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