The room itself reminds me of Quincy College Academy: brown railroad paint on the door and mopboards; a silver radiator; one window arched at the top; and light green walls, cracked and peeling and stained. There are two mops and three rolls of toilet paper and some steel wool in one corner, but I have permission to move these things out. In short, I am all set — either to write during the day, something which is impossible at home, or to go into the rubber-goods business. This is the kind of building the Clementines used to have their offices in in Chicago. I decided yesterday, sitting here wishing the door had a lock on it, that I wouldn’t get pictures or do anything about the walls or floor — which is splintery and worn. Only one object I desire: one of those old-fashioned watercoolers, the kind you put ice in, and a big bottle of spring water, the bottle upside down, and … the bubbles each time you draw one. It’s the bubbles I’d like to have. Otherwise I can stand it the way it is: the peace and quiet of noises which mean nothing to me, traffic, bells, cries of fishmongers and religious-goods butchers from the street.
This room is like a dirty bottle, but inside is the vintage solitude which hardly anybody can afford nowadays, and I am sipping it slowly, hoping to straighten out my life as a writer. I’ve done little or nothing since returning from Michigan. We have a new woman who comes three or four mornings a week, and she’s a good one, and Betty too is hoping to accomplish something as a writer. The light, I’ve just noticed, comes into the room, falls upon the paper in the typewriter, just right. It comes from the west, though, and that could be awful in the summer — but then that, as you always say, is life. I must dash off a line to Ted.2 After all, what I’ve managed to do here in No. 7—that is the number on my door — is only what he did in Elmira. I have more room, however — for what? For staring straight ahead, I guess.
All for now.
Jim
Why don’t you tune in Bob and Ray, weekdays at 5:00 p.m., from the Mutual station in the Cities — it’s above KSTP on the dial? I get them via Wadena.
HARVEY EGAN
From Number 7
March 25, 1957
Dear Fr Egan,
[…] You know that play I was telling you about? Well. And so to the novel. I am trying to work up some feeling for Fr Urban, his last night as a preacher, but don’t seem to have the material I need. What I want is some examples of other men transferred as he has been, removed from the spot in the vineyard where it certainly did appear that they were doing awfully good work. Maybe it’s in Newman. I have always remembered Fr Wulftange’s remarks on Littlemore: another grey day at Littlemore, etc. Ah, well, I’m glad to be back with Fr Urban. We understand each other.
I made my trip to Urbana, Jacksonville, and Quincy, after 17 years away. The best thing was the visit I paid to Msgr Formaz, pastor at Our Saviour’s in Jacksonville for 52 years, dean of the Springfield Diocese, and the man who rec’d my mother into the Church and baptized me. He is 82 and a delicious old man, civilized, subtle, wise, and witty. I stopped off at Springfield, at Templegate, booksellers, and was told stories of him by the proprietors, who also told me a good one about Waugh when he was there some years ago. Reporter: Is it true you don’t care for American methods of heating? Waugh: What makes you say that? Reporter: Something I heard or read somewhere. Of course I only know what I read in the papers, as Will Rogers used to say. Waugh: Will Rogers? He’s dead, isn’t he? Reporter: Yes. Waugh: Now he knows better.
I visited the cemetery in Jacksonville and noted all the Irish counties on the tombstones, more than I’ve seen since I looked over the graves in St Paul. The Powers lot is filled, only a few yards from the clergy, on high ground. I felt it was all a mistake, all these poor Irish immigrating — for what? Now they know better. Don and Mary over last night, my first social life in some time, in St Cloud. They had gone out to hear Fr LaFarge on racial justice. I was not up to it. Well, that’s all I know this time. Write. I saw in the paper where we are jubilant about the changes in fasting regulations, we Catholics, I mean. T. Merton sent me his new book of poems. I can’t see him as a poet. But that goes for about all the poets. And now your arch-author must leave you.
Jim
Jim had become friends at Ann Arbor with Michael Millgate, then a teaching fellow, later a biographer, critic, and teacher.
MICHAEL MILLGATE
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud
March 28, 1957
Dear Michael,
[…] I am writing this from my new office in downtown St Cloud. […] I have no telephone, though things are really hopping here, what with lighting my pipe and going to the toilet and scratching myself. I am in the same building with the Girl Scouts, not a going concern in St Cloud, where the Camp Fire Girls dominate, with two attorneys, and something called the Western Adjustment and Inspection Company. I keep thinking this is just the spot for a small mail-order rubber-goods and pornography business and that I am the man for it.
I have just finished Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which I enjoyed, and have just finished not finishing Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter. It took me half the book to find out that it is worthless. Such books, and Nancy Mitford’s, serve only to impress me with the genius of Evelyn Waugh. When they are bad, they are horrid.
Also Sean O’Faolain’s book on modern writers, I’ve been going through. He does the job that has been needed on Faulkner and that no American, presumably, knows enough to do. It doesn’t take much to make us pious. […]
That horse whose name you were trying to remember that night at my place was Freebooter, I think. I have nothing for the National tomorrow, and if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do about it. Very frustrating, life with the Lutherans. […]
Jim Powers
KERKER QUINN
509 First Avenue South
St Cloud, Minnesota
March 28, 1957
Dear Kerker,
[…] Jacksonville was obsessed with basketball, but I did have a nice hour in the cemetery and several hours with the old priest who baptized me and who hadn’t seen me since but who has followed my career as a writer closely. Quincy was worse. I spent five hours there, three in loneliness and two with the mother of an old friend. And so much for that.
Thanks again for your hospitality, and please let Chuck and Suzie know I appreciate that bash they put on for me.
Jim
And please tell Chuck that with a few choice words he ended my career, at least for a while, as a playwright.
Jim and Betty were told that St. Cloud State College would be taking the old red house by eminent domain. It was to be demolished and the land converted into a parking lot. Jim’s story “Look How the Fish Live” is based on this. Around the same time, Jim suffered a severe attack of appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital, where he had an emergency appendectomy, the worst ordeal known to man, in his view.