I went to the public schools first, had my first fights for girls, which I won incidentally, and in the third grade transferred to Catholic schools when we moved to Rockford. So on to the seventh grade, when I went back to the public school — it was the day of the purple and green felt hats and “Did you ever hear Pete go tweet, tweet, tweet on his piccolo?” You were six years old then, I was thirteen, smoking cigarettes and kissing girls after school. A year later I found out about masturbation. A year later a Franciscan came to the Catholic school, where I was making my first retreat, and made us all as clean as a hound’s tooth. I submerged myself in the athletic life of the place. I had a fight and got my nose broke. I became a basketball star. I also played football. At the end of the year we decided to have a yearbook (my senior year), and I was not chosen to be editor. I did not want to be and, if I had, could not have been. Already I was beginning rather to want to be the dark horse in any enterprise, someone with no office or commitments who would do something daring or impossible and save the day. It is funny now.
I graduated and went to Chicago, where my family had been living for a year. It was hell after Quincy, after leisurely beers (we drank a lot of beer for high-school boys in Quincy), and nothing more serious than typing class or Washington Irving, the only writer I liked then that I could like now, I think. A couple of times I was almost a success. I always wasn’t, though, when they finally hired somebody. I went to a public school (college) and quit at the half year to drive a big Packard for a bastard through the South and Southwest. I stayed in dollar hotels, a different one nightly, except for weeks in San Antonio and El Paso, when I would drink too much. I was put in jail in San Antonio, picked up one morning when I was returning from taking the car to be washed. They held me for a half hour when they found out I was from Chicago. The bastard I worked for was at the St Anthony Hotel, the biggest and best, but they preferred to call Chicago. When they decided to let me go, I told them I might be about on the next day and if they didn’t have anything to do then — again — they could pick me up again. For this I got the rest of the morning in jail. It was my first jaiclass="underline" scrawlings on the wall, two racetrack touts not telling the truth about themselves when I was so naive as to ask, cold white macaroni on a sallow tin plate. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez. Here I lost my virginity. I was nineteen.
I came back to Chicago in the spring. It was terrible still. I worked for Marshall Field’s in the book section and met my first homosexuals. I enjoy their company today, so long as the situation is clear to them. I began to read, though while traveling I would look for my material on Sinclair Lewis in every town I’d pass through, and discovered Huxley, Aldington, and then, moving backward, Huysmans, Symons, Verlaine, Baudelaire. I took French lessons privately for two years because I wanted particularly to read Baudelaire. I got a job as an editor on Historical Records, WPA. I fell in love, or roughly speaking, did, with a Romanian girl. She taught me some things. It was the first time I felt that it might be good to know a woman who would worry about whether it was raining or missing a class (I was going to Northwestern at nights). But I spurned such pedestrian stuff. I wanted wine, women, and song — but not domestic wine, married women (married to me), and the best songs, I felt, had been made up at the time of Villon. I was a nice case of nonsense, I suppose. We parted. I met another girl who was more a woman. But I don’t think I’ll follow this any further … it is not good, I see, to go into these deals until we know each other better and perhaps never at all. I know I don’t care to know about your affairs or whatever you call them.
Presently I am in love with you, as I have been with nobody else, as indeed I thought not possible for me, and as for other people being in love, I knew what they were all about. I love you, Betty. Please love me accordingly. It has taken me a long time to come to you. I have taken the long way around, and I have missed several turns. I am glad I missed them. I believe there is no one else in the world but you for me. I do not care what Uncle Em or the Catholic Church knows about mating males and females. You are for me. I hope I am for you. There is no other way. You could kill someone if you told me now you no longer loved me. That is the way it is. Je t’adore is not wrong when I say it to you. I do. […]
Love,
Jim
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
November 26, 1945
Dear Marsh,
Your letter rec’d, filed, and now in process of being preserved for posterity. Enjoyed your sample of the professor of anatomy, a dull business, methinks. How can I keep from looking down on doctors? I see little of them now that I work at night, but when I do, I think how meek and humble and poor fare for satire are priests compared to them. Doctors have the world by the balls as priests must have had it in the Middle Ages. A priest asked me why the St Joseph’s nuns were so cold toward priests. I had to pretend incredulity and ignorance. I could not tell them that their priests wear white, have plenty of jack, and roll into the place in tweeds in the morning. I am trusting that you will rise above all this. What I mean, I guess, is that they make such an individual deal out of being a doctor (as though they were artists) when they are popped out of the medical factories like horseflies in August. You know all this, and I am not talking to you. I am just a little irritated, I suppose, to have to carry beer in a saloon the sign out front of which I don’t care for. September, let us pray, I’ll be a free man. […]
I have met a girl I intend to marry in May or June. She is a writer, unpublished except for the college magazine, contests — Americanism, what I like about it — and Atlantic Monthly essay contests. She has written a beautiful novel. She is as fine as, say, you are, and I hope I won’t be too crude for her. Catholic, of course, my priestly connections would never permit me to entertain heresy on such a permanent basis as marriage. […]
Harry Sylvester is coming back from Guatemala in the spring to teach a seminar at St Benedict’s (where Sister Mariella is head of the English department); Emerson Hynes, a rural lifer and a fine fellow despite all that, and a couple of other interesting people are bedded down in the vicinity (Back to Benedict). I expect my wife to be more popular than I’ll ever be. That may sound like murder at a distance, but she is also a UChristian of the sort I’ve never come against before. I mean she is without being ugly, and so isn’t of necessity. Likes Dante. Me, I like Grain Belt, a friendly beer.
Pax. Write.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 28, 1945
My dear Betty,
[…] Well, when I got up today, I found the toilet lying on its side like a wounded horse and the floor up in chunks all over the bathroom. It seems something broke, or has been broke for quite a while, causing water to drip down below. But since, as the plumber put it, I am not home much, the former occupants didn’t mind a minimum of dripping, but now someone new lives downstairs, and they don’t like dripping, even a minimum of it. I guess they’re stuck up. […]