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

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Well before the publication of his first novel, Morte D’Urban, in 1962, my father, J. F. Powers, henceforth called Jim, planned to write a novel about “family life,” an intention that persisted for the rest of his life. It was to be, in some fashion, the story of a writer, an artist, with bright prospects, a taste for the good things in life, and an expectation of camaraderie as he made his way in the world. The man falls in love, gets married, has numerous children — but has neither money nor home. He finds no pleasant ease and little of the fellowship of like minds he associated with the literary life he had thought was to be his own. The novel would be called Flesh, a word infused with Jansenist distaste, conveying the bleak comedy and terrible bathos of high aesthetic and spiritual aspiration in hopeless contest with human needs and material necessity.

The proposed book took on other names and fused itself with other themes, most notably with the triumph of consumerism in American life: at times it was The Sack Race; at other times, NAB (Nationally Advertised Brands); and, at yet others, Nobody Home. (The last two also served as provisional titles for another unwritten novel, while The Sack Race became the working title for Jim’s second — and final — novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, the image serving admirably for both priests and artists.) In one version of the novel — drawn very much from life — the narrator, a “one-book author” who is unable to complete a second novel, has been reduced to living with his populous family in his wife’s parents’ middle-American home.

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