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

Somebody at America sent me that issue with the Prince review in it, and so I saw the Waugh piece: too bad, why America can’t do better, I don’t know; the ghetto mentality, as we in liberal circles used to say. Life here much the same. Betty still with child, but the end shouldn’t be far away. Girls go swimming two or three times a week, as part of physical education, in the sea. They have tennis racquets too. Boz and Hugh go about their business, building, farming, trains, shipping (we see boats of all kinds in the sea below us), and I’ve just come from making Hugh’s bed, which he had stripped down to the springs, only to drop off, and then to wake up, mad at the dirty trick he’d played on himself. Which reminds me that I must teach the children short-sheeting, to round off the evening chaos. […]

JFP Ltd is pretty quiet except in Germany, where, since coming to Ireland, I have had three little books published; the publisher is breaking up my two books and administering them in the form of spitballs. Well, I go down to the office six days a week, sit down, and prowl about Duesterhaus. For the last month I’ve been redoing the rec room — and can’t seem to get the job done. Maybe tomorrow the ice will break (these metaphors I use are an author’s stock-in-trade). A man tried to break in on me today, an agent with a client presumably interested in renting space in the building. Since the agent didn’t seem to know I was there, but since I definitely was, I acted the part of the genuine tenant, a little outraged at this invasion of privacy. I have a deal with the owner of the building (£15 a quarter) for this hole I inhabit but would have to move out if he succeeded in interesting a regular tenant in my space; I have bet against this eventuality, in effect. In view of the luck I’ve been having, however, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if asked to vacate. […] All for now.

Jim

Betty gave birth to Jane Elizabeth Powers on July 2, 1958, at the Leinster Nursing Home in Dublin. Betty’s journal, July 2, 1958: “8¼-pound daughter at 2:30 a.m. The news penetrates to me at one point and oh the relief of it. No pregnancy had felt so tedious, so completely unjust. But she is American, I’m sure now. The last product of the red house and my distress at leaving it.”

ART AND MONA WAHL

Friday morning [July 4, 1958]

Dear Art and Nana,

[…] The baby, by the way, looks very healthy and less gnomelike than I remember the other children looking at this stage. We don’t have a name, since it’s a girl. I had wanted it, if it were a boy, to be Hjalmar. Now I must close, get this to Betty, and get back here to my office. I enjoyed your letter, Nana — the vision of you dashing off to coffees. I think of these last days for Bertie in St Cloud and am glad to be elsewhere; the pace must be terrific. I see Art and Al, like mechanics in the pits, changing wheels in a matter of seconds, while you and Bertie wait impatient to be off to the next coffee, and then the next, and so on. I see you as wearing crash helmets. I shouldn’t bother you with these visions, I know. Incidentally, the boys and girls at home are doing very well under Mrs Kinsella’s supervision. She has a real talent with children. All for now.

Jim

Betty’s Journal, July 4, 1958

Five, five, five. How did it come about? I keep repeating Fr Egan — they are, in the end, the only thing that will have mattered. I believe it; I feel it. And yet they defy peace and order and what of art — of Jim’s if not mine? Are we to make him into just another man who will die, his body rot, his possessions be dispersed, and his immortality all in heaven? God does intend there to be man-made beauty on earth. We are to make order of it all. Order and art.

MICHAEL MILLGATE

Baile Atha Cliath

July 5, 1958

Dear Michael,

First of all, excuse the envelope, but the J. F. Powers Corporation, Westland Row Division, is short of stationery at the moment. I write to tell you that Betty has produced a female child, weight eight and a quarter lbs, date July 2, and that we haven’t decided on a name yet but lean toward Radio Train, as combining the best in both the Irish and American traditions.

Anyway, these have been hectic days, especially for me, traveling back and forth in the middle of the night, supervising our help at home (which has been supplemented by, of all things, a competent woman). Everyone well at home, including Jacobite Echo, the cairn terrier who belongs to the woman who is helping out. […]

I saw Prof. Stanford twice clipping tall grass and said hello. Otherwise there hasn’t been much of that famous brilliant conversation for which we are noted over here.

I wonder how you and Amis got along. All for now, and if you cross over, give my regards to Broadway.

Jim

DON AND MARY HUMPHREY

29 Westland Row

July 17, 1958

Dear Don and Mary,

[…] We had a baptism party Sunday, lots of talk about “little Christians” and the traditional falling down and wetting of pants by children. I wish you could have been here. Speaking of all that, I see where the Hyneses are now able to tell parents how to sanctify vacation time for their children. My impressions are only impressions, of course, but it does seem to me that they are getting out of hand. Going a bit too far, if you know what I mean. I happened to see a brochure advertising a new publication by the Abbey Press in which this is presumably to be published, this sanctifying of vacation time. I also saw a picture of Betty’s brother and of Jack Dwyer — what happened to his tie? I assume he’s adapting to his environment. I see my compatriots without ties in the streets here, but most of them do wear a camera. All for now.

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

Dublin

July 23, 1958

Dear Fr Egan,

I was walking around in my office thinking my thoughts with a bottle of Pilsner Urquell (“The Only Genuine Pilsner”), product of Plzen, and a damn bad beer it is, inside me, when I looked up and there, staring downstage, from his place on the wall, was Fr Ed Ramacher3 (in earphones) cranking a television camera, and I thought it might be well if I gave you a little description of my office.

There is one door, formerly black with fingerprints, now clean, and it opens in, and on the inside is one hook, on which hangs my Dunloe “Fills the Gap” raincoat. The floor is wide boards now stained mahogany, by me, because I decided against buying Egan’s linoleum and that left only part of the floor stained. There is a small fireplace, but it isn’t used except for debris: bottle caps, matchboxes, “The Friendly Match,” and tobacco cartons. I have an electric fire with a copper reflector. The fireplace is to my right, the one window to my back, which looks out, west, upon Trinity College and something called “Dental Hospital,” on the sidewalk in front of which I have on occasion seen the blood of patients who didn’t eat enough unbleached wheat. The window is the dormer, or starving artist’s, type; all the roofs visible from it are slate.

I have this old sawed-off washstand for a desk — a really beautiful old finish, like a chestnut horse — and a Victorian tufted chair upholstered in one of the first imitations of leather and on the floor what appears to be an Oriental rug but is really only a bit of dyed burlap; this is under me and desk only. On the floor to my right are a number of empty bottles, witnesses to my cosmopolitan taste: Guinness, Mackeson’s, Younger’s, Ringnes’s. To my left are some old books and priceless manuscript pages (my own) to be used to start fires at home. On the wall I look at, straight ahead, a calendar and Fr Ed; to my right Fr Pinky Doherty smiling at some laypeople of both sexes; to my left Fr Urban pointing a pencil at a photograph of a new building — this is really a man named Dexter M. Keezer, president of McGraw-Hill publishing company, but I cut him out of This Week last year, put collar on him, and he is Fr Urban. He keeps looking over at me. Yes, so I’d better leave you now and get back to Duesterhaus. Thanks for your kind offer in your last; I hope I won’t come to that.