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

When I finish up in January, I intend to look you up for lunch. It’ll be the 17th, I think; a Thursday. Could you hold that open? I’ll let you know if it’s to be another day.

Academically yours,

Jim

Very glad to hear Clocker23 is abroad again and at Oxford. I have noticed that he’s become an expert on British writers, have read his reviews here and there. Tell him I’d like to see him at Oxford, sunning himself at Parson’s Pleasure or bicycling on High. I often think of Clocker. He is, in fact, as we used to say in fun, a sweet guy. Would that we could go racing together in England!

BETTY POWERS

507 Church Street

Ann Arbor

Tuesday morning, December 18, 1956

Dear Betty,

[…] Who the hell sent the envelope addressed “Earl”?24 Mrs Barnhart, I imagine, just to make it perfect, and you did say they’d accepted. The hand is what you’d have to call illiterate, and so I eliminate Mrs Wormhoudt. Ah, well, I’m glad the printer didn’t make that mistake. […]

Don’t worry about the liquor. I’ll just buy a case of everything. I may get the wine in St Cloud anyway. I expect to have a merry time of it on my way home, stopping people all along the way and wishing them “Many of ’em!” After all, all I’ll be carrying is my canvas bag, a punch bowl, twenty-four cups, a half-dozen fifths of whiskey, gin, rum, etc. “Same to you!” […]

Jim

The conversazione was a great success and remembered as such into the twenty-first century by survivors in the Movement.

HARVEY EGAN

The Cloisters

St Cloud

January 2, 1957

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] Nothing has happened here since the conversazione. The last few guests left this morning. No one stayed overnight, though we’d made up beds for four. I gather that it was a success, and if so I’m glad. That is all I hoped. I knew I wouldn’t hear anything memorable at such a gathering. There remains the problem of refusing invitations resulting from it, but we are comparatively safe with the children as alibis for staying home. […]

We were very glad you could come and stayed as long as you did. Maybe in Ireland when we give a hunt ball, you’ll stay all night. I have no plans for that, however. I’d like to finish a novel quick. That doesn’t seem to be how I do things, though. […]

Ace Brigade

Merton sent me his new book, but I haven’t read it yet. Mary Humphrey got right to it. She does most of my spiritual reading, she who doesn’t need it. But as you say Doris Day used to say, “That’s life, I guess.”

BETTY POWERS

507 Church Street

Ann Arbor

January 8, 1957

Dear Betty,

[…] It is now 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, and I’ve just had a call from Clyde Craine25 of the University of Detroit. Apparently, he knows me better than I know him; he calls me “Jim.” The whole affair grows. I am to be interviewed on WWJ, the NBC Detroit outlet, at 2:30 or 2:45, I guess it is; then I call Clyde; then we have dinner; then we put something on tape; then there is the reading itself; then we see some people afterward; and then I either stay overnight at Clyde’s or return on the midnight train. In fact, it isn’t as busy as it sounds, and Clyde isn’t, actively, pushing me around, but the thing just builds up, of itself. And I keep wondering what it means. I am not that well-known. I wish I were. Boredom, I guess, on the part of everybody. Even I am looking forward to it, but tell myself to watch that I don’t drink or talk too much; I must put the whole thing under the glass of analysis. Clyde was for my reading “The Valiant Woman,” though the story always bothered his boss, he said; a Jesuit, evidently. I got the impression that there might be crusaders in the audience, book burners and the like. I hope so. I wish that I could purchase some pneumatic horns, attached to glasses, say, that I could blow up and put on for reading. I am to read “The Presence of Grace.” Well, that’s enough of that. Having just spoken to Clyde, I am still full of it, you understand. […]

Much love,

Jim

I am wearing Austin’s rubbers here.

BETTY POWERS

507 Church Street

Ann Arbor

Saturday, January 12, 1957

Dear Betty,

[…] Now for my day in Detroit. I arrived by bus around 1:15, looked in the windows of a whole row of shoe stores, asked about a couple of pair — whether they came in black; they didn’t — and forgot about that. I appeared at WWJ, waited a few minutes in the lobby, then Fran came in — a combination of Mrs Hancock, in “Blue Island,” and Mrs Mathers — and up we rode in the elevator, we being the aforementioned and Lanny Ross26 and his entourage, girlfriend, photographer, another man. In the fifteen seconds it took for us to go down the hall after leaving the elevator, before we entered the studio, Lanny questioned me. Obviously, he was annoyed that he was having to share the program with me. “Writer,” I said, asked what I was, though Fran had told him as much when she introduced us. “What kind of writer?” “Short-story writer.” “Something like this?” he said, pulling out a pocket-size pulp magazine — detectives, or something. “No,” I said flatly. “Well?” he asked. “ The New Yorker ,” I said. “Oh,” he said. “That’s kind of whimsical, isn’t it?” “I suppose,” I said. Then I heard him saying to Fran, as I was removing my coat and putting it on the grand piano, “Is this going to be a round-robin?”

Well, to make a long program short, Fran has heard of me through Time magazine, through having seen the best books of the year, and I am introduced as “James Powers.” And at first she and Lanny sort of give way to me in the program, asking me questions, and I answer them as sweetly as I can, but there is a disturbing drift toward the negative, culminating in my saying a literary man could no longer associate himself with a newspaper. Fran wants to know right away if I know this station is owned by a newspaper. I say, yes, and that I sometimes read the paper on Sundays but that I am not singling out Detroit papers, just all papers. I say I am able to read a few of the British papers, which are “written,” and Lanny says, “Like The Manchester Guardian ?” and I say yes and add The Observer and Sunday Times .

All the sudden we’re off that and into Lanny’s new project, which is singing in supermarkets, in behalf of a new series of records, Master-Something-or-Other Records, “lovely Strauss waltzes,” and “My Fair Lady,” very popular with teenagers in Fran’s family. Well, I detested Fran, but I rather liked Lanny. You could see the nasty yellow hair dye, and he looked pretty burned-out around the eyes, but he was a man and he’d been somebody once and maybe he still was. He saw that I wasn’t trying to hog the microphone; he saw, I think, I didn’t give a damn. Toward the end of the 15-minute program he broke into folk song, rather a surprise to me, but I was glad to hear something else. I haven’t seen anybody dressed like Lanny since Ken McCormick appeared in Milwaukee. Subtle grey herringbone topcoat, black shoes, grey and black tie, white shirt — sombre, crisp though, like the grey side of the dollar bill. I was walking out without a word, since the photographer was snapping Fran and Lanny together, when Lanny came over and said he’d been glad to meet me and was going to look up my work — the Gollancz edition was in my hand — and Fran too said she’d been glad to meet me. There you are, a short résumé of that part of the trip to Detroit.

I then called Mr Craine. We had two drinks at the Detroit Athletic Club, drove forever to the restaurant, where we dined with his wife, Fr Farrell, dean of the graduate school, and another couple. This was rushed, time being short, and before the reading I cut a tape with a fellow who asked me a typed-up question which I looked at before we started cutting. This ultimately took a negative turn too. Then came the reading, a much bigger crowd than they expected, about 200 people, I’d say, and they’d expected under 50. The reading seemed to take forever, and I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. The questions afterward, however, went on for over an hour. This was pretty stimulating, I was told. I won’t go into it all — except to say that things took a negative turn. I did sense, however, that Mr Craine and others felt that it was quite an evening.