My one big plan now, aside from the novel, which is always with me, is to get a big house and someone to help you, and I don’t know how I can do it. I want to buy a house on Summit, big enough for my mother and dad to live upstairs or somewhere, and I fear you are not with me in this. It is the saddest thing in my life, however, to see my mother worked the way she is here, to say nothing of my father. I think, is it too much to ask of you, and really, all things considered, I think not. I think it would be good for you; I know it would be good for me. I think my mother might become the friend you’ve never had (and as I say that, I feel you draw away), but I believe that, Betty. With two other women I might have married, I know it would have worked out, and you are better than either one of them; no comparison, otherwise. However, I am not trying to be cunning about this, it is the simple truth, and I wish I could believe that you might see it. In any event, I feel I must work much, much harder, and I fully intend to, and I do not kid myself about schedules, etc., not since the one I made out before I married you, the one that used to hang on the wall. There is a little too much activity here (the child) for me to collect my thoughts very well, but you have the fragments.
I want to tell you, too (what I feel is unnecessary), that I love you very much, that I wish I might make your life easier, and that gets back to the house and help again. Will you try to go along with me on this? I almost say, If you love me … but that would be wrong; I know you love me. Perhaps you should listen to me in a few things, though, such as you did in having your hair cut, and they will be better for you than you can imagine. You are inclined to think along traditional lines; I mean, if we haven’t done things, it is a good reason not to do them; but we must make a few swift surgical moves and departures: after all that is how we got married in the first place, and to my mind that is the best way; at least it is good to think that we fell in love all at once and were not cautious then and we haven’t been, except at intervals, since then. We have won a lot that way; we have lost too; but I think I’d rather have what we’ve won … and I know exactly what I mean, though you might think me vague. […]
I love you, then. […]
Jim
10. If you can’t win with me, stop playing the horses! January 18, 1949–September 6, 1949
Evelyn Waugh and Jim, 1949
ROBERT LOWELL
150 Summit Avenue
St Paul, Minnesota
January 18, 1949
Dear Cal,
[…] What word of Ted?1 I always said, remember, we’d mean nothing to him if he ever married that money he talked about, but I did not think we’d be cut off until then.
This month is my “hard time.” I am trying to get a MS together for Mr Moe, with an eye to a renewal,2 but what I thought was going to be just a typing job has turned into a worse job than the original. Just imagine a doctor with the patient all apart on the table, or a mechanic with my car, and add the time element, the February deadline, and you have my predicament. I’ve had it from my agent that renewals are hard to get anyway. I’ve been flirting with the idea of buying a house (with the money I haven’t got but might get if I took a job with something called the Catechetical Guild here: they are dealers in all kinds of religious junk and are thinking of opening up a new department publishing, with Doubleday, Catholic “classics” in the Permabooks format. If that doesn’t develop, I don’t know what I could do there; even if it does develop, the least that would happen to me would be the loss of my faith, I think, just seeing all the junk they have to convert the heathen — games like Pollyanna or Monopoly, for instance, except they deal with the sacraments or dogma. Waugh would love it. Me too, but I wonder, buying a house on it, if I could do the novel about it that would inevitably accumulate).
The truth is I’ve got to buy a house, with these three girls of mine (I count Betty among them). And I think I’d try to buy some awful big damned place up the street, from 12 to 40 rooms, the kind nobody else wants anymore because they cost too much to heat and are gloomy; rather in the direction of Yaddo style, architecturally. But I haven’t really looked into it; don’t know what they cost. And also, I haven’t got the job I’d need. I couldn’t do it on the Guggenheim, though. Ah, well, let me be a lesson to you. Stay single. That way you can afford to be yourself. […] All for now and best.
Jim
Journal, February 14, 1949
Betty told me that the priests had been up to see Sister Mariella … and in the talk this came out about me: He’s lookin’ for a job, didja know that? And that because I was foolish enough to go out and see them at the Catechetical Guild. I thought I made it seem disinterested enough, but I guess not … I think it gave them joy to think I was around begging for work — from them, too, whom I’d hurt so much in the past. Oh, God. Impossible not to think of Joyce and all he had to say about the Church — or is it just the Irish?… That “He’s lookin’ for a job” is a terrible reminder of my own father and all the time he spent looking for a job … And the world is waiting for me as it waited for my father — he’s lookin’ for a job! Sister M. said the priests referred to me as to the devil incarnate — but that is probably exaggerated — a little.
Father Egan had run afoul of someone big in the St. Paul diocesan hierarchy, most likely because of his radical Christian views, and was assigned to a parish in Beardsley, Minnesota, a parched little town on the border of South Dakota. In the summer, it was one of the hottest places in the state. “Whenever the wind blows a particle of dust in my eye,” wrote Jim, “I think of you out there on the lunatic fringe of the world.” Egan threw himself into the duties of the parish and maintaining the rectory.
HARVEY EGAN
150 Summit Avenue
April 2, 1949
Dear Father Egan,
Friday night and I trust you are back in Beardsley by now. I enclose some clippings. I’ll try to keep sending these to you, only the best ones. You know I didn’t get a chance to send stuff to the boys in the last war (due to a little mix-up), and so I intend to make up for them with you. After all, it is like that, what you are going into. And I want you to know, speaking for our block, that we think of you often and will try to make it up to you if you ever return to the States. We are also holding forum meetings in which we discuss the problems of the day, and this, we humbly hope, will make St Paul a better place to live in, for us and for you when and if, as I say, you return. It shouldn’t have happened to a dog, what happened to you, but then we can’t have everything our own way all the time, can we? (I’m not so sure about that, but a certain Fr B.3 is said to hold with that doctrine, and so I go along, knowing what happened to some that set themselves, however secretly they thought, against him.) All for now. (Jamaica opened today: weather clear, track fast…)
jf
St. Paul, “Home of the Saints,” was much better suited to Jim’s temperament than rural Minnesota. The city provided the company of Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren, and other writers with whom he enjoyed the conversation and sense of fellow feeling for which he longed. Evelyn Waugh, who was writing a piece on American Catholicism for Life magazine, arrived in St. Paul. He and his wife came for dinner at the Marlborough, where Betty served them lobster Newburg.
HARVEY EGAN
150 Summit Avenue
May 2, 1949
Dear Fr Egan,