Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963

by J.F. Powers, Katherine A. Powers (Editor)

A wry, moving collection of letters from the late J. F. Powers, "a comic writer of genius" (Mary Gordon)

Best known for his 1963 National Book Award–winning novel, Morte D'Urban, and as a master of the short story, J. F. Powers drew praise from Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, among others. Though Powers's fiction dwelt chiefly on the lives of Catholic priests, he long planned to write a novel of family life, a feat he never accomplished. He did, however, write thousands of letters, which, selected here by his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, become an intimate version of that novel, dynamic with plot and character. They show a dedicated artist, passionate lover, reluctant family man, pained aesthete, sports fan, and appreciative friend. At times wrenching and sad, at others ironic and exuberantly funny, Suitable Accommodations is the story of a man at odds with the world and, despite his faith, with his church. Beginning in prison, where Powers spent more than a year as a conscientious objector, the letters move on to his courtship, marriage, comically unsuccessful attempt to live in the woods, life in the Midwest and in Ireland, an unorthodox view of the Catholic Church, and an increasingly bizarre search for "suitable accommodations," which included three full-scale emigrations to Ireland. Here, too, are encounters with such diverse people as Thomas Merton, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Alfred Kinsey.
An NPR Best Book of 2013

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

480 pages, Hardcover

First published August 20, 2013

About the author

James Farl Powers was an American novelist and short-story writer who often drew his inspiration from developments in the Catholic Church, and was known for his studies of Catholic priests in the Midwest. Although not a priest himself, he is known for having captured a "clerical idiom" in postwar North America.

Powers was a conscientious objector during World War II, and went to prison for it. Later he worked as a hospital orderly. His first writing experiment began as a spiritual exercise during a religious retreat. His work has long been admired for its gentle satire and its astonishing ability to recreate with a few words the insular but gradually changing world of post-WWII American Catholicism. Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy praised his work, and Frank O'Connor spoke of him as "among the greatest living storytellers".

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spending the last few weeks peeking into the life of the late Catholic writer J. F. Powers through a collection of his letters made me wonder, does anyone write letters like these any more?
Powers, the long-time professor of English and writer-in-residence at St. John University in Collegeville, Minn., used his gift for the language in frequent missives to friends and colleagues, which makes this collection of his letters read much like a memoir, or better yet a novel.
Perhaps cyberspace holds all the emails and social media messages we peck out nowadays, and perhaps and a tech-minded historian will be able to pull them down and gather them into book form. But I’d be surprised if any achieve the literary quality of those that Power’s daughter Katherine A. Powers has adroitly edited and packaged.
Take this sample from a letter in which he describes the long-time leader of St. John’s Abbey, Benedictine Abbot Alcuin Deutsch:
“He is a good man, but his last name is Deutsch, and if he’s like a lot of other Germans, and I think he is, he expects to get to heaven for not having made any impractical moves during his stay on earth. I have often wondered why they didn’t try to prove, somewhere along the line, that Jesus Christ received a gold watch for 33 years of service.”
That Powers ended up living much of his life in Minnesota’s German-plentiful Stearns County and working for the German Benedictines at St. John’s is just one of the ironies of the man’s life.
“Suitable Accommodations” makes for interesting reading because it takes us into the mind of this unique character, a man author Evelyn Waugh tabbed “one of our greatest storytellers,” an author who won the National Book Award for his first novel yet never achieved the success he felt was his destiny.
Perhaps because his specialty was priests his was a limited audience and not populist fare.
The award-winning “Morte D’Urban,” the novel about a charming Midwestern priest who is as much a man of the world as he is a man of God, sold only 25,000 copies or so, and failed to receive the kind of promotion one might expect from a publisher like Doubleday.
Many of even the earliest letters — the collection covers 1942 to 1963 — foreshadow the life James Farl Powers was to live.
He refers to a steady job as “prostitution . . . masking itself as ‘honest labor.’ ”
The irony, and it’s in the title of this collection, is that Powers was consistently writing in his letters about trying to find “suitable accommodations” both for his then-growing family and for a place with the peace and quiet to allow him to write.
Every so often he leans for money on his good friend Father Harvey Egan, pleading to the priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis for funds to keep the wolf from the door until the mail brings a much-anticipated check for a short story he has submitted to The New Yorker or to one of the small-circulation literary magazines that have purchased his work over the years.
The late Father Egan, a one-of-a-kind himself as the pastor in later years of ultra-progressive St. Joan of Arc Parish in Minneapolis, gets credit for preserving many of Powers’ letters.
None of which fits, however, when you read in a 1947 letter to Father Egan that Powers’ tastes in liturgy lean toward the conservative. Living in Avon, not far from where Powers is teaching at St. John’s University, he writes:
“We like to go to St. John’s [Abbey Church] because there is no lay participation, or I do. I am only slowly getting the idea that I am surrounded by people who are working night and day for things like the dialogue Mass. Imagine my dismay at the discrepancy between the party line and my own feelings in these matters.”
Later he’ll refer to himself as “anti-laical” but also “anticlerical.”
Along with letters Powers wrote, his daughter has included a handful of entries from his journal. Often they show a man in despair: “May 18, 1959: Out of gas — creatively . . . I feel absolutely powerless these days to prevent financial ruin. Ideas for stories don’t come.” And just eight days later: “Money, money, money — this is the answer to every question confronting me.”
Scraps of Powers’ varied interest show up regularly. He’s fond of playing the horses, especially during the family’s several stints living in Ireland.
He follows the minor-league St. Paul Saints baseball team, keeps abreast of the gossip surrounding the design of the new Abbey Church at St. John’s, chimes in a number of idea for names of the new National Football League team being established in the Twin Cities in 1961, would have preferred the Democrats had nominated his friend Eugene McCarthy instead of John F. Kennedy to run in the 1960 presidential election.
“I did not, and do not, like Kennedy. That doesn’t mean he’s no better than Nixon. . . . Gene McCarthy nominated him . . . in the best speech of the convention. Too bad it isn’t Gene instead of Jack, if we have to have a Catholic. I understand Pope John’s already packing. I think we can use him, too.”
Powers refused military service during World War II, was imprisoned for it and released to do compulsory work at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul.
A curmudgeon if there ever was one, he was against the Legion of Decency (which rated movies for decades according to Catholic morals), wasn’t thrilled that fasting regulations were eased, agreed with author Evelyn Waugh that he was more of a short story writer than a novelist and presciently had this to say about Calvin Griffith, the tight-fisted owner of the then new Minnesota Twins baseball team: “I do not think Cal will ever put our welfare before his own.”
It’s such good writing you’ll be disappointed that the letters end with 1963. You’ll want to know the rest of the J.F. Powers story, but daughter Katherine explains well at the volume’s end why that won’t happen.
That epitaph one should read on one’s own.

[Stephanie Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two weeks ago I finally got around to reading JF Powers’ Morte D’Urban, a novel about a very sophisticated priest who finds himself exiled to rural Minnesota where he spends most of his time doing house repairs. I was so taken with the novel that I picked up this collection of letters.
I don’t know why I persist in thinking that writers will be exemplary people. This collection, put together by the author’s eldest daughter, reveals Powers to be self-obsessed about the primacy of art before all else (including shelter and food).
Early on he says to a correspondent: “I don’t want a job of course. Only the freedom to write and, it may be, starve. For I intend to make it like that, have had my mind made up for some time, and might as well begin to find out if it is possible.” This is all fine, except that Mr. Powers has a wife and, eventually, 5 children.
He talks often of having made it clear to his parents that making money would not be a priority and regrets that his wife has not made it clear to her family. Thus it is with increasing dismay that the reader watches him turn down job after job and condemn his family to a life of multiple cold, wretched dwellings. No matter where the family lands they are always worrying about food and housing and according to his daughter’s “Afterword,” her parents were not good at sheltering their children from any of these worries.
Powers goes on whine that he is “the husband of a woman who no talent for motherhood (once she’s conceived.)” The bitterness toward his wife is especially hard to take since he spends many holidays away (he likes it that way) and has numerous ways to escape domestic pressures. His wife, also a writer, does not.
But this is a review of the book not the man and the collection of letters and the story they tell are compelling. I dare anyone who reads this book to romanticize starving for one’s art ever again.
I like Mr. Powers much better when he talks about literature. He writes the following to one of his friends who has wondered if he served as a model for one of the characters in a story: “You were and were not in it, Birdie; it is the usual mixture of fact and fiction and should not be read for anything but entertainment. The requirements of art demand that you do violence sometimes to the facts as they took place, or interpret them differently, or make up incidents and conjure up characters that life itself, being such an erratic artist, seldom provides.”

[The American Conservative]

"Though the letters contain incidental details that subtly suggest the sources of Powers’s books—e.g., squirrels he chased from the eaves of one of the better houses the family rented ultimately come to nest in those of St. Clement’s Hill—the most agonizing tale they tell is not about the genesis of art or the impositions of family life but the limit of Powers’s eye for reality. He persisted in believing that the external demands of fatherhood and making a living prevented him from spending more time at the writer’s desk. But this does not ring true. His idleness and limited range of subject and style were the more compelling cause. He could live the material for Flesh, but I doubt he could ever have finished writing it."

Read the full review here: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

J. F. Powers was a writer, primarily of short stories but in l963 he received a National Book Award for his novel, MORTE D’URBAN. These letters, edited by his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, are not so much about his writing, but more about the struggles of a writer who often lived hand to mouth.

This was by choice, though, as Powers disdained the idea of a steady job such as teaching in a university. He felt the artist had to be free and unencumbered, writing of his struggle with conventionality, “I am like Daniel Boone, cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness.” He survived on grants, short teaching jobs, and income from his short stories, many of which appeared in the NEW YORKER. Originally, he had planned on growing produce and living off the land, but his efforts there were a complete failure

A problem, though, for Powers was that he was married to wife, Betty, and they had five children to be fed and cared for. Accomplishing this was a major challenge, especially as they were constantly moving, with several extended stays in Ireland alternating with homes in the Midwest. The title refers to his advertisements for living quarters, requiring “suitable” accommodations. Powers was aware of his inadequacies of providing or his family, writing, “The truth about me is that I just don’t qualify as the ideal husband.” At another point, he wrote,“Let me be a lesson to you. Stay single. That way you can afford to be yourself. . .” I suspect that to have had five children, he was fond of them, but they're seldom mentioned in these letters. Perhaps they didn’t fit the “struggling artist” vision of himself.

The letters are entertaining and amusing, often revealing a mordant sense of humor. Powers wrote thousands of letters, many of them to a priest friend who saved them. There are no letters to Powers, though, and I thought the introduction could have commented on this omission (did they exist?). as well as the criteria by which she selected these particular letters.

Besides the many letters to his priest friend, Father Egan, who often loaned Powers money, he knew many figures in the literary world, and was in correspondence with poets Robert Lowell, and Theodore Roethke, Katherine Ann Porter, Sean O’Faolain,, the Irish writer, Evelyn Waugh, and Theodore Roethke, to name a few of the better known names. He wrote about his financial troubles, his conflicts with publishers, his surroundings, whether it was best to live in Ireland or the United States,, and a ongoing interest in the foibles of Catholics, particularly clergymen, a subject emphasis in his writing.

In the end, I think a reader can be of two minds about Powers. Either he wasted his talents in endless procrastination and self-absorption, given his his slight published output, or, despite these faults, his writing talents emerge, even in these letters, and if nothing else depict, exaggerated in his case, , the ongoing conflict that always is present between art and commerce.