Suitable Accommodations by J. F. Powers

Author:J. F. Powers [Powers, J. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Egan was finally released from exile in Beardsley and assigned to St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis as chaplain. Jim, unable to resist the tawdry spectacle of the summer’s political conventions, bought a TV.

HARVEY EGAN

509 First Avenue South

August 24, 1956

Dear Fr Egan,

Glad to hear from you, and think you’re in your element: cancer, newspapers hot from the press, TV channels clear, and most of all freed from your maintenance work, heating, caulking, watering, etc. Allow me, then, in the light of all this, to congratulate you on your new assignment.

I visited Mpls last week on a buying trip: tea, clothing for Betty and children, typewriter for Betty, and so on. There wasn’t time for what we did, and so I didn’t call you, but I’ll be seeing you at Schiek’s or somewhere in the weeks to come. We have been buying everything in sight. A new refrigerator (the old one was still running, a 1936 model); a foam rubber mattress; and TV. Yes, the pressure built up to a terrific pitch for a few days before the Dems convened, and I went into a flurry of research—as usual CU24 and the other outfit had nothing to say. So I went by hearsay and the look of the cabinet and bought a Spartan, a table model. It is doing well by us, with a thirty-foot antenna. We’ve seen some good movies, mostly English: Pickwick Papers, The Man in the White Suit, Carrington V.C., and others. I enjoyed the Dems; their opponents, what a bore, and what a flop Stassen turned out to be. I thought Eisenhower’s speech good, though, as those things go. Did you hear Clement’s?25 I see in Newsweek where Red Smith said the Democrats (using Clement) hit the Republicans with the jawbone of an ass.

Yes, as you would know from above, The New Yorker bought the story, and it should appear sometime this fall.26 I was exhausted from revising it (and it still isn’t ready) and haven’t done any work for two weeks. Pretty soon Ken McCormick will be back from Europe and will be asking how’s the novel coming. I am beginning to regret my decision to teach at Michigan and hope I can make it count as time in the desert, peace and quiet, and get some of my work done that I wouldn’t find possible here. […]

Write.

Jim

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