7
Robert Lowell, Yaddo, 1947
Jim’s first book, the short-story collection Prince of Darkness, was published by Doubleday in the spring of 1947. Jim and Betty (who was expecting a child at the end of October) went to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat at Saratoga Springs, New York, arriving on July 1. The weeks that followed approached an idyll for Jim as he made friends with a number of men who shared his taste for male camaraderie, literature, and high-wire conversation. Chief among them were the poets Robert Lowell, known as Cal and, at times, Rattleass (from Boston, Mass.); and Theodore Roethke, “a big long fat man who needs a lot of stoking,” sometimes called Champ or Beast (of Bennington); Harvey C. Webster, from the University of Louisville, sometimes called Clocker because he, like Jim, was a devotee of the track; Bucklin Moon, Jim’s editor at Doubleday; and the writer Arna Bontemps.
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
July 9, 1947
Mon pere,
Your letter and two spot rec’d. Saratoga does not open until August, and so I’ll try to keep your deposit until then. I like your system: an 8–1 bet in the fourth, then a 3–1 in the fifth. If that does not produce results, I do not know what will. Well, we arrived here without a bit of trouble, not even a flat, and our merry Chev rolled all the way without a cough. Chevrolet builds great cars! Since coming here, we’ve not done a lot of work, though some, and there are no excuses for not working. It is not an amusement center; everybody is working on a book or painting a picture or chiseling a bust, and production means survival once we leave this haven of rest, and so there isn’t much loafing—at least if there is, everyone is careful to do it in private. We have a couple of big rooms and a bath but use just one. It’s two or three times as big as our house in Avon. We have breakfast from 8:15 to 9:15, lunch in our rooms (they pack it) at any time, and dinner at 6:30. Food is very good, about the best I’ve had, except in certain rectories. Among the notables are JF, his wife, Marguerite Young, Robert Lowell, Owen Dodson, Bucklin Moon, Arna Bontemps, Michael Seide. Others, but I doubt that they’d mean much to you. I see mostly Moon and Theodore Roethke: we form the non-intellectual center. But do some fishing with Lowell. The little lakes are full of bass. Went to Mass Sunday and heard an intelligible sermon.
Emerson sent me Riley Hughes’s review from Columbia; it was quite flattering to me; not so to Harry Sylvester.1 Emerson wonders if it will make for strife between the authors. No doubt, but then Harry is selling, and I am not, and there should be some consolation for him in that. There are 25,000 copies of his book in print now. Mine, Moon tells me, is doing much better than expected but is still under 2,000, I think. Book business is very bad, and of course short stories always go to the post with two strikes against them. Thanks for sending the Best Sellers review. I thought it rather spotty for them. Favorable enough, but not very well done. For instance, there is no character in my book guilty, so far as I’m concerned, of gluttony; certainly not Fr Burner, or the priest in “The Lord’s Day.”
I’ve been thinking a lot of places since coming here and have just about decided that St Paul is the place for me. It is about right, it’s old, it’s not too big, I have what friends I have there, and perhaps I could make it my Dublin. As Dick Keefe told me, “Jim, you’re a city man.” So, if there’s any chance for peace in the future, I think I’ll concentrate on insinuating myself into St Paul. The bomb is the big but. No one here seems to have much hope. Lowell (he’s a convert, you know, an ex-con like me, for being a CO) says it’s pacifism or nothing, says we must become pacifists. I say I don’t know, maybe we should become travelers. But where is the big question then. Geographically, I prefer the East to the Middle West. The country doesn’t go on and on forever; there are more trees and hills. Well, well, I know you don’t hold still for much of that kind of talk. This is a huge old pile, in the Summit Avenue manner, only bigger, and is crammed with junk: statues, bishops’ chairs, ugly pictures, miniatures, fountains, books, etc., possibly the biggest heap of its sort for many miles. I rather like it, though. Enough for this time … pax.
Jim […]
See Monty Woolley, the actor with the beard, all the time in one bar, waiting for a live one or somebody he can insult. They say he’s queer as a crutch.
CHARLES SHATTUCK
Yaddo
July?, 1947
Dear Chuck,
A line to let you know how things are in these parts. We’ve been here since the first of July, drove it all the way with no trouble with my runabout, which I believe you have a picture of. And now that we have it here, the runabout, I am quite the most popular person; Yaddo lies more than a mile out of town, and the bars, of course, are in the town. My most regular passengers are Buck Moon, Theodore Roethke (“The Beast of Bennington”), Robert Lowell. The first two are most regular, sometimes go without me, and Lowell is usually likewise broke, though it’s more oversight with him; he forgets to cash checks. […] There are some Brooklyn painters, and they are awful. Also a few analysts posing as writers, also awful. We play croquet evenings, quite the bloodiest thing I’ve been mixed up in since I gave up Pollyanna, the Glad Game.2 […] Ruth Domino3 is sort of a fixture here—at least she puts out the mail and has charge of library books—but I do not know much about her, except her accent is German. Lowell says she was investigated by the FBI last spring for being a Communist, but then so many of us have been investigated by the FBI, even you. […]
Pax,
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
July 23, 1947
Dear Father Egan,
[…] Lowell apparently is having his dark days. He says he is “not a practicing Catholic,” but I will not give him the satisfaction of asking why not. Something to do with his marriage. His wife is Jean Stafford, author of Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion(Harcourt, Brace), but she is or was a Catholic before him. I figure characters like Lowell and myself flourish without direct apostolic work. The bark is always there. He knows it. He can climb on whenever he gets tired enough. Pamphlets and all that are out with his kind. He is a very nice guy. It’s just a matter of time. Enough. Pax.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
August 20, 1947
Dear Fr Egan,
Yes, there you are, lounging around, living the good life, and here I am up to my neck in handicapping and creative labors. I am grateful to you for all the reviews. […] Who is Rev. E. J. Drummond, SJ, PhD? Is he the dean of the graduate school, Marquette University? Is it true that perhaps my hand is not as yet sure in the handling of complex symbols? What are complex symbols? Can I find them in the Racing Form? I am at sea. Should I look up Fortunata Caliri4 in New York and get taken around? What would Betty say? All in all it’s very funny, and I only wish there were more such reviews. I would not like to be panned, the way Harry is being, at least not for the same reasons, but I do enjoy being dissected by these English teachers. […]
Haven’t been to the track. Last time over saw Stymie beaten by outsider, Rico Monte, the Argentine beetle. This town, when we enter it, is full of New York touts and torpedoes and their women. Go in for a beer now and then, Michelob; “Glass a Mick, Jack.” Seldom see or recognize the better classes, though we did see Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics lady, and Harry Warner, of Warner Bros Pictures, the other night at the horse auction. Harry paid $44,000 for a yearling filly by War Admiral out of Betsy Ross II (please pass that info on to Fr Casey). […]
They postponed the drawing on the Buick at St Clement’s here. We have a ticket. The lady who “does” our rooms says Father said everything was going so well he thought they’d extend the carnival a few days, postpone the drawing, and besides it rained Saturday night. You should have his job. He sits out on the sidewalk downtown with the Buick and helps the eighth-grade girls make change. I hope we win, not that we need a new car.
Pax,
Jim
Jim and Betty left Yaddo for New York City on September 2. Betty took the train for Minnesota on September 4. Jim returned to Yaddo on September 5.
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
September 5, 1947, Friday afternoon,
a few minutes after returning
Dear Betty,
I don’t quite know where you must be now, probably in Chicago, or coming into Chicago, or about to leave Chicago. It is around 2:30 here. I had an egg sandwich, clam chowder, and a piece of pie downtown before getting a cab and coming out; all at remarkable low prices. It was raining this morning when I went to Grand Central, as it was yesterday evening when we went, and so I took a cab, though I’d thought of walking. Well, after I came back from taking you to the train last night, I was pretty sad and tired. I took a bath and napped until Buck came, which was almost ten. Then we talked for a while, went out for a beer, only one, at Jimmy Ryan’s, a jive joint on 52nd Street, and walked up Broadway, which was truly awful in the heat, though I wish I’d thought of taking you there—just for the horror of it. […]
The effect of your things on the clothesline over the bathtub in the closet is … not good, little memories of the summer gone by. So, along with the now comparatively mild ghosts of Buck and Champ and Lowell, there is you. I am living in a haunted house. I do not expect to see anyone I want to see here in September. I expect to work. I feel that I must. I also won’t be able to find the distractions I did when you were here. […] And now, before I take my bath, let me tell you—you always forget—I love you. Do not be sad. Get to work. Take it easy. I hope you’ll be staying at Bertie’s but am addressing this otherwise because I don’t know B.’s address.
Jim
HARVEY EGAN
Yaddo
Saturday, September 6, 1947
Mon pere,
[…] I expect to leave here around the last of September. It was possible for me to stay, and I began to wonder why I should return to Stearns County. As you see, I found no good reason for it. It has thinned out here, though, the old crowd I ran with no longer here: Buck Moon; Theodore Roethke; Rattleass Lowell … We were wined and dined in the grand manner this time in New York. Cocktail party, the Saturday Review, Life magazine, New Republic, NY Times Book Section people all there; yes, they all asked about you. Luncheon at 21 and Giovanni’s; dinner at Cherio’s. We stayed at the Algonquin at Doubleday’s expense. “Red” Lewis5 was there, another Stearns County boy.
The big thing, though, was landing $1,000 from my publishers without showing them a thing, no chapters, no outline. So now we are planning on having a well and probably will if they will come and drill it before we run out of dough again. I wanted to get a toilet too; J. L. Benvenisti,6when he comes to lecture, can stay at our house if he wants to. I thought I’d try to sell him to the Avon Commercial Club. He is my favorite Commonweal writer. He is the only one not so fair-minded that it makes you tired. I am thinking seriously now of doing that piece on Bishop Sheil for The New Republic.7 I talked it over with them. They seem to want to be very favorable about him. I do not know if I can do a piece like that. Somebody told me once that he was a grandstander. Of course I could not do that either, a piece making that point. (In fiction, yes; naming names, no.) We’ll see. It will be something to do when I’m in Chicago. Any leads?
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Thursday morning, September 11, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your letter written Tuesday came this morning, my only piece of mail, and I was glad to hear from you, marveling at the picture you painted of Stearns County and its denizens—horrified really to remember in detail and depth what I’d rather forgotten. I mean the people in the doctor’s office and their language. […]
I dreamed off and on last night of jail. Guess it was brought on by a letter from home, about my brother not working, narrowly escaping trouble all the time. I met Agnes Smedley last night in Clocker’s studio.8 She is not very much fun, I think, though that is the wrong idea, I guess. Other people find her inspiring, such faith, love of people, etc. Joe9 and Steve, I hear, went on record this morning at the breakfast table as saying Bob Taft10 was a fascist and a stinker—all sentiments culled from Agnes Smedley—and Mary Townsend11 was there. Mary was very bitter about it indeed, even said something about Agnes ought to be kicked out of Yaddo. I think that’s about it. Mary’s husband was a speed demon, one of the boys out of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, I guess, and she is filled with the conservatism of the unthinking, well-off; Agnes is filled with radicalism of the opposite. Somehow, though, it comes to about the same thing in them. Their personalities render their beliefs negligible. The funny thing, I guess, is that Joe and Steve don’t know what happened, though they were there to see and hear it. They are a couple of beauts. To my knowledge I have never heard either one say anything I do not remember reading many times in the newspaper. And now I leave you, having analyzed the local scene for you. As you can see, it’s pretty much the same. Clocker is about the only one left I can stand at all.
Love,
Jim
What about the well?
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday afternoon, September 12, 1947
Dear Betty,
Your last letter rec’d last night. This is one hell of a hot day, altogether as bad as we had in early August. I envy you if it’s getting cool there. […] I am hoping that in one of your letters pretty soon you’ll finally get around to giving me a picture of things as they really are. So far you’ve skipped around as though you haven’t had time to sit down and think; in your subject matter, that is. I am wondering: Do we have electricity? Do we or are we going to have a well? When? How are the Hyneses? The Humphreys? I am not very interested in the sermons at church or weddings. Now, praise the Lord, it is raining. I’m afraid, however, it won’t last. Very glad to hear you are so healthy and that we aren’t going to have twins. I think a week in Chicago will be plenty, and if I leave here on the 27th, I should arrive in St Cloud in plenty of time for event. What do I do at it? I promise to cut the first person dead who expects me to act like Dagwood or Carlos Cotton12 with the cigars. […]
Much love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday afternoon, September 19, 1947
Dear Betty,
Rec’d your good, long letter this morning and felt right away that it was too bad I had to write such a bad one, like yours that preceded it, yesterday. […] I was very glad to have so much information on Don. That is the sort of reporting I’d been hoping for. Now, if you could do as well on Sr Mariella and the Hyneses, I think I’d be satisfied. Do not count on it, however. I had a long letter from Fr Garrelts this morning, and so I really started the day off well, with two good letters. Yes, it is rather scarifying, the way things are going up in price, and we will have to devise other ways of eating, as you suggest. I still doubt that very much can be done about our menus, though, without spending money. Those silly damned menus you get in the paper are no help at all. It is even insulting to read them. I see where the Calvert Distillery people are using actual photos of the people who have changed to Calvert’s now. Imagine that. Imagine the people who let themselves be used in that way. It is the proof of our degeneracy. […]
I’ve decided that Joe isn’t so bad. He told us the other night about how he sketched a nude model in the Artists’ Village in the World’s Fair but couldn’t take more than an hour of it. He had to wear a smock and flowing tie. The man was sorry to see him go, the manager, but Joe had to go. It was too much. “And now we black in the head” is the sort of thing he had to say to the carnal mob which was supposed to be made up of people interested in sketching. […] I hope this letter makes up for my last, bad one. I miss you all the time.
LOVE,
Jim
I guess I might as well do another page, since you did so well by me. […] Fr Egan, did I tell you, sent the review from the Catholic World of my book. One of the worst ones, on the Sign order, but worse: “With a few deft strokes he limns a character … There is an economy of incident and word … Simplicity of style and language does not conceal the telling phrase … Interest is sustained and suspense is not lacking … A priest will rightfully be moved to irritation instead of meditation by the ineptness of the surgery that hacks rather than cuts cleanly”—in short the whole Catholic works, or why we will never have a legitimate literary criticism. And who is the reviewer assigned to my book? He is the author of the forthcoming Judicial Philosophy of Justice Cardozo.13 God save us. I am seriously considering never appearing in a Catholic publication again. This is an extreme case of it, of course, but The Commonweal is only different in a degree. It is all contained in the evaluation of fiction. It is for women. Nonfiction, now, that is for men. Fiction is not taken seriously. We are still tied to the apron strings of all the old bores. Then too we are still in a ghetto, Catholics who write, or even read …
I am hoping we’ll be able to keep warmer this winter than last. This winter will probably be worse, too … Everybody remarked last night how wonderful you were, pregnant, so bouncy, so glow in the eye, so bloom on the cheek. And I had to say I had not noticed it, but I guess I had without putting it in words. I do remember how pretty and sad you looked in that restaurant where we had our last supper … It seemed a terrible shame to leave you, to remember the things, some of them, I’d said to you, and worse, the nice things I’d only thought and not said to you … Enough. I’m getting out of hand … I love you … Betty.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Saturday, 6:00 p.m., September 20, 1947
Dear Betty,
[…] I had a great long talk about doctors and analysts and the world condition today at lunch with Clocker and O’Connor Barrett. I found that Barrett and I have the same outlook, the rather unmentionable one which says that about all an artist can do is his work; that the goals of the cooperators, communists, and other reformers are not new goals at all; that it would be a lot better use of the language if they would state that they are bent on a petty, stuffy little crusade and not the great soul-stirring one their literature seems to describe, patching, not creating. Last night Elizabeth14 sat in the main room after dinner and went into Yaddo history, including a great ice storm, and it was fairly interesting. […]
Still no word about our well, or any real news about the rural lifers, in your letters, which are good but omit these things as though it were almost a conspiracy to keep me breathless, waiting. Why don’t you go to the telephone and call somebody up? Or won’t your dad take you out to Hyneses some Sunday? Or won’t the Meades talk over the phone? I hear the gong. I love you. Write.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
September 22, 1947
Dear Betty,
Dullish short letter from you yesterday, Sunday, and nothing this morning, but I guess I must love you just the same, consider it with your other faults as nothing against your virtues. […]
Yesterday The NY Times ran that stuff about me in People Who Read and Write and Fornicate, getting my initials wrong and, it would seem, cutting out a vital message about priests and doctors. At least the paragraph on me is headed “Priests and Doctors,” but there’s nothing about either one. I imagine it was my famous thesis about doctors nowadays having the eminence that priests had in the past that was cut. […]
Do try to get to Hyneses soon. I am anxious to know if Zahn and Leonard15 will be around to temper the monotony this winter. […]
I must prepare to meet the Stearnsers. With the prospect of more expense on the car, I am almost absolutely resigned to not going to Washington.16 You do see the dilemma for me, though, don’t you? When I hear from you that Pat is spending a thousand dollars for furniture and you are trying to get a cabinet for our baby for five … if we are two in one flesh, we are not yet two in one spirit. It is not your fault at this point … you are a woman in a world you never made, and not to be blamed for wanting things you ought to have, for being brave … about things I guess I’d hoped you wd not feel you’d have to be brave about to do without … I don’t know what you can do now. I suppose I thought I’d made it clear there’d be times like these. Maybe you can make a lot of money. Perhaps you’d counted on that, and that’s where the trouble is. Is it so bad, though, that you have to be brave? You have said many times that you didn’t want to marry Elmer or the dentist … Excuse this reverie. I’m really sorry I wrote this last bit. I don’t believe in it. It is the same thing Buck’s wife gets him saying. I think the thing in women that gets men feeling guilty in this way is bad. I think such women have married the wrong men. I think it’s their own fault.
Love……
Jim
ROBERT LOWELL
Yaddo
Thursday [September 25, 1947]
Dear Cal,
Glad to hear from you, only wishing I might have seen you two “leftists” (Harry S.17 and you) together in New York, or anywhere for that matter. […]
The car—you would want to know how the car is, wouldn’t you? The car was given six new spark plugs, fresh oil, and air in the tires. For almost a week it ran like a dream. Then it rebelled. […] I had counted, until then, on driving through the Alleghenies, down from Elmira, where I am paying a call, and on into the nation’s capital, there to see a friend and you—I am doing a paper on the percentage of Latin words, rather of English words of Latin origin, to be found in the work of Theodore Roethke, as against Walter Savage Landor, and I understand that you are very helpful in such matters. But, no, alas, I must needs take the shortest road home (Chicago). Now that I have your schedule, I see it might have been possible to drive you to the Middle West. You would have liked that? In any case it would have been nice driving you about the nation’s capital, letting it be seen right away that you were not without friends of substance … I thought the limerick (Powers, sours, races, paces, hours) unkind …18
I heard from [Robert] Fitzgerald (not Fitsgerald, or do you mean it that way?). He enclosed the review he wrote which might have been if I’d been newsworthy or whatever it is they look for in a writer … […] Just Agnes Hart, Edw. Maisel, and Joe and me left—and Agnes Smedley, but she doesn’t seem to be my type and vice versa. These are tough times for a clerical fascist. Agnes is writing the life of a one-eyed Chinese general; he is what she calls “an amazing man.” God bless you.
Pax,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Yaddo
Friday morning, September 26, 1947
Dear Betty,
[…] Well, today is my last here, and I’m afraid I hadn’t anticipated the feeling I have about leaving. I don’t want to. I can’t think very straight either. I’d expected to work right through until the time I left, but my state of mind won’t allow it today. I guess you must have felt that way … about working, I mean, on the last day. Nice old place here, I’ve enjoyed it so much, even now, though summer was better when everybody was here, and I hate to leave. I do leave, however, tomorrow morning: Mary Townsend is having my sandwiches put in a bag. So much for leave-taking … […]
I guess the St John’s games are something, as you say, and I hope we’ll get to one together since you like that. Maybe the last one in October if the baby comes around the middle and we can get someone to take care of the baby … oh, God, with that statement I realize again that we are moving into another category. Do not talk about not wanting the baby. You will have it; you will want it; so will I. […]
Now, my last letter from Yaddo, with love. Keep happy. If you have any cravings which can be satisfied under ten dollars, let me know, or go ahead and get it yourself.
Jim
Jim left Yaddo and drove to Elmira, New York, to visit Ted LeBerthon, who was in the midst of a nervous breakdown. He then drove to Washington, visiting John Haskins and Robert Lowell. He drove Lowell to Gambier, Ohio, to Kenyon College, after which the two traveled on to Chicago.
BETTY POWERS
2115 F Street, N.W.
Washington 7, D.C.
September 29, 1947
Dear Betty,
First chance I’ve had to write to you on the way—and I will have wired you my whereabouts by the time this arrives. As I mean to say in the wire, the car was running so well, and the situation in Elmira looked so bad, so unpropitious to camaraderie, I decided to go to Washington. I studied the roads in that tour book and found the hills or mountains are not so much, as in fact they aren’t. The thing that was bad, which they did not mention, was the condition of much of the road. Good stretches, then bad stretches. However, the car is doing wonderfully, and I know you will understand my decision to make the trip after all—after deciding I wouldn’t. I intend to see Lowell while here, perhaps this morning, and may get a little more information on the Guggenheim—let that, I think, be justification for my coming if you can’t feel good about camaraderie—and I know I’m making you hate that word, if you don’t already. […] It is Monday morning. I love you.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Washington
Wednesday, October 1, 1947
Dear Betty,
Just a note to let you know nothing in particular. We are leaving tomorrow early—7:30—for Gambier, Ohio, Kenyon College, and should leave for Chicago Friday or Saturday, arriving Saturday evening. I am again in no very collected state of mind, much wrangling here over bookcases, food, etc., things on which Hask and Mrs Hask differ and which I am expected to take sides on. Yesterday had lunch with Lowell and Hask, and then Lowell and I went out to St Elizabeth’s Hospital to see Ezra Pound. I wonder, alas, if you ever heard of him. He was the “discoverer” of Eliot, Cummings, Joyce, and others, a great figure in literary history, who spoke on the radio for Mussolini during the war and now is supposed to be out of his mind and is supposed to be tried for treason if he ever recovers. […]
Love,
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Paulina Street, Chicago
October 5, 1947
Dear Betty,
Well, sir, I know you’ll think this letter is too long coming, but we arrived here only today. We had no trouble, none at all, all the way—and you can tell that to E. Hynes, C. Cotton, and D. Humphrey. We left Washington, as you ought to know, Thursday morning and arrived at Gambier, O., that night around nine-thirty. It was definitely the longest, hardest day of all. It was almost 400 miles and much of it over winding roads after dark, and there was also those awful towns around and including Pittsburgh to go through. For the time I was passing through them, I was all for the rural life.
Yesterday we set sail for Chicago, after a good evening with John Crowe Ransom, editor of The Kenyon Review, and some of his cronies: a very literary evening during which hundreds of names came up and I hardly knew them at all, the Elizabethans and Pope and Dryden and Juvenal and Petrarch—in fact, I guess, many of the people your education prepared you to talk about. Very good, though.
After traveling sixty miles or so yesterday morning, I got gas and discovered Chicago was still over 300 miles. We had been told by the classicists that it was 275 from Gambier; it would seem to be almost 400. So, though we might have made it, we decided to take it easy and come into Chicago this morning, which we did. We spent last night in one of those “cabins” you rent. We went to bed at 10:30, trying vainly all evening to have a good time. No use, though; it was one of those noisy little towns pierced every few minutes by a train going to Chicago and coming out of Chicago. We had thought originally to get a cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan, but that can’t be done, evidently.
We went to one place, inquired, were told to wait a minute, but by then we began to notice it was inhabited almost entirely by old ladies sitting tight in rocking chairs. So I decided we ought to move on. We managed this, or I did, by asking the woman who’d told us to wait: Have you got a bar? She stuttered and asked to have the question repeated. I repeated it, or Lowell did, for he was enjoying himself; it was almost like Boston with all the old ladies reading through magnifying glasses. She said: I should say not! So we left, meeting a man in the yard wearing a brown shirt, wearing binoculars, and looking like a scout master. He got his map for us; his map was more detailed. We left. We end, as I said, having our beer and dinner in this noisy little town. It was the only place you could get anything but beer; so I guess I ought to add that we had martinis too. It was called Chesterton. So maybe there’s something to be said for the Catholic revival, or wasn’t he in it? […]
Lowell and I had good fun all the trip. We left better friends than ever. He paid for most of the gas, meals, etc. He ended by imitating the car’s voice all the time, always thinking, what was it thinking now? This morning we talked for hours about what if New York and Chicago had a war. […]
Henry19 lectures me in one letter: says I’ve got more fame than anybody ever had from one book of stories, including Joyce, Porter, and Welty. Wants me to relax and stop agitating. It’s a good letter, much sense in it; I do think, though, he had seven old-fashioneds for lunch that day. […] Take good care of yourself. I love you, Betty.
Jim
BETTY POWERS
Chicago
October 6, 1947
Dear Betty,
No letter from you today, but then I suppose you didn’t get mine today either, the one mailed yesterday. It is quite warm, even warmer than warm, here, and that doesn’t do much for me and Chicago. […]
I was wondering if you were being so lenient about my return—you said not before the 29th—on account of you are so sweet or on account of we still don’t have a well, with the prospects about the same. Which? Both, you say. Well, I’ll be back before the 29th, never fear. I may leave here around the 13th, stay a day or two with Jack Howe at Taliesin, a day or two in St Paul, and then, triumphantly, to Stearns County. Doesn’t seem much of a drive, Mpls to St Cloud, after my travels. Do wish my folks would get out of this animated ghost town. If they were somewhere near me, somewhere within easy distance, say a hundred miles or so, I think my greatest emotional worry would be over. I guess they would move all right if it weren’t for Grandma. She doesn’t want to leave her friends, the only trouble being that no one has ever seen one of them. Her money is in the bank here too. She probably can’t get it through her head that it could be transferred, or perhaps she just wants to make it miserable for my mother as long as she can. You get the situation. I think my mother could be your second friend—until me, you said, you never had a real friend—as she is a beautiful soul, always fixing up something, making something, for you. She is my mother. I am prejudiced. It is also all true. Well, I’ve come to the end of the page. No more. I love you. That’s all.
Jim
ROBERT LOWELL
Taliesin
October 14, 1947
Dear Cal,
Just a line to tell you that Katherine Anne Porter and Dudley Fitts said yes, KA wiring me “by all means go ahead,” and writing a fine letter which makes me feel good.20 I heard from Kerker Quinn that she is doing the Sewanee review of my book; Zabel21 is doing the Accent one; and that is certainly flattering, for how many books do they review? You are the fourth one on my Guggenheim application, the three aforementioned [sic] and you. […]
Don’t think I’ll do the Sheil piece. It’d be rather ironic, the way I’d have to do it, now that I know what I know—too many microphones and cameras in the bishop’s life—and so I’m skipping it, though the Lord knows, and Betty knows even better, that we could use the money.
Staying here a day or two with two friends from the prison days.22 I saw a plan yesterday for raising the face of Pittsburgh. About all that remains of the riverfront is the cathedral of learning, and it’s dwarfed by other things. This is another monastery, devoted to another god. I seem to spend my life in other people’s monasteries, listening to talk of other gods. […]
My address now: Avon, Minn. Let me hear from you.
Jim