Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
January 4, 1947
Dear Betty,
Two letters from you today, none yesterday. Very glad to have them both. I am sorry I caused you so much concern by not writing. I only stopped writing, as you ought to know now, when I didn’t hear from you for several days. If I had not heard from you today, I would not have written either. I am in the dark on your sorrow, why you should go about weeping, and hope you aren’t going to fulfill all of Harry’s worst warnings. I do know it was many, many times worse for you, losing the baby, to say nothing of the pain you suffered. I do not feel so bad. I would feel shakier than I do, about money, if we had a baby. In that respect I am relieved. If that makes me a pagan or something, that’s too bad. […]
Is it my ice skates you want me to send? If the word in your letter is “skates,” it is a new form — but I intended to bring them or send them. I am a very fine skater, both plain and fancy, and daresay there is no one quite like me. But surely you suspected that. I should very much like to whang Emerson Hynes, that eminent rural lifer, across the shins with a hockey stick. Enjoyed your account of Harry in the eyes of Sr Remberta5 and others. You must not, and I suppose you are the last one who would, contribute any little facts on Harry that we picked up in our stay at Brewster. […]
Tell me more about the Stearns County scene. Does it seem the same? Does it seem worse? Better? Tell me, for a change where this subject is concerned, the truth. Can we actually live there? What do we burn in our stove in Avon? Wood? Coal — if so, do you have any ordered? I mention it now, knowing how slow everything and everybody moves. Also, I love you very much. Would like to be near you, very near. Would like to call you some names. There is nobody here like that but Mickey, and he is sometimes a cross patch. Are you gaining, losing, weight? Are your breasts swollen yet? Are you going around in bobby socks, with your knees sticking out, like Elsie Dinsmore or the Bobbsey girls? Or are you a big girl now? Now, you just sit down and answer all the questions in this letter, and I ought to have a good one. Thanks for the special of this morning. How did you bring yourself to do it? You might have hoped, as last week, that somehow, someway, I would get it without sending it special, and I would be mad, the letter would arrive Monday, and you would be wide-eyed and wondering when I didn’t write. Much love. Hold tight.
Your
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
Tuesday morning, 10:00 a.m.,
January 7, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your long letter rec’d today. […] Well, you get into quite a few things in this letter. It gives me a good picture at last of the Avon situation. I am especially pleased to note your enthusiasm for carrying water, coal, excrement, etc., and hope I can keep up with you. You even put a Catholic Worker interpretation on it. Obviously, in Brewster, we were not under that illusion, for things certainly did pile up there and we had none of the carrying to do that we both look forward to in Avon. Surely you don’t mind if I amuse myself with this, do you? I am not surprised. I had expected to have to do worse things, and still do. […]
I love you.
Jim
THANKS FOR THE CHOCOLATE BARS! They were enjoyed by one and all. Better get some for Avon. I prefer them over Hershey’s. I don’t know what to do with the $10 you sent. My libido is very high, but you would not want me to use it for that, would you?
Jim and Betty moved into the newly constructed house in the Avon woods in January 1947. Betty, at least, had high hopes for the rural life, intending, among other things, to keep bees, going so far as to acquire a bee veil and smoker. The house was a rudimentary dwelling, a one-story structure built into the earth with a tar-paper “roof” and no running water. Jim and Betty — and, eventually, I, Katherine — lived in it for periods in 1947 and 1948. The couple also bought a car. “My cross grows heavier,” Jim wrote to Kerker Quinn. “We have taken unto ourselves a 1931 Chevrolet.”
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Avon, Minnesota
The Wee Hours, April 3, 1947
Dear Chuck,
[…] Haven’t done much since getting back in Minnesota. I weigh a theory now and then which goes like this: this country is not housebroken (perhaps St Paul is the only place in Minnesota which is), and the savage spirits still lurk in the trees and lakes and they do not like this writing going on, and so it is harder than usual to get things on paper right, the spirits always getting in the way. Who will tame the wilderness with prose? […]
Pax,
Jim
Now I am going to drink a bottle of bock in your honor.
7. Camaraderie, July 9, 1947–October 14, 1947
Robert Lowell, Yaddo, 1947
Jim’s first book, the short-story collection Prince of Darkness, was published by Doubleday in the spring of 1947. Jim and Betty (who was expecting a child at the end of October) went to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat at Saratoga Springs, New York, arriving on July 1. The weeks that followed approached an idyll for Jim as he made friends with a number of men who shared his taste for male camaraderie, literature, and high-wire conversation. Chief among them were the poets Robert Lowell, known as Cal and, at times, Rattleass (from Boston, Mass.); and Theodore Roethke, “a big long fat man who needs a lot of stoking,” sometimes called Champ or Beast (of Bennington); Harvey C. Webster, from the University of Louisville, sometimes called Clocker because he, like Jim, was a devotee of the track; Bucklin Moon, Jim’s editor at Doubleday; and the writer Arna Bontemps.
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
July 9, 1947
Mon pere,
Your letter and two spot rec’d. Saratoga does not open until August, and so I’ll try to keep your deposit until then. I like your system: an 8–1 bet in the fourth, then a 3–1 in the fifth. If that does not produce results, I do not know what will. Well, we arrived here without a bit of trouble, not even a flat, and our merry Chev rolled all the way without a cough. Chevrolet builds great cars! Since coming here, we’ve not done a lot of work, though some, and there are no excuses for not working. It is not an amusement center; everybody is working on a book or painting a picture or chiseling a bust, and production means survival once we leave this haven of rest, and so there isn’t much loafing — at least if there is, everyone is careful to do it in private. We have a couple of big rooms and a bath but use just one. It’s two or three times as big as our house in Avon. We have breakfast from 8:15 to 9:15, lunch in our rooms (they pack it) at any time, and dinner at 6:30. Food is very good, about the best I’ve had, except in certain rectories. Among the notables are JF, his wife, Marguerite Young, Robert Lowell, Owen Dodson, Bucklin Moon, Arna Bontemps, Michael Seide. Others, but I doubt that they’d mean much to you. I see mostly Moon and Theodore Roethke: we form the non-intellectual center. But do some fishing with Lowell. The little lakes are full of bass. Went to Mass Sunday and heard an intelligible sermon.
Emerson sent me Riley Hughes’s review from Columbia; it was quite flattering to me; not so to Harry Sylvester.1 Emerson wonders if it will make for strife between the authors. No doubt, but then Harry is selling, and I am not, and there should be some consolation for him in that. There are 25,000 copies of his book in print now. Mine, Moon tells me, is doing much better than expected but is still under 2,000, I think. Book business is very bad, and of course short stories always go to the post with two strikes against them. Thanks for sending the Best Sellers review. I thought it rather spotty for them. Favorable enough, but not very well done. For instance, there is no character in my book guilty, so far as I’m concerned, of gluttony; certainly not Fr Burner, or the priest in “The Lord’s Day.”