by J.F. Powers
The big thing, though, was landing $1,000 from my publishers without showing them a thing, no chapters, no outline. So now we are planning on having a well and probably will if they will come and drill it before we run out of dough again. I wanted to get a toilet too; J. L. Benvenisti,6 when he comes to lecture, can stay at our house if he wants to. I thought I’d try to sell him to the Avon Commercial Club. He is my favorite Commonweal writer. He is the only one not so fair-minded that it makes you tired. I am thinking seriously now of doing that piece on Bishop Sheil for The New Republic.7 I talked it over with them. They seem to want to be very favorable about him. I do not know if I can do a piece like that. Somebody told me once that he was a grandstander. Of course I could not do that either, a piece making that point. (In fiction, yes; naming names, no.) We’ll see. It will be something to do when I’m in Chicago. Any leads?
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Thursday morning, September 11, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your letter written Tuesday came this morning, my only piece of mail, and I was glad to hear from you, marveling at the picture you painted of Stearns County and its denizens—horrified really to remember in detail and depth what I’d rather forgotten. I mean the people in the doctor’s office and their language. […]
I dreamed off and on last night of jail. Guess it was brought on by a letter from home, about my brother not working, narrowly escaping trouble all the time. I met Agnes Smedley last night in Clocker’s studio.8 She is not very much fun, I think, though that is the wrong idea, I guess. Other people find her inspiring, such faith, love of people, etc. Joe9 and Steve, I hear, went on record this morning at the breakfast table as saying Bob Taft10 was a fascist and a stinker—all sentiments culled from Agnes Smedley—and Mary Townsend11 was there. Mary was very bitter about it indeed, even said something about Agnes ought to be kicked out of Yaddo. I think that’s about it. Mary’s husband was a speed demon, one of the boys out of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, I guess, and she is filled with the conservatism of the unthinking, well-off; Agnes is filled with radicalism of the opposite. Somehow, though, it comes to about the same thing in them. Their personalities render their beliefs negligible. The funny thing, I guess, is that Joe and Steve don’t know what happened, though they were there to see and hear it. They are a couple of beauts. To my knowledge I have never heard either one say anything I do not remember reading many times in the newspaper. And now I leave you, having analyzed the local scene for you. As you can see, it’s pretty much the same. Clocker is about the only one left I can stand at all.
Love,
Jim
What about the well?
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday afternoon, September 12, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your last letter rec’d last night. This is one hell of a hot day, altogether as bad as we had in early August. I envy you if it’s getting cool there. […] I am hoping that in one of your letters pretty soon you’ll finally get around to giving me a picture of things as they really are. So far you’ve skipped around as though you haven’t had time to sit down and think; in your subject matter, that is. I am wondering: Do we have electricity? Do we or are we going to have a well? When? How are the Hyneses? The Humphreys? I am not very interested in the sermons at church or weddings. Now, praise the Lord, it is raining. I’m afraid, however, it won’t last. Very glad to hear you are so healthy and that we aren’t going to have twins. I think a week in Chicago will be plenty, and if I leave here on the 27th, I should arrive in St Cloud in plenty of time for event. What do I do at it? I promise to cut the first person dead who expects me to act like Dagwood or Carlos Cotton12 with the cigars. […]
Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday afternoon, September 19, 1947
Dear Betty,
Rec’d your good, long letter this morning and felt right away that it was too bad I had to write such a bad one, like yours that preceded it, yesterday. […] I was very glad to have so much information on Don. That is the sort of reporting I’d been hoping for. Now, if you could do as well on Sr Mariella and the Hyneses, I think I’d be satisfied. Do not count on it, however. I had a long letter from Fr Garrelts this morning, and so I really started the day off well, with two good letters. Yes, it is rather scarifying, the way things are going up in price, and we will have to devise other ways of eating, as you suggest. I still doubt that very much can be done about our menus, though, without spending money. Those silly damned menus you get in the paper are no help at all. It is even insulting to read them. I see where the Calvert Distillery people are using actual photos of the people who have changed to Calvert’s now. Imagine that. Imagine the people who let themselves be used in that way. It is the proof of our degeneracy. […]
I’ve decided that Joe isn’t so bad. He told us the other night about how he sketched a nude model in the Artists’ Village in the World’s Fair but couldn’t take more than an hour of it. He had to wear a smock and flowing tie. The man was sorry to see him go, the manager, but Joe had to go. It was too much. “And now we black in the head” is the sort of thing he had to say to the carnal mob which was supposed to be made up of people interested in sketching. […] I hope this letter makes up for my last, bad one. I miss you all the time.
LOVE,
Jim
I guess I might as well do another page, since you did so well by me. […] Fr Egan, did I tell you, sent the review from the Catholic World of my book. One of the worst ones, on the Sign order, but worse: “With a few deft strokes he limns a character … There is an economy of incident and word … Simplicity of style and language does not conceal the telling phrase … Interest is sustained and suspense is not lacking … A priest will rightfully be moved to irritation instead of meditation by the ineptness of the surgery that hacks rather than cuts cleanly”—in short the whole Catholic works, or why we will never have a legitimate literary criticism. And who is the reviewer assigned to my book? He is the author of the forthcoming Judicial Philosophy of Justice Cardozo.13 God save us. I am seriously considering never appearing in a Catholic publication again. This is an extreme case of it, of course, but The Commonweal is only different in a degree. It is all contained in the evaluation of fiction. It is for women. Nonfiction, now, that is for men. Fiction is not taken seriously. We are still tied to the apron strings of all the old bores. Then too we are still in a ghetto, Catholics who write, or even read …
I am hoping we’ll be able to keep warmer this winter than last. This winter will probably be worse, too … Everybody remarked last night how wonderful you were, pregnant, so bouncy, so glow in the eye, so bloom on the cheek. And I had to say I had not noticed it, but I guess I had without putting it in words. I do remember how pretty and sad you looked in that restaurant where we had our last supper … It seemed a terrible shame to leave you, to remember the things, some of them, I’d said to you, and worse, the nice things I’d only thought and not said to you … Enough. I’m getting out of hand … I love you … Betty.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Saturday, 6:00 p.m., September 20, 1947
Dear Betty,
[…] I had a great long talk about doctors and analysts and the world condition today at lunch with Clocker and O’Connor Barrett. I found that Barrett and I have the same outlook, the rather unmentionable one which says that about all an artist can do is his work; that the goals of the cooperators, communists, and other reformers are not new goals at all; that it would be a lot better use of the language if they would state that they are bent on a petty, stuffy little crusade and not the great soul-stirring one their literature seems to describe, patching, not creating. Last night Elizabeth14 sat in the main room after dinner and went into Yaddo history, including a great ice storm, and it was fairly interesting. […]
Still no word about our well, or any real news about the
rural lifers, in your letters, which are good but omit these things as though it were almost a conspiracy to keep me breathless, waiting. Why don’t you go to the telephone and call somebody up? Or won’t your dad take you out to Hyneses some Sunday? Or won’t the Meades talk over the phone? I hear the gong. I love you. Write.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
September 22, 1947
Dear Betty,
Dullish short letter from you yesterday, Sunday, and nothing this morning, but I guess I must love you just the same, consider it with your other faults as nothing against your virtues. […]
Yesterday The NY Times ran that stuff about me in People Who Read and Write and Fornicate, getting my initials wrong and, it would seem, cutting out a vital message about priests and doctors. At least the paragraph on me is headed “Priests and Doctors,” but there’s nothing about either one. I imagine it was my famous thesis about doctors nowadays having the eminence that priests had in the past that was cut. […]
Do try to get to Hyneses soon. I am anxious to know if Zahn and Leonard15 will be around to temper the monotony this winter. […]
I must prepare to meet the Stearnsers. With the prospect of more expense on the car, I am almost absolutely resigned to not going to Washington.16 You do see the dilemma for me, though, don’t you? When I hear from you that Pat is spending a thousand dollars for furniture and you are trying to get a cabinet for our baby for five … if we are two in one flesh, we are not yet two in one spirit. It is not your fault at this point … you are a woman in a world you never made, and not to be blamed for wanting things you ought to have, for being brave … about things I guess I’d hoped you wd not feel you’d have to be brave about to do without … I don’t know what you can do now. I suppose I thought I’d made it clear there’d be times like these. Maybe you can make a lot of money. Perhaps you’d counted on that, and that’s where the trouble is. Is it so bad, though, that you have to be brave? You have said many times that you didn’t want to marry Elmer or the dentist … Excuse this reverie. I’m really sorry I wrote this last bit. I don’t believe in it. It is the same thing Buck’s wife gets him saying. I think the thing in women that gets men feeling guilty in this way is bad. I think such women have married the wrong men. I think it’s their own fault.
Love……
Jim
ROBERT LOWELL
Yaddo
Thursday [September 25, 1947]
Dear Cal,
Glad to hear from you, only wishing I might have seen you two “leftists” (Harry S.17 and you) together in New York, or anywhere for that matter. […]
The car—you would want to know how the car is, wouldn’t you? The car was given six new spark plugs, fresh oil, and air in the tires. For almost a week it ran like a dream. Then it rebelled. […] I had counted, until then, on driving through the Alleghenies, down from Elmira, where I am paying a call, and on into the nation’s capital, there to see a friend and you—I am doing a paper on the percentage of Latin words, rather of English words of Latin origin, to be found in the work of Theodore Roethke, as against Walter Savage Landor, and I understand that you are very helpful in such matters. But, no, alas, I must needs take the shortest road home (Chicago). Now that I have your schedule, I see it might have been possible to drive you to the Middle West. You would have liked that? In any case it would have been nice driving you about the nation’s capital, letting it be seen right away that you were not without friends of substance … I thought the limerick (Powers, sours, races, paces, hours) unkind …18
I heard from [Robert] Fitzgerald (not Fitsgerald, or do you mean it that way?). He enclosed the review he wrote which might have been if I’d been newsworthy or whatever it is they look for in a writer … […] Just Agnes Hart, Edw. Maisel, and Joe and me left—and Agnes Smedley, but she doesn’t seem to be my type and vice versa. These are tough times for a clerical fascist. Agnes is writing the life of a one-eyed Chinese general; he is what she calls “an amazing man.” God bless you.
Pax,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday morning, September 26, 1947
Dear Betty,
[…] Well, today is my last here, and I’m afraid I hadn’t anticipated the feeling I have about leaving. I don’t want to. I can’t think very straight either. I’d expected to work right through until the time I left, but my state of mind won’t allow it today. I guess you must have felt that way … about working, I mean, on the last day. Nice old place here, I’ve enjoyed it so much, even now, though summer was better when everybody was here, and I hate to leave. I do leave, however, tomorrow morning: Mary Townsend is having my sandwiches put in a bag. So much for leave-taking … […]
I guess the St John’s games are something, as you say, and I hope we’ll get to one together since you like that. Maybe the last one in October if the baby comes around the middle and we can get someone to take care of the baby … oh, God, with that statement I realize again that we are moving into another category. Do not talk about not wanting the baby. You will have it; you will want it; so will I. […]
Now, my last letter from Yaddo, with love. Keep happy. If you have any cravings which can be satisfied under ten dollars, let me know, or go ahead and get it yourself.
Jim
Jim left Yaddo and drove to Elmira, New York, to visit Ted LeBerthon, who was in the midst of a nervous breakdown. He then drove to Washington, visiting John Haskins and Robert Lowell. He drove Lowell to Gambier, Ohio, to Kenyon College, after which the two traveled on to Chicago.
BETTY POWERS
2115 F Street, N.W.
Washington 7, D.C.
September 29, 1947
Dear Betty,
First chance I’ve had to write to you on the way—and I will have wired you my whereabouts by the time this arrives. As I mean to say in the wire, the car was running so well, and the situation in Elmira looked so bad, so unpropitious to camaraderie, I decided to go to Washington. I studied the roads in that tour book and found the hills or mountains are not so much, as in fact they aren’t. The thing that was bad, which they did not mention, was the condition of much of the road. Good stretches, then bad stretches. However, the car is doing wonderfully, and I know you will understand my decision to make the trip after all—after deciding I wouldn’t. I intend to see Lowell while here, perhaps this morning, and may get a little more information on the Guggenheim—let that, I think, be justification for my coming if you can’t feel good about camaraderie—and I know I’m making you hate that word, if you don’t already. […] It is Monday morning. I love you.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Washington
Wednesday, October 1, 1947
Dear Betty,
Just a note to let you know nothing in particular. We are leaving tomorrow early—7:30—for Gambier, Ohio, Kenyon College, and should leave for Chicago Friday or Saturday, arriving Saturday evening. I am again in no very collected state of mind, much wrangling here over bookcases, food, etc., things on which Hask and Mrs Hask differ and which I am expected to take sides on. Yesterday had lunch with Lowell and Hask, and then Lowell and I went out to St Elizabeth’s Hospital to see Ezra Pound. I wonder, alas, if you ever heard of him. He was the “discoverer” of Eliot, Cummings, Joyce, and others, a great figure in literary history, who spoke on the radio for Mussolini during the war and now is supposed to be out of his mind and is supposed to be tried for treason if he ever recovers. […]
Love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Paulina Street, Chicago
October 5, 1947
Dear Betty,
Well, sir, I know you’ll think this letter is too long coming, but we arrived here only today. We had no trouble, none at all, all the way—and you can tell that to E. Hynes, C. Cotton, and D. Humphrey. We left Washington, as you ought to know, Thursday morning and arrived at Gambier, O., that night around nine-thirty. It was defini
tely the longest, hardest day of all. It was almost 400 miles and much of it over winding roads after dark, and there was also those awful towns around and including Pittsburgh to go through. For the time I was passing through them, I was all for the rural life.
Yesterday we set sail for Chicago, after a good evening with John Crowe Ransom, editor of The Kenyon Review, and some of his cronies: a very literary evening during which hundreds of names came up and I hardly knew them at all, the Elizabethans and Pope and Dryden and Juvenal and Petrarch—in fact, I guess, many of the people your education prepared you to talk about. Very good, though.
After traveling sixty miles or so yesterday morning, I got gas and discovered Chicago was still over 300 miles. We had been told by the classicists that it was 275 from Gambier; it would seem to be almost 400. So, though we might have made it, we decided to take it easy and come into Chicago this morning, which we did. We spent last night in one of those “cabins” you rent. We went to bed at 10:30, trying vainly all evening to have a good time. No use, though; it was one of those noisy little towns pierced every few minutes by a train going to Chicago and coming out of Chicago. We had thought originally to get a cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan, but that can’t be done, evidently.
We went to one place, inquired, were told to wait a minute, but by then we began to notice it was inhabited almost entirely by old ladies sitting tight in rocking chairs. So I decided we ought to move on. We managed this, or I did, by asking the woman who’d told us to wait: Have you got a bar? She stuttered and asked to have the question repeated. I repeated it, or Lowell did, for he was enjoying himself; it was almost like Boston with all the old ladies reading through magnifying glasses. She said: I should say not! So we left, meeting a man in the yard wearing a brown shirt, wearing binoculars, and looking like a scout master. He got his map for us; his map was more detailed. We left. We end, as I said, having our beer and dinner in this noisy little town. It was the only place you could get anything but beer; so I guess I ought to add that we had martinis too. It was called Chesterton. So maybe there’s something to be said for the Catholic revival, or wasn’t he in it? […]