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 definitely 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? […]
Lowell and I had good fun all the trip. We left better friends than ever. He paid for most of the gas, meals, etc. He ended by imitating the car’s voice all the time, always thinking, what was it thinking now? This morning we talked for hours about what if New York and Chicago had a war. […]
Henry19 lectures me in one letter: says I’ve got more fame than anybody ever had from one book of stories, including Joyce, Porter, and Welty. Wants me to relax and stop agitating. It’s a good letter, much sense in it; I do think, though, he had seven old-fashioneds for lunch that day. […] Take good care of yourself. I love you, Betty.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
October 6, 1947
Dear Betty,
No letter from you today, but then I suppose you didn’t get mine today either, the one mailed yesterday. It is quite warm, even warmer than warm, here, and that doesn’t do much for me and Chicago. […]
I was wondering if you were being so lenient about my return — you said not before the 29th — on account of you are so sweet or on account of we still don’t have a well, with the prospects about the same. Which? Both, you say. Well, I’ll be back before the 29th, never fear. I may leave here around the 13th, stay a day or two with Jack Howe at Taliesin, a day or two in St Paul, and then, triumphantly, to Stearns County. Doesn’t seem much of a drive, Mpls to St Cloud, after my travels. Do wish my folks would get out of this animated ghost town. If they were somewhere near me, somewhere within easy distance, say a hundred miles or so, I think my greatest emotional worry would be over. I guess they would move all right if it weren’t for Grandma. She doesn’t want to leave her friends, the only trouble being that no one has ever seen one of them. Her money is in the bank here too. She probably can’t get it through her head that it could be transferred, or perhaps she just wants to make it miserable for my mother as long as she can. You get the situation. I think my mother could be your second friend — until me, you said, you never had a real friend — as she is a beautiful soul, always fixing up something, making something, for you. She is my mother. I am prejudiced. It is also all true. Well, I’ve come to the end of the page. No more. I love you. That’s all.
Jim
ROBERT LOWELL
Taliesin
October 14, 1947
Dear Cal,
Just a line to tell you that Katherine Anne Porter and Dudley Fitts said yes, KA wiring me “by all means go ahead,” and writing a fine letter which makes me feel good.20 I heard from Kerker Quinn that she is doing the Sewanee review of my book; Zabel21 is doing the Accent one; and that is certainly flattering, for how many books do they review? You are the fourth one on my Guggenheim application, the three aforementioned [sic] and you. […]
Don’t think I’ll do the Sheil piece. It’d be rather ironic, the way I’d have to do it, now that I know what I know — too many microphones and cameras in the bishop’s life — and so I’m skipping it, though the Lord knows, and Betty knows even better, that we could use the money.
Staying here a day or two with two friends from the prison days.22 I saw a plan yesterday for raising the face of Pittsburgh. About all that remains of the riverfront is the cathedral of learning, and it’s dwarfed by other things. This is another monastery, devoted to another god. I seem to spend my life in other people’s monasteries, listening to talk of other gods. […]
My address now: Avon, Minn. Let me hear from you.
Jim
8. I’ve a few stipulations to read into the rural-life-family-life jive, November 6, 1947–April 5, 1948
The “house” in the Avon woods, 1947
Jim and Betty were living again out in the woods with inadequate heat, no water, and plenty of dampness. Betty’s baby was overdue.
HARVEY EGAN
Avon
November 6, 1947
Dear Fr Egan,
I haven’t heard from you in some time, hope you are still in good standing. It is snowing here today, the first snow of the season, which makes it seem like old times, and our roof is leaking, which really makes it seem like old times, and still we do not have a well. Already, however, Betty has filled a bucket with snow, thinking it will melt and give us water, but she does not reckon on our stove, which always stays cool, no matter what we do to it. In short the rural life is about the same. Betty is still very much with child, the event being over a week delayed now, and I must say I am getting tired of it. It holds up my trip to the Cities. […] There doesn’t appear to be any real prospect of our getting water — all we get are promises, the same ones we got this time last year — and we’ve been thinking we ought to postpone our life here. Do you suppose you could find a place in St Paul, cheap, roomy, private? Soon? I suppose not. I know what I’m asking. Still, it’s the only thing I can see. We might, probably will, stick it out here with baby and no water and damn little camaraderie, but I think we’d be happier this winter in St Paul. Or Mpls, I would say, though I prefer St Paul, as does Betty. I told Fr G. about this in a letter yesterday. Please let me know, only don’t strain yourself, I know it’s a long-shot bet at best.