Jim
Jim and Betty’s engagement produced hundreds of letters. Jim’s were filled with love and yearning, even Betty’s way of saying grace before meals stirred him: “You say it with more beauty than anyone I’ve ever seen. It is perfect when you say it, like a dog digging a hole with his muzzle.” The engagement also brought Jim more frequently to the environs of St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a place awash with Catholic reform. Jim called the region “Big Missal Country,” a witty reference to the prayer book whose use was ardently promoted by liturgical reformers. Jim already had an association with the place through his radical and reforming Catholic friends whom he called “the Movement.” Chief among them was Emerson Hynes, who taught sociology at St. John’s and was, with his wife, Arleen, a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements. Though Jim was fond of these people, he took an increasingly dyspeptic view of most of their causes, especially the emphasis on the family, which made him shudder, and the movement to increase the liturgical role of the laity, which he liked to call anticlericalism.
HARVEY EGAN
St Paul, California1
November 12, 1945
Dear Pere,
[…] I spent the weekend with Sister Mariella at St Benedict’s. I am filled with what I choose to call Benedictinism. I saw Emerson Hynes and wife one night (Sunday), and my faith was shaken. T. à Kempis2 is now no longer with us. I had thought he enjoyed an irremovable position. Much to talk about with you.
I have the road more or less prepared for you to enter into their midst.
I met the girl whose novel I was reading for Sister Mariella. I think I will marry her. That, too, to discuss. […]
Pax,
JF
Don Humphrey, another member of the Movement, now enters the letters. An artist, sculptor, and chalice maker, he had also participated in the Catholic Worker movement. At this time he was living in poverty and precarious circumstances with his large family in the Twin Cities area. Jim found the best sort of camaraderie in Humphrey and was appalled by his predicament as a man of great artistic talent whose life was blighted, as Jim saw it, by too many children and no money.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 15, 1945
Dear Betty,
This is Thursday, and as I compute it, I should have had a letter from you today. Anyway, I got up at eleven this morning, in case it should be in the morning mail, and again at 2:30 this afternoon in case … and so already I am beginning to worry about you. I am standing on this corner, and you do not come. I do not think you are sick, and of course what I really know is that perhaps I could not reasonably expect to hear from you until tomorrow, even if you wrote on Wednesday, as you said you would. I have already had two dreams of you, not what you might think, but along Zane Greyish lines: someone is always getting in the way who has to be destroyed, and what happens then, when the happy ending should begin, I never know.
I also test you in this way: I think at all hours of the day do I want to marry you now. I do this when you might (or I might from my past experience) think the answer would be no, as in the morning, when many of my best-laid plans have stacked up to nothing, ideas and lines for stories written the night before. But the answer is always Yes. It is a little surprising to me each time it is, though a little less each time, of my having taken such a hard view of myself and the idea of holy matrimony for so long. So that is the way it is … if you are as you were and have not changed your mind or come to your senses — having seen through me and what a stinker I am, which happened to be one thing I admitted to, as then it always means the opposite. I am not sure of you. I remember looking at you and feeling that I could almost see you making and unmaking up your mind. I don’t know why, in either case, granting the other. I ask myself what I would do if you did change your mind, and I know that it would probably not be disastrous, unless you call living one’s life out as I have so far, a bachelor, disastrous. In this event I am glad I did not get to know you any better than I did, which incidentally required a deal of restraint on my part, which restraint you may not appreciate in the nature of things. But which you would have if it had been missing and one of those little nuns had come upon the scene with her head full of wholesomeness.
I have been out buying oysters and milk and rolls, and now, with the warmed-up coffee from Ted’s lunch, I will eat. It would be good to raise oysters, mushrooms, and cranberries on a farm. Ted and Harrigan (editor, Catholic Digest) have just gone to Harrigan’s for a farewell dinner. Ted is leaving tomorrow night. Our relationship has been blissful since my return. I think he was actually glad to see me. I told him about you, and he was glad about that (he read the first chapter of your novel and your piece on Catholic education which the Digest considered for republication and maybe still does) in a way I find curious. He is of the opinion I need someone like you, believing I will go wacky otherwise, meaning what he regards as “perfectionism” in writing leading to that. But now I think I’ll leave this letter where it is for today, hoping for tomorrow.
Saturday. I am up again this morning, and how very, very glad I was to get your letter (and how could I write to you when I hadn’t your address; but I did write to you, as see the foregoing, only not mailing it). […] But now there is your letter, and you say you love me, once directly and once, at the end, glancingly, and I am very happy about that. No, it is twice directly. That is better. I have read your letter four times already. HG, I am given the light to understand now, is Holy Ghost. At first it puzzled me. I am, descending to the level of important things which really don’t matter, but are better the way you say they are, happy your family is losing its peculiar antagonism to me.3
I love you, Betty. It is the first time, I know now, I ever loved anybody. But even if I’d never met you, this I know: I had never loved anybody the way one is supposed to. So you are the first one. Do not catch pneumonia and die. God is against these things; for some reason really known to him and the cause for much dull absurdity on the part of the theologians, he does not want them to last. But, God, I say, this is different — and not just different in the ridiculous way I knew people thought their affairs, because theirs, were different. This is different, I feel, in an absolute sense. […]
I want you to do two things in this letter: (a) send me your telephone number; (b) send me a dime store ring which fits you. I am going to get Don Humphrey to make a ring. I am going to Robbinsdale4 tomorrow to see him and Fr Garrelts. I will tell them, as I know I’ve told too many already, Sylvester in Guatemala among them, that we are to be married. When, at the very earliest, could you come to St Paul? Ma mere is coming next week. I was thinking last night, providing you still loved me, we could go to Chicago maybe in Jan. or Feb. Tell me.
I love you, Betty.
Jim
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 17, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
I have put off thanking you for everything in writing because I remember you were to be in two or three places and very busy this week or the one coming or both. I had my first letter from Betty today — after meeting the mailman for two or three days. It was a very nice letter, and I have read it too often already. […] I have told everyone I’ve seen or written to since my return how you do things at St Benedict’s. I use the poetic method. For instance, I tell my mother you scrub the kitchen three times a day and two nuns went blind making St George and the Dragon. […]