr,” and “Dr.”

Letter from prison

In 1942, when this story begins, Jim was twenty-five years old and living in Chicago with his parents in their apartment at 4453 North Paulina Street. He had a job at the wholesale book company A. C. McClurg and was also writing. His story “He Don’t Plant Cotton” (whose characters were based on the jazz musicians Baby Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and Lonnie Johnson) was accepted by Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature . The magazine had been founded in 1940 by Kerker Quinn in concert with six other editors, including Charles Shattuck, who became Jim’s most helpful editor and critic.

CHARLES SHATTUCK

4453 North Paulina Street

Chicago

September 8, 1942

Dear Mr Shattuck,

Naturally, I’m very pleased that the editors of Accent like “He Don’t Plant Cotton” well enough to publish it.1 […]

Concerning the who’s who data, this will be my first published story. Aside from the fact that I am 25 and live in Chicago, there is nothing I wish mentioned about me: because those facts, paltry and insignificant, are at least accomplished.

Off the record, I work for a wholesale book company. In fact I might even be what the Publishers Weekly and booksellers refer fondly to as “a bookman,” but the bestseller wars have left me, in spite of my tender years, battered and scarred beyond finding much solace in that hallowed term, smacking of crafts and guilds though it does.

In italics, I want to get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write. I am not working on a novel now.

I do not think my years are tender. Time passing haunts me even more than Space intervening.

Thanks once more. I am hoping you will be able to publish the story soon.

Sincerely,

J. F. Powers

Jim applied for the status of conscientious objector in November 1940 but was classified 1-A in September 1942. His great friend from his Quincy College Academy days, George Garrelts, ordained a priest in September 1942, was a strong supporter of Jim’s decision to resist military service. After a failed appeal, Jim did not present himself for induction on April 3, 1943. Arrested two weeks later, he spent three days in the Cook County Jail before being released on a thousand-dollar bond. He was indicted by a grand jury on May 6, 1943, and on September 30, 1943, was sentenced to three years at Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota. He served thirteen months before being paroled.

While inside, Jim was allowed to write two letters a week. He worked in the hospital and, to some extent, on his own writing. Unlikely though it was, and thanks to the friends he made there, prison gave Jim a sense of what life might be for an artist. Among his fellow inmates were a number of cultivated, idealistic men who were also conscientious objectors. Among them were John Marshall, with whom he wrote and produced a play, and two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, Jack Howe and Davy Davison. Howe drew up a plan of a farm for Jim that represented to him a more intellectual and cultivated expression of the ideals of the Catholic Worker movement.

CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT

Sandstone

May 22, 1944

Dear Charlotte and Bill,

[…] You make your life in New England2 sound attractive — even to me. At times I’ve thought my place to be there. But most of the time I’ve wondered if there is any place for me except in some branch of the government service. There is a justice, hardly poetic, in the way I find myself tied up in destiny with millions of people when what I want most is to be separated from them. […]

The weather is nice and I’m tempted to get out of the dormitory, but when I do, there’s only a sandy lot surrounded by concrete walls — and so monotony has the upper hand always. There is no grass. A while ago I saw somebody playing with a small snake. There it was lying in the sand, pushed about by prison shoes, and I guess it will die eventually. It can’t get out either. […]

Write when you feel like it — and love.

James (Powers) 1939

CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT

Sandstone

June 11, 1944

Dear Charlotte and Bill,

[…] This is Sunday in Sandstone, and it has rained intermittently all day. […] The letters from Mother and Daddy brought sad news also — Eric Swenson is dead and Russ Alonzo’s brother, whom I hardly remember … Well, I don’t know what to say about these things. I can only hope these boys thought they were engaged in good work. If so, it’s not so bad, as we must all die sooner or later and it is a privilege to die for something meaningful — however funny that sounds. As Father George says, it is very strange how such fuss is made about certain saints who died for the love of God, the hardships and martyrdom they thrust upon themselves, and yet when millions die for — they don’t know what, most of them — it is not wondered at, except secretly by many afraid to speak out. […]

Wm Fifield,3 […] who wrote to me several weeks ago, mentioning that a nun plans to use “Lions”4 in an anthology she’s editing,5 writes again that he is a CO and understands my situation. I had written to him, explaining my inability to write a long letter. […]