The world outside the house, whichever one he happened to be living in, became increasingly untenable to him, and his vision of the ideal house became ever more one of an asylum, a place safe from the contagion of the world and the line of complacency it peddled. As he retreated, the family he had once seen as having thwarted his calling as an artist became his model society — all the more so after most of its members had left and the idea could flourish unchecked by reality. In 1979 he wrote to me, then thirty-one and living, as were his other children, far away: “You referred to Boz’s plan for me to make a lot of money so we can move back to Ireland. He may be right. I see it as idealism, but what else would work for our family? A big house not too far from Dublin, Jane weaving and dyeing in one room, Hugh philosophizing and botanizing in another, Boz and family in one wing, Mary etching in one tower, Katherine reading in another, Mama in the garden, Daddy with The Irish Times and The Daily Telegraph in his study.”
To which scheme I say to myself now, as I did then: Oh, dear.
* * *
Jim’s letters are assertions of comic might against the absurdity, as he saw it, of his existence. He wrote them in part to stave off chaos, to give reality a shape of his own creation, however dark. As it happens, the last communication between my parents was conducted — in a manner of speaking — in writing and was another attempt to fend off the unbearable. On the morning Betty died (at home, wasted by cancer, unstintingly cared for by Jim), he asked her what she would like for breakfast. She just shook her head. He went off and returned with a pencil and checklist with entries for “Eggs” and “Liver.” He left; came back; no checkmark. He took the list away and returned with it, having added “Kisses.” She smiled faintly and again shook her head. He left it with her, and when he returned again, she had marked “Liver.” This struck him, as I have no doubt it was meant to by Betty, partner and butt of his dark sense of humor, as perfect in its intransigence and bleak comedy.
Betty died a couple hours later. Jim said he spent that time telling her how sorry he was for having given her such a hard life and no home. He never really recovered from her death, though he lived for another eleven years, alone, and long enough to be forced to leave another house slated for destruction.
A Note on the Text
I have selected the letters and journal extracts that make up the text of this book from thousands of letters and several personal journals with the aim of keeping the focus on JFP’s life. I have cut letters and passages that are not necessary to the story, including a large number concerning JFP’s deliberations and negotiations with editors and publishers.
Passages cut from the letters are indicated by this: […]. Passages cut from the italicized interstitial material are indicated by ellipses alone.
I have created consistency in such matters as capitalization and corrected the very few spelling mistakes. I have added some additional paragraph breaks as JFP often sacrificed format to postage economy. I have also retained JFP’s preference for the British custom of using no period after an abbreviation if the last letter of the abbreviation is the same as the last letter of the word being abbreviated — for example, “Mr,” “Mrs,” “Fr,” “Sr,” and “Dr.”
1. Fortunately, I am under no obligation to earn a living wage, September 8, 1942–November 6, 1945
Letter from prison
In 1942, when this story begins, Jim was twenty-five years old and living in Chicago with his parents in their apartment at 4453 North Paulina Street. He had a job at the wholesale book company A. C. McClurg and was also writing. His story “He Don’t Plant Cotton” (whose characters were based on the jazz musicians Baby Dodds, Jimmie Noone, and Lonnie Johnson) was accepted by Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature. The magazine had been founded in 1940 by Kerker Quinn in concert with six other editors, including Charles Shattuck, who became Jim’s most helpful editor and critic.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
4453 North Paulina Street
Chicago
September 8, 1942
Dear Mr Shattuck,
Naturally, I’m very pleased that the editors of Accent like “He Don’t Plant Cotton” well enough to publish it.1 […]
Concerning the who’s who data, this will be my first published story. Aside from the fact that I am 25 and live in Chicago, there is nothing I wish mentioned about me: because those facts, paltry and insignificant, are at least accomplished.
Off the record, I work for a wholesale book company. In fact I might even be what the Publishers Weekly and booksellers refer fondly to as “a bookman,” but the bestseller wars have left me, in spite of my tender years, battered and scarred beyond finding much solace in that hallowed term, smacking of crafts and guilds though it does.
In italics, I want to get away and, yes, you guessed it, Write. I am not working on a novel now.
I do not think my years are tender. Time passing haunts me even more than Space intervening.
Thanks once more. I am hoping you will be able to publish the story soon.
Sincerely,
J. F. Powers
Jim applied for the status of conscientious objector in November 1940 but was classified 1-A in September 1942. His great friend from his Quincy College Academy days, George Garrelts, ordained a priest in September 1942, was a strong supporter of Jim’s decision to resist military service. After a failed appeal, Jim did not present himself for induction on April 3, 1943. Arrested two weeks later, he spent three days in the Cook County Jail before being released on a thousand-dollar bond. He was indicted by a grand jury on May 6, 1943, and on September 30, 1943, was sentenced to three years at Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota. He served thirteen months before being paroled.
While inside, Jim was allowed to write two letters a week. He worked in the hospital and, to some extent, on his own writing. Unlikely though it was, and thanks to the friends he made there, prison gave Jim a sense of what life might be for an artist. Among his fellow inmates were a number of cultivated, idealistic men who were also conscientious objectors. Among them were John Marshall, with whom he wrote and produced a play, and two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices, Jack Howe and Davy Davison. Howe drew up a plan of a farm for Jim that represented to him a more intellectual and cultivated expression of the ideals of the Catholic Worker movement.
CHARLOTTE AND BILL KRAFT
Sandstone
May 22, 1944
Dear Charlotte and Bill,
[…] You make your life in New England2 sound attractive — even to me. At times I’ve thought my place to be there. But most of the time I’ve wondered if there is any place for me except in some branch of the government service. There is a justice, hardly poetic, in the way I find myself tied up in destiny with millions of people when what I want most is to be separated from them. […]
The weather is nice and I’m tempted to get out of the dormitory, but when I do, there’s only a sandy lot surrounded by concrete walls — and so monotony has the upper hand always. There is no grass. A while ago I saw somebody playing with a small snake. There it was lying in the sand, pushed about by prison shoes, and I guess it will die eventually. It can’t get out either. […]