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

Yes, it does appear that we will be staying on here for a time, the flat at Strobels’—overlooking the river — having fallen vacant a week or so ago. About seven rooms, including the third floor. Girls heartbroken, but there are too many things pending — my work — which I don’t care to transplant just now. So rejoice, and tell all my good friends in St Paul and environs that I will remain and am always on tap for good talk and good fun and all that’s worthwhile. Let’s make the most of my presence while we have it.

Jim

[…]

The big scandal is the infighting going on at St John’s, to get the big window — at this late date, after okaying sketches, after ordering all the glass — away from Bruno Bak. Frank.12 I gather Breuer has begun to fear that the window will kill his building — kill the powerhouse effect for which he is so famous. This of course is off the record.

Good news, that, if true that Del is planning a comeback. I’d like to give this boy of mine Joe O’Connell a shot at him. Any chance of Glen making a comeback?13

“In the days of Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was chief, there lived a mighty preacher of the Order of Saint Clement, and Urban was his name.”

The Powers family moved into the top two floors of the Strobels’ house, a place almost directly across the street from the site of the old red house, now a sandlot used for parking. Jim was desperate about money and infuriated by the chaos of family life; still, he was immensely pleased to be in his old office, and just being there buoyed his spirits.

He crept ahead on the novel and, at the office, adopted the ironical conceit that he was running a going concern, “coming and going like a businessman in sheep’s clothing, or vice versa,” issuing any number of spoof letters “From the Desk of America’s Cleanest Lay Author” (“Pledges Administered * Pious Lobbying Undertaken * Fig Leaves”). These exercises went some way toward defusing the frightening reality of his situation.

HARVEY EGAN

Suite 7

September 19, 1959

Dear Fr Egan,

It has been a tough fight, moving this time — the worst ever, and only two blocks away. I had known things were bad with us, confusion, possessions, etc., but the payoff is when I look for my manuscript, when the air is beginning to clear, and find it is missing. I had two chapters in a plastic container — sort you businessmen use when you go to the bank — but it is nowhere. An ad appears in the Lost & Found section of The St Cloud Times , starting today. I’ll never get the manuscript back if it falls in the hands of the St Cloud clergy. You see I have this parrot, who lives in a rectory, and says: God love you!

Otherwise, well, the kitchen is small, tortuously so, but the living room is good, and the bedrooms look out upon the Father of Waters, as we all call the river up here. I am making a fire screen (for the fireplace) today, out of old iron picked up at Gopher1 and copper screening: impossible to find one ready-made here except at exorbitant prices. I have been gluing furniture — in short, preparing myself for my old age as a sexton and chauffeur for some lucky pastor.

Boston College wants me to come and lecture once, for $250 and expenses, but I’ve decided against it. Even if I had you write my talk, I’d have to change planes at Chicago and New York to get to Boston — and I don’t think I should be risking my life just to swell the procession of big names on the BC lecture roster (Frost, Warren, O’Faolain are others). I know this will please you. […]

Jim

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

412 First Avenue South

St Cloud, Minnesota

October 20, 1959

Dear Katherine Anne,

I have your postcard and will answer your questions: we are here at the above address (which overlooks the Mississippi), and we are pretty well. We were going back to Ireland in September (and had arranged for the girls’ reentry into school there and paid for it) when this place fell vacant. Why it should be offered to us with five children is easily explained: it is owned by Betty’s aunt and uncle. And also why we, who know we must leave it, probably in a year, decided to take it; we just weren’t up to another transatlantic move so soon. It would have been into the dark again, with no housing and this time with one more child to make housing even more difficult and with less money in hand than we had the last time we tried it, when I had the Kenyon Review fellowship money. And so, for all these reasons, and because this place became available, here we still are. Each night I find I’m stranded. A good friend died while we were in Ireland last year, and I knew St Cloud wouldn’t be the same without him — I had expected to spend my declining years in argument with him, before a good fire — and it isn’t. There is no news. Let me hear from you— not on a postcard. If you’ve published anything anywhere, or are about to, please let me know.

Yours,

Jim […]

HARVEY EGAN

412 First Avenue South

St Cloud

October 22, 1959

Dear Fr Egan […]

All fairly well here. No word on the coming story. It may be this week, or may not — nobody tells me anything. I read my Reidar Lund and Hennessy,2 but I don’t seem to get any better for it.

I couldn’t have asked for more: Glen Flanagan’s comeback and Del off to Bangkok.

Jim

This envelope was opened by mistake, contents noted, and clumsily resealed. J. Edgar Hoover.

Donald McDonald, a writer for The Catholic Messenger , the newspaper of the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa, wrote to Jim saying that he would like to interview him. Jim agreed but for months heard nothing more. In his letters, Jim turned the affair into a satire on an author’s eagerness for publicity. He also found material for epistolary capers in his friend Joe O’Connell, who had written a book review, an unlikely undertaking for this gifted artist.

HARVEY EGAN

December 7, 1959

Dear Fr Egan,

[…] Thanksgiving would’ve been murderous if I hadn’t been called upstairs periodically (it was celebrated below, at Strobels’), but what could I do? Nobody invited me out for dinner. There should be an organization that would make it possible for family men to spend holidays away from home — instead of inviting a serviceman to dinner, why not ask a family man? […]

Brought the vacuum cleaner down here yesterday and used it, and now the office fairly sparkles. Discovered among my papers one of the chapters I considered lost and am happy about that, though — let’s face it — a little dismayed to find that it doesn’t read as well as I’d been imagining. I haven’t heard a word from McDonald of The Catholic Messenger and don’t know what to do. Do you think it would be all right if I write and ask him in a nice way when he intends to interview me? I don’t want to crab my act, of course, but I desperately want to be interviewed. I have so much to say. Maybe a Christmas card would be the thing, with a friendly note. If I can get him to interview me, I’ll do what I can to get him to interview you. Well, that’s enough of that.

Jim

Joe O’Connell has written a review of Van Zeller’s book on art, for Worship , and that’s all he can talk about— his review . I think he’d like me to stage a party at which, by candlelight, he’d read his review. Watch for it, if you get Worship ; it occurs to me that you’re about the only person I know who doesn’t review. What’s the matter?