6 of 7 books I love. Save a very few literary Minnesotans, I don’t expect many FBers to know this novel, reissued by NYRB, won the National Book Award in 1963. It’s set, as was Mr. Powers, in the environs of St. John’s, the Benedictine college and monastery midpoint between my mother’s and father’s towns in Stearns County. Morte D’Urban, dumbed down by Garrison Keillor to Lake Woebegone, may be the best novel I know about where I’m from. Better even than Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, which takes place half an hour west on I-94 out of St Cloud.
Mr. Powers and I became correspondents with the publication, 24 years later, of his second novel, The Wheat That Springeth Green, a coming of age story set in St. Cloud from the time of my father’s coming of age to about the time of my birth there. Save for the main character entering the clergy, it may as well have been about my father, who was no less comically tragic.
Jim was Evelyn Waugh’s favorite American writer. Alan Pryce-Jones attested to me the exulted reputation he enjoyed in England. What he gave me was a perspective on the mores, ethics, and history of a place I knew as a child from a p.o.v. eerily akin to but less circumscript than my father’s heavily redacted version. His collected letters, ‘Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life’ (NYC: FSG, 2013 tell an even eerier story. I lost both Jim and my father in 1999. You’ll need wait for my forthcoming ‘Unsuitable Accommodations” to understand why.
The photo is of a two year old Adam on a visit to Jim’s in the shadow or Marcel Breuer’s mid-centry mod’ masterpiece, St. John’s Abbey. The book’s inscription refers to his visit to Greenwich Village, where we spent an evening at Bradley’s on University Place with Jimmy Rowles playing Ellington. “ Out of nowhere” refers to our unlikely relation, perhaps even my suitable affections.