We often think of you. I don’t know when we’ll go back to America, or where we’ll go when we do. We have literally no plans.
Jim
Epilogue: I once knew a writer (before I was married) who had a wife and four children, and he was always traveling around with them and his manuscript of the moment, which he kept in a metal file, which he carried, and when this writer came into a hotel dining room with his wife and children and the metal file and the violin case (one of the children played the violin), he’d turn on you in anger and say, “What’s everyone looking at?” That has since become the story of my life, except that I have five children (none of whom, however, plays the violin) and a leather case for my manuscript, and I don’t ask what everybody’s looking at.14
J. F. Powers, 1963
Afterword: Growing Up in This Story by Katherine A. Powers
Katherine Anne Powers
This volume ends with 1963. There are enough letters, further removals, and more ocean crossings en famille to supply at least another volume, but the novel Jim might have written concludes here. What lies ahead, years ahead to be sure, is a certain resignation. “It’s as if the story of my life has been badly cut, like a film, and what’s left has those specks and scratches on it from too many showings.”1 But what lies directly ahead — the near future, that is — is not suitable material for Jim’s gift.
His children were becoming adolescents and, infinitely worse to his way of thinking, teenagers. The presence all around him of burgeoning consciousnesses, of egos to rival his own, and, most harrowing, of his two older daughters’ growing fascination with the opposite sex was too much for this author to control and defuse through comedy. In 1963, he hadn’t yet come to see his children as people possessing identities and destinies separate from his own — that revelation was years away — but he was having trouble maintaining the illusion that his was the central point of view. Add to that the older children were beginning to be infected by popular culture, and not just any popular culture either, but that of what was becoming the sixties. This he viewed with appalled incredulity, and the move to Ireland in 1963 was made in part to stem the contagion. I cannot say that in this respect it was a roaring success.
Growing up in this family is not something I would care to do again. There was so much uncertainty, so much desperation about money, and so very little restraint on my parents’ part in letting their children know how precarious our existence was. Our terrible plight — as it was always painted — was made all the more so by how particular, not to say impossible, our requirements were in the realm of housing and style of living.
Reading these letters, I found myself becoming sad and occasionally angry at what could be described as a folie à deux. What really shocked me was seeing more clearly what my mother had taken upon herself in joining her life to this man’s. Jim had warned her repeatedly before they were married not to expect an ordinary life (“sometimes I get to thinking you don’t know me at all, don’t know what you’re getting into, and if you do, you think changes can be made which, as a matter of fact, won’t be made”). But Betty, who loved Jim and believed that he was an exceptional being, a true artist, also believed that he would be rewarded as such if only he would knuckle down and stop wasting time. He wouldn’t or couldn’t, but she did.
Betty wrote almost every day on a strict schedule, hoping to bring in some money — which she did, though nothing like what the situation required. She published a number of stories in magazines, including The New Yorker, and in 1969 her one novel appeared, Rafferty & Co. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux while Jim was trying desperately to get out of a multibook contract with the despised Doubleday, it was based in a gentle way, far too gentle, I would say, on life in Ireland with a man something like Jim. Aside from that, she cooked every meal from scratch and sewed most of our clothes; she went to her parents for aid; she scrimped, rationed, and cobbled together the wherewithal for our survival.
But to return to Jim’s letters. In the end, their wit and drollery and festive turns of phrase won me over. A distance developed between me, the person actually present in the predicament the letters describe, and me, the reader. And indeed, in selecting the letters to tell this story, I increasingly felt I was bringing order to a situation where there was little. With that came satisfaction and a certain amount of peace.
My sister Jane, on the other hand, found reading the letters more troubling. She was bowled over by the early ones, by Jim’s expressions of love for our mother. But the feeling aroused by the whole twenty-one-year run of them was one of overwhelming, inalterable sadness. “All that energy, all those plans, all that crazy idealism in the beginning: it somehow turned in on itself to make something — our family, our way of life — that was always contrary and constricted. There are hints of JFP’s truculence in the early letters, and they make me uneasy and unhappy, as they pierce through the beautiful fabric of his prose like little daggers. Also, he was so hopelessly impracticaclass="underline" How could it ever have turned out well?”
The last word will be Jim’s, from Ireland (again), some seven years further down the road. We find him having recently acquired a pair of “Tall Man” pajamas, now transformed into yet another emblem of the human condition of which he was always an appreciative victim.
Greystones, County Wicklow
August 23, 1970
Dear Fred and Romy,
[…] I was interested to see [from Betty’s letter] what it is we are doing, or will be doing (finishing our books and making a pile and coming back), as we don’t often discuss such matters and I often wonder what it is we are doing, or will be doing. As for lonely, well, all men are lonely. I am myself lonely, always have been, and never more than when in my new pajamas. I think of myself then as the last man on earth, as Tall Man. My sleeves extend four inches beyond my fingertips, one of my legs is, for some reason, narrower, the stitching overlapped for a few inches before rejoining the main stitching, like a service road, and I bag in the back, I’m told. However, I am well and working, and hope you are the same.
+ TALL MAN
NOTES
Introduction
1 From an unpublished manuscript in the hands of Rosemary Hugo Fielding.
1. Fortunately, I am under no obligation to earn a living wage
1 Published in Accent (Winter 1943).
2 Bill was attending the Harvard Business School.
3 William Fifield (1916–1987), the writer and editor.
4 Published in Accent (Autumn 1943).
5 Sister Mariella Gable was compiling an anthology of Catholic fiction, Our Father’s House (1945), in which she included “The Trouble” and “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does.”
6 Jack Howe.
7 Ramona Rawson (1920–1999), former girlfriend, who did not show deference to George Garrelts.
8 Garrelts wrote to Jim (November 17, 1942), “A stand is about to be taken in re Ramona Rawson … You are not in love, are not likely to be, and cannot ever abidingly or successfully be. My evidence is detailed. She would not darn your socks. She would not accompany us to Mass. She sat sullenly by in the presence. She found no ways during our stay in Waupaca [Wisconsin].”
9 Henry Wallace was replaced by Harry Truman as Roosevelt’s running mate at the Democratic convention in Chicago.