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

LEONARD DOYLE

29 Westland Row

Dublin

October 7, 1958

Dear Len,

[…] We read about Fr Peyton’s crusade2 in your diocese, thanks to your thoughtfulness in sending the news story, and though I don’t take this particular aspect of our religion as hard as some people do, it did give us a jolt. The part that gets me is the sudden appearance of people you wouldn’t have thought it of, in the lineup. There was quite a lot of that in Nazi Germany, I believe. I am thinking of working up a prelate whose motto would be “I Love a Parade.” How would you put that into Latin? I remember a discussion which took place at my house a few years ago, when two priests were discussing the work of Fr Peyton, not very enthusiastically. Finally, one said: “Do you suppose he’s even a Christian?” Oh, I liked the storm troopers coming to your house to collect your pledge. It’s hard to be cool at such times, but that’s the correct attitude, I believe. Of course, a beard helps too, keeps people off balance. […]

Coolish these days in my office. I have on my electric fire, but it isn’t very noticeable. Likewise at home. We always seem to land in places where little has been done about such problems, and we have the option of fixing matters up for the short time allotted to us in any one place on earth (by destiny, I mean) or shivering through it.

I have always felt pretty sure of myself, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live, or at least where I didn’t want to live. But the irony now is that this is no longer true. In the course of one day I change back and forth a hundred times, calling myself a fool to consider leaving Ireland and a fool to consider staying. Betty is doing the same thing. And so we are little help to each other. Fortunately, the children don’t seem to care what we do. They fondly imagine that the moment they walk in, if we do return, when everybody is glad to see them, that moment will go on and on. We, Betty and I, at least know about that .

Jim

Jim and Betty, homesick and discontented in the usual way, decided to return to the United States.

HARVEY EGAN

Ard na Fairrge

Dalkey

October 21, 1958

Dear Fr Egan,

Sitting here torn between reading the next installment of Monty’s war memoirs3 and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (the latter in its original Left Book Club edition, which I bought secondhand for sixpence), I happened to see an auction catalog on the table, and I then continued a discussion I’d been having with myself earlier: whether ’tis better to hope that we’ll not only hear favorably but suddenly from The New Yorker or to get in immediate touch with Mendota4 in case the Oriental rugs illustrated in the catalog are worth having and can be had at our price. […]

The auction is next week, the rugs going off on Wednesday, but one need not have the total amount (a 25 % deposit is required at time articles are knocked down) until the end of the week. If the rugs (and there are other items of interest to a householder) should run around fifty or sixty pounds, as I imagine they will, and we should get two of them, we would be pushed to the wall in the fiscal department. I maybe ought to tell you more. I am finessing from nothing. Fifty in the St Cloud bank, which is just rotting — not enough to send for — and $33 in my pocket (as personal identification in case of accidents), and forty or fifty pounds, more or less, in the bank here. But should the story be acceptable to The New Yorker , we would be back in the bazaars in a big way; if it shouldn’t, it would be Doubleday, a source untapped for years, though available, and austerity — I would be in the bad position of drawing four or five hundred a month and having to produce accordingly on the novel. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, if one is settled down with one’s appliances and house around one, but if one is setting out for the New World with one’s wife and family, one needs what we used to call “getaway money.” So there you have it. A plan of many flaws, not the least of which is the intention to buy Oriental rugs while crossing the Delaware, as it were. […]

We have made a deposit on the Hanseatic (German ship), formerly the Empress of Scotland , but we have misgivings even now. Betty was badly shaken when her aunt wrote about a place on a half lot, with oil heater in the living room, and said she could just see us in it — with the emphasis (we thought) on us . Mighty nice here now, with the wind off somewhere else, the fire making itself felt in the fireplace, the radio tuned to a German station, light opera. A gay company at my table […]

Jim

HARVEY EGAN

Dublin

November 1, 1958

Dear Fr Egan,

Bullion received, with thanks. Hectic days, these, with so much to do — which I won’t go into. Except that these last weeks, if I continue at the present pace, will be entirely wasted so far as immortal literature is concerned. However, I am going to make a great effort to salvage some time for it. Not easy when one has to think of everything, as I do.

What really takes the bounce out of me is the thoroughly unpromising housing situation to which we return. Art Wahl, some months ago, offered Betty — let’s be accurate — ten thousand to be applied on a house if we returned to Stearns. That is really all we’re holding, the only card. I had thought, a year ago, that we would just make it to Ireland (sane, that is), and would crawl ashore and lie gasping in the sand, but that we would be at our destination. Now it seems that this lies back in the other direction (yes, I know in which direction it really is, but let’s try to keep it in the park, huh?).

I confess the temptation to stay on still flits through my mind (about once an hour), but things have gone pretty far. People like us, with so many children, should stay at home, where our vulnerability wouldn’t be so noticeable. I mean a man can keep working the sand up around his head, and surrounded by others doing the same thing, nobody is going to come right out and say: Hey, fellas, our asses are all out. But that is the feeling I have more and more. I used to think that the worst thing about Don Humphrey’s parenthood was the indignity of it: something would happen in the neighborhood (a neighbor complaining about his cesspool or dry well, as he called it), and it would be crystal clear for a moment that he was considered a Jeeter Lester,5 really the sort of fellow who shouldn’t have moved to town. All this with reference to the house Betty’s aunt picked out for us in St Cloud: oil burner in living room, no basement (just a dirt pit), three bedrooms (one with no window), bathroom back of the kitchen, and half a lot (nine feet from the alley on one side, twelve feet to the neighbors on the other, the house itself that distance, I mean). This doesn’t mean I want you to look for a place, at least not yet. I am just trying to convey my feelings these days. (It should be said that Betty’s father nixed the house I’ve just mentioned.)

Meanwhile, I went to another auction (the one in Co. Offaly wasn’t worth the long drive) and came away with six “lots,” as we say in the trade: two old prints, a carving set, two Sheraton trays, and a Sheraton barometer: everything we’ll need to set up housekeeping, as you can see. Lovely to look at, though, especially the barometer, which is inlaid with shell designs and of course doesn’t work. By the time this reaches you, Gene McC. will be in or out. Time says he’s running ahead of Thye in the polls but that “knowing Minnesotans” expect Thye to squeeze through.6

I am not picking ’em, since I assured my mother Siri would be the next pope; I just told her, as though there was no doubt of it, thinking it would be more telling that way.7