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

This room is like a dirty bottle, but inside is the vintage solitude which hardly anybody can afford nowadays, and I am sipping it slowly, hoping to straighten out my life as a writer. I’ve done little or nothing since returning from Michigan. We have a new woman who comes three or four mornings a week, and she’s a good one, and Betty too is hoping to accomplish something as a writer. The light, I’ve just noticed, comes into the room, falls upon the paper in the typewriter, just right. It comes from the west, though, and that could be awful in the summer — but then that, as you always say, is life. I must dash off a line to Ted.2 After all, what I’ve managed to do here in No. 7—that is the number on my door — is only what he did in Elmira. I have more room, however — for what? For staring straight ahead, I guess.

All for now.

Jim

Why don’t you tune in Bob and Ray, weekdays at 5:00 p.m., from the Mutual station in the Cities — it’s above KSTP on the dial? I get them via Wadena.

HARVEY EGAN

From Number 7

March 25, 1957

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] You know that play I was telling you about? Well. And so to the novel. I am trying to work up some feeling for Fr Urban, his last night as a preacher, but don’t seem to have the material I need. What I want is some examples of other men transferred as he has been, removed from the spot in the vineyard where it certainly did appear that they were doing awfully good work. Maybe it’s in Newman. I have always remembered Fr Wulftange’s remarks on Littlemore: another grey day at Littlemore, etc. Ah, well, I’m glad to be back with Fr Urban. We understand each other.

I made my trip to Urbana, Jacksonville, and Quincy, after 17 years away. The best thing was the visit I paid to Msgr Formaz, pastor at Our Saviour’s in Jacksonville for 52 years, dean of the Springfield Diocese, and the man who rec’d my mother into the Church and baptized me. He is 82 and a delicious old man, civilized, subtle, wise, and witty. I stopped off at Springfield, at Templegate, booksellers, and was told stories of him by the proprietors, who also told me a good one about Waugh when he was there some years ago. Reporter: Is it true you don’t care for American methods of heating? Waugh: What makes you say that? Reporter: Something I heard or read somewhere. Of course I only know what I read in the papers, as Will Rogers used to say. Waugh: Will Rogers? He’s dead, isn’t he? Reporter: Yes. Waugh: Now he knows better.

I visited the cemetery in Jacksonville and noted all the Irish counties on the tombstones, more than I’ve seen since I looked over the graves in St Paul. The Powers lot is filled, only a few yards from the clergy, on high ground. I felt it was all a mistake, all these poor Irish immigrating — for what? Now they know better. Don and Mary over last night, my first social life in some time, in St Cloud. They had gone out to hear Fr LaFarge on racial justice. I was not up to it. Well, that’s all I know this time. Write. I saw in the paper where we are jubilant about the changes in fasting regulations, we Catholics, I mean. T. Merton sent me his new book of poems. I can’t see him as a poet. But that goes for about all the poets. And now your arch-author must leave you.

Jim

Jim had become friends at Ann Arbor with Michael Millgate, then a teaching fellow, later a biographer, critic, and teacher.

MICHAEL MILLGATE

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud

March 28, 1957

Dear Michael,

[…] I am writing this from my new office in downtown St Cloud. […] I have no telephone, though things are really hopping here, what with lighting my pipe and going to the toilet and scratching myself. I am in the same building with the Girl Scouts, not a going concern in St Cloud, where the Camp Fire Girls dominate, with two attorneys, and something called the Western Adjustment and Inspection Company. I keep thinking this is just the spot for a small mail-order rubber-goods and pornography business and that I am the man for it.

I have just finished Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes , which I enjoyed, and have just finished not finishing Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter . It took me half the book to find out that it is worthless. Such books, and Nancy Mitford’s, serve only to impress me with the genius of Evelyn Waugh. When they are bad, they are horrid.

Also Sean O’Faolain’s book on modern writers, I’ve been going through. He does the job that has been needed on Faulkner and that no American, presumably, knows enough to do. It doesn’t take much to make us pious. […]

That horse whose name you were trying to remember that night at my place was Freebooter, I think. I have nothing for the National tomorrow, and if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do about it. Very frustrating, life with the Lutherans. […]

Jim Powers

KERKER QUINN

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud, Minnesota

March 28, 1957

Dear Kerker,

[…] Jacksonville was obsessed with basketball, but I did have a nice hour in the cemetery and several hours with the old priest who baptized me and who hadn’t seen me since but who has followed my career as a writer closely. Quincy was worse. I spent five hours there, three in loneliness and two with the mother of an old friend. And so much for that.

Thanks again for your hospitality, and please let Chuck and Suzie know I appreciate that bash they put on for me.

Jim

And please tell Chuck that with a few choice words he ended my career, at least for a while, as a playwright.

Jim and Betty were told that St. Cloud State College would be taking the old red house by eminent domain. It was to be demolished and the land converted into a parking lot. Jim’s story “Look How the Fish Live” is based on this. Around the same time, Jim suffered a severe attack of appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital, where he had an emergency appendectomy, the worst ordeal known to man, in his view.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

509 First Avenue South

St Cloud

May 2, 1957

Dear Katherine Anne,

[…] We must soon move. We have hated it here in St Cloud, but we have loved being in this old house, which is now 101 years old, the oldest in town, painted red, barn red, with green trim, and owned by two maiden ladies, one of whom is failing in health and the other is living in California. First, ten days ago, an appraiser visited us, with no explanations except that he’d been sent by the owners’ insurance agent. I wrote and rec’d reassurances that the house would be retained for some time to come. Ultimately, it would be consumed by the Teachers College across the street (they have made dormitories out of two imposing residences since we’ve lived here), and there is always something in the newspapers about their needing money to expand. Recently, the “Teachers” part of the name has been dropped, which makes it St Cloud State College, more in line with its true purpose, though preparing teachers is still an important part of its work, and this change is expected to aid faculty members in getting their books published — I am paraphrasing the press.

Well, yesterday we heard that Jan. ’58 might be the latest we could occupy the house. This, in effect, with two children in school, means we’ll have to move and be somewhere else in the fall. We are hoping it will somehow be put off, that we can stay here another school year, but it is not likely: there is the career of a young college president to be considered too (he is also president of the local chamber of commerce); the more he builds, the more likely he is to get the call to a better pulpit, say, Iowa State, and so on up the ladder. Of course I am prejudiced. If one could believe that what is going on across the street is education, it would be different. But here are country boys and girls continuing their high-school life, never, I think, encountering the idea of a university, or anything like it, in their entire education.