You ask how Ireland is. Well, there was our new baby, then a visit from the Strobels (during which time I rented a car and drove them around some, not my idea of fun), and then came the news about Don. So I go to my office six days of the week, and some days I sit here and brood, hardly turning a hand, and some days I go out to an auction. […]
We are not definitely committed to returning, but I think that is what will happen if, as I say, I can produce the wherewithal. If I should fail, I suppose we might have to stay on here — and neither of us is at all certain we’d be worse off doing so. We do have a house here, although it’s a freezing proposition in the winter, and I do have a life of sorts in Dublin, wandering about, plenty of newspapers, bookstores, auction sales, and, though I haven’t felt easy enough in my mind of late to visit these, theatres and racecourses.
What I mean, Joe, is that it’s more satisfying than dropping in at the bus station in St Cloud to see if they’ve changed the racks. When I think that Don may not be there anymore, the place gets really hard to take. There are a few others — Fred Petters, Dick Palmquist — but they have other sources of pleasure than friends.* And there are you country people, but you all — you as long as you work — have ways and means of scotching discontent that either never worked for me or no longer do. These old eyes, though they are not the eyes of a painter or sculptor, have to be fed too. I think that’s the hardest thing, the thing that’s always hurting me in Stearns County whether I’m conscious of it or not: just having to look at the mess, the landscape, the offenses against architecture (which is a rather grand way of putting it, like accusing dogs of adultery). Ah, well. You know what I mean. Eyestrain, however, is a very great factor, as I define the term here.
All for now. Please keep writing. Best to you both.
Jim
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ard na Fairrge
Mount Salus
Dalkey, County Dublin
August 21, 1958
Dear Katherine Anne,
[…] It is odd — to me — how as one grows older, memoirs become such an interesting form of writing. When I was young, working in bookstores, I could never understand why they were published at all. The British are great for memoirs, and I must say I never miss reading the reviews of them, of books by people I’ve never heard of usually. Harold Nicolson’s Some People you probably know; fictitious memoirs, a way of getting at people and life that we Americans don’t seem to have tried at all, as a form of fiction, I mean. Perhaps we don’t see enough memoirs to play upon the idea. […]
A few facts. Betty had a baby girl on July 2. We call her Jane, for reasons almost entirely euphonious. She is healthy. We plan to return to the U.S. — to what, we don’t know — in November or December. I am in the act of earning our passage back these days — which is precisely where I was last year at this time. It is either that or look for another house here — one we can be warm in when winter comes, a full-time job and probably an impossibility anyway. The children are much better off in school here, I enjoy — as, say, a clam would — Dublin, but there are other considerations. Unfortunately, they do not outweigh the considerations for staying on, nor do those outweigh these for not staying. They balance out perfectly. We will not realize our mistake until we make it, and this, I fear, will continue as long as we live. We won’t be in the least surprised either, each time it happens. We have not here a lasting home, is the text, but there isn’t much satisfaction in that, is there?
Jim
JOE AND JODY O’CONNELL
August 23, 1958
Dublin
Dear Jody and Joe,
Your last came this morning before I left for the office, where I am now, and we are both very glad to hear that Don is holding on. We did hear from Em, a good letter but rather disturbing too in its description of the New Don (as he was before the stroke), which I guess is what you were saying too, only Em, of course, is well pleased with the results of so much tribulation. That is how I should be too if I thought I were going to die, I know. If Don does recover, though, I think we can count on a certain amount of backsliding — welcome relief, you might say. I would not care if he stopped a long way short of his Sputnik period (which I only heard about) but would not want him an Ade Bethune woodcut either, one-dimensional, illustrating some one virtue.
We also heard from Fr G., who expressed more confidence in Don’s recovery than others have. He seems to be suffering from camp followers at the hospital—“all those people.”
I have heard twice from Leonard, believe it or not, and mean to write him a suitable reply as soon as possible. He feels we have failed him and ourselves by not making a go of our venture in Ireland, and he may be right. I do not like to think of it as a mistake, but that is the word for it. It is also the word for whatever else we might have done at the time we did this. It is the word for coming back again. That is what I am doing to accept the idea that, so far as domestic arrangements are concerned, we cannot bring the fact into accord with the desire. There is too much against us, but still I do not intend to throw in the sponge. I may be seen emptying diapers, but I may be seen too at auctions looking for something to fill up one of the numerous gaps in my life, in the decor of the house I don’t have. […]
Leopardstown races today — Saturday — but I won’t be there. October, I think. In October, maybe I’ll feel more like it, I think. I am suffering from dry rot. I saw a fellow out the train window this morning whom I’d met at Sean O’Faolain’s last winter — a novelist named Mervyn Wall whom I really liked — and he was getting on the train I was on, but I couldn’t summon up the feeling to go and sit with him. I suppose for the same reason that I seldom have a drink at home: I don’t want to set the stage, strike up the band, for nothing.
Now, when I was younger … I was blinder.
No, we didn’t see Bucky1 or his dome. It was on radio — Bucky chatting. He doesn’t speak English — runs his words together like John Foster Dulles and pretty much sounds like a Consumers Union report: “snowload,” etc. I’d say he comes halfway between F. L. Wright and the tool section in Sears’s basement (before it burned)—achievementwise, to use what may well be one of his words.
Jim
LEONARD AND BETTY DOYLE
August 23, 1958
Dear Doyles,
I was raking through the debris here on the desk in the study, looking for a piece of paper so I could write to you, and what should I find but this letter already begun by another hand. Let me say, in passing, so that you’ll better comprehend the foregoing sentence, that this desk is used almost exclusively by the woman of the house, a published arthur in her own right, my candidate for the Christian Mother of the Year, among other things. She is now slumbering overhead, among her troops, and I am listening to the BBC — the Light Programme, getting this week’s top twenty. In this way, I keep faith with you all out there. To your letter then, Leon. (Why, I asked myself a moment ago, does no one call Leonard Leon?) […]
Sometimes I think I ought to get together another collection of phonograph records and keep adding to them; same with books; same with everything, and keep busy that way. Takes money, though. Sometimes I think I should start collecting money, keep adding to it, keep busy that way — and in that way broaden my circle of friends, people of kindred interests. Perhaps you’d care to join me in this. […]
The home life is such that one often doesn’t care to venture out, one feels he might be picked up, for blinking, flinching involuntarily, as if he were an escapee from an asylum rather than a good Christian Family type suffering from FF (Family Fatigue), which, by the way, is not going to go away but get worse and worse. Some of those white rats just don’t answer any bell, in the end I imagine. With my office in Dublin, I escape a lot of this; I have to if I am to make a living; but I get a good shaking up before I leave in the morning and the first thing when I come home. Much of this wouldn’t be true for a lot of other people, but I am not a lot of other people,* unfortunately — or fortunately if I am to go on unlike a lot of other people, making it as a writer, that is. But what the hell, Leon. I’ve told you enough. And much, much more than is necessary, since in a way I’m talking about your life. It’s true I don’t have to play pals with a lot of people I buy things from — people I don’t know don’t call me “Jim” here — and Dublin, for all its dirt, is much easier on the eyes than any place I’ve seen in America. […]