The absolutely big news I have for you is that I dropped Joe H. Palmer a line, and this evening he phoned, and we have an evening planned for here Friday night. I saw him at the yearling sales one night, with his wife, at a distance, and got to thinking I just had to see him. So I risked a note. He sounds on the phone something like he looks: “Hallo, this is Joe Palmer.” Wish you were going to be here. I am not telling the other inmates. They would not know about him anyway and also might not have enough sense to honor him as I intend to. It means I’ll have to get a bottle of bourbon in. He’s from Kentucky. I’d like to ask Jack Conroy (a writer) down (he lives above us), but I don’t want to set him off. He’s been on one toot since coming about a week ago. He is from Moberly, Missouri, originally, but for many years was considered the white hope of the proletarian novel. Nice fellow. Lot of stories. I have not seen a radio since coming here and might be said to be taking the cure.
I see where the Holy Father is routing us contemplatives out of our tunnels, says we’ve got to mix more. How do you feel about that? (I have had two good ones, one paying $33.00, one $27.50, but I had them to show, and those are the win prices.) A fellow selling tip sheets in the grandstand said: “Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” I plan to attend the morning works tomorrow. I sit behind the clockers. There are two sets. Those who work for the track handicapper, and they are Negroes; those who work for the Racing Form and Daily Telegraph, all white. The former are better for dialogue, though the others have their points. They have big binoculars, notebooks, handbooks, encyclopedias, and typewriters. When a horse comes on the track a quarter of a mile away at the gate, up go the binoculars, and that is all they need, just a glance, to tell which one of thousands it is. Would that I were one of them, but, no, I had to be what I am.
We have a place in Milwaukee lined up. Three bedrooms, so we’ll expect you now and then. I’ll tell Joe he is your favorite arthur. (“Arthur” is one of Conroy’s words. When he was famous, after the success of his first book, he sent for all his old friends in Missouri, and they came like a plague of locusts, eating and drinking all before them. It was the habit of their leader to ask at literary parties: Sir, are you a published arthur?)
Fit and ready.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
[late August — early September 1949]
Dear Father Egan,
[…] Saratoga meeting no great success; no great loss (about 12 or 15 dollars, I’d say). Your five went the hardest. I send you the chart. The horse was Greek Song: the bet, as ordered, to place. You can see what he did. I blame the boy for not breaking him right. A cousin of Skoronski, who, you may recall, rides like a Chinaman. The meeting a great success in every other way, though. Had Joe Palmer over here two or three times and his friend Jim Roach, who does the same thing, but not so well, for The NY Times. Joe took us to the track for breakfast one morning, picking up the tab for $7.90 (that was for us three) and also sending us six passes to the clubhouse. You would have liked him. […]
Breezing.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
150 Summit Avenue
September 6, 1949
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] We plan to leave the babies in St Cloud, move them from there to Milwaukee. I have my family’s car, a 1940 convertible, for the trip. We drove up in it, Betty and I, after looking over the place in Milwaukee. It is out in the country. I’m going to need a car to escape it, I fear; the country, that is. It is brand-new, you know, upstairs from the people who’re building it. It is better than we deserve. Things will be tough at first, since we must buy a new gas stove, washing machine, etc. I don’t believe I was led to believe in the necessity for such things in The CW.10 But then there wasn’t much about your housekeeper either, was there? […]
Do you have movies in Beardsley, or lantern slides? We’ll expect to see you on Sunday the 11th. I’m sorry about Greek Song, but that’s the way it goes: some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
Pax …
Jim
11. I’m beyond the point where I think the world is waiting for me as for the sunrise, September 19, 1949–October 7, 1951
Art and Money’s “little rambler house” on the Mississippi, 1951—Mary and Katherine with cousin Michael Bitzan
The Powers family left St. Paul for Milwaukee, where, for two school years, Jim taught creative writing at the Jesuit-run Marquette University. “Betty and I feel sad about leaving St Paul,” Jim wrote to the exiled Egan in Beardsley. “Perhaps, though, we can have a triumphal return someday. Perhaps about the time you have yours.” The family lived on the second floor of a house in a new, treeless neighborhood far from the heart of the city.
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
September 19, 1949
Dear Father Egan,
Monday morning. We have a semblance of order here now. The books are still in boxes. We await another baby bed before the “den” can be cleared out for me. I am in no mood for work yet, however. Yesterday I journeyed — three transfers on the bus — to Borchert Field, where I saw the Saints go down to defeat, Roy, the Brewer pitcher, giving one hit, Naylor, who would have been the last man to face him. So that means they go to St Paul to finish off the series. I went with Gordon’s old friends, the Hollanders. They are very cynical about the Brewers and Nick Cullop, whose scalp they seek.1 I teach my first class tomorrow afternoon. Do you suppose they would understand if I called it off on account of having to follow the team back to St Paul?
Which reminds me that Life arrived the other night at 11:15 p.m., special delivery: the Waugh story on American Catholics with a picture of JF and Harry in it. My picture is one that Time took two years ago at Yaddo for that review they never ran. I think I look like a queer in it, but perhaps that will boost my sales in that important quarter. The Waugh piece has some good things in it but is cloudy at the end, I think. It is the Sept. 19 number in case you want to pick up a copy — on second thought where in Beardsley will you be able to do that? Fry’s?
Katherine Anne is here buzzing around the typewriter. She is a good girl, as is Mary. Both behaved themselves all the way from St Cloud. We have a secondhand stove, a good bargain. We expect you to stay here whenever you come this way — on your way to and from conventions, the track, etc. I am going to get a special bed for the “den,” where I intend to stock such visitors as yourself. We won’t have it in time for Fr Garrelts next Friday, and there may be some trouble about who sleeps on that lounge we have. He has kicked against that goad in the past. All for now. Let us hear from you.
Jim
This place very bright and, let’s face it, soulless. Deadly nice little houses nearby peopled by souls taken up with new cars and lawn mowers. […]
Two years previously, Jim had written to Betty in a spate of pique: “I should study the mind of the Church which knows the one thing to be got out of marriage is children. The which we are getting. Now, if we only had some veneer furniture and a Studebaker.” The specter of veneer furniture never materialized, but Jim now found himself with a Studebaker, the first of two he was to acquire from the Strobels after they retired them.
HARVEY EGAN
Milwaukee
Monday in the desert, October 11, 1949
Bone pastor,2