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

Fit and ready.

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

Yaddo

[late August — early September 1949]

Dear Father Egan,

[…] Saratoga meeting no great success; no great loss (about 12 or 15 dollars, I’d say). Your five went the hardest. I send you the chart. The horse was Greek Song: the bet, as ordered, to place. You can see what he did. I blame the boy for not breaking him right. A cousin of Skoronski, who, you may recall, rides like a Chinaman. The meeting a great success in every other way, though. Had Joe Palmer over here two or three times and his friend Jim Roach, who does the same thing, but not so well, for The NY Times . Joe took us to the track for breakfast one morning, picking up the tab for $7.90 (that was for us three) and also sending us six passes to the clubhouse. You would have liked him. […]

Breezing.

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

150 Summit Avenue

September 6, 1949

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] We plan to leave the babies in St Cloud, move them from there to Milwaukee. I have my family’s car, a 1940 convertible, for the trip. We drove up in it, Betty and I, after looking over the place in Milwaukee. It is out in the country. I’m going to need a car to escape it, I fear; the country, that is. It is brand-new, you know, upstairs from the people who’re building it. It is better than we deserve. Things will be tough at first, since we must buy a new gas stove, washing machine, etc. I don’t believe I was led to believe in the necessity for such things in The CW. 10 But then there wasn’t much about your housekeeper either, was there? […]

Do you have movies in Beardsley, or lantern slides? We’ll expect to see you on Sunday the 11th. I’m sorry about Greek Song, but that’s the way it goes: some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.

Pax …

Jim

Art and Money’s “little rambler house” on the Mississippi, 1951—Mary and Katherine with cousin Michael Bitzan

The Powers family left St. Paul for Milwaukee, where, for two school years, Jim taught creative writing at the Jesuit-run Marquette University. “Betty and I feel sad about leaving St Paul,” Jim wrote to the exiled Egan in Beardsley. “Perhaps, though, we can have a triumphal return someday. Perhaps about the time you have yours.” The family lived on the second floor of a house in a new, treeless neighborhood far from the heart of the city.

HARVEY EGAN

Milwaukee

September 19, 1949

Dear Father Egan,

Monday morning. We have a semblance of order here now. The books are still in boxes. We await another baby bed before the “den” can be cleared out for me. I am in no mood for work yet, however. Yesterday I journeyed — three transfers on the bus — to Borchert Field, where I saw the Saints go down to defeat, Roy, the Brewer pitcher, giving one hit, Naylor, who would have been the last man to face him. So that means they go to St Paul to finish off the series. I went with Gordon’s old friends, the Hollanders. They are very cynical about the Brewers and Nick Cullop, whose scalp they seek.1 I teach my first class tomorrow afternoon. Do you suppose they would understand if I called it off on account of having to follow the team back to St Paul?

Which reminds me that Life arrived the other night at 11:15 p.m., special delivery: the Waugh story on American Catholics with a picture of JF and Harry in it. My picture is one that Time took two years ago at Yaddo for that review they never ran. I think I look like a queer in it, but perhaps that will boost my sales in that important quarter. The Waugh piece has some good things in it but is cloudy at the end, I think. It is the Sept. 19 number in case you want to pick up a copy — on second thought where in Beardsley will you be able to do that? Fry’s?

Katherine Anne is here buzzing around the typewriter. She is a good girl, as is Mary. Both behaved themselves all the way from St Cloud. We have a secondhand stove, a good bargain. We expect you to stay here whenever you come this way — on your way to and from conventions, the track, etc. I am going to get a special bed for the “den,” where I intend to stock such visitors as yourself. We won’t have it in time for Fr Garrelts next Friday, and there may be some trouble about who sleeps on that lounge we have. He has kicked against that goad in the past. All for now. Let us hear from you.

Jim

This place very bright and, let’s face it, soulless. Deadly nice little houses nearby peopled by souls taken up with new cars and lawn mowers. […]

Two years previously, Jim had written to Betty in a spate of pique: “I should study the mind of the Church which knows the one thing to be got out of marriage is children. The which we are getting. Now, if we only had some veneer furniture and a Studebaker.” The specter of veneer furniture never materialized, but Jim now found himself with a Studebaker, the first of two he was to acquire from the Strobels after they retired them.

HARVEY EGAN

Milwaukee

Monday in the desert, October 11, 1949

Bone pastor,2

[…] There is a monsoon blowing at our little blockhouse today too. We are situated on a prairie. Today is my day for reading MSS — tomorrow being a class day. I’ve just finished one, probably by an ex-seminarian, about a fellow who decides to leave the seminary. My comment, in effect: “Does this character have holes in his head?” Then there was one about a gambler who stole gold from a prospecting Chinaman; my comment: “Whence this materialism?” And so on. It is really, so far, an easy way to earn one’s daily bread. Not what I’ve been used to in recent years, but better than the years before, and I hope I’ll not have to do worse in years to come. Hold that sexton’s job open.

After much financial strife, the reward. I sold a story to The New Yorker . So I am going to buy Strobels’ 1942 Studebaker. I hope to get it at the end of this month — Mr S. should have his new one then — and if so, I might pick up that crackpot3 in St Joe and come see you. Like to see you among your platters.4 We are hard put for a church here. I try to plan it so I’m downtown on Sundays. Out here, well, out here … it’s not the cathedral, just as it isn’t Summit Avenue; raw country, raw people. Between the virgin land and the neon signs, nothing; no history; nothing.

I don’t see anybody at Marquette. I come and go. Very good that way, though I did hope to get in with the chancery crowd here too. They’re freezing me out, though, or else they don’t know I’m alive. Have had the usual invitations to say a few words, though, and turn them down. […]

I went to Chicago Saturday for the day and bought a sport coat at Jerrems — I felt I owed it to my students, always appearing in the same sack; they might think there isn’t money in writing. If I do get to Beardsley, I trust I’ll get to see your friend Popeye. Did you leave him some literature? What is the approach in the country, with no streetcars to leave Catholic publications on? Suppose you thrust it under the hens and the farmers get it when they come for the eggs. […] Write and pray …

Jim

I have a Chinese fellow in one class. He was a general in the last war under Chiang. About the nicest general I ever hope to meet. Only on English for two years, so there are problems, literary problems.

Jim took an increasing interest in the career of Del Flanagan (1928–2003), a middleweight prizefighter born in St. Paul. Del and his brother Glen were known as the Fighting Flanagan Brothers. In his letters to Father Egan, Jim worked up the idea that Del’s woes were akin to his own, eventually calling him “the J. F. Powers of boxing.” The racehorse Greek Song came in for the same treatment.