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

JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL

December 28, 1957

Dear Joe and Jody,

Here it is Saturday night with everybody gone to bed but me and the radio and the turf fire. […] I am smarting from a card I rec’d today from my friend Haskins (who spoke up for the common man last summer, you may remember, one evening at our house), who, referring to my Christmas story in The New Yorker ,10 says: “A potboiler, no?” Such blindness, coupled with such impertinence, is hard to take. […] One just doesn’t take up with such people, but having done so long ago, one doesn’t just write them off. What one would like to do is cut off their balls, lovingly, that is, and shake their hand in friendship … […]

Glad to hear Don made it out. There is something very good about Don coming, unannounced out of the night in winter. He used to scratch at the screen in my study. On the other hand, there’s something awful about Don not showing up after announcing he’s coming over, and never a word of explanation. So look out for that.

And now to Jody. We got a terrific lift out of her part of the letter, both the account of an evening in the Movement and her sketches. I call that talent, literary or not; the lovely still life. I do hope she continues along this line. I want the whole damn gallery. We had a letter from Em in the same mail with yours, and I find I can’t get enough of that photo of him and the pope. I keep looking at it; pornography was never so sweet in my youth. Pope and Anti-Pope, I call it, or More Popish Than the Pope. We can all be proud of Em, and I meant to tell him so in my next letter, which will be coming very soon. Don’t think I haven’t lamented to Betty that we had to be away from the scene this fall. The Movement is really jumping. I hope you aren’t so blind that you can’t see that. You are very fortunate to be living in this time in that place … […] Now I must close.

Jim

That winter, the weather was said to be the worst in Ireland in sixty years. Drafty, high ceilinged, and absent “a little thing called central heating,” Ard na Fairrge possessed a deadly chill such as Jim and Betty (and the children) had never experienced.

FRED AND ROMY PETTERS

Ard na Fairrge

Mount Salus

Dalkey, County Dublin

[early January] 1958

Dear Fred and Romy,

We were so glad to hear from you, and I know I thought many times of your living room during the Christmastime, of the trees I’d seen there and the one you probably had. It will be a sad day for you, if it ever comes, when you have to do with a commercial tree. […]

This is a Saturday afternoon with a gale blowing, the sea looking like a picture in an old book of photographs, rough, grey, the only things missing a destroyer or two and a U-boat. […] Betty has taken the last week pretty hard, the cold, I mean. It has been down to 25, which is quite an ordeal here, worse than 25 below in Minnesota — for, you see, we are heating by fireplace and in rooms with 12-foot ceilings (the one in the front hallway is as high as the house). Fortunately for all concerned, I don’t have to get up as early as the others in the morning, when it’s chilliest. […]

Yes, Fred, do write and tell us of “a suitable house”—you know there isn’t one. We do miss you all, as I keep saying, have raised you all to your proper heroic proportions as dear friends and gentle people in our imaginations, but there are differences between us, after all, the biggest one being that we are out and you are in — I won’t go into the matter of which is better: there are disadvantages on both sides. But we are out in the picturesque cold. We don’t know what we’ll do. Best to you both, and please write.

Jim

JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL

Ard na Fairrge

Mount Salus

Dalkey, County Dublin

January 4, 1958

Dear Joe and Jody,

I must have a clock in my head like the Great Arcano, Master of Pace, for here it is Saturday night again and my thoughts turn toward you all, not that I haven’t thought of you from time to time in the last week … I wasn’t in the mood until tonight — and perhaps the mood is due to these little bottles of Mackeson’s stout that I am consuming against the morrow, which is Sunday, always a tough day for me, even without a sermon — I haven’t heard a sermon yet this time in Ireland, always drawing a curate, and they are, evidently, only trusted to read the announcements. Not a bad idea. It goes part of the way in the right direction. I don’t get those attacks of Sunday Sickness that I used to get. Now you understand why, in my nonviolent fashion, I have always opposed the vernacular. I did listen to Macmillan, the prime minister, earlier this evening, and so, you might say, I’ve had it — and in English at that — for this week.

We are all pretty much as you would have found us last week, all but me in bed, the radio going, an Italian station, Radio Moscow having closed down. Listening to RM is like getting KUOM for me: obviously extremely decent people announcing, a note of concern in their voices, as if to say, you poor bastard, but we’re for you, we’re giving you this good high-class fare, not without stimulating lectures and news coverage and folk songs. I haven’t listened to RM much this time but must try to remember where it comes in. I used to like to hear them bragging about their dam, when we were here the last time. I wonder whatever happened to that little old dam, the biggest little old best dam in the world. I suppose it’s Sputnik now. […]

Jim

DON AND MARY HUMPHREY

Ard na Fairrge

January 31, 1958

Dear Don and Mary,

[…] I do wish you could see something of the country; the furniture, silver, architecture, and what strikes me as the most impressive thing about Ireland: its stone walls, just everywhere you look, walls: man-hours that didn’t go up in smoke or pass away somehow but are still here to be seen, marching into each other and off into the country endlessly. I have thought many times of building a wall, and perhaps I am peculiarly sensitive to what’s involved; this vast achievement, much of it make-work in famine times, but a lot of it going right down into the sea and sound as if laid by God himself.

No word lately from any correspondent in the Movement. I would like to hear from someone of course, but I am not the mental case I was about it some weeks ago. Something died in me then. I look out at the cold, cold sea, and I realize it’s going to be that way from now on, cold, cold, for old JF whether it’s the sea or the land, Ireland or America. I had a bad accident last night. Half rising out of my easy chair to kill off a madrigal singer on the radio, I slipped somehow and came down on the side of the chair, the armrest (not well padded) injuring my ribs near my heart. Quite painful still, and I’m not as fast as I was at my tuning (the radio). But otherwise we are all more or less well — and you might say I was wounded in action. How about cutting loose with another letter, Mary? We enjoyed your last very much — and that goes for one and all in the Movement. How about a group picture?

Jim

Journal, February 13, 1958

Reading J. B. Morton’s Belloc and enjoying it. Must remember it when I begin next — family life — novel. For the high spirits — spirits, song, walks, people, conversation — which remind me how it was supposed to be when we got married … Hynes, if he ever really had this idea, confused it with the 4-H Club. But it needs handling in a book — and I think Flesh is the place for it. It will give the beginning — as a flashback — the foundation for contrast — that the book needs. And I want to do it. It gives me pleasure — sad pleasure — to think of it — this style we didn’t keep up and even forgot — at least I did until I read the book last night. My theory is that marriage kills it or it becomes something else*—that Belloc made it work because he had no wife later. That may be the secret of George’s success, too — at this .