J.a.S.S.W.F.O.I.T.
Just a Simple Soul Who Found Out in Time.
P.S. To think I once thought butter sinful!
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
(the home of happy feet)
September 13, 1945
Dear Marsh,
I am tearing this off in the wee hours of the morning. You came to mind as I entered the realm of X-ray, cystoscopy, diathermy. […] As for your private life, in some lamentable respects, it resembles my own, and I think I’ll just skip that. I can go to confession. I don’t know what you can do … wait it out, I suppose. I use that sometimes myself, instead of confession, as confession in some circumstances strikes me as the easy way out (a way to miss the meaning, destroy the chance of changing through experience); too much so. I do not believe I’ll get married, ever. If so, it will be like lightning. I do not expect to be hit by that either. And I will not even go so far as to say, on the other hand, you never know … I see too much too soon in women to get very far along.
Recently, I’ve had glimmers of what a challenge it would be honestly to try to be a saint; glimmers in all the darkness, one or two or three. I am not much tempted, in what I imagine to be the classical sense (St Anthony), but all it comes to is “something to do” instead of cheering or barking, a chance to wag my tail over something one degree more than nothing. Sometimes I enjoy music more (do you know Ravel, La Valse?), but music is a sometimes thing. Sex, on the other hand, always affords that minor lift — or the idea at bottom does, if not it itself. The small pleasure of pulling one’s fingers out of the dike; the sorrow soon after; the struggle to get the dike in shape again. Tick, tock, night, day, night … if the square root of death is one hour, you know it is not so long, life, and every hour in between is, if you could only let yourself see it, you would get up and leave this interminable double feature after the thousandth time you saw it. Write.
Jim
Elizabeth “Betty” Wahl had graduated that spring from the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, four miles from St. John’s in Collegeville, Minnesota. She had been Sister Mariella Gable’s prize student and was now living at home with her parents in nearby St. Cloud, working as a bookkeeper for her father Art Wahl’s construction company. She was also writing a novel under the tutelage of Sister Mariella, who eventually asked Jim to read the manuscript and come up to St. Benedict’s to discuss it. One cannot help seeing matchmaking on Gable’s part and starry-eyed aspiration on Betty’s. Twenty-one years old, romantic, and worshipful, Betty considered the ideal marriage to be union with the mind, body, and soul of a great artist. As for Jim, he was clearly in the mood to be hit by lightning.
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
October 15, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
[…] I shall be pleased to read Miss Wahl’s book, only asking that you send it on and give me until, say, sometime in early November to get it read and up there to talk about it, as you suggest. […] I am conscious of the possible irony in my criticizing the work of someone who has turned out 70,000 words at 21, words which you must not think badly of. But we shall see. I guess I might have more to my credit if I’d been born a girl or as I am with money enough so I wouldn’t have to work at the nonsense I always have had to, or if the call to the colors hadn’t gone out when I was ripe for them, or, as Ted LeBerthon says, if my aunt had whiskers she’d be my uncle. I am amused that you found me a “stripling.” I wish I were five years younger at least. […] Ted LeBerthon, who now lives with me on the sixth floor of this old brownstone ghost of a building, is 53, and most of the time it seems to be the other way around. We can still lie awake at night (Sundays, when I don’t work, anyway) and talk. It is something I used to do as a child and again in high school (the chances of our team in the state tournament) and also when I graduated and hit Chicago (Pater, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Symons). But I don’t think I’ll want to talk in bed when I’m 53. […]
JFP
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
October 23, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
A line to let you know I rec’d your letter and the MS today. I have just finished the first chapter and without going any further would be willing to bet on the book and with more certainty on future books from Miss Wahl. The title, I think, is very bad: the first paragraph likewise. But after that it rides right along. […] There is a very rare honesty, it seems to me, about the first chapter. I am even a little awestruck by it. […] I like especially the ease with which Miss Wahl writes. Shattuck (of Accent) would love it. I have a private opinion ease comes easier with women. […] A woman I know, the mother of a close friend, works as a saleslady in a department store. She used to run out and rub the back of a hunchback, calling him “old huncher,” for good luck. I was fascinated with the idea of it, or not only the idea (the cruelty of it lurking at several removes) but this particular woman involved in it, but the more I said it in various ways to myself the further I got away from the art of the thing. […]
Best,
Jim
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 1, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
I think I ought to tell you the weekend of the 11th looks likely. […] I will say I think the book ought and — which is more — will be published. I would offer the services of my agents28 if Miss Wahl would care to have them. […] But we can talk about that too. I should want (if my criticism is to be abided by, and I am not sure I wish it so) to go through every chapter. Such things as the candle making, the Sister who presides there, should be the case more often in this book. I feel something about the place (St Benedict’s) is very wonderful and unique and deserves more going into than it gets. But, as before, more anon.
Best. Pax.
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 6, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
[…] I have been negotiating with buses and trains and nuns. […] It might be easier for all of us for you to leave the convent and for Miss Wahl to run away from home. […]
Pax.
Jim finally met Betty Wahl on Saturday, November 10, 1945, and proposed marriage to her two days later. She accepted.
2. With you it will be like being ten years old again, November 12, 1945–November 29, 1945
Betty Wahl