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

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

North River Road

St Cloud, Minnesota

June 3, 1953

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] Potato bugs, armyworms (now being sprayed by a man in a truck), and so on here. You’d think with so much DDT being used, we’d have fewer harmful insects, wouldn’t you? (That is what is known as a leading question.)

Bp Busch’s funeral today, but Don and I decided not to brave the clergy, hordes of whom are here for it.7

Guess that makes Mom Bartholome top dog.8 Heard a good one about her lately. Seems she was at some big celebration or other, and feeling called to say something timely to her son (I guess it was not a speech, just something she felt compelled in the circumstances to say), she said: “Son, save your money.” […]

Best,

Jim

James Ansbury Powers (Boz) and Jim, 1954

In September, Jim and Betty finally found a solution to their housing problem in the “red house,” the oldest house in St. Cloud. The arrangement was that Jim and Betty would act as caretakers in lieu of rent and also share residency for part of the year with the two women who owned the house. Writing to Egan, Jim said, “I know you and know you’ll not like the setup, that we don’t have the whole house; but that is where the facts of life come in: we don’t belong in a house like this, just as we didn’t belong in Ireland — both being beyond us, in this our time, in this our plight.”

Built in 1856 as an office and storerooms and expanded into the house it became in 1861, the place had served as a tea garden (Grandmother’s Tea Gardens) in the 1920s and 1930s. The grounds were set out with lilacs and other flowering bushes and shaded by oak, elm, maple, black walnut, and mulberry trees. Occupying half a block across the road from the Mississippi, it was, as Jim wrote to Katherine Anne Porter, a “nice beat-up old house … with probably the loveliest yard, all unkempt, in St. Cloud, crawling with railroad lilies and mosquitoes. The sensation, walking through it, is one of buoyancy.”

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud, Minnesota

October 5, 1953

Dear Fr Egan,

Your letter rec’d this morning, the only piece of mail, which just shows you what life has come down to for me, and a Monday morning at that. Why, I remember the day when every mail brought invitations to write or speak (for nothing). Now I might as well be in Barry.

I write so soon because I want to tell you the good news. I was up on a ladder in a high wind mending a squirrel hole in the house — they bowl nuts in the attic about two in the morning — when a wire came from Ken McCormick of Doubleday saying I’d be getting $3,000 in the coming year from the Rockefeller Foundation. I’d applied, on his advice last winter, or spring, and had hoped to hear in July. I’d given up some time ago. Now, it would appear, we’ll be able to live another year, eat and everything. To think you used to talk against Standard Oil! Well, I’m telling you, but don’t tell anybody. I want to see how long society will cold-shoulder me. I refer to the fact that no one comes to see me, no one writes.

Naturally, I’ll take up the novel again, providing I can get rid of the hammer and saw I carry about with me, night and day, and wallpaper brush. Send me some of your old yellow slips: squirrel hole, hole under my workroom, hole in shed, hole in attic, wiring in cellar, furnace, pad for my room, rug for my room, Hamm’s, and so on.

[…] It is a run-down place but very beautiful in its way, and the grounds are the loveliest in St Cloud, I think. The owners, sisters of advanced age, both unmarried, name of Mitchell, Presbyterians, are descended from the original Yankee settlers; their father was author of the History of Stearns County and had a newspaper and holding company here. I like them, Ruth and Eleanor. They live in Mpls and St Paul, respectively; Hampshire Arms and Laurel Avenue. That’s about it. […]

Write. Come.

Jim

James Ansbury Powers was born on November 13, 1953. His name mutated from Bother Brown to Bozzer to Boz.

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud, Minnesota

November 14, 1953

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] I am alone here, Betty in the hospital. We had a boy yesterday morning (6:09 a.m.) and will call him James, I guess, making him the fourth one. The girls, who wanted another girl, are staying at Wahls. They consider boys selfish, “miners”—someone who grabs things and says, “That’s mine!” Hump says now I’m really in business, in the family-life sense, and I guess expects my life to become more of a shambles, but we’ll see. […]

Went to see Martin Luther , the movie, and found it interesting, but confirmed in my faith, which proves something, I guess. If you would shake my faith, let me see a movie made under Catholic auspices. When I saw Luther at home, with Mrs Luther rocking the cradle, sewing, and Dr Luther teaching nine-year-olds sitting all in a row, I saw that the appeal was primarily sentimental, and so I guess it must always be, here, in lieu of anything else, anything like theology. Letter this morning from the First Methodist Church, mimeographed, welcoming me to St Cloud, suggesting that I come around unless I have other affiliations — which is very often not the case. The curate is Japanese.

Les McCarthys1 (French) were here Wednesday afternoon. Word from them on the Sylvesters. Guess Rita is in a state asylum. Harry teaching in N. Carolina and divorced from her, in love with another. There’s comedy and tragedy for you. He never should’ve left the sport page, Gene McCarthy said, and that’s about it, I think. […]

Now I must close, pick up some food for Betty to eat in the hospital. She says she’s never tasted any like it.

When are you coming to see us?

Jim

CHARLES SHATTUCK

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud, Minnesota

November 30, 1953

Dear Chuck,

[…] We have found this house, a place too good to believe we live in, run-down as it is, owned by these elderly sisters who come for a few days now and then and are easy to take: I see they have left me the Saturday Review with KAP’s picture on it, knowing we named our Katherine Anne after her. And I got this grant, after giving up on it, having applied last spring and expected to hear in July, and got it in the nick of time, in October, with Betty about to have a baby, movers to pay (from Milwaukee, where our furniture was in storage), and though I didn’t know it until four days later — there were four days of perfect bliss — with a rejection from The New Yorker in store for me: another cat story, one I would’ve bet on, and consider, with the usual revisions to be made, superior to the other two. […] For someone as unprolific, or lazy, as I am, it’s a bitter blow, from which I’m just now recovering. I took it out on the red squirrels that have made the attic and the walls of this house their home; with trap, gun, and fence I fought them, as the character in Joyce’s “Counterparts” made up for everything by beating his children.

Anyway, I’m damn happy to have the grant and to be eating, as is Betty. She had a baby November 13, a boy, and we’re calling him James Ansbury, after my father. His father was also a James: the Ansbury was his mother’s name (she came from York, he from Waterford [Ireland] where all the Powerses come from). […]

Jim

ROBERT LOWELL

509 First Avenue South