It isn’t often that I think about the old house. I don’t like to think about it. I get upset and angry when I think that a year ago I missed the autumn there and little knew that that was the last one for me and for us there. We would all be happy back there, I know, but that chapter has ended. We did not end it — and I trust whoever was responsible (aside from the circumstance of the college expanding, an incidental to the swift kick we got) is now satisfied. […]
All for now. Please keep up the correspondence. I think I enjoy it more than anyone else, which is not to say that Betty doesn’t enjoy it to the fullest; I just enjoy it more. Once more, in writing, my thanks to you and Al, to Art and Nana, for all your labor and concern in our behalf.
Jim
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
St Stephens, Victoria Road
Greystones, County Wicklow
November 20, 1957
Dear Leonard and Betty,
We rec’d two communications today; your letter this morning and a royalty check for the British edition of Prince (1948): 67¢.
JF: Nine copies home, five export. Fourteen! Some sale!
Betty: Well, it’s up, isn’t it?
We are now nearing the hour of five, the light outside grows purple, the light inside is on, Betty is rustling The Irish Times, our glasses are empty (of Power’s Dublin Whiskey), the coal fire glows at $30 a ton, and the two boys nap on and on, and on the radio from somewhere in the hills of Durham a Catholic seminary choir sings vespers. I pick up my Doyle and am moved to respond to your fine letter.
The girls (to complete the picture) are on a train somewhere between Greystones and Killiney, where they are now enrolled at a convent school run by the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, an order founded by a woman named Connolly whose husband, I understand, after instigating her higher vocation, reverted to the flesh and wanted her back; too late. Anyway, it is a good, expensive school where the standards are apparently high. Ours were tested and found “intelligent but very backward educationally.”
The big news here is that the McCarthys4 walked in on us Sunday, around noon. I was reading The Observer, Betty slumming around in the kitchen. They were our first visitors — except for the curate. At first I thought, seeing Gene suddenly before me, that Em would follow, but he didn’t. He chose Rome over Ireland, tourism over the Movement — or so it seems to me — and thereby showed himself for what he is. We had dinner with Sean O’Faolain and others at a good restaurant Monday night — this at Gene’s invitation and expense. We had a good time. My regret, though, was that Em wasn’t there. The McCarthys are out of touch with the stirrings in the Movement. Gene seemed a little hurt that I didn’t consider him in it anymore. Let’s just say the McCarthys are on leave of absence. I promised them that if Gene lost the next election and returned to the land, we’d return to watch. […]
Speaking of Sputnik, the only people to mention it to me have been the barber and a shopgirl; the former thought we probably knew as much about it as the Russians but just hadn’t put what we knew to proper use, and the latter wondered if I’d seen it pass over yet. I hadn’t, and haven’t. What time is it on?
I confess I was glad to hear things have been “grim” for you these last four weeks. Misery loves company — and it’s hard to believe one doesn’t lead the list these last weeks. […]
Times are considered very hard in Ireland, much unemployment, and I can believe it. On the other hand, an Englishman who runs a café in Dalkey told me that nobody suffers in Ireland, not as he understands the term. The hardware man (Allie Evans) in Greystones said quite a few people here had left for America, mostly for Canada, but that he thought they’d be sorry. I agreed with him. We thought if a man could make a living at all, he’d be happier here. Anyone leaving Greystones for anywhere else will miss the scenery, I know. There are moments when the sun, filtered by the clouds, shines on the sea and on stone and on the green in such a way that I wonder if such moments aren’t enough to make up for everything. […]
Jim
At the end of November, the Powers family moved into Ard na Fairrge, a decaying Georgian house on Mount Salus in Dalkey, county Dublin. Betty discovered to her and Jim’s horror that she was pregnant again.
ROBERT LOWELL AND ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Ard Na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
December 3, 1957
Dear Cal and Elizabeth,
Glad to have your good letter and late word on your fellow immortal (this is a reference to Ted Roethke). I happened to hear from Buck Moon about the same time and passed the news (about Ted) onto him.5 Buck was coming out of some kind of tunnel himself, but he didn’t say what kind. I hadn’t heard from Buck for years. He is now working for Curtis Brown, the agent.
This house we’re in now is an improvement on the other. Scabrous Georgian, noble views of the sea, turf in the fireplaces, room for the children. Unfortunately, we aren’t in the mood to appreciate it, having experienced some terrible misgivings about expatriation and yet with no place to live at home — and hating it where we were, a good old house.
Have no friends, have no plans for any. I may have to work. Either that or fritter and go down. I’m glad to hear you’re operating as a poet again. You’ll be better for the layoff, I think, but I am also hoping you will continue your autobiography, which struck me as the real thing, in your best comic vein and more.
Yes, I’ve always enjoyed reading Wilson,6 only disappointed when he touches upon the spiritual and sounds like one of the little Blue Books published by Haldeman-Julius,7 but even that, in a man otherwise so perceptive, is refreshing. I only hope he never gets religion on that level and daresay it isn’t likely he will. I shook his hand in the New Yorker offices once and admired a tweed coat he was wearing and his overall grizzled look. The Scotch in him.
All for now. Write when you feel like it. I hope Boston still interests Elizabeth. I think you’re right to be there, where you belong. There is a man living next door to us in a Georgian morgue, teaches at Trinity, high up in the Church of Ireland (layman), and I don’t know whether he’s the poet or not.8 Seems to me Faber publishes a poet by the name of Stanford, his name. Everybody (one or two people) has said we should enjoy his company. I spotted him this morning sitting in the window on the second floor, the open window facing out to sea (and England), reading a book, and looking like somebody in Henry James, or my idea of same.
Jim
DON AND MARY HUMPHREY
Ard Na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
December 7, 1957
Dear Don and Mary,
A little slow in replying this time. One week ago, about to the minute — it is 3:15 p.m. — we moved into this house. In the past week we have gradually ordered our lives, though they are still rather chaotic by our standards in St Cloud. We are realizing more and more that we had a system of a sort there, though it was not satisfactory; it will take some time to equal it here — and the question before us is — is it ever possible in a rented house, subject to an owner’s decisions? I think the answer is no, and when you have a lot of children, it is important not to have to start over at intervals. I realize this is something you, and others who own their own homes, have known for some time. My trouble is not wanting to settle for the life that seems to go with home owning, but I am coming to see the error of my ways, having paid and paid with these false starts and find the latest one harder than the one before it, right on back to Avon and St Paul. All this is not a prelude to our making a home in Ireland; I don’t even mean that we’d like to do that. We wouldn’t in our present mood, which is very odd. To us, anyway. We have been so busy with the material side of existence that we haven’t been able to enjoy the advantages of living here. I get up in the morning, and it’s almost an hour before I get the fires going, since we were burning only turf until yesterday; now we have some coal for the fireplace in the kitchen. […]