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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963 by J. F. Powers Jon Schaff J. F. Powers, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. Edited by Katherine A. Powers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013. 450 pp. $35.00. Some time ago I was in a major bookstore in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota, looking for Morte D’Urban by J. F. Powers (1917–99). Not only was I told that they did not have the book, but was further (rudely) told that the bookstore did not have a regional author section and never had. This lack of [End Page 130] acknowledgement seems to be indicative of much of J. F. Powers’s life experience. Part of that experience is now captured in Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963. This collection of letters, edited by Katherine A. Powers, J. F. Powers’s daughter, gives a window into the heart of a writer struggling to produce art while oppressed by financial and familial obligations. The collection also demonstrates Powers’s wry sense of humor that infects his fiction. Powers, born in Illinois, spent most of his adult life in Minnesota, mostly around St. Paul and St. Cloud. One of the themes of the book, though, is Powers’s inability to settle into any home, to find “suitable accommodations,” bouncing from home to home, even spending time overseas in Ireland, trying to make his way as a writer. As Katherine Powers notes in the introduction, Powers and his wife would move over twenty times in the course of their marriage. The book takes the reader through major events in roughly the first half of Powers’s life: his early imprisonment for refusal to serve in World War II; his courting and marriage to his wife Betty; the publication of his first set of short stories; the birth of various children; and culminating with the success of Morte D’Urban, his first novel (of only two), which won the National Book Award in 1963. Various themes arise out of Powers’s letters. One is Powers’s extraordinary ability to avoid paying work. Powers would couch this as a kind of virtue, speaking of “cutting my way through that bourgeois wilderness” without losing himself “in a corporation.” Powers, while consistently complaining about lack of money, turned down multiple offers for editorships, teaching jobs, and speaking engagements. While moving his family from dingy home to dingy home, Powers struggled to complete his stories and avoided what he thought menial work that might pay the bills. One also gleans from Powers’ letters the trials of the artist. In Powers’s letters, and some choice selections from wife Betty’s journals, one senses that Powers had a deep sense of his artistic talent and his frustration that the trials of life (money, houses, cars, family) so often distracted him delving as deeply into that artistic vision as he’d have liked. Powers expresses deep frustration that artists less talented than he prospered, while he, thanks to his own lack of diligence and some extraordinary bad luck, continued to struggle financially while gaining considerable critical success. Together these themes of poverty and lack of publishing success often make Suitable Accommodations a gripping yet sorrowful read. [End Page 131] Powers would eventually take up a job at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, teaching creative writing. In my memory as a student there in the early 1990s Powers did not have a high profile on campus. At that time discussion of John Hassler, then writer-in-residence, was much higher. Granted, as a government major I did not run across Powers in class, although I have no recollection of English major friends speaking of him nor, when I did take an advanced writing course, was it from Powers. Powers seems to lack the genius or the tenacity for self-promotion that, it must be said, is part of building a literary reputation. While Hassler’s books were fairly widely read by students, including me, it was not until...