2
Betty Wahl
Jim
Jim and Betty’s engagement produced hundreds of letters. Jim’s were filled with love and yearning, even Betty’s way of saying grace before meals stirred him: “You say it with more beauty than anyone I’ve ever seen. It is perfect when you say it, like a dog digging a hole with his muzzle.” The engagement also brought Jim more frequently to the environs of St. John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a place awash with Catholic reform. Jim called the region “Big Missal Country,” a witty reference to the prayer book whose use was ardently promoted by liturgical reformers. Jim already had an association with the place through his radical and reforming Catholic friends whom he called “the Movement.” Chief among them was Emerson Hynes, who taught sociology at St. John’s and was, with his wife, Arleen, a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements. Though Jim was fond of these people, he took an increasingly dyspeptic view of most of their causes, especially the emphasis on the family, which made him shudder, and the movement to increase the liturgical role of the laity, which he liked to call anticlericalism.
HARVEY EGAN
St Paul, California1
November 12, 1945
Dear Pere,
[…] I spent the weekend with Sister Mariella at St Benedict’s. I am filled with what I choose to call Benedictinism. I saw Emerson Hynes and wife one night (Sunday), and my faith was shaken. T. à Kempis2 is now no longer with us. I had thought he enjoyed an irremovable position. Much to talk about with you.
I have the road more or less prepared for you to enter into their midst.
I met the girl whose novel I was reading for Sister Mariella. I think I will marry her. That, too, to discuss. […]
Pax,
JF
Don Humphrey, another member of the Movement, now enters the letters. An artist, sculptor, and chalice maker, he had also participated in the Catholic Worker movement. At this time he was living in poverty and precarious circumstances with his large family in the Twin Cities area. Jim found the best sort of camaraderie in Humphrey and was appalled by his predicament as a man of great artistic talent whose life was blighted, as Jim saw it, by too many children and no money.
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 15, 1945
Dear Betty,
This is Thursday, and as I compute it, I should have had a letter from you today. Anyway, I got up at eleven this morning, in case it should be in the morning mail, and again at 2:30 this afternoon in case … and so already I am beginning to worry about you. I am standing on this corner, and you do not come. I do not think you are sick, and of course what I really know is that perhaps I could not reasonably expect to hear from you until tomorrow, even if you wrote on Wednesday, as you said you would. I have already had two dreams of you, not what you might think, but along Zane Greyish lines: someone is always getting in the way who has to be destroyed, and what happens then, when the happy ending should begin, I never know.
I also test you in this way: I think at all hours of the day do I want to marry you now. I do this when you might (or I might from my past experience) think the answer would be no, as in the morning, when many of my best-laid plans have stacked up to nothing, ideas and lines for stories written the night before. But the answer is always Yes. It is a little surprising to me each time it is, though a little less each time, of my having taken such a hard view of myself and the idea of holy matrimony for so long. So that is the way it is … if you are as you were and have not changed your mind or come to your senses—having seen through me and what a stinker I am, which happened to be one thing I admitted to, as then it always means the opposite. I am not sure of you. I remember looking at you and feeling that I could almost see you making and unmaking up your mind. I don’t know why, in either case, granting the other. I ask myself what I would do if you did change your mind, and I know that it would probably not be disastrous, unless you call living one’s life out as I have so far, a bachelor, disastrous. In this event I am glad I did not get to know you any better than I did, which incidentally required a deal of restraint on my part, which restraint you may not appreciate in the nature of things. But which you would have if it had been missing and one of those little nuns had come upon the scene with her head full of wholesomeness.
I have been out buying oysters and milk and rolls, and now, with the warmed-up coffee from Ted’s lunch, I will eat. It would be good to raise oysters, mushrooms, and cranberries on a farm. Ted and Harrigan (editor, Catholic Digest) have just gone to Harrigan’s for a farewell dinner. Ted is leaving tomorrow night. Our relationship has been blissful since my return. I think he was actually glad to see me. I told him about you, and he was glad about that (he read the first chapter of your novel and your piece on Catholic education which the Digest considered for republication and maybe still does) in a way I find curious. He is of the opinion I need someone like you, believing I will go wacky otherwise, meaning what he regards as “perfectionism” in writing leading to that. But now I think I’ll leave this letter where it is for today, hoping for tomorrow.
Saturday. I am up again this morning, and how very, very glad I was to get your letter (and how could I write to you when I hadn’t your address; but I did write to you, as see the foregoing, only not mailing it). […] But now there is your letter, and you say you love me, once directly and once, at the end, glancingly, and I am very happy about that. No, it is twice directly. That is better. I have read your letter four times already. HG, I am given the light to understand now, is Holy Ghost. At first it puzzled me. I am, descending to the level of important things which really don’t matter, but are better the way you say they are, happy your family is losing its peculiar antagonism to me.3
I love you, Betty. It is the first time, I know now, I ever loved anybody. But even if I’d never met you, this I know: I had never loved anybody the way one is supposed to. So you are the first one. Do not catch pneumonia and die. God is against these things; for some reason really known to him and the cause for much dull absurdity on the part of the theologians, he does not want them to last. But, God, I say, this is different—and not just different in the ridiculous way I knew people thought their affairs, because theirs, were different. This is different, I feel, in an absolute sense. […]
I want you to do two things in this letter: (a) send me your telephone number; (b) send me a dime store ring which fits you. I am going to get Don Humphrey to make a ring. I am going to Robbinsdale4 tomorrow to see him and Fr Garrelts. I will tell them, as I know I’ve told too many already, Sylvester in Guatemala among them, that we are to be married. When, at the very earliest, could you come to St Paul? Ma mere is coming next week. I was thinking last night, providing you still loved me, we could go to Chicago maybe in Jan. or Feb. Tell me.
I love you, Betty.
Jim
MARIELLA GABLE
150 Summit Avenue
November 17, 1945
Dear Sister Mariella,
I have put off thanking you for everything in writing because I remember you were to be in two or three places and very busy this week or the one coming or both. I had my first letter from Betty today—after meeting the mailman for two or three days. It was a very nice letter, and I have read it too often already. […] I have told everyone I’ve seen or written to since my return how you do things at St Benedict’s. I use the poetic method. For instance, I tell my mother you scrub the kitchen three times a day and two nuns went blind making St George and the Dragon. […]
Fr Egan has invited me over for Thanksgiving: it will be interesting to see what kind of table Detachismus sets on that day. I must tell him about St Benedict’s and Betty. I called Fr Garrelts (tomorrow I’m going to Robbinsdale), and I actually felt sorry for him, as I do for myself, as I was … before Betty. […] Pax —Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 20, 1945
My dear Betty,
[…] Summer is terrible here, and my job is worse (I sweat lakes), but with you it will be like being ten years old again. And we can plot our getaway for the months we’ll have to stay here. It is two blocks to the cathedral. There is Summit Avenue to take walks on. I have no friends in St Paul, but in Robbinsdale is Fr Garrelts (Fr Egan is in St Paul; you will like him) and Mr Chapman (who shuddered the other night when I saw him at the way the Irish are talking up Spellman for pope—“a terrible farce”). Fr Garrelts wants to see you, and so does Don Humphrey and his wife. Don will make the rings. It may be a funny engagement ring, as I do not think I can buy a stone and wouldn’t if I could at a jeweler’s. […]
November 20. 8:00 p.m. I was supposed to be taking a nap for the last hour. I find it easier to be up with the lights on. I see things around the room to pick up, records, pipes, the typewriter. In the dark I see you. But you are not there. So it is very discouraging and in the long run promises to be an ordeal. I am glad that you suggested an earlier marriage. It will be like getting out of jail sooner. […]
November 21, […]
9:30 in the evening. I have just finished the rough draft of the story I mentioned yesterday. It will be short, 3,000 words; I had the basic idea from Sr Mariella. I will dedicate it to her, but only as SM, as it would probably fix her for good. I call it “The Lord’s Day,” and it is about nuns who have to count the collections on Sunday afternoon in the priest’s house.5 Do not say anything about it to Sr Mariella. I promised her I would write it, but I did not think I’d get at it so soon. I am thinking of you all the time. I do not know whether I’d get more done if you were here or not here. In either case you are an obstacle to work. […]
Tomorrow Thanksgiving dinner at Madge Egan’s (Fr Egan’s mother); Fr Garrelts and others to be present. We will all be in our truest American manner. I intend to make heavy references to the Pilgrim fathers (I’m sure Fr Egan has never thought of them as anything but heretics). […]
I have a story in process about an old man who thinks that it is too bad, feeling the way he does about his wife, who has died. If we were married, I would better know how he really feels. I will have to follow my instincts, as it is. I hope my mother comes this week, so that you can come next or next or both. She is interested to know about you. She has a better perspective than perhaps you do on what it means when I say I intend to marry a girl. She knows I have never said it before. I am sure you will love her—I do not say that loosely or hopefully—I know you will. What is best in me I have from my mother, not that my father is second-rate. No, I mean that what faculty—admittedly underdeveloped—I have for listening and keeping my mouth shut I have from her. That is one of the very big things I see in you that I love and realize the absolute unique beauty of. […] Now it is almost time to put on my silly white suit and leave. I love you and am sorry if I am getting tiresome with that line. […]
Jim
BETTY WAHL
November 25, 1945
Dear Elizabeth Alice of the Sea Green Eyes,
I am taking my Royal (on loan from Egan Enterprises) in hand and endeavoring a reply to your wonderful letter rec’d this day. My mother is just to my left, on the davenport, mending things and sewing on buttons. She says, quote: “You certainly have been neglected.” We are running out of buttons (myself, I am a plain dealer and use safety pins). […]
It was most encouraging to hear that your father has been all those things. It is the first time I’ve felt good about him. You see, I know from experience I never have trouble with people who have been hoboes and so forth. Now I am watching out for your mother: a schoolteacher, whoa. […]
Now, because you have asked for it, I will tell you about me. I was born of poor and honest parents, Irish on my father’s side (County Waterford, the southernmost part of Ireland, where the name Powers, if you look it up in the Ecclesiastical Directory, is still the biggest one there, bishops, college presidents, bartenders, all have it), but his mother’s name was Ansberry and she came from Liverpool, and I do not know if that means there’s some English, but I think not, as Liverpool, a slummy place, is highly Irish and she was most definitely Catholic.
She was the woman who ruined my father’s life, I hold. He supported her instead of accepting offers he had to go to Europe and study piano (he was considered a prodigy about Jacksonville—where I was born, in Illinois—practicing the piano nine and ten hours a day, working in a music store as a player of any and all music sold there at the age of twelve. We have some of his old exercises yet; they are pages more black than white with notes). It is another curse of the Irish to throw themselves away on an aging mother or not to marry because there isn’t enough money coming in and brother John, who should undertake his share, is a first-class bastard. I am not making it up: my father had a brother John. I remember him as a tall, dark man with button shoes, gold teeth, and a large brown handful of silver from which he would select a quarter, say, and give it to you. Ten days later you would hear that he was in Boston or Spokane. He wore serge, and sometimes I think I have some of him in me.
My dad’s father came here from Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, and worked in the gashouse in Jacksonville. I know very little of him, except that he was probably taken in as my father was after him. Many children, seven or eight, and a large dog who would bite the wrong people by the name of “Guess.” What’s his name? I remember my father telling me as a child, people would ask. “Guess,” they would reply. Joke. So much for my father’s side: many unmarried children on that side, maiden literary aunts like my aunt Kate, who read to me as a child; my aunt Mame, still alive, who is being forced out of the house she did huge washings in for fifty years; my aunt Annie, dead, a Catherine of Russia type, a real dictator and organizer, who ran a grocery store with an iron hand and who would give her customers hell every morning if they didn’t order enough over the telephone. She liked me. In fact, they all liked me, because I liked them. My sister never did: she thought they were kind of crude. They were.
Turning to my mother’s side, we leave the Holy Roman Catholic Church and enter the Old Time Religion, the Methodists.6 Her mother is now living in Chicago with my father and mother and is now senile, the widow of three or four husbands, a dear old lady who should never have left the small town. She tries to go to the Methodist church in our neighborhood in Chicago, and everyone is nice, the minister shakes her hand after services, but they don’t sing right. She wants everybody to join in, and they let one woman do most of it. My mother’s father was a farmer and painter; we have some of his work, which isn’t bad at all (I’ll show it to you when we go to Chicago together). He, her father, had nice hair, just like mine, my grandmother thinks. My mother went to college, a rare thing in our families, and did a little gentle sketching. She is a gentle woman.
My father had dance bands before they were married (he had them to make money; I think he hated that kind of music) and worked for Swift and Company. He became a manager and got the idea he was a sure-enough business genius. It was dispelled in 1934. Since that time, until the war and he got this paper-shuffling job, times were tough. Now he takes pride in this job which must go the way of all war efforts. It is too bad he becomes engrossed in secondary things. I subscribed him to Time. He likes it. If he sits down at the piano now (which is all out of tune), he fumbles around, and it hurts him worse than anyone. So he gets up and sits down to Time [magazine]. The American Tragedy. I think I see what happened. I am determined it shall not happen to me. Help me.
I went to the public schools first, had my first fights for girls, which I won incidentally, and in the third grade transferred to Catholic schools when we moved to Rockford. So on to the seventh grade, when I went back to the public school—it was the day of the purple and green felt hats and “Did you ever hear Pete go tweet, tweet, tweet on his piccolo?” You were six years old then, I was thirteen, smoking cigarettes and kissing girls after school. A year later I found out about masturbation. A year later a Franciscan came to the Catholic school, where I was making my first retreat, and made us all as clean as a hound’s tooth. I submerged myself in the athletic life of the place. I had a fight and got my nose broke. I became a basketball star. I also played football. At the end of the year we decided to have a yearbook (my senior year), and I was not chosen to be editor. I did not want to be and, if I had, could not have been. Already I was beginning rather to want to be the dark horse in any enterprise, someone with no office or commitments who would do something daring or impossible and save the day. It is funny now.
I graduated and went to Chicago, where my family had been living for a year. It was hell after Quincy, after leisurely beers (we drank a lot of beer for high-school boys in Quincy), and nothing more serious than typing class or Washington Irving, the only writer I liked then that I could like now, I think. A couple of times I was almost a success. I always wasn’t, though, when they finally hired somebody. I went to a public school (college) and quit at the half year to drive a big Packard for a bastard through the South and Southwest. I stayed in dollar hotels, a different one nightly, except for weeks in San Antonio and El Paso, when I would drink too much. I was put in jail in San Antonio, picked up one morning when I was returning from taking the car to be washed. They held me for a half hour when they found out I was from Chicago. The bastard I worked for was at the St Anthony Hotel, the biggest and best, but they preferred to call Chicago. When they decided to let me go, I told them I might be about on the next day and if they didn’t have anything to do then—again—they could pick me up again. For this I got the rest of the morning in jail. It was my first jail: scrawlings on the wall, two racetrack touts not telling the truth about themselves when I was so naive as to ask, cold white macaroni on a sallow tin plate. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez. Here I lost my virginity. I was nineteen.
I came back to Chicago in the spring. It was terrible still. I worked for Marshall Field’s in the book section and met my first homosexuals. I enjoy their company today, so long as the situation is clear to them. I began to read, though while traveling I would look for my material on Sinclair Lewis in every town I’d pass through, and discovered Huxley, Aldington, and then, moving backward, Huysmans, Symons, Verlaine, Baudelaire. I took French lessons privately for two years because I wanted particularly to read Baudelaire. I got a job as an editor on Historical Records, WPA. I fell in love, or roughly speaking, did, with a Romanian girl. She taught me some things. It was the first time I felt that it might be good to know a woman who would worry about whether it was raining or missing a class (I was going to Northwestern at nights). But I spurned such pedestrian stuff. I wanted wine, women, and song—but not domestic wine, married women (married to me), and the best songs, I felt, had been made up at the time of Villon. I was a nice case of nonsense, I suppose. We parted. I met another girl who was more a woman. But I don’t think I’ll follow this any further … it is not good, I see, to go into these deals until we know each other better and perhaps never at all. I know I don’t care to know about your affairs or whatever you call them.
Presently I am in love with you, as I have been with nobody else, as indeed I thought not possible for me, and as for other people being in love, I knew what they were all about. I love you, Betty. Please love me accordingly. It has taken me a long time to come to you. I have taken the long way around, and I have missed several turns. I am glad I missed them. I believe there is no one else in the world but you for me. I do not care what Uncle Em or the Catholic Church knows about mating males and females. You are for me. I hope I am for you. There is no other way. You could kill someone if you told me now you no longer loved me. That is the way it is. Je t’adore is not wrong when I say it to you. I do. […]
Love,
Jim
JOHN MARSHALL
150 Summit Avenue
November 26, 1945
Dear Marsh,
Your letter rec’d, filed, and now in process of being preserved for posterity. Enjoyed your sample of the professor of anatomy, a dull business, methinks. How can I keep from looking down on doctors? I see little of them now that I work at night, but when I do, I think how meek and humble and poor fare for satire are priests compared to them. Doctors have the world by the balls as priests must have had it in the Middle Ages. A priest asked me why the St Joseph’s nuns were so cold toward priests. I had to pretend incredulity and ignorance. I could not tell them that their priests wear white, have plenty of jack, and roll into the place in tweeds in the morning. I am trusting that you will rise above all this. What I mean, I guess, is that they make such an individual deal out of being a doctor (as though they were artists) when they are popped out of the medical factories like horseflies in August. You know all this, and I am not talking to you. I am just a little irritated, I suppose, to have to carry beer in a saloon the sign out front of which I don’t care for. September, let us pray, I’ll be a free man. […]
I have met a girl I intend to marry in May or June. She is a writer, unpublished except for the college magazine, contests—Americanism, what I like about it—and Atlantic Monthly essay contests. She has written a beautiful novel. She is as fine as, say, you are, and I hope I won’t be too crude for her. Catholic, of course, my priestly connections would never permit me to entertain heresy on such a permanent basis as marriage. […]
Harry Sylvester is coming back from Guatemala in the spring to teach a seminar at St Benedict’s (where Sister Mariella is head of the English department); Emerson Hynes, a rural lifer and a fine fellow despite all that, and a couple of other interesting people are bedded down in the vicinity (Back to Benedict). I expect my wife to be more popular than I’ll ever be. That may sound like murder at a distance, but she is also a UChristian of the sort I’ve never come against before. I mean she is without being ugly, and so isn’t of necessity. Likes Dante. Me, I like Grain Belt, a friendly beer.
Pax. Write.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 28, 1945
My dear Betty,
[…] Well, when I got up today, I found the toilet lying on its side like a wounded horse and the floor up in chunks all over the bathroom. It seems something broke, or has been broke for quite a while, causing water to drip down below. But since, as the plumber put it, I am not home much, the former occupants didn’t mind a minimum of dripping, but now someone new lives downstairs, and they don’t like dripping, even a minimum of it. I guess they’re stuck up. […]
I love you.
Jim
BETTY WAHL
150 Summit Avenue
November 29, 1945
My dear Elizabeth Alice,
[…] I have a large case of whiskers presently but can’t get into the bathroom for the plumber and his toys, which are all over the place. No, Betty, we will “never have our first fight.” I am counting on you to prevent that by seeing the ultimate truth in whatever opinion I hold on anything—such as pajamas. Why are you so stuck on pajamas? It makes me uncomfortable to think of you sleeping in pajamas and whatever else you wear, as implied. I think of LeBerthon in his ski suit. I am open to persuasion, however, but you will have to prove it to me along approved debating lines. Think of the poets, probably even Dante, I can summon to my side of the question. You will have only Edgar Guest and Longfellow (who slept in his beard, which is not the same thing) on your side. The angels—do you think they use pajamas?
I am sorry you prefer Fuzzwick to my middle name. I do not know what that means. I wonder if you could be contemplating violence where my dignity is concerned. Do you intend to make of me one of those hapless American males with a funny name, such as Blondie’s husband, Dagwood? Beware, young woman, if so. It will go hard with you, and Mother Church will back me up, you know that, where discipline is involved, she is on the man’s side (that is what Don Humphrey likes about it and what Mary Humphrey doesn’t like). Now I am going to cut this off. I enclose a key to the apartment instead of putting it under the door. You keep it until you need it in May or June. Also some more mail—to show you what a big demand there is for authentic JFP on the market. (Actually, I am worried, but hope to lay up a few stories this winter, like squirrels bury nuts.)
I love you.
Jim