I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 29, 1945
My dear Elizabeth Alice,
[…] I have a large case of whiskers presently but can’t get into the bathroom for the plumber and his toys, which are all over the place. No, Betty, we will “never have our first fight.” I am counting on you to prevent that by seeing the ultimate truth in whatever opinion I hold on anything — such as pajamas. Why are you so stuck on pajamas? It makes me uncomfortable to think of you sleeping in pajamas and whatever else you wear, as implied. I think of LeBerthon in his ski suit. I am open to persuasion, however, but you will have to prove it to me along approved debating lines. Think of the poets, probably even Dante, I can summon to my side of the question. You will have only Edgar Guest and Longfellow (who slept in his beard, which is not the same thing) on your side. The angels — do you think they use pajamas?
I am sorry you prefer Fuzzwick to my middle name. I do not know what that means. I wonder if you could be contemplating violence where my dignity is concerned. Do you intend to make of me one of those hapless American males with a funny name, such as Blondie’s husband, Dagwood? Beware, young woman, if so. It will go hard with you, and Mother Church will back me up, you know that, where discipline is involved, she is on the man’s side (that is what Don Humphrey likes about it and what Mary Humphrey doesn’t like). Now I am going to cut this off. I enclose a key to the apartment instead of putting it under the door. You keep it until you need it in May or June. Also some more mail — to show you what a big demand there is for authentic JFP on the market. (Actually, I am worried, but hope to lay up a few stories this winter, like squirrels bury nuts.)
I love you.
Jim
3. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions? December 4, 1945–January 26, 1946
Father Harvey Egan (“Dear Pere … you can get your checkbook out any day now.”)
Betty paid her first visit to Jim in St. Paul. She came by train from St. Cloud and spent a couple of days with him in relative chastity. In his letters, Jim began his campaign to drive home to her that he really did not intend to take a job. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly concerned about Don Humphrey’s situation of near homelessness and ever more disgusted by the failure of those who had the wherewithal to support him to come through with the goods.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 4, 1945
A few minutes before seven the next morning.
Dear Betty,
A line to let you know I love you. I am feeling terrible this morning, and a couple of times last night I wondered if I would make it. I was deadly tired when you left. I guess I was tired when you were here but didn’t know it with you to be near. In a few minutes I’ll take a bath and go to bed. I will take this, and Fr Egan’s letters, which I forgot to mail, downstairs first, though. I hope when we’re married and living here you won’t have such a tremendous effect on me, that it won’t seem too much like hell to leave you and go through the motions I have to at the hospital. I know you must be worn out too today and hope you will sleep. You did look pale when I left you or you left me last night. You must be healthy if you are going to carry your cross, which is me, successfully.
I love you this morning.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
December 5, 1945
My dear Betty,
I am up — it’s almost two — and have read your little letter and am very glad to find there’s nothing wrong. Sometimes it takes people two or three days to think things over, and I had been wondering if there’d been any cause for regrets. Had I done something all wrong? I’ve also been down for a quart of milk and six sweet rolls; the coffee is cooking now. In a few minutes I’ll sit down to one of my famous home-cooked meals — which I hope you didn’t find too rugged. I guess not, if you’ve not lost any weight. I am virtually recovered today. Yesterday I was still groggy from Monday night.
About the stars — why is it I’m a butterfly, and what does that mean? I am afraid it means the same old thing — fly-by-night, which is getting to be my middle name, and I had always thought, and thought others thought, I was fairly stable and all that. I can’t put my finger on just what it is, whether it’s because I don’t intend to sell insurance or work in a bank or because I wouldn’t dress up and play war with the rest of the fellows, or because I am a writer (if I am a writer) or what the hell it is. Anyway, I am getting touchy on the subject. Perhaps there is this much truth in it: I am worried about making a living, as I confessed to you again and again, because I won’t go about it in the ordinary way — eight hours out of my life daily so that the system may prosper and the crapshooters running it.
But I don’t think you want me to do that. If you do, it would be well to say so now. It is not something you can bring me around to in the name of “reform.” I have no intention of letting you go, but if you have that idea (and I can’t believe you have), I want you to get rid of it — else it will be worse than the War of Roses. My mother strove for years and years, with all things in her favor (five-day notices fluttering on the door), and she never won. I got little jobs, but she never won, and now she knows it. And, furthermore, I think it’s indecent of Sister Mariella, and whoever else thinks so, that you should marry some dumb farmer who’ll “make you a good husband”—for which I read “bull.” It is because of such arrangements that we have war and strife: people getting the barn painted and letting the living room moulder away with a vase of wax flowers and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. There is much truth in the line about if you have a loaf of bread, sell it and buy hyacinths for your soul. I am not really talking to you when I write this, I think and hope I’m not. I am only if in my nearsightedness I have missed the little signs that my regeneration includes prostitution on a job masking itself as “honest labor.” The jobs I had, in bookstores and the rest, were never honest. Not for me. Should a giraffe have to dig dandelions or a worm fly a kite? Now I see I’ve run into a corner I never meant to get into and the whole idea here is one I know you and I don’t disagree on. I think I must just be threatening myself. […]
I got a fine letter from that unpredictable lady La Mariella (she does so many good things and says so many bad things — yes, the farmer business again). She sent a photo of a house, a long description of it, and even posed as a possibility that Don might teach a little at St B.’s, as the Reverend M. has been wanting to enlarge the art dept. I sent all this data on to Fr G., and I know he’ll go over to Don’s tonight and make him very happy with it.
It doesn’t take much of an opportunity to give Don all he needs (he caught deer with barbed wire fence when his family was living on the Catholic Worker Farm, Aitkin, Minn., and not just for fun, for they were hungry). I told you how he caught that chicken, remember? Sister M. mentions the possibility of Don finding work with an antique repairer in St Cloud (there’s only one, evidently, and it takes months to get things repaired). That’s what Don is doing now, for money. If he could live in this house (it’s owned by the postmistress, a Miss Uhte) and teach a little and work a little and paint a lot — that would be wonderful. He is the greatest Catholic painter since El Greco. He is a wood-carver, sculptor, and chalice maker (and ring maker). For money he has repaired antiques, worked in a foundry as a molder, carpentry, and in fact anything that has the vaguest connection with the plastic arts and crafts. His wife is a churchgoer in the worst Irish sense. She is very fine also, not much on housecleaning, however; she’d rather go to church. She looms rugs. And now I come to the part in this letter where I want to tell you: