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

What do the beautiful changes among the hierarchy mean to you?18 How can you lose, okay.

See you, then, on the Wolverine out of the LaSalle Street Station, or the Twilight out of the IC.19 Here, I’ll get this round. Well, the next one then.

Keep in touch.

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

June 25, 1956

Dear Fr Egan,

Hope you’re no longer here (at the hospital) but that this follows you back to Beardsley, or to the second week of the retreat if there is one. Don’t forget, if you should miss out in your diocese, there is always New York state (and Saratoga in August).

Oh, yes. This is from the English advance.20 It actually came.

I am on my way over to see Hump now. He went to a picnic yesterday out at Hyneses, and according to Mary, whom I’ve seen in the meantime, everything went all right except for one argument Tom had with Arleen, who maintained that our bishop is not as bad as were Stalin and Hitler in their day.

Again, thanks for the lift.

Jim

Thomas Merton, visiting St. John’s, came to dinner at “the small ancient red wooden house,” as he put it in his Journals . He saw Jim as “a mixture of dryness and spontaneity, a thin, sensitive person whose vocation is to go through many unbearable experiences.”

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

July 30, 1956

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] Now, this is top secret, though everyone knows about it. Father Louis, OCSO,21 at the mental health institute at St John’s, was here for dinner with companion (a doctor, also OCSO) and Betty’s brother,22 who was used as a go-between, rec’d permission to attend at last moment. He was the one who kept stressing, in telephone calls with Betty, need for secrecy; I suppose they fear the newspaper publicity. But who should ring me up from downtown on Friday, the day of the dinner here, but one R. M. Keefe,23 who now looks like two of the same. Well, Betty was worried that it would seem that I was protecting myself, and worried at the impression Dick would make, he being so fun loving, but in fact it was a good thing. He got along fine with the doctor, and it was a good evening. I liked Fr Louis quite a lot. He is now novice master and said he’d like to get someone like Dick now and then instead of what he’s getting. You realize, I trust, that this whole affair was not my idea but his. I gather that he is still being tempted to turn Carthusian. He hadn’t read Grace , though he’s bought five copies of Prince , he said, and so I sent him a copy with a quotation from St Bernard, who, in my humble opinion, is the best writer among the saints, admittedly few, I’ve read. I gave it to him in the original Latin, which should be safe enough, providing I don’t ever see him again. You know I’ve never been much of a Latinist; inter alia (there was a horse by that name in Ireland) was about as far as I got.

Tonight, after dark I am to attack a hive of wasps who have taken up residence in the wall of that bay window in the kitchen. I have devised a trap made of screen into which, providing I can get it over the hole in the house wall, I expect the wasps to fly. Then I will do them in with DDT and also shoot some into the wall where the hive presumably is. I wish you were here because I must dress in veil and padding to do the job, fearing stings. Whereas you, Father …

Boz will have his eye operated on Wednesday morning, August 8, and I’d be very grateful if you’d remember him then and on the days following. Please tell Sister Eugene Marie, who, I suspect, stands in well with heaven.

All for now.

Jim

Egan was finally released from exile in Beardsley and assigned to St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis as chaplain. Jim, unable to resist the tawdry spectacle of the summer’s political conventions, bought a TV.

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

August 24, 1956

Dear Fr Egan,

Glad to hear from you, and think you’re in your element: cancer, newspapers hot from the press, TV channels clear, and most of all freed from your maintenance work, heating, caulking, watering, etc. Allow me, then, in the light of all this, to congratulate you on your new assignment.

I visited Mpls last week on a buying trip: tea, clothing for Betty and children, typewriter for Betty, and so on. There wasn’t time for what we did, and so I didn’t call you, but I’ll be seeing you at Schiek’s or somewhere in the weeks to come. We have been buying everything in sight. A new refrigerator (the old one was still running, a 1936 model); a foam rubber mattress; and TV. Yes, the pressure built up to a terrific pitch for a few days before the Dems convened, and I went into a flurry of research — as usual CU24 and the other outfit had nothing to say. So I went by hearsay and the look of the cabinet and bought a Spartan, a table model. It is doing well by us, with a thirty-foot antenna. We’ve seen some good movies, mostly English: Pickwick Papers, The Man in the White Suit, Carrington V.C. , and others. I enjoyed the Dems; their opponents, what a bore, and what a flop Stassen turned out to be. I thought Eisenhower’s speech good, though, as those things go. Did you hear Clement’s?25 I see in Newsweek where Red Smith said the Democrats (using Clement) hit the Republicans with the jawbone of an ass.

Yes, as you would know from above, The New Yorker bought the story, and it should appear sometime this fall.26 I was exhausted from revising it (and it still isn’t ready) and haven’t done any work for two weeks. Pretty soon Ken McCormick will be back from Europe and will be asking how’s the novel coming. I am beginning to regret my decision to teach at Michigan and hope I can make it count as time in the desert, peace and quiet, and get some of my work done that I wouldn’t find possible here. […]

Write.

Jim

Red house in winter

Jim left for Ann Arbor in September for a semester of teaching at the University of Michigan. He rented the apartment of the scholar and literary critic Austin Warren, who was on leave from the university. The adjoining apartment was occupied by a couple, Pansy and Dwight, whose goings-on — and those of the metal hangers in their closet — were clearly audible to Jim, who was as fascinated as he was annoyed by the situation.

BETTY POWERS

507 Church Street

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Tuesday, September 25, 1956

Dear Betty,

[…] The woman who cleans was here today, worked three hours, and really worked. I haven’t seen a woman clean like that for years and years. She is colored. She will also do my laundry. She seems nice, very worried about Austin, called him “a poor old man,” and she’s in her sixties, I’ll bet; Austin is 57, was born 1899 at Waltham, Mass., according to a note in one of his books. […]

I sent Boz a little book yesterday, one of those little Potter ones that he should be able to understand and the girls can read it. It is about six in the evening now, and I’ll go out and mail this. I am hungry but can think of nothing I want. Except you, of course.

Much love,

Jim

BETTY POWERS

507 Church Street

Ann Arbor, Michigan

September 26, 1956

Dear Betty,

[…] The apartment is very nice. Its defects are that you can hear through the walls, and the bed in the same room with the kitchen. The living room is very nice, though crawling with books, ikons, pictures, which has a depressing effect on me, makes me feel anything but well-read. There is also a table with candlesticks, a piece of marble, a crucifix, a Roman breviary on it; it looks like an altar. Mr Rice1 isn’t sure what Mr Warren does with this, some kind of service, he thinks. Austin’s name is on the mailbox downstairs, but up here, on the second floor, there is a little card on the door that says: “Oratory of SS Basil & Gregory.” Apparently, Austin has been getting more and more … uh, ecclesiastical, as the landlord put it. He is Greek. Austin has joined the Greek Orthodox Church, I understand. […]