Читать книгу The Message of the City - Patricia E. Palermo - Страница 11

CHAPTER TWO

“HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW”

An Overview of Her Life and Career

“Ten years from now I will still be Dawn Sherman Powell—but girls, that name will be famous then. Ten years from now, I will have arrived.”

—Diaries, 2¹

BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

Dawn Powell was born on November 28, 1896, in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, to Elroy “Roy” King Powell, a charming rogue of a traveling salesman, and his young wife, Hattie Blanche Sherman Powell, by all accounts a doting mother to her three daughters. The first six years of Dawn’s life seem to have been serene and generally uneventful, except that the clever little girl started reading at four and writing “from the time she was big enough to hold a pencil” (Farnham, 3).² But tragedy struck the tranquil household when her twenty-nine-year-old mother died on December 6, 1903, just eight days after Dawn’s seventh birthday. From that moment forward, Dawn’s childhood would be difficult; indeed, the next several years would be so brutal as to be almost unbearable. Through it all, she developed a determination and self-reliance that would serve her well for the rest of her life. She learned never to take anything too seriously, finding comedy in even the most tragic situations.³ Good friend Jacqueline Miller Rice⁴ remembers that the adult Powell always “hid her fear and despair. She showed her best face to the world. And what a glorious face it was” (Guare, x). Powell would consign her fear and despair to her diaries, which she kept faithfully most of her life.

Her mother’s death, evidently of a botched abortion, left Dawn’s irresponsible but generally well-meaning father alone to care for Dawn and her sisters: Mabel, who was older than Dawn by sixteen months, and Phyllis, who was three years younger. Because Roy Powell traveled for a living, the three young girls were frequently shuttled from one relation to another, among them Aunt Dawn Sherman Gates, whom the young girls adored and for whom Dawn had been named. But tragedy would soon strike again: Aunt Dawn died, presumably also as the result of an abortion, when she was just twenty and young Dawn merely ten years old. Page writes that a slip of paper found among Powell’s papers upon her death read, “When I was 10 and Aunt Dawn died, I swore I at least would always remember. I did” (Bio, 16).⁵

The novelist would later would recall “liv[ing] around with other relatives in various villages and factory towns all over central Ohio” and staying “in grandmother’s rooming house in Shelby and often called in by transient theatrical troupes to take part in plays” (Letters, 81). Still later, in an autobiographical entry for Twentieth-Century Authors, she wrote of “a year of farm life with this or that aunt, life in small-town boarding houses, life with very prim strict relatives, to rougher life in the middle of little factory towns” (1123). Those nomadic years would prove to be happier than the ones that would follow, however, when, in August 1907, Dawn’s father married the wealthy but miserly and coldhearted Sabra Stearns. The family moved about ten miles southwest of Cleveland to Sabra’s large farmhouse in North Olmsted, then a small farming community.

An observant child who did well in school, young Dawn loved to read, especially the novels of Dickens, Dumas, and Hugo.⁶ From an early age, she developed a clear eye for the pretensions and airs of the adults she saw around her, filling notebook after notebook with sketches, poems, and stories of her observations. Dawn kept these books carefully hidden under the porch of the North Olmsted house, fearing her stepmother’s rage if she found out about her writing. When Dawn was thirteen, her stepmother did discover the notebooks and immediately burned them⁷—calling them Dawn’s “trash”—in an act so cruel that it prompted the girl to leave home a short time later, immediately following her graduation from the eighth grade (Diaries, 186). Later, in her most autobiographical novel, 1944’s My Home Is Far Away, Powell painted a harrowing picture of Sabra Stearns Powell, renamed Idah Hawkins Willard for the fictionalized portrait, although, according to biographer Page, Powell “seems actually to have understated Sabra’s cruelty” (Bio, 197). “Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I . . . diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives” (Diaries, 222), Powell admitted.

The fictional stepmother’s way of bringing up the girls was to take a “stand,” yet

[her] “stand” was so elaborate, and involved so many contingencies, that her new family despaired of ever getting it straight. First, they were to stay out of the house except for sleeping and eating. Second, they were not to sit out on the lawn mooning where everybody could see them, nor were they to go visiting relatives or school friends or have them call. They were not to use their school paper for games, because it cost money, nor were they to keep reading in their school readers for fun after their lesson was learned. . . . They were not to go places where townspeople would talk about their ragged clothes, but they were not allowed to use their sewing boxes either, because needles and thread cost money. (My Home, 221)

Powell’s diary recounts almost word for word many of the same incidents that the novel relates, including Sabra’s “stand.” In the diary Powell wrote, “Stepmother’s greatest joy was in making us go downtown on errands with no hems in our ragged calico skirts (and forbidden needle and thread to sew them as Waste) so our schoolmates would sneer” (187). While such frugality might be understandable in a poor family, to begrudge shabby young children needle and thread makes no sense at all for a wealthy one; Sabra owned one of the most impressive houses in town. At any rate, the comments Powell wrote in her diary seem tame compared to what Page turned up in his research for the biography: he says that the “unbelievably vicious and sadistic” stepmother, who seemed to take an evil delight in her cruelty, would “beat the three girls regularly, almost, it seems, as a form of physical exercise” (Bio, 9). Powell reported both in her diaries and in her novel that She, as the girls referred to Sabra, would indeed keep her and her sisters locked out of the house until dark, prohibit them from entering the parlor, and forbid them to touch the books or the piano or anything else in the house not specifically theirs, but at the same time take from them any small item they might own. Once young Dawn with a quarter she had earned bought a silver-tasseled whip at a county fair; when the stepmother found it, she hung it in clear view in the kitchen and would regularly thrash the girls with it (Diaries, 187).⁸

In the same novel and in her diaries Powell painted a vivid portrait of her father as well, a man whom the girls adored but who had little practical sense. Debra Warstler, daughter-in-law of Powell’s niece, Carol Warstler, says, “While [other] family members refer to him as a ‘jerk,’ they also recall that his daughters loved him” (14).⁹ Painting a less forgiving portrait of the “selfish” Roy Powell, Debra Warstler writes that Phyllis Powell Cook (Powell’s younger sister) told her that Roy Powell had opened an ice cream parlor in 1905 but that it was not until he sold it a year later that the girls were ever treated to a cone there, and that the treat came not from their father but from the new owner (6).

Powell told of her father’s returning home from sales trips with such frills as a birdcage or a music box for his daughters while they remained ragged and shoeless, hungry and dirty. Even when he was not on the road he was ineffective in protecting his children from the harsh treatment of his new wife and generally seemed, at least to Dawn, almost as miserable in Sabra’s presence as she and her sisters were. In 1941, looking back on her childhood, Powell remembered that her stepmother had ultimately “made my father give up the road” he so loved to “work in the mill. . . . Papa sat at table over burnt oatmeal, scorched potatoes, soggy bread, lifeless chicken with lumpy gravy. He discoursed on this spoon which he had picked up at the Palmer House in Chicago” in happier days (Diaries, 187). The proud but unfortunate Roy Powell seemed rarely to get things right. He had thought that marrying Sabra would bring some stability and social position to his daughters, but in fact the marriage did just the opposite.

On discovering that her notebooks had been burned, an event that would anger her for the rest of her life, young Dawn boarded a train for her aunt Orpha May Sherman Steinbrueck’s home in small-town Shelby, Ohio, about an hour’s ride from North Olmsted¹⁰ and halfway between Cleveland and Columbus in Richland County.”¹¹ Here she found refuge from the “psychopathic cruelty” (Letters, 132) she had faced in Sabra’s house and the neglect she had met with since her mother’s death. Clearly, the strong-minded Powell was never one to give up or to give in, and she was never one to lose her sense of humor. Despite the psychological injury that fleeing at such a young age the only home she knew must have caused, Powell would later write lightly of running away. In My Home Is Far Away, the portrait the author painted of young Marcia’s escaping her stepmother’s house resonates. Once safely on the train, Marcia is “still scared, but she felt lightheaded and gay, the way Papa did when he was going away from home. She thought she must be like Papa, the kind of person who was always glad going away instead of coming home. She looked out the window, feeling the other self inside her, the self that had no feelings and could never be hurt, coming out stronger and stronger” (318). Much like Marcia, Powell learned to separate her inner being from her outer, almost always presenting a gay face to friends and strangers alike. Very few others knew of her demons, her nightmares, her troubles.

Just two years before her death, in an essay entitled “What Are You Doing in My Dreams?” a determined-sounding Powell would again write of leaving home: “There’s something about farm life that gives you the strength to run anywhere in the world,” she reflected (221). “What you have to do is walk right on down the street, keeping your eyes straight ahead, pretending you’re on your way someplace a lot better. And that’s the way it turns out, too; wherever you land is sure to be better than the place you left” (219). After first landing in the “better place” that was Auntie May’s home in Shelby, Powell ultimately landed in the better place of her dreams, New York City.

Page writes that this successful flight from Sabra’s house was actually Dawn’s second attempt; after her first effort to leave she had been caught and forced to return (Bio, 13). One can only imagine the abuse she must have endured once she was brought back. This time she took better care to plan her escape so well that she would never have to return. Powell herself reported that she left home with thirty cents in her pocket (or ninety cents, as she later remembered in “What Are You Doing in My Dreams?”) that she had earned picking berries, but Page writes that she received financial assistance from her older sister, Mabel, who had already run away from home and settled in Shelby at her grandmother Sherman’s boardinghouse (Bio, 16). Powell’s unconventional maternal aunt, who was always called Auntie May,¹² lived at 121 North Broadway—this heartland Broadway possibly helping fuel Powell’s longing for the “real” one—which was located directly opposite a busy railroad station: Shelby was a transfer point for the New York Central, Baltimore & Ohio, and Pennsylvania railroads. Seeing the travelers come and go, hearing the whistles blow as the trains pulled into the station and then departed, piqued Powell’s imagination and stirred her longing to escape small-town Ohio for more glamorous regions, just as characters do in her 1930 Ohio novel Dance Night. Young Dawn realized that she was much more like her restless father than, for example, her maternal grandmother, Julia Sherman, who “got her excitements on remote farms from traveling hucksters, cousins or distant relatives who wandered up the cow lane” (Diaries, 470). Such “excitement” would never do for Dawn; she was always anxious to experience the real excitement of the big cities, and what bigger and more glamorous city was there than New York?

Some time later, remembering her days living near the train station, Powell would quip that she had been brought up in Shelby, “not on the wrong side of the railroad tracks as is generally supposed, but right on the railroad tracks” (Farnham, 3; my emphasis). The travelers who would come and go from the train station, buying meals from accomplished cook Auntie May, or staying nearby at Dawn’s grandmother’s boardinghouse,¹³ offered Powell abundant material for observation. Again the girl kept notebooks, but although this second collection of writings and drawings,¹⁴ begun while Dawn was living with Auntie May, “survived into the late 1960s,” according to Page, it now seems to have vanished (Diaries, 1).

The burned writings were not the only reason that Powell left home: she had learned that her stepmother was going to keep her from attending high school. Being forbidden to read the books in Sabra’s house was bad enough for the bookish girl, but being kept out of school would have proved intolerable. Living now with Auntie May, in 1910 Dawn enrolled in Shelby High School, where she earned high marks and worked on the school paper, and, in her senior year, acted as editor of the yearbook. From the age of sixteen she worked as a reporter on the Shelby Globe (Gross, 112). Fellow reporter Eleanor Farnham remembers that an enthusiastic Powell “always got to the fires first” (Farnham, 3), determined to do her job well and eager, as always, for any fresh excitement the town might offer.

Powell was happy to be allowed to attend high school and grateful to be living with Auntie May. The two would “talk about all things all day, never bored with each other” (Diaries, 72). The eccentric older woman, Dawn recalled, “gave me music lessons and thought I had genius, and when I wrote crude little poems and stories, she cherished them” (Page, “Chronology,” 1045). Her aunt, who not only loved her, cared for her, and supported her, proved a fine example for the girl. According to Page, “the emancipated, self-reliant Orpha May, who did as she pleased, followed her own moral code, and insisted on being treated as an equal among men, provided Dawn with her greatest role model” (Bio, 14). Auntie May’s influence on Dawn was far reaching: without her, Powell may never have been able to attend even high school, let alone college; it is likely that she also would never have had the opportunity to flee small-town Ohio for New York City.

Some years later, after Powell had settled in New York, she would invite her aunt for a visit in a letter that reveals the free-spirited sense of humor of both women: “Unless we take another girl you can sleep in our living room,” Dawn wrote, “or if Helen’s father comes to see us you can sleep with him. He is a widower—a doctor—and has oil wells in Texas so you could do worse” (Letters, 43). Not only was her aunt unconventional and open minded, but she so believed in Dawn that she encouraged her to pursue her ambitions as no one else had done before. When Dawn was about to graduate from high school, Auntie May encouraged the girl to follow her dreams and go on to college, a luxury they could ill afford.¹⁵ She suggested that her young charge write a letter seeking admittance to Lake Erie College for Women, founded in 1856, in Painesville, Ohio. And so Dawn wrote to Vivian Small, president of the college, promising to work hard in exchange for any tuition remission she might receive.¹⁶ Though the letter no longer survives, early friend and college roommate Eleanor Farnham recalls that Powell had written something along the lines of “I’ll do anything to work my way through, from scrubbing back stairs to understudying your job” (Gross, 111).¹⁷ President Small, who believed that rich and poor alike were entitled to an education, saw to it that Dawn was admitted to Lake Erie College. The college, just five years before Powell’s death, would award her an honorary Doctor of Literature degree.

Auntie May paid for some of Dawn’s college expenses,¹⁸ a lawyer friend of Dawn’s aunt also contributed, and, according to Powell, “everybody in town helped me gather proper equipment for this mighty project, so that my borrowed trunk would scarcely close over the made-over dresses, sheets and towels blotted with my signature, tennis racket with limp strings, and a blue serge bathing suit in four sections, 1900 model, contributed by a fat neighbor on the assumption that going to ‘Lake Erie’ meant I would be spending most of my time in the water” (Letters, 249). The college assisted its new student financially: President Vivian Small herself made a personal loan to Powell; in a 1919 note to her friend and former Lake Erie College classmate Charlotte Johnson, Powell mentioned still owing President Smith $55.00 (38). Despite the financial assistance she received, still Dawn had to help pay her way, always putting in “five hours a day to earn her expenses,” as she wrote in her entry for Twentieth-Century Authors (1123). She worked in the school’s general office, where her duties included “answering doorbell [and] telephone, putting out mail, ringing bells for class and running a rotten, rheumatic old hydraulic elevator,” which requires “some muscle” to operate and which “nearly kills my back” (Letters, 15).¹⁹ She also found employment in the college library, and in the summer of 1915, between her freshman and sophomore years, she served as maid and waitress at the Shore Club in Painesville,²⁰ where she began keeping a diary addressed to Mr. Woggs, an imaginary confidant; those early journals are a precursor to the diaries Powell would keep until her death.

Resolved as she was to succeed academically, Dawn earned unremarkable marks at Lake Erie, partly because she kept herself involved in nearly everything the campus had to offer. She not only worked part time, but she also wrote for both the college yearbook and the school literary magazine, the Lake Erie Record, serving as literary editor from her sophomore year and as editor in chief in her final year.²¹ She also put out an “anonymous, dissenting newspaper called The Sheet that competed with the [school] magazine” (Gross, 111); the paper offers glimpses of the wittily irreverent writer Dawn Powell would later become. Active with the school’s theatrical group, she portrayed Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Letters, 21); an unnamed role in Mice and Men²² (9–10); and Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest (15). She even wrote of masquerading as a performing dog with “a whisk-broom tail” one Halloween (15). As busy as she was, she still found time to write and perform skits for her classmates (17), donating the extra money she earned from them to the war effort or funding excursions into Cleveland to see such plays as The Little Minister with Maude Adams (15). Classmate Eleanor Farnham later said she felt sorry for anyone who had not attended Lake Erie while Dawn was enrolled there, for the lively Powell “turned everything upside down” (Gross, 111). Familiar with stories passed down about the famous alumna, today’s Lake Erie College Lincoln Library director, Christopher Bennett, wrote to me in a personal letter (August 31, 2006) that “Dawn really did shake up things on this campus for those four years.” Dawn herself, in a diary entry from the time of her sophomore year, insisted that a humdrum existence was not for her. “I must have days of rushing excitement,” she wrote (2).

One yearns to go someplace where the band plays all the time and life is not so simple.

—Letters, 26

In September 1918, following her graduation from college, Dawn Powell did precisely what she had always firmly believed “the gods” had “written” for her (Letters, 26): she moved to New York, and the city did not disappoint. Powell contemporary E. B. White would write decades later of three New Yorks: the one of the native, the one of the commuter, and finally the one of the person who moves to Manhattan from somewhere else. “Of these three trembling cities,” he said, “the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal” (17–18). Having achieved her goal of moving to New York, she immediately felt that she had finally landed in the place she was meant to be. She delighted in New York from the moment she arrived, eager to “jump right in” (Letters, 26) and to savor all it had to offer, though she had brought with her little more than her determination, her talent, and fourteen dollars (26). The “slight, impoverished, and wide-eyed woman of twenty-one,” as Tim Page describes her (Bio, 35),²³ first settled in a woman’s boardinghouse on West Eighty-Fifth Street, a slightly fictionalized version of which is depicted in both her 1925 novel, Whither, and her 1931 play, Walking down Broadway. “Promptly and somewhat improbably,” Page writes, “she found work as an ‘assistant efficiency manager’ with the Butterick Company” (36), which published then as now dress patterns²⁴ and in Powell’s days an array of ladies’ magazines, including Women’s and the Delineator. A young Theodore Dreiser had served in managerial positions at Butterick and the Delineator before Powell spent time there. In 1930, long after she had left the Butterick Company’s employ, the Delineator published a short piece of hers called “Discord in Eden,” paying her $1,000; Powell says she had seen it “rejected 13 times” before (Diaries, 15).

After only five weeks she left Butterick for the better-paying job of “second-class yeomanette” (Lake Erie College, “Early 1900s,” 1) with the United States Navy, offices at 44 Whitehall Street (B. H. Clark). When World War I ended, her “navy work [having] lost its urgency” (Bio, 38), she found a position in the promotion department of the Red Cross; a short time later she landed a publicity job with the Interchurch World Movement, a group founded after the war, with aspirations to create a better world.²⁵ It was in this position that she met Joseph Roebuck Gousha, a young blond-haired and blue-eyed writer, born in 1890, who had lived in Pottstown, Norristown, Oil Town, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked as “a drama and music critic on the Sun” (Bio, 42). The two were immediately attracted to one another; in fact, Powell in the last months of her life would write in an article for Esquire that she had decided before their first date that he was the man she was going to marry (“Staten Island,” 121). Gousha, who like Powell had recently moved to New York, seemed to take as much pleasure in Manhattan as Dawn did. Enjoying a conventionally romantic courtship, the pair frequently dined out together, went to the theater, took carriage rides in Central Park, and “drank at some of the embryonic speakeasies that were springing up in Greenwich Village” (Bio, 42). So taken with him was she that she began keeping a little booklet that she named “The Book of Joe” (Diaries, 3–4), an undated sample from which reads

I went to Joe’s house for dinner and we walked to the Bay. . . . I made a peach pie—the very first and my Adorable said it was good. I love him so much and I will be so happy when we are together for always . . . My Dearest took me to the Bretton Hall²⁶ for lunch and then we rode in a hansom lined with plum color through the park. (Diaries, 3)

Later, in letters and diaries, she regularly referred to Joe as “Adorable,” “Most Adorable” (Letters, passim), and “that loving golden Leo lad” (Bio, 278). The two were heavy drinkers even then, and their drinking would only escalate over the years. Of their first date, a walking tour of Staten Island, Powell wrote: “It was a Prohibition year, so naturally part of the hiking equipment was a hip flask of some exquisite blend of lemonade and henbane with a zest of metal rust” (“Staten Island,” 121).

If her New York novels are filled with images of drinking and bars—James Wolcott says of them, “Squeeze their pages and you can almost hear them squish” (46)—her life story is full of boozy nights at home and out on the town. In The Thirties, Edmund Wilson related the events of a party at Bill Brown’s²⁷ Village apartment, during which an inebriated Powell “pour[ed] her drink down the back of a girl who was sitting on the stairs” (304); he later famously mentioned one of many “knock-down and drag-out” parties at Powell’s place (405). In the next decade, when Powell was hospitalized awaiting the removal of a large tumor in her lungs, Wilson was surprised to see her looking “fresher and younger” than he had ever seen her, without “rings or pouches around her eyes,” a fact he attributed to her being unable to drink there (Forties, 304). Her own diaries are full of references to drunken parties and nasty hangovers: she tells of one evening that began “at the Café Royale” (the actual spelling was Royal),²⁸ where she had been “drinking ferociously”; the evening ended hours later with Powell “spilling [her] drinks all over Peggy’s²⁹ sofa, occasionally roused into consciousness by being very wet” (Diaries, 87). Gore Vidal remarked on the gin-filled aquarium he saw in Powell’s apartment at 35 East Ninth Street in the summer of 1950 (Golden Spur, xi), though Page believes that the story is probably untrue: Powell, a cat owner, never once mentioned having owned either fish or aquarium, and that she would have gone to the expense of an aquarium is unlikely (phone call, March 7, 2013). But imbibe she did: Matthew Josephson writes that she “drank copiously for the joy of living” (21).³⁰ Still, Powell was not to be likened to the uptown Algonquin lunch set who drank away their afternoons and wrote comparatively little: she would in fact become angry if an acquaintance asked her to lunch. “Did they think she was the Village playgirl? she’d shout. Didn’t they know she had some writing to do?” (Page, “Resurrection,” 3).³¹ Like Willa Cather, who believed that “the business of an artist’s life” is “ceaseless, unremitting labor” (Benfey, 4), Powell had no tolerance for those artists who would squander their talent or waste their time, an intolerance she demonstrated in novels from 1925’s Whither on. In her Diaries she complained of friends who “like to pester people who are working” and of those who are “happy to gnaw away at the bones of your energy and talent” (229). One simply could not write while entertaining or being entertained; in fact, from the time she was a child, she relished the sanctity of isolation. For writers, she said, “there is nothing to equal the elation of escaping into solitude” (228). Looking back, she would fondly recall the “sheer exhilaration” she had felt as a child when she had “got up into the attic or in the treetop or under a tree way off by the road where I was alone with a sharp pencil and notebook” (228–29). The serious artist always required seclusion, sobriety, and silence to produce.

At night . . . I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow.

—Diaries, 4

Some nine months after their first date, on November 20, 1920, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha were married at the Little Church around the Corner,³² located on Twenty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Madison. To Powell’s delight, her beloved Auntie May traveled to New York from Ohio to attend the wedding (Letters, 51), after which the young couple honeymooned at the brand-new Hotel Pennsylvania³³ on Seventh Avenue (Bio, 43), then the world’s largest hotel (Hirsh, Manhattan, 80). Both the church and the hotel stand today.

Powell’s new husband, who like Dawn had been left to fend for himself from an early age, gave up his ambitions of becoming a critic, a poet, or a playwright, deciding that Dawn was the more talented of the two. Poet and friend Charles Norman remembers Joe’s saying, “I married a girl with more talent than I have, and I think she should have the chance to develop it” (Poets, 51). It may be that this portrait of Gousha is overly kind: he was already deep in the throes of alcoholism by that time and was unable to produce what work he might otherwise have done. Whatever the reason, the couple agreed that Powell should quit her job and write, and that Joe, whom Norman describes as possessed of “charming old world manners” (51), would support the family with his work at a New York advertising agency, later as an executive with the firm.³⁴

After first deciding to live apart in what was considered the “new Bohemian fashion,” they ultimately changed their minds and rented their first apartment together at 31 Riverside Drive. An article without a byline that made the third page of the Evening World of January 3, 1921—this article, in which Powell received top billing, might have been so well placed because of the pair’s work in publicity—had the following to say of the couple:

When two nice young poets, Miss Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha, were married . . . they thought, the bride said later, they would “vindicate [Ohio-born novelist] Fannie Hurst,” who had been married in 1915 but who kept her marriage a secret for five years.

Accordingly Mr. Gousha returned to the home of his mother, brother and two sisters at number 540 81st Street Brooklyn, while the twenty-four-year-old Mrs. Gousha, pretty and brunette, continued living with a girl friend at number 549 West End Avenue.

But—

It took them only two weeks to find out that their . . . minds are quite elastic on the subject.

This was said by Mrs. Gousha at a “New York Night” before going to Pelham, where the two were “enchanted” to pass the New Year holiday with friends. (“Wed to Vindicate”)

The article continues in this same upbeat vein, ending with a flighty poem Powell had written, called “Inspiration,” and the couple’s earnest pronouncement that “they are not at all Greenwich Villagers” but that what they enjoyed most thus far about married life was “going on walks and seeing what we can’t own.” As it happens, they never would be able to afford much, though they would become stalwart Villagers.

In fact, it was only a short time later that they moved to their first Greenwich Village residence at 9 East Tenth Street (a plaque commemorating Powell’s living there was erected at Page’s urging and then later stolen); the couple subsequently moved to West Ninth, a street on which countless “wordsmiths” could be seen “shuffling up and down . . . like a pack of cards in pursuit of Lady Luck” (Loschiavo, 2). It was here, primarily, that Powell wrote her first novel, Whither. Later, in the summer of 1926, the young family moved to 106 Perry Street, also in the West Village, where they would remain for over a decade. The building, which still stands, is something of a literary landmark for those in the know, as it is here for the most part that Powell wrote “Dance Night, completed most of The Tenth Moon . . . and began Turn, Magic Wheel” (Bio, 100). Delighted to be living in the Village, where all the real artists lived and the place she would always consider her “creative oxygen” (Diaries, 391), Powell wrote, in 1934,

This little room is [the] loveliest thing I ever had. Upstairs here at night you see the towers of lower Manhattan lit up, the Woolworth, etc., and the voices of extra-news in the street, bouncing from wall to wall: “Russia—oom-pah chah! Russia—oom pah chah!” These sounds mingle with the far-off skyscraper lights, distant boat whistles and clock chimes and across the street in the attic of the Pen and Brush Club³⁵ I see girls hanging out their meager laundry. (94–95)

In the early years the couple seems to have been very happy. But the marriage would be unconventional, Dawn having deep relationships with two other men, among them screenwriter/playwright John Howard Lawson, later one of the Hollywood Ten.³⁶ Lawson’s son Jeffrey, in a telephone conversation with me in August 2012, recalled that in the 1930s Powell had been a frequent visitor to the Lawsons’ Long Island home, where heavy drinking continued long into the evenings. Jeffrey, maybe seven or eight years old, would be given “a glass of ginger ale to join them.” His beautiful mother, Sue Edmond Lawson, would occasionally get into physical fights with Powell. “After all the heavy drinking,” he said, “inhibitions would slip away and they’d start in on each other’s shortcomings. My mother more than once punched Dawn in the face. I always thought that Dawn wished my father had married her instead of my mother.” In a diary entry of December 5, 1933, Powell wrote that she “didn’t want to go anywhere with the Lawsons now that I see they are really dangerously insane so far as I am concerned” (Diaries, 78), though she did not explain further. But she would recall violent altercations with Sue Lawson even into the 1950s; one letter to Wilson tells of a surprise visit from an understandably upset Sue, her husband having been imprisoned for failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Suddenly she hauled off and started beating up Canby,”³⁷ then choking Margaret De Silver.³⁸ As Powell tried to pull Sue off Margaret, she “got a sock in the face.” She added, parenthetically, “I gave [Sue] a good kick personally and pushed her into a chair where she sat with insane blazing eyes, face distorted with hate” (169–70). The younger Lawson concurs that his mother was “probably an alcoholic, flighty and temperamental, though very different and sort of sad in the afternoons when she was sober.” Though Powell and Sue Lawson had a stormy relationship, Lawson recalls that his mother “seemed to be fascinated by her: I remember her standing outside of Scribner’s whenever we were in New York, looking at the Dawn Powell books stacked in pyramids in the windows,” despite the fact that he also remembers Powell referring more than once to his mother as “a Southern bimbo, or something like that” (personal e-mail, July 24, 2012).

Powell also likely had an affair with travel writer, translator, and editor Coburn “Coby” Gilman, born on September 3, 1893, in Denver, Colorado.³⁹ But Joe, too, was known to indulge in the occasional fling; as Page puts it, both of them “enjoyed a succession of lovers on the side” (Bio, 44). The marriage was a rocky one, after time, yet despite serious financial difficulties and painful misunderstandings, Powell’s drinking and persistent health problems,⁴⁰ Gousha’s alcoholism, the above-mentioned infidelities on both sides, and sometimes lengthy separations, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha would remain married until his death. Following a long battle with cancer during which she dutifully cared for him, Joe died in St. Vincent’s Hospital on Valentine’s Day, 1962. The marriage had lasted forty-two years. After his death Powell would fondly reflect, “He was the only person in the world I found it always a kick to run into on the street” (Diaries, 436). Never fully recovering from his death, she often meditated on the loss in her diaries and would follow him in death just three years later.

A beloved, astonishingly smart little boy

—Bio, 50

On August 22, 1921, when Powell was twenty-four years old, her only child, a boy, was born. From her bed at St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, Dawn wrote a letter to her sisters, Mabel and Phyllis, about the difficult birth: “I had a terrible time and it was just as hard on the baby. He is awfully husky but being born was a tough business for him and just before he came out his heart went bad.” Further, Powell said that she “didn’t dilate at all” (Letters, 46). The infant would suffer a blood clot on his brain and bruising caused by the doctor’s forceps, she wrote. Even while having to deliver such terrible news, Powell’s trademark humor surfaced in the next lines: “Doctors said I should have had my babies five or six years ago. That would have been awkward, as I would have had some difficulty in explaining them” (46).

Despite the difficult birth, the young mother went on lovingly to describe her child: “He has coal-black hair and big blue eyes and a tiny little nose and a beautiful mouth and one ear flat and the other sticks out. He is unusually tall. Got that from me.⁴¹ He has a fat little face—looks just like a Chinese mandarin but very very beautiful” (47). Obviously, Dawn Powell was a proud new mother.

Sadly, Joseph Jr., who would always be called Jojo, suffered from a disability perhaps caused, at least in part, by his difficult birth. From about the time he turned three years old, it became apparent that something was terribly wrong. Though there was never any clear diagnosis, he was sometimes thought to be suffering from schizophrenia, sometimes mental retardation, sometimes cerebral palsy, often a combination of the three (Bio, 49). Edmund Wilson in The Fifties referred to the “defective” (435) boy as Powell’s “spastic son” (637); a cousin, Phyllis Poccia, remembers him as something of “an idiot savant” (Bio, 49); even Gore Vidal, as late as 1996, described him as “retarded” (“Queen,” 18). Today one might refer to the boy’s condition as autism, though the disease was not understood then and not even named until the 1940s. Powell friend Matthew Josephson described Jojo’s case effectively. Soon enough after the boy’s birth, he wrote, Dawn and Joe “discovered that their child was ‘retarded,’ had weak motor impulses, moved awkwardly, spoke with difficulty, and would need attention and help all his life. He was a borderline case, not feebleminded, but giving evidence of having been brain-damaged at birth” (35). Josephson went on to say, quite movingly, “After having suffered tragedy in childhood and then having won a modicum of happiness and security, Dawn Powell suffered new sorrows over her Jojo, whom, in spite of everything, she greatly loved” (36).

Jeffrey Lawson was five years younger than Jojo. He remembers the older boy as “strange; I was afraid of him. He never spoke to me or paid me any attention. He would walk with his arms held out, mumbling to himself. But it was clear that Dawn loved him very much.” During our first telephone call, Lawson remembered Dawn as maternal, even to him, saying, “She would always look at me with a certain kind of love, I think, probably because she was in love with my father. She would talk to me and treat me as if I mattered to her. I recall her, in the early 1930s, as zaftig, feminine, soft, and kind, very serious and intellectual, but witty and often laughing” (August 25, 2012).

Jojo was in many ways brilliant but antisocial, stubborn yet loving, serene one moment and fierce the next. Throughout his life he would almost always require medical attention and often institutionalization; as a child he would often stay up “howling” all night long, in “inconsolable tantrums” (Bio, 49), to the chagrin and mystification of his parents. Difficult always and sometimes violent, throughout his youth he was in and out of mental hospitals, treatment clinics, psychiatrists’ offices, and given one therapy after another, including shock treatments.⁴² Unfortunately, nothing worked. The cost of his care was enormous, and Powell wrote madly, trying to keep up with the doctor bills that kept her and Gousha in a perpetual state of anxiety and often, especially in later years, almost homeless and very near poverty.

As much as the young family needed money, however, Dawn Powell was a proud young artist with standards that she refused to compromise. Although Hollywood often came calling, she at first wanted nothing to do with it, refusing offer after offer. Many of her friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, including John Howard Lawson, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald,⁴³ Robert Benchley, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and others famously did time there, but Powell found the idea less than appealing and in fact found Hollywood and the huge sums of money it offered poisonous to the creative spirit.⁴⁴ In March 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, she was offered $500 a week to go West for three months but declined, writing in her diary, “We need money but that stuff is not in my direction and life is too short to go on unpleasant byroads” (14). A year later she sold her play Walking down Broadway to the films for $7,500.00, a huge sum in 1931, though she was disappointed to find that the resulting movie, retitled Hello Sister, had almost nothing at all to do with her play. In the early months of 1932, Powell did do some screenwriting in Hollywood but found the work distasteful. Later still she turned down both Paramount’s offer to pay her $1,500 a week in the summer of 1934 and United Artists’ invitation to work on a screenplay of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Bio, 142). Finally, in 1936, her resolve having weakened, she agreed to go out and work with Samuel Goldwyn Studios for one month. Once there, she was offered a three-year contract and hefty paychecks, but, she wrote, “This quick money ruins every writer in the business” (Letters, 94). Further, she said, “I quaver at signing away years like that” (92), for if ever she were to do so, “New York [would] become only an interlude between jobs.” She knew too that churning out the melodramas that Hollywood wanted from her would keep her too busy to write her novels. Once finally back in Manhattan, she refused all further offers to return to Hollywood. As attractive as the money always was, writing film scripts, Powell said, “makes you hate yourself” (Josephson, 40). Instead she would stay home and continue working on what she considered her first real New York novel, the book that would become Turn, Magic Wheel.⁴⁵

She also loathed the celebrity book promotion circuit, believing that what made one a writer was writing rather than all the posturing that, in her view, too frequently accompanied it. As Suzanne Keen says, “Powell has little patience with those who believe in their myths of self-presentation” (24). Her first novel, Whither, focuses on the idea; Turn, Magic Wheel explores it fully, lampooning a celebrated writer based on Ernest Hemingway; A Time to Be Born rips it apart, lambasting a character inspired by Clare Boothe Luce.

Powell’s father had been a traveling salesman, her Auntie May a department store buyer, her husband an advertising man, and she herself had worked in publicity. Given this background, it should come as no surprise that the fostering of consumer desire emerges in nearly all of her writings. But, for Powell, the marketing of merchandise was one thing; the peddling of one’s art was another. Close friend Edmund Wilson wrote of her “complete indifference to self-promotion,” noting that “she rarely goes to publishers’ lunches or has publishers’ parties given her; she declines to play the great lady of letters, and she does not encourage interviews” (“Dawn Powell,” 233). Vidal, similarly, recalled that Powell was “not about to ingratiate herself with book reviewers like the New York Herald Tribune’s Lewis Gannett,” whom Vidal considered “as serenely outside literature as his confrere in the daily New York Times, Orville Prescott, currently divided into two halves of equal density” (“Queen,” 23). Despite Vidal’s vitriol, Gannett was quite a fine critic. Still, Powell was more apt to tell critics what she thought of their reviews than to attempt to curry favor with them, even though she knew that their favor might have resulted in more positive commentaries. As Sanford Pinsker says, with “a bit of horn-tooting she might well have unseated Dorothy Parker as the wickedest wit in town” (67), adding, “When the literati might have done her some good, she held their feet to the fire rather than sucking up” (68). Although in her diary she would comically lament that “all my life has been spent killing geese that lay golden eggs, and it’s a fine decent sport,” she still refused to seek out the spotlight or to do anything she would label “false” to achieve it. In fact, she so disliked being “the observed instead of the observer” (Diaries, 453) that she would paint in Turn, Magic Wheel a portrait of a female character terribly uneasy under observation, while fictional author Dennis Orphen, based on Powell herself, observes her unremittingly. For Powell, as for Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s literary alter ego, the artist remains a “tranquil watcher of the scenes before him”; it is the novelist’s job to watch and to study rather to be watched and studied. As Powell noted in a diary entry of March 8, 1963, “I realize I have no yen for any experience (even a triumph) that blocks observation, when I am the observed instead of the observer” (453). Writing to Gerald Murphy, purportedly about his sister and her good friend, Esther Murphy, Powell wrote, “Some people don’t want to be the action—they really want to be spectator” (L. Cohen, 135), revealing more about herself, perhaps, than about her friend.

Instead of putting on airs or lusting after fame, Powell quite simply, as Page says, “lived to write” (Diaries, 1). It was true: she rarely felt comfortable without at least one, or more often several, sizable writing projects underway at a time. In a letter of August 4, 1940, in the space of one small paragraph, she wrote of the many genres in which she was working simultaneously: “I have been frantically finishing and reading proofs on my novel Angels on Toast which is coming out next month so my theatrical itch has been under control. I do have a half-idea for a new play but am trying to hold its head under water until I get some short stories done” (Letters, 109).

To attempt to understand these fevered undertakings, one should note that Powell found solace and sanity in writing and felt especially lost whenever working on anything but a novel, the genre that would calm her “hysterics” and give them a place to exist “instead of rioting all over my person” (Diaries, 90). For Powell, “the novel is my normal breath . . . my lawful married mate” (69). If writing was her sanity and her solace, she found it also a grueling task: one diary entry says simply, “Wonderful day—murderous hard work but results” (427). Writing was the only activity she knew of that would help keep her demons at bay. Frances Keene,⁴⁶ who had met the novelist in the 1950s, understood that writing for Powell “was the bulwark against the chaos and tragedy of her life” (Bio, 266). Powell’s diary entry of February 3, 1936, for example, records the following account of trying to write in the presence of her fourteen-year-old son:

This is the longest period of Jojo being completely hopeless. I can scarcely remember any time since fall that he has put through a calm normal day. He requires the most intense control, for from morning to night he bursts in, plants himself before me and shouts meaningless sentences over and over. (113)

Free time was a precious commodity, even though Powell and her husband, about three years after Jojo’s birth, had hired a day nurse, Louise Lee, to come in to tend to the boy. Lee would remain with the family for thirty-three years, until a stroke prevented her from continuing. The arrangement worked out well for all concerned: Jojo was relatively content in her care, Gousha felt less burdened, and Powell gained a few hours of freedom each day that enabled her to go elsewhere to write. Before she was married, the young author had often escaped the noise of the boardinghouse in which she lived to write in comparative solitude in Central Park; now she chose the children’s room of the New York Public Library at Forty-Second Street, because “they have those low tables in there that are just the right height for me. And it is always quiet in the children’s room. Children aren’t allowed there, so far as I know” she quipped (Van Gelder, “Some Difficulties,” 102).⁴⁷ Writer Hope Hale Davis,⁴⁸ who like Powell had published short pieces in Snappy Stories⁴⁹ (Davis, 70), recalled in an essay requested by Steerforth shortly before her death often seeing the young author crouched over the small tables hard at work, but rarely interrupting her, knowing that for Powell “every undisturbed moment” had to count (Bio, 52).

Later, when she and her family had moved to an apartment near University Place, Powell would often escape to the relative peace of the rooftop to write. Fleur Cowles, associate editor at Look and, later, founder and editor of Flair magazine,⁵⁰ remembers the author sitting up there writing all day, coming out only at night “to take a quizzical look at what’s going on” (5).

Dedicated to her work, Powell took in nightlife as much for observation and camaraderie as for entertainment, though surely she enjoyed her evenings on the town. Matthew Josephson wrote that in the café of the Hotel Lafayette, formerly located at University Place and Ninth Street, Powell “set up a little café society of her own . . . where she had people laughing with her for more than thirty years” (19) until the hotel was razed to make way for apartment buildings. Dos Passos biographer Virginia Spencer Carr writes similarly that Powell’s “ear was privy to almost every literary and theatrical grapevine” holding “forth at a corner table” there (283). Another favorite haunt was the nearby Hotel Brevoort, owned, like the Lafayette, by Raymond Orteig;⁵¹ the Brevoort, at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, had been in existence since 1854, the Lafayette since the 1870s. The little society who would meet at the stylish Lafayette café consisted not only of Powell’s many literary friends, but also of “theatre people and some notable artists of the American school, such as Niles Spencer,⁵² Stuart Davis,⁵³ and Reginald Marsh,⁵⁴ as well as assorted Bohemians and tipplers” (Josephson, 20)—and it did far more than keep people laughing: it provided Powell a never-ending supply of material for her writings and a convenient place to meet and consult with other artists. But after the gaiety of her evenings at the Lafayette, the equally well-loved Brevoort, or elsewhere in the city, Powell would always return home to the troubles awaiting her there.

She rarely longed to escape from New York, however. From the time she arrived in Manhattan until her death, she would almost always hate to leave her adopted home. When her father suffered a stroke in July 1926, Powell returned to Ohio but wrote, “I was just sick as we pulled away from NY. I don’t see how I could be happy anyplace else” (Letters, 64).⁵⁵ Her husband would later report that Dawn was never happy away from the city “until she smells the sidewalks of New York once again” (Bio, 275). In her last novel, The Golden Spur, an artist character “was always so glad to get back to Manhattan . . . that he started walking as soon as he hit the beloved pavements so as to get the empty, clean smell of the country sunshine out of his system and let God’s own dirt back in” (83). Like the character, Powell always “hated going to the country, she used to say, and could not breathe well until she had returned to the polluted air of New York” (Josephson, 48). She did return to Ohio a few more times after her father’s death, once in the spring of 1940, having accepted an invitation from her alma mater to speak at a college assembly. Of her doings in New York since her graduation, she said with characteristic wit and modesty, “I did publicity work and book reviewing, I married and now have a son and a player piano” (Farnham, 3). Of course by then she had done much more than some “publicity work and book reviewing”: by 1940 she had written and published nine novels, to say nothing of the many other pieces she had produced.

Other trips from Manhattan served to make her miss it all the more; a jacket blurb on the first edition of her Sunday, Monday and Always quotes her as saying, “The past winter spent in Paris has only increased my passion for New York. I explore it endlessly. The fact that it is getting more and more bedlamish, dirtier, more dangerous, and more impossible seems to heighten my foolish infatuation with it.” She answered friends who questioned her distaste for traveling away from the city, “There was no place on earth I wouldn’t go if I lived anyplace but New York” (Diaries, 302). Why should she leave New York? she would ask. Though she would always consider herself a “permanent visitor” to Manhattan, she genuinely believed she belonged nowhere else. As Richard Lingeman writes, “She was the classic New Yorker from somewhere else . . . a self-styled ‘permanent visitor’ who observed the natives with the sophistication of an insider and the wide-eyed innocence of an eternal small-towner” (40). Or as Wilson said of Powell in a letter to Alfred Kazin, who had written a piece about New York transplants from the Midwest for Harper’s, she “is the perfect example of the Westerner coming to New York and becoming a New Yorker, but observing it with the eye of someone who has come to it from outside” (Letters on Literature, 699).⁵⁶

And nowhere else could she write as skillfully, though it was a difficult balancing act to shift from the small and large tragedies of her daily life to the comic sensibility of the satire she wrote. The balancing act became particularly difficult in later decades: on Christmas Day 1957, Powell wrote of Gousha’s imminent “retirement” from the advertising agency, to occur in January of the next year, and bemoaned the fact that he would no longer be drawing a salary (Diaries, 378). By then nurse Louise Lee had died, and their finances were now far too depressed for them to afford help anyway. Soon enough, Powell would begin spending several years tending to Joe as he lay dying of cancer.

Her last novel, the almost universally lauded The Golden Spur, was published in 1962, the same year that her husband died, despite her having been “so harassed with a dozen piddling things” (Letters, 295). While caring for Joe, she complained in a petulant letter to her sister Phyllis: “I have to do EVERYTHING. Get up, cook, wash dishes, make beds, rush to get chapter ready and then take off for two o’clock appointment uptown, rush back and do book review for Post, rush to deliver THAT myself downtown, back to pick up stuff for supper, swig a drink and fall asleep” (295).

Even when she herself was suffering from cancer, she continued reading and reviewing the latest publications. In her last year she contributed a “jacket valentine” to the newest novel of fellow writer and editor friend Morris Philipson (Poore, “Young,” 29),⁵⁷ provided commentary for the Washington Post on Joseph Mitchell’s new publication, Joe Gould’s Secret,⁵⁸ and reviewed novels for the New York Post. At the same time she continued working on an unfinished play, The Brooklyn Widow; a fragmentary novel, Summer Rose; and even an incomplete children’s book about cats, called Yow (Bio, 223, 307). In the same year she published her essay about her first date with Joe, “Staten Island, I Love You,” and gave what is the only surviving taped interview we know of to a young reporter who had no idea that she was dying. “She offered me whisky,” he wrote, “but would herself drink only ice water: later I learned that she was dying of stomach cancer, a fact no word, no inflection revealed” (Hethmon, “Memories,” 40). Friends hovered about to comfort her in her last weeks. Matthew Josephson reported that “whereas she had been made terribly insecure by the want of love in her childhood, she did not lack for it at the end” (50). Hannah Green and Jacqueline Miller Rice cared for her daily, and even “the very aged Coburn Gilman now made heroic efforts to curb his drinking habits and attended her at her bedside every night like a nurse” (50).⁵⁹

The final entry in her Diaries appeared on September 30 (477); the last letter she is known to have written is dated October 22 (Letters, 350–51). That final letter, written to her beloved cousin John Franklin “Jack” Sherman, to whom Page almost always refers as “one of the world’s great gentlemen,” expresses Powell’s wonder at not being able to “even dodder to the living room without difficulty—let alone nip out into the gay world” of Manhattan (350). As painful as that realization must have been to her, she nevertheless did not let on, refusing to sound morose in this last letter she would write.⁶⁰

On November 14, 1965, just two weeks shy of her sixty-ninth birthday, Dawn Powell died at St. Luke’s,⁶¹ the same hospital where she had given birth to her only child so many years before. She left her eyes to New York’s Eye Bank and the rest of her body to Cornell Medical Center. Her final remains were later taken to Potter’s Field on Hart Island, where they were interred in a mass pauper’s grave bearing no name.⁶²

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Matthew Josephson said I was the wittiest woman in New York. Impossible!

—Diaries, 34

Powell certainly enjoyed some successes; she was also admired by many of the top writers, artists, and critics of the day and knew many notables who resided in or visited New York while she lived there. Although she never made the bestseller lists, “her books weren’t exactly neglected in her lifetime; par for her was a sale of around 5000 copies” (Lingeman, 38). To some the very “personification of Manhattan” (Vidal, “Queen,” 25), Powell enjoyed close friendships, as we have seen, not only with Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Matthew Josephson but also with Malcolm Cowley, John Latouche,⁶³ Sara and Gerald Murphy, Malcolm Lowry, Dwight Fiske,⁶⁴ and her editor, Max Perkins, widely considered “the most distinguished editor in the book business” (Cowley, “Unshaken” II, 30). She was acquainted with many other noteworthies, among them Robert Benchley, Djuna Barnes,⁶⁵ e. e. cummings, Rex Stout, Sherwood Anderson, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, and Theodore Dreiser. Edmund Wilson, who had met Powell in 1933 and referred to her as “one of his only real friends” (Sixties, 64),⁶⁶ wrote in a New Yorker article of her “gift of comic invention and individual accent that make her books unlike all others” (“Dawn Powell,” 233). Ernest Hemingway, who called Powell his “favorite living writer” (Diaries, 226), told Lillian Ross that Powell “has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have [but] is not tear-stained” (Ross, 69–70). Malcolm Cowley in a 1963 Esquire piece spoke of his “lasting gratitude” for Powell’s works and for those of “one or two other women of the generation” but added rather presciently that those same women writers “have been less widely read than male contemporaries of no greater talent” (78). John Dos Passos, who always admired Powell’s work, admired the writer as well: in his autobiography, he named her “one of the wittiest and most dashingly courageous women I ever knew” (154). “Dos,” as she and all his other friends always called him, was proud that his friendship with Powell had lasted from their meeting in the 1920s until her death. A publisher friend said Powell had a “New York following that considered her in the class of Madame Recamier,⁶⁷ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Dorothy Parker” (Crichton, 84). She was famous enough that her name sometimes appeared in gossip columns and in such places as the New York Times’ “Books and Authors” feature, which on September 28, 1930, offered readers this curious tidbit:

Dawn Powell, whose novel of an Ohio boomtown, Dance Night, is to be published October 10 by Farrar and Rinehart, is becoming known in literary circles as a clever entertainer. One of her best stunts is to give an imitation of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson,⁶⁸ a cannibal, a cannibal’s wife, a wounded lion, three dead elephants, and a movie camera. The elephants, we presume, are silent, as in rigor mortis. (BR8)

Evidently her antics at some party or other had drawn sufficient attention to find their way into the Times. Her name also appeared in such columns as Frank Sullivan’s annual New Yorker Christmas poem, “Greetings, Friends!” in which he would mention various celebrities of the days whose names were recognizable to his readers (Sullivan, 27),⁶⁹ and in a silly poem attributed to one Walgrove Snood in reviewer Charles Poore’s “Books of the Times” column of December 4, 1932 (39). Clearly, Dawn Powell had before long achieved more than a little renown in her adopted city.

As we have noted, she was uncomfortable playing up to reviewers and preferred the role of observer; she was similarly uncomfortable with the adulation of fans, when she did come upon them. Charles Norman recounted one memorable encounter Powell had with an admirer: “At a party I gave on Perry Street,” he wrote, “there was a woman who sat on the floor. Dawn was in a chair yards away from her, but little by little the woman came closer, crawling with a glass in her hand, and looking up admiringly at Dawn. Soon she was beside Dawn, who jumped up. ‘I didn’t want a lapful of ears,’ she told me” (Poets, 53). As always, Powell remained uneasy in the spotlight.

. . .

If critics today almost uniformly sing Powell’s praises, many well-known commentators of her day did so as well. J. B. Priestley, who said he “never misses anything Dawn Powell writes” (Bio, 246), saw in her work “an admirable mixture, not often found, of humour, genuine sentiment (born of compassion), and very shrewd and sharp satire” (“Dawn Powell”). Diana Trilling famously wrote that “Miss Powell, one of the wittiest women around, suggests the answer to the old question, ‘Who really makes the jokes that Dorothy Parker gets the credit for?’” (“Four Recent Novels,” 243). Powell may have approved of Trilling’s comment, even though her carefully constructed novels and Parker’s slick one-liners had little in common.

The Second Novel as First . . .

Despite Powell’s distaste for her first novel, Whither, the book earned some fairly positive notices on its release. The author herself so firmly disliked it that she thereafter always disavowed it, saying, in the entry she wrote for Twentieth-Century Authors, that she “preferred to let the error be forgotten” (1123). Thirty-five years after the publication of Whither, when Hannah Green⁷⁰ found a copy in a secondhand bookstore, Powell was not at all pleased (Diaries, 4). Still, four noteworthy publications—the New York Times, the Literary Review, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Boston Evening Transcript—considered it important enough to merit reviews in their pages. Friend and the New York Evening Post’s Charles Norman wrote that “Whither is a much finer conception of the jazz age than even [ John Howard Lawson’s] Processional is.⁷¹ There is an ironic, tender mockery in Miss Powell’s book, and a delicate, refreshingly humorous satire. I laughed aloud over many paragraphs. For escape from the heavy, all-observing (and all-recording) popular novels, I recommend Whither” (“Jazz,” 5).⁷² Two days after Norman’s piece appeared, Powell recorded in her diary, “Macy’s, Brentano’s, and Womrath begin to move Whither as a result of Charles’ review. Things look brighter” (5).

For a time Powell held out hope for the novel, though she was disappointed to find that a commentary soon to follow in the Saturday Review of Literature was less positive:

. . . While the author writes with earnestness, and evident sincerity and produces a thoroughly readable story, the book is neither searching in its insight into character, nor conspicuous as a study of life. The plot is thoroughly conventional in texture and the ending departs not at all from the usual, and if there be anything to distinguish the book it is a certain freshness with which the author writes and a certain engaging air of being deeply and seriously concerned about her characters and their lives. (694)

Though by no means a rave, the review did capture one of the hallmarks of Powell’s writings that critics would thereafter comment upon, for better or worse: her empathy for her characters, no matter how difficult, unlikable, or troubled they were.

Another contemporary reviewer, one S.L.R. writing in the Boston Evening Transcript, found much to like about the novel:

Sophistication and good humor are not usually associated, yet Mrs. [sic] Powell has managed to make them boon companions for three-hundred pages. Whither is a satire upon New York’s great army of Discontent—these thousands of girls who go to the city from Great Harrington, or Moline, or Hoosack Corners for their “great opportunity” which, because they are never willing to work up to it, never arrives. And so the years pass, waiting for Ethel Barrymore to die or the idea for the greatest novel of the decade to happen along. (5)

The New York Times review was partially positive as well, maintaining that the book had “real value” in its depiction of the struggle writers too often face between security and artistry, and in its “deft and lively characterizations” (“New York Adventures,” 19). But light sales and her own evaluation of the novel convinced her that the book was a failure.

Powell’s hometown Ohio paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also spilled a few lines of ink on Whither,⁷³ though reviewer Ted Robinson was not impressed:

For the romantically inclined sweet young things who will “do” their two weeks at the sundry seasides and shadynooks this summer and who demand “snappy”⁷⁴ fiction in which young or youngish heroines, “living their own lives,” brusquely choose their mates without consulting the brutes, or who feverishly carve out careers—letting the chips fall where they may—here is some new fiction of that sort. (9)

The first novel he mentions “of that sort” is Whither, which he calls simply “The romance of a small-town girl in New York’s Bohemia” (9). Books he includes alongside Powell’s are the rather undistinguished-sounding titles Last Year’s Nest⁷⁵ and Singing Waters,⁷⁶ among others. Whither, too, is a none-too-impressive title; in fact, many of Powell’s titles are less than intriguing.

For years the novelist would claim that her second publication, the Ohio novel She Walks in Beauty, was her first (Diaries, 12), much like Willa Cather before her, who admitted in “My First Novels (There Were Two)” having done the same thing. In 1943, eighteen years after the publication of Whither, in a brief autobiography to be included with the short story “You Should Have Brought Your Mink” in Story Magazine, Powell still refused to acknowledge Whither as her first novel:

My mother’s people, the Shermans, have lived [in Ohio] for five generations around Morrow County. This makes every person north of Columbus my cousin. Graduated from Lake Erie College. Did publicity and magazine writing in New York. First novel, She Walks in Beauty, appeared in 1938, and after that came The Bride’s House, Dance Night, Tenth Moon, Story of a Country Boy, all stories of a changing Ohio . . . and the last one published last August A Time To Be Born. Have contributed to various magazines, New Yorker, etc., and have done some work for the theatre. Have one husband, Joseph Gousha, and one son, Joseph, Jr., age 18. (103)

The author was so harsh in her assessment of Whither that many of today’s reviewers follow her lead and rarely mention it.⁷⁷ Anne T. Keene, however, did scare up a copy and included it in her essay in Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books. She wrote that “what became the classic elements of Dawn Powell’s work were in evidence from the outset” (232). The book is now available on a print-on-demand basis on Amazon.com, a fact that would surely horrify Powell.

Many of Powell’s next publications would be fairly well received; in fact, as Page says, the critical “neglect of Powell during her own lifetime has been overstated” (At Her Best, xvi). The Ohio works were often praised for their lyricism, realism, and believability: She Walks in Beauty, the first Ohio novel, was called, on its 1928 release, “very well written” by the Saturday Review, its characters “striking and complete” (869). The Bride’s House, published in 1929, “a strong, direct, and seemingly very intimate book about a woman torn between affection for her husband and passion for a dashing and mysterious stranger” (Bio, 66), received some positive critical attention, including this line from the New York Times: “A striking story, macabre in its intensity, [the author] painting her characters with a remarkable sureness and precision” (Bio, 90). Her fourth novel, 1930’s Dance Night, always one of Powell’s favorites of the Ohio books, received some encouraging commentary, though for such a fine piece not nearly as much as it should have.⁷⁸ In one of the few positive notices it received, an unnamed New York Times commentator appreciated its “unforgettably real people drawn with an unerring instinct for characterization” (Bio, 115), but others faulted what they considered her unsavory characters and contrived ending. The next work, 1932’s Tenth Moon (which Powell had titled Come Back to Sorrento) was lauded by Harold Stearns in the Sunday Tribune for its “fusing of the new stream-of-consciousness school and the directly realistic” (Diaries, 53); another reviewer of the same novel, Powell happily recorded, likened it to “the sound of a flute heard across water at twilight, like a lark at sunrise” (Diaries, 54).⁷⁹

A handful of her short stories received some recognition: “Such a Pretty Day” was included in the New Yorker’s “pretty swell garland of reading” (Poore, “Books: Short Stories”), the 1940 anthology of sixty-eight of the best short stories it had published in its first fifteen years, placing Powell in the company of John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, Sherwood Anderson (to whom John Updike likened her) and Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara and James Thurber. The story would become so well known that Powell more than a decade later would complain that “somebody is always saying, ‘Miss Powell, did you write anything besides that New Yorker short story “Such a Pretty Day”?’” (Letters, 204). On the 1952 appearance of her collection of short fiction, Sunday, Monday and Always, one reviewer said that Powell’s “observation is merciless, her style a marvel of economy, her pen double-edged” (Nerber, 5); another reviewer, William Peden, called it “a welcome rarity in today’s book world, a volume of humorous short stories” that are “deftly and expertly put together” (10).⁸⁰

. . .

When more than a decade after Whither was published and Powell again began setting her novels in New York, critics sometimes found her a skilled portraitist and a gifted satirist. Charles Poore, in 1940 reviewing the newly released Angels on Toast, found it not only “hilarious” and “blistering” but “warmhearted and yet singularly penetrating” (“Diversity,” 19). Similarly, Alice Morris, a contemporary of the author’s, said of another Powell novel written in that decade,

If the art of satire at Miss Powell’s hands is less baleful, less knife-edged and glittering than when Mr. Evelyn Waugh puts his hand to it, it is equally relevant, and more humane. In The Locusts Have No King, Miss Powell pins down her locusts—some New York barflies, bigwigs and gadabouts—with drastic precision, but never without pity. She laughs at them, but never laughs against them. . . . The combination of a waspish sense of satire with a human sense of pathos results in a novel that is highly entertaining and curiously touching. (1)

Comparisons with Waugh would surface again; Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker wrote that “Dawn Powell’s novels are among the most amusing being written, and in this respect quite on a level with those of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark. . . . Miss Powell’s books are more than merely funny; they are full of psychological insights that are at once sympathetic and cynical” (“Dawn Powell,” 236).

Another contemporary of the author’s, also reviewing The Locusts Have No King, spoke of “the justice of Miss Powell’s satire . . . the human honesty of her insights, [and] her wit . . .” all of which make for “an accomplished and engaging novel” (A. Morris, 2). Such praise met many others of her books as well. The Wicked Pavilion, when released in 1954, was even “given pride of place on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Book Review” (Page, Intro At Her Best, xvi).

Yet Powell suffered many bitter professional disappointments; as Vidal says, she endured a “lifetime of near misses” (“Queen,” 23). In her own day, as in this, she was never as well known or as widely read as many believe she deserved to be. Often critics contemporary to Powell wrote mixed reviews of her novels and plays, praising her wit, intelligence, and skill while railing at her so-called cynicism. In her diary Powell responded to the charge: “The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism’” (Diaries, 273). Reviewers too often faulted not her characterizations but, curiously, her characters, calling them unsavory, objectionable, hardly worthy of the reader’s notice. It was the complaint that most exasperated Powell; one sees her over and over again in her diaries wrestling with it, at one time trying to understand the charge, at another to respond to it.

I have always been fond of drama critics . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know nothing about it.

—Noel Coward

The same sort of unfavorable commentary that greeted her novels met her first produced play, Big Night, which she had originally called The Party. It was a satire of the advertising industry that Powell wrote in response to her husband’s having been fired from his position in the late 1920s. Produced by the Group Theatre in 1933, the play, Group Theatre cofounder Harold Clurman remembered, had seemed “very funny” to the actors when first they read it (81); Wendy Smith, too, says that before the Group got hold of it, it was “a tough, bitingly funny drama” (81). A terrible disappointment, it closed after only nine performances. Director Robert “Bobby” Lewis recalled that of all those working at the Group Theatre, “nobody understood Dawn’s characters, her sophisticated dialogue, her wit” (Bio, 128). Sitting in on a rehearsal one afternoon, Powell quipped, “Isn’t that remarkable? . . . That was a funny line when I wrote it” (W. Smith, 115).

Clifford Odets, who recalled landing the bit part of a doorman in the play, spoke of Clurman’s plodding take on Powell’s piece:

It was astonishing how he could take this little comedy with its bitter undertone and relate it to all of American life. In fact, sometimes in rehearsal it became necessary to say, “Don’t try to act all of this solemn stuff, because this is after all a light comedy. Don’t load it all down with these significances. To the contrary, this has to be played as if it’s a series of cartoons in The New Yorker.” (Hethmon, “Days,” 190)

Clurman admitted that the Group had not known what they were doing when they staged the play (100), after which, he recalled, the press “ran screaming” from the performance, “like so many maiden aunts” (100).⁸¹ Richard Schickel, in his biography of Elia Kazan, wrote of the play that “Powell thought it was a comedy. The Group thought it was a waste of its idealism” (19). The biographer goes on to say that Group cofounder Cheryl Crawford, “who started directing it, and Clurman, who finished it, kept sobering it up, thus betraying what merits the play had. As Powell, a merry and shrewd social observer, put it, ‘The Group has put on a careful production with no knowledge whatever of the characters—as they might put on a picture of Siberian home life—made up bit by bit of exact details but [with] the actual realism of the whole missing’” (20).

Even though she recognized that the produced play had little to do with what she had written, Powell believed that the critics had roundly censured Big Night for being “too brutal, too real,” her characters faulted for being too seedy, too sordid (Letters, 285).⁸² Answering the critical complaints, Robert Benchley, “who adored Powell” (Guare, x), wrote in his New Yorker review of the comedy that other contemporary plays such as “Dinner at Eight⁸³ and Dangerous Corner⁸⁴ are about unpleasant people for the most part, but they wear evening clothes. Are we only to have high-class cads on our stage?” (26).⁸⁵ A drama critic for the New York Evening Post went so far as to call the play’s cast of characters a “tiresome” band of “odious little microbes” (Sexton, 3–4). Powell responded to the criticism in typically undaunted if defensive fashion:

At first I was dashed, then the accumulation of stupidity challenged me and even flattered me—to be attacked as a menace to the theater was the first real sign that I had a contribution to make there. It was like finding out you could hurt the elephant—the only defeat or failure is in being ignored or being told you have appeased it. In either case you are lost—just so much hay for the elephant. I was not hay; I was the barbed wire in it, and so I made far more impression. (Diaries, 62–63)

Not all the reviews were negative: Brooks Atkinson, reviewing for the New York Times, found a small thing or two to like in it, writing that the play possessed a “good theme for a drama of modern customs and amenities. Although Miss Powell has given at least two-thirds of her attention to the befuddled squalors of apartment dissipation, she is not unmindful of the tragic implications; and in one good scene in the third act she shapes them into concrete drama.” In the end, however, the critic found that “the wildness of the party runs away with the play” (n.p.).

Richard Lockbridge, theater reviewer for the New York Sun, was less fond of Big Night, calling it “a really venomous comedy” that “provides food for thought—and, on the part of all males, for wincing. Miss Powell does not care much for men, particularly for men employed as salesmen by advertising agencies, particularly for men who exploit their wives in an effort to promote business” (16). A curious statement, that last: why would any woman “care much” for men who would exploit their wives for business? The reviewer adds, “But the venom of the author’s distaste for all these singularly distasteful persons makes it interesting; gives it a bite and a refreshing air of being about something” (16). That “being about something” may have had more to do with the Group than with Powell.

A recently unearthed copy of the playbill for Powell’s first produced play quoted a review by well-respected theater critic and editor Barrett H. Clark: “The cruelty of what Dawn Powell writes is not an author’s cruelty, it is the facts as she sees and feels them. Perceiving accurately what goes on about her, she dramatizes it without sentimentality, and with something of the brutality of Restoration comedy” (14). These lines must have pleased Powell, who admired Barrett and had heard him lecture at Lake Erie while she was enrolled there. It was Barrett who assisted Powell in getting the Group Theatre to take on the play (Bio, 127).

A final word appeared in the New York World-Telegram. More a summary than a review, the unsigned piece was likely the work of Heywood Broun, that paper’s drama critic at the time. Powell recounts his having joined her dinner party at Tony’s restaurant when Big Night closed (Diaries, 63).

Despite the few kind and even noncommittal words the play received, it was an abject failure, and Powell knew it. She would write in her diary that “I learned out of the attacks on my play more of what I could do, what I was prepared to fight for in my plays, and what I must improve, than in any classroom acceptance of fairly good stuff” (82). Never one to accept defeat, within four months of its pillorying in the press she would complete her second play, 1934’s Jig Saw, the only one of her plays to be published in her lifetime. One commentator notes that in it Powell’s “wit and observation [remained] intact, her topsy-turvy sense of truth and falsehood sparkling from every page. The acute, piercing observations that make her New York novels such madcap wonders are prefigured brilliantly in Jig Saw” (Sexton, 7). The play concerns, among other things, empty-headed materialistic women and, as usual, a sprightly cast of ne’er-do-wells.

In 2001, the Yale Repertory Theatre produced the comedy for the first time in nearly seventy years and for the first time in its original rendering. In November and December 2012, the ReGroup also restaged the play as closely as possible to the way Powell had wanted it: they even scared up her notes from the original production, a copy of which Allie Mulholland generously provided me.

. . .

Jig Saw, produced by the Theatre Guild,⁸⁶ was more favorably received than its predecessor Big Night had been, but then what play wasn’t? Roy S. Waldau judges that the play, which starred Spring Byington, Earnest Truex, and Cora Witherspoon, “was barely distinguishable from the majority of commercial entertainments that Broadway provides yearly” (187), but that lukewarm appraisal is a far cry from the lambasting that Big Night had received. Waldau goes on to cite a somewhat favorable Brooks Atkinson review that appeared in the New York Times immediately after the play opened:

Miss Powell has learned her craft by close attention to the accepted patterns. She knows when to be daring, when to be perverse, what foibles are most risible and how to twist lines into laughs. . . . Jig Saw may be dull under the surface, but it is bright on top, where facile humors are displayed to best advantage. (187)

Though the review is by no means a rave, neither is it a pan. Powell may have come to learn stagecraft better than she had known it previously, or she had succumbed to convention more thoroughly by that time, and she was fortunate to have left the Group Theatre. Closing after forty-nine performances, this second stage effort was a “modest” little achievement (Sheehy, 126). Jig Saw, in all its “extra-dry urbanity,” was “nearly Big Night’s counterpoint in every way,” quite different in “tone . . . temperament, [and] tactics” from “the scrappy, urgent comedy of Big Night” (Sheehy, 126).

Years after that production of Jig Saw, sounding frustrated with her failure at writing for the stage, Powell had a thing or two to say, whether fairly or no, about theater critics: “The fault it not that they know little about drama, it’s that they know so little else. ‘Life-like’ is a word they use for a form of life they have seen sufficiently on the stage for it to seem normal to them” (Diaries, 191). Soon enough, however, the author realized that the novel was her forte.

. . .

By 1936 she had become accustomed to hearing the same line of criticism of her novels that she had heard about her first play. For example, awaiting the publication of that year’s Turn, Magic Wheel, she feared that the book would “probably . . . annoy people as ‘Big Night’ did, according to the way Carol⁸⁷ and Halliday⁸⁸ react. . . . ‘Unpleasant, dreadful people’—what they always say when I have congratulated myself on capturing people who need no dressing up or prettifying to be real” (Diaries, 112). Although the novel earned many glowing notices, it received its share of complaints, too. Edith H. Walton, in an otherwise positive review, wrote that “Amusing and witty as it is, this tale of publishers and writers, of night-club addicts and the padded rich, is not precisely comfortable to read” (“Ironic,” 7).

Worse criticism awaited her second (or third, if we count Whither) New York novel, The Happy Island, published in 1938. In the New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” column, an unsigned review chided the author for choosing to write about the “doings of a pretty worthless and ornery lot of people,” even though she “serves it all up with a dash of wit” (94). Still another complained of the “dimwitted” “playboys and playgirls who cavort through its pages” (Walton, “Café,” 7). In a final insult, William Soskin, of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that Powell seemed to dislike people so much that “the smell of men and women is a stench in her nostrils” (3).⁸⁹ Soskin clearly had missed Powell’s response, in the very novel he was reviewing, to this exact sort of criticism: The Happy Island’s playwright character, Jefferson Abbott, newly transplanted to New York from a small town in Ohio, has been savagely attacked by the critics as full of “brutality and bitterness,” a despiser of humankind, to which he replies, “I never set out to be a literary Elsa Schiaparelli, dressing up human nature to hide its humps” (118). These words echo Powell’s own response to the familiar charge, but they somehow missed the reviewer.

A less favorable commentary on Angels on Toast than Charles Poore’s, above, found the Chicago/New York novel “cleverly surprising” and Powell a writer with an “exceptionally keen ear for dialogue,” but ultimately faulted the writer for creating “characters who are pretty hopeless because nothing much worth hoping for ever caught their attention” (Van Gelder, “Business,” 6).

A few years later, Powell’s next novel, A Time to Be Born, was called “another of her very enjoyable books about very disagreeable people” (Sherman, 6). Why this line of criticism, one wonders? Clearly O’Neill⁹⁰ was writing much more sordid characters than Powell was, as were Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dreiser, and other contemporary American playwrights and novelists. It was almost becoming a mantra, as if each reviewer were repeating what each had said before and echoing what each was saying now. As Heather Joslyn says, Powell “was criticized in her time (and still is by some ’90s readers) for her propensity for ‘unpleasant’ characters, but they’re not so much unpleasant as unvarnished. Her small-town portraits owe more to Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Her big-city swells don’t just utter precious witticisms between sips of martini; they exploit each other, bed-hop, and social-climb” (“Bright”).

Even Diana Trilling, who usually championed Powell’s novels, criticized the writer of The Locusts Have No King for “the insignificance of the human beings upon which she directs her excellent intelligence” (“Fiction in Review,” 611). Powell responded in her diary to the familiar complaint: “Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn’t visit my folks, they’d visit theirs” (271). Teachout said of the comment, “Trilling is nobody’s fool, but she went to see the wrong family” (“Far,” 6).

Forty years after Trilling’s review first appeared, it annoyed Gore Vidal, who wrote,

Trilling does acknowledge the formidable intelligence, but because Powell does not deal with morally complex people (full professors at Columbia in mid-journey?),⁹¹ “the novel as a whole fails to sustain the excitement promised by its best moments.” Apparently to be serious a novel must be about very serious—even solemn—people rendered in a very solemn—even serious—manner. (“American,” 2)

Always considering herself a “serious novelist,” Powell wrote in her diary that her habit was simply “telling the truth. It’s very odd that [critics] should say you hate people because you don’t prettify them. But I like them the way they are, not gussied up for company” (213). If what she did was satire, as her reviewers often said, then why fault her for telling the truth? One of her favorite works, which she read over and over again, was Frances Trollope’s 1832 travel memoir Domestic Manners of the Americans.⁹² She defended Mrs. Trollope’s initially controversial book largely on the grounds that it told the truth of the new country rather than sugar-coat it, precisely what Powell always aimed to do.

As for her own works being labeled satires, she famously wrote, “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out” (Diaries, 119). Though she wrote again and again of her unhappiness with the critical indictment that too often was leveled at her, she did not answer the charges publicly, preferring to confine her feelings to her diaries, just as she confined her personal troubles there.

By the 1940s the author had begun to believe that she was writing in “an age that Can’t Take It”; it seemed to her that readers and critics alike were always crying “Where’s our Story Book? . . . Where are our Story Book people?” (Diaries, 188). For Powell, the public was uncomfortable with her clear eye and sharp wit; for them, as J. B. Priestley wrote, her work was more like “asperges vinaigrettes [than] a chocolate sundae” (Bio, 246).⁹³ Again in her diaries, Dawn Powell sought to explain her technique:

I merely add a dimension to a character, a dimension which gives the person substance and life but which readers often mistake for malice. For instance, take the funeral of a much-loved family woman, a mother. Treating this romantically, one writes only of the sadness in the people’s hearts, their woe, their sense of deprivation, their remembrance of her. This is true, but it is not as true as I would do it, with their private bickers over the will . . . as they all gorge themselves at the funeral meals, as the visiting sisters exchange recipes . . . as pet vanities emerge.

Yet in giving this picture, with no malice in mind, no desire to show the grievers up as villains, no wish more than to give people their full statures, one would be accused of “satire,” of “cynicism,” instead of looking without blinders, blocks, ear mufflers, gags, at life. (118–19)

Powell believed that her critics did not understand satire when they spoke of it; instead, she said, they were actually speaking of “whimsy” (Diaries, 215). And despite the fact that her reviewers too often seemed not to “get it,” she came to be proud to be writing satire. In a diary entry of 1943 she wrote that “satire [is] social history,” that “the only record of a civilization is satire,” especially works like Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, which “gives a completely invaluable record of Paris, its face and its soul, its manners and its talk of 1840” (215) and, again, works like Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners. Powell created an important record of small-town Ohio during the early years of the twentieth century, and of New York in the first half of the same century. As Carleen M. Loper notes, “Following her wit, the second great gift Dawn Powell left us was her sense of place. If one is feeling nostalgic for an America that no longer exists, for a Greenwich Village of the ’30s and ’40s, or a mill town in the Midwest, one need look no further than the pages of her novels or diaries” (4).

The novelist wrote of what she observed and what she knew. Possessed of a talent for psychological insight, she was able to capture the inner workings of the minds of the people she was acquainted with, those she observed every day on the streets and in the cafés of the Village, those she had met and lived with in the remote farming towns and railroad junctions of Ohio. She knew about the small-town midwestern nobody and his lofty dreams, his disappointments, his despair. She understood the strivers and the seekers, the liars and the phonies, the rogues and the scoundrels who populated the rat-race worlds of advertising and publishing, theaters and saloons, art and commerce, and so she chose to write about them, just as they were. These characters populate her fiction with an authenticity that put some readers off; perhaps the fact that she presented them so realistically made some of her readers and critics perceive flaws in themselves. Whenever editors asked that she prettify her characters, she would tell them that they did not need to be prettified; still, their response always was, “But yes, . . . they do; before the reader will identify himself, he must be changed so that no one else will recognize him” (Diaries, 112). But, for the author, what was the point in writing the unrecognizable? She wanted to write the truth of her characters, the truth as she found it. Regardless of the social status, gender, moral practices, or professions of her characters, Powell longed for reviewers to respond to what she had put on the page or the stage, not to what they wished to see there.

The familiar charge never strayed far from her mind. Even as late as 1956 she recorded a humorous diary entry entitled “The Secret of My Failure.” While other authors, she said, would write something like “‘Last time Gary saw Cindy she was a gawky child; now she was a beautiful woman . . .’ I can’t help writing ‘Last time Fatso saw Myrt she was a desirable woman; now she was an old bag . . .’” (356). She would not romanticize the truth. “I believe true wit should break a wise man’s heart,” she once said. “It should strike at the exact point of weakness and it should scar. It should rest on a pillar of truth, . . . The truth is not so shameful that it cannot be recorded” (Josephson, 28). For Powell, writing was always about just that: telling the truth.

She finesses her way into your heart with fresh charm—[reading her] is like revisiting an old friend, or making a new one.

—Ann Geracimos, 1

In 1981, nearly two decades after Powell’s death, the first full-length study of her life and works was written. Judith Faye Pett, in her dissertation “Dawn Powell: Her Life and Fiction,” interpreted Powell more kindly than most of the novelist’s contemporaries did. Perhaps it is the distance of years and the changed attitudes of Pett’s generation that enabled her to perceive the compassion in the author’s portrayals as opposed to what had previously been perceived as vitriol, disapproval, and dislike. Pett recognized her “empathy, her sympathy for her characters” even while the novelist was simultaneously able to “see through or anticipate the results of their actions” (66). For Pett, Powell “accepts the world as it is” rather than seeking to change it. As Gail Pool wrote in 1990, Powell never made “life or people out to be any better than they are. Her great talent was for evoking so precisely what—in all their humor and sadness—they are” (20). In 1990, Michael Feingold explained that Powell’s “complexly acid vision was never wholly appreciated in her own time, perhaps because she reflected her time too accurately. Butterflies, even after they’re preserved and pinned, can’t be expected to wax enthusiastic about the woman with the net. How lucky the 1990s are that Powell’s multicolored collection . . . has reached the light again, in all its brilliant hues” (14). Reading Pett, Pool, Feingold, and the reviewers who follow them, one cannot help but think that Powell had been born several decades too soon.

A slightly earlier posthumous commentary on Powell, this one written in 1973 by her friend Matthew Josephson, spoke of the writer with an eye to posterity. “The good humorists dealing with the comedy of manners play a most useful part in helping us to see that which is real and that which is sham in our social behavior,” he wrote. “Casually, in a tone of levity, her books told the plain truth about the changing mores of the urban American during a long span of time extending from the 1920s through the 1950s” (19). It well may be that the upheaval of the times contributed to the discomfort that many Powell contemporaries felt as they read—or did not read—her novels.

More recent critics are generally delighted with Powell. Comparisons with Waugh persist: into the 1990s, the New York novels would be compared to his Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies (Feingold, 13); another recent commentator says, “Think of [Powell] as a homegrown Evelyn Waugh, with an added soupçon of Yankee asperity” (Marcus, 1). Joseph Coates writes, “Rediscovering a good but neglected writer is both exhilarating and depressing. Here is this terrific novelist, Dawn Powell, a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and more prolific than the two put together, who has left a whole shelf of funny, entertaining books that few had ever heard of before Vidal” (3).⁹⁴ Library Journal calls Powell “one of the great American women writers of the twentieth century [who] at her best is better than most, male or female” (60). Novelist, columnist, and art critic Philip Hensher, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, concurs: “Powell is a supremely deserving candidate for admission to the Library of America, a writer of consistent and startling pleasure, cruelty, and ingenuity. Next to her the celebrated wits of the Algonquin look self-conscious and willful, their exercises in pathos whiny and thin . . . Powell belongs on the shelf with the masters of the novel” (“Country,” 135). The ballyhoo, once again, had begun.

THE DAWN POWELL REVIVALS

For decades Dawn Powell was always on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion.

—Gore Vidal, “Dawn Powell, the American Writer,” 1⁹⁵

Two or even three Powell “revivals” have taken place in recent decades, the first precipitated by an editorial in the fall 1981 issue of the Antioch Review. Editor Robert S. Fogarty had asked several well-known writers to name a forgotten author who should be recommended to readers of the Review. Two of the five he questioned, Roger Angell (writer and stepson of E. B. White) and Gore Vidal, replied simply, “Dawn Powell.” In the brief interview that follows, Vidal said that Powell is “as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens” (400), high praise indeed—and, in fact, maybe praise too high to be easily swallowed.⁹⁶ Half a dozen years later, as we have seen, Vidal again lauded the writer, this time in a sustained commentary published in the New York Review of Books, which later appeared in the reissue of Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur. It is in this seminal essay that Vidal referred to Powell as “our best comic novelist” (L). He went on to say:

But despite the work of such cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been.⁹⁷ . . . In her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O’Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. (1–2)

James Wolcott tells of busily rescuing long-neglected Powell volumes from dusty shelves and mouse-infested back rooms just before Vidal wrote his essay, Wolcott’s aim being to “write a piece that would place Powell in her proper berth” (42). But then the Vidal piece appeared, and Wolcott, not having yet finished amassing his collection, knew that he had been trumped. In 1989 David Streitfeld of the Washington Post credited Vidal with almost single-handedly bringing Powell to our notice (before Tim Page came along), saying that, “if there’s no Dawn Powell revival soon, you won’t be able to blame Gore Vidal. He’s done everything except hawk her books on street corners” (X15). The Vidal essay aroused enough interest in Powell that by the early 1990s New York’s Yarrow Press had reissued the first of the two Powell novels it would release. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, in 1989 published three works in a Quality Paperback Book Club edition, Three by Dawn Powell, introduced by Vidal. He admitted that he felt “incredibly smug” and “proprietary” (“Queen,” 17) about these releases. One only wishes that he had written about Powell earlier; if he had, perhaps he would have rescued her all the sooner from her long existence as “a secret handshake among the chosen few” (Boston Globe, “Dawn Powell Has Arrived,” 3).

Though Powell’s reissued novels received fine notices upon their re-release, this first “revival” soon lost steam. According to Philip Hensher, writing in the Spectator in 2002, “Many of the best American writers,” among whom he includes Dawn Powell, “somehow ‘don’t count’” (“Groping,” 30). And for British reviewer Nick Rennison, the novelist “may well be the best-kept secret in twentieth-century American literature and the one most worth unlocking” (II, 1).

. . .

By the mid-1990s, the second revival had begun, this time thanks to Tim Page, who has not only sung Powell’s praises in many a locale, but who wrote the only published biography of the author, brought out a collection of her well-received diaries, and edited and issued her remarkable letters. Even before all this activity, Page was responsible for the 1994 collection Dawn Powell at Her Best, a hardcover volume of two of her novels,⁹⁸ several short stories, and an essay, along with a useful introduction. Page, as a newsman, knew that for this first reissue to receive any serious critical attention, it would have to be published in hardcover. The collection received so much favorable notice that at Page’s urging Vermont’s Steerforth Press later reissued twelve of Powell’s novels, a collection of her short stories, and four of her plays, all in paperback editions and all to much critical notice.

Terry Teachout, writing in 1995, summed up this next revival: “Every decade or so, somebody writes an essay about Dawn Powell, and a few hundred more people discover her work, and are grateful. And that’s it. Few American novelists have been so lavishly praised by so many high-powered critics to so little effect” (“Far,” 3). He added that Powell “remains today what she was a half-century ago: a fine and important writer adored by a handful of lucky readers and ignored by everyone else” (3). “If there is any justice,” he continued, “she will soon receive her due” (6).

A few years later, in a 1999 essay entitled “Big Lights, Big City: Dawn Powell and the Glory of Revival,” Heather Joslyn found Powell’s works noteworthy not only because of their sheer volume but because they were “both of and far ahead of her time.” She wrote:

Her body of novels form a continuing social history of the American Century’s first half, depicting how restless searchers left their flyspeck rural hometowns and flooded into their country’s big cities, how they reinvented themselves there, and how they inevitably re-created the gossipy insularity of the villages they’d escaped inside the foreboding concrete canyons of their new frontier. (“Bright”)

Following the Steerforth reissues, Page saw to it that The Library of America release nine of Powell’s novels in two volumes.⁹⁹ Lauren Weiner of the New Criterion, originally hesitant to believe that another “full-fledged Powell revival [was] in progress,” came by 1999 to see “the evidence piling up” and finally to “accept the idea,” adding that two of Powell’s novels, A Time to Be Born and The Locusts Have No King, “deserve to be on a short list of the best comic novels in American literature” (“Fruits,” 23). In a lengthy 2002 essay praising the novelist, Alice Tufel noted that this second revival “is a dream come true too late” (155).

But the revivals, short-lived or no, have made something of a lasting imprint. Today Powell’s reissued books are readily available in bookstores and on online auction sites, though most of the first editions, which once were to be found in used book stacks for as little as a quarter apiece,¹⁰⁰ have now been snatched up by collectors and are being offered at steep prices. Some of Powell’s novels may in fact be brought to the movie screen: filmmaker David Mamet is said to have purchased the film rights to two of them (Loper, 4), and award-winning filmmakers Ivy Meeropol and Mark Campbell completed a screenplay of The Happy Island, which they were in recent years said to be shopping around (“Ivy”).¹⁰¹ A decade ago Angelica Huston was working on bringing out a film based on a Powell book, and Julia Roberts has been said to have had some interest, but nothing has come of any of it.

To Charles McNulty, it seems that she “has been ‘rediscovered’ so many times that nearly every age tries to claim Powell as a contemporary” (2), while Michael Rogers calls her “the comeback kid” (“Golden,” 160). The Christian Science Monitor notes that the “compassionate and sharp-eyed” Powell “keeps turning up on the lists of the underrated” (“Great Reads”); and Erica Jong, who polled “250 or so distinguished writers and critics” to put together a women’s fiction list, found Powell ranked in the top 100 (35). The novelist is included in 2002’s Invisible Giants: 50 Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books, and Terry Teachout’s well-received 2004 collection of essays leads off with “Far from Ohio” in her praise.¹⁰² She is sometimes mentioned in the Sunday New York Times Book Review: to name a few occasions, in 2005 she appeared in Randy Cohen’s article “We’ll Map Manhattan” and in its follow-up article a month later. In the same publication, Thomas Mallon in 2008 regretfully referred to Powell and fellow New York writer Helene Hanff¹⁰³ as “sharp, gallant characters . . . women clinging to New York literary life, or its fringes, by their talented fingernails” (15). In a 2004 review of a new book—Boomtown, by Greg Williams—Chris Lehmann noted that, when Williams makes a certain point about New York City, readers “can almost see Dawn Powell nodding faintly in assent” (C.04), a comment placing Powell in the position of novel-writing authority on New York; another book reviewer called Gloria Emerson, the author of Loving Graham Greene, “a delicious cross between Dawn Powell and Martha Gellhorn”¹⁰⁴ (Russo, Review). A Maryland bookstore owner recently told me that late cartoonist and award-winning American Splendor screenwriter Harvey Pekar was an ardent Powell fan and collector. An article celebrating the 180th birthday of Ninth Street headlines Powell over all the other artists who have lived there, including such notables as Marianne Moore, Elinor Wylie, S. J. Perelman, Bret Harte, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many others (Loschiavo, 2). In another recent New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called Powell the Village’s “wittiest chronicler” (9), while for the Village Voice’s Toni Schlesinger, the very words “Greenwich Village” make her “think of Dawn Powell throwing one back” (2). Nick Dennison includes Powell’s A Time to Be Born in his two-part article, “Reading the City: Old New York.” The series, an exploration of novels that bring Manhattan to life, links her works with those of more famous novelists such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Steven Crane (I, 1–3); and Henry Roth, John Dos Passos, and Damon Runyon (II, 1–5). Ross Wetzsteon devotes a chapter to Powell in his book Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia;¹⁰⁵ and Alice Sparberg Alexiou, in her 2006 biography of Jane Jacobs, foe of Robert Moses and noted preservationist of city neighborhoods, includes Dawn Powell as a familiar Village “luminary” (22, and passim).

Powell’s name frequently turns up even when one is not expecting to find it: for example, perusing the “About Us” link on the Peccadillo Theater Company’s website, I stumbled upon this item: “Peccadillo concentrates on the era of the well-made play, a period of sparkling wit and sophistication in comedy as well as deepening realism in the drama. It encompasses such diverse and, sad to say, little-known American playwrights as Sidney Howard, Philip Barry, William Inge, Dawn Powell, and many, many more” (1). True to their word, the Peccadillo Theatre Company in March 2001 produced Powell’s 1934 comedy Jig Saw under the direction of Dan Wackerman, and a year later New York’s Sightlines Theatre Company also staged it. For Village Voice theater critic Jessica Winter, the play, this time staged as written, “hardly lacks for whiskey-lubricated one-liners” though it “evokes less the droll chamber music of Powell’s contemporary Noel Coward than the cacophony stirred by the recent revival of The Women.” Powell would detest being compared to Clare Boothe Luce, whom she famously satirized in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born. But these New York productions were not the first revivals of the play: in 2000, Los Angeles Classical Theatre Ensemble Antaeus staged it in a production directed by John Walcutt, and even before that, in 1997, it had been restaged at Long Island University (Parks, 1).

. . .

The Peccadillo also produced Talk of the Town, an original musical comedy about the Algonquin group; and The Ladies of the Corridor, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d’Usseau’s weepy 1953 drama (McNulty, 2). I ran across the following mention in a review of Broadway’s 2004 revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comedy Twentieth Century: “Just a footnote: you know, most urban literature of this time—by the likes of John O’Hara, Dawn Powell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker—was very, very hip. This play, with its snappy dialogue, modern thoughts about sex and adultery and cynicism about show business, could be set in 2004 instead of 1932 and no one would notice” (R. Friedman, “Anne,” 3). It seems as if, in theatre circles at least, Dawn Powell’s name had almost become a household word.

Extracts from Powell’s diaries appear in 2000’s The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, in Phillip Lopate’s Writing New York, and in Teresa Carpenter’s New York Diaries, 1609–2009. Seeing that Carpenter had included so much of Powell in her 2012 book, I wrote her to ask why. She replied,

I’m sometimes asked to pick my favorite diarists from this collection and I usually demur out of a sense of literary courtesy. But I’ll break ranks with courtesy in this instance to say that Dawn Powell is emphatically top-tier. She was a woman who knew so much sorrow—alcoholic husband, disabled son, personal struggles. . . . Yet in the end it’s her extraordinary resilience and vitality that make her diary entries so compelling. In her personal writings, sorrow is eclipsed by a constant stream of ideas for novels and stories all of which sparkle with wit and insight into the human condition. Her off-the-cuff vignettes of Greenwich Village, which she called her “creative oxygen,” are more vivid than photos, and her often ruthlessly spot-on portraits of New Yorkers are classics of the genre.

Though Powell has been named one of the “extraordinary diarists of our era” (Levinson, 107), more often of course she is acclaimed for her novels. Lewis M. Dabney, in his biography of Edmund Wilson, placed Powell among the ten novelists who “helped define the literary and intellectual life” of this country in the last century (6). The bookseller Powell’s Books, reviewing the Library of America’s issues, called her “a rediscovery of rare importance” (2), while the Library Journal noted that the collection placed her among our finest writers, where she belongs (Rogers, “Dawn Powell Novels,” 160). For New York Times critic A. O. Scott, Dawn Powell is “a writer we can no longer imagine ever having forgotten” (B10).

One can imagine her impatient response, “It’s about time!”—softened with a rueful laugh, of course.

—Margaret Carlin, 1¹⁰⁶

By 2000, Powell’s work had begun to appear in a few anthologies and some college course syllabi as well. Not only does Ross Wetzsteon’s Republic of Dreams include her, but she appears as a character in Vidal’s 2000 novel The Golden Age, in which the writer describes her as “a round little woman with squirrel-bright eyes” (284). Vidal called her last published work, The Golden Spur, one of his five favorite postwar novels (“True Gore,” 1–2). A course at the New School, called “Dawn Powell’s New York,” was offered by Professor Theresa Craig in the fall of 2003 (New School, 44); and her work has been included in a course called “Urban Myths and the American City” at Columbia University’s Barnard College. Powell friend and emeritus Professor William Peterson of Southampton College, Long Island University, who once taught at the novelist’s alma mater, together with Tim Page presented a symposium for the centennial of Powell’s birth at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University in 1996; and in 2006, the sesquicentennial of the founding of Lake Erie College, all freshman arrivals were given copies of My Home Is Far Away in celebration of its most famous alumna.

. . .

In its premiere performance, Powell’s Women at Four O’Clock, along with Jig Saw, Big Night, and “several dramatic adaptations of Powell’s short stories,” was staged by Sightlines Theatre Company, at the Seventy-Eighth Street Theatre Lab in New York, from January through March 2002 in a festival named “Permanent Visitor: A Festival Celebrating Dawn Powell in New York.” Musical Theatre Works staged an adaptation of Powell’s 1942 novel, A Time to Be Born (Horwitz, 45), written by Suzanne Myers (Redeemable, 1). And Walking down Broadway, another Powell drama never before produced, debuted at New York’s Mint Theatre in late 2005.

Literary tours of Powell’s remaining haunts and residences are conducted from time to time; and her effect on popular American culture has even reached 1980s and 1990s television: Seinfeld, the program once thought to be “too New York” by television audiences and producers alike (Boudreaux, 1), may in fact owe something to Ohio-born Powell. At least three episodes closely echo certain incidents in her Turn, Magic Wheel (71), The Happy Island (121), and The Golden Spur (passim). The novelist has been linked to other television programming: Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich calls Powell’s New York novel A Time to Be Born a forerunner of the HBO series Sex and the City¹⁰⁷ (4C.1); and Rory, the erstwhile college student in Gilmore Girls, is shown in one episode to be reading Dawn Powell’s collected works, thanks to Tim Page. Radio, too, has recently featured Powell: on January 29, 2005, WOSU radio program Ohio Arts Alive, of Columbus, Ohio, “paid tribute” to the author in a special broadcast featuring radio host Christopher Purdy, Tim Page, and two of Powell’s now-deceased cousins, sister and brother Rita and Jack Sherman. Selections from The Bride’s House, A Time to Be Born, Come Back to Sorrento, and Turn, Magic Wheel; certain Diaries entries; and the first act of Big Night were read (Purdy, “Christopher,” 1). In April 2005, her short story “Can’t We Cry a Little,” a “humorous look at radio’s Golden Age,” was read during the eightieth-anniversary tribute to the New York Public Radio station WNYC (“Women with Attitude,” 1). The story was read again on September 24, 2006, at New York’s Symphony Space and broadcast on National Public Radio Station WBFO, this time in “celebration of the short story” (WBFO, 1–4).

Additionally, discussions about and readings from Powell’s novels and plays have in recent years been held in various New York City locales and elsewhere; writers including Susan Minot, Francine Prose, and Melissa Bank have appeared at bookstores such as the Housing Works Used Book Café in Soho to speak about Powell and to read from her novels (Russo, 1). Marian Seldes, Michael Feingold, and Fran Lebowitz have given readings of Powell’s works at the Algonquin Hotel, an irony which surely would not be lost on our novelist, who sniffed that that crowd did little more than “spend their lives preventing each other from working” (Diaries, 209). America’s great stage actress Irene Worth (1916–2002) read from Powell’s novels on at least two occasions in New York, once at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village; Professor William Peterson has since the 1990s presented public lectures on Long Island about the novelist (Finalborgo, 9); and Tim Page has spoken on her at such locales as the Museum of the City of New York, New York University, and in numerous Greenwich Village bookstores. John Strausbaugh’s 2013 publication, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, mentions Powell throughout.

Today, interest in Powell is climbing again. In 2010 the ReGroup Theatre Company helmed by Allie Mulholland staged a reading of Big Night at St. Luke’s Theatre in New York and presented a talk on her work and that of other Group playwrights at Symphony Space in 2011; in November and December 2012, they produced the comedy off-Broadway, also in Powell’s original version. Jig Saw was recently restaged at the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in December 2013, by Nan Bauer; Tim Page and Carol Warstler were on hand to introduce the play. Page remarked that ““Dawn Powell’s fizzy, dizzy Jig-Saw comes to brilliant and exhilarating life in [this] production!” In late 2012 Page offered her original diaries for sale, prompting much attention in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker and in social media sites. A short while later Columbia University purchased the volumes, to much media notice, including a piece by John Williams in the New York Times which stated, quite rightfully, that “Page has done more than anyone [else] to champion her work.” Powell was featured in a 2011 discussion of Group Theatre playwrights at New York City’s Symphony Space; her friend and portraitist, Peggy Bacon, was in 2012 featured in an art exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; and her novel A Time to Be Born was not only chosen that same year as a selection of the New York Times’ “Big City Book Club” but a few months later named by literary blogger Nathaniel Rich as one of the finest novels of World War II; he stated that “it doesn’t have a single gun” in it yet it “captures the viciousness and madness of the homefront.” Contemporary writer Whitney Otto, perhaps most famous for her novel and the film adaptation of How to Make an American Quilt, told me in a 2013 e-mail that her 2002 novel A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity had been partially influenced by The Wicked Pavilion and that she did not fail to speak of the Powell novel while on publicity tours. Her 2012 book, Eight Girls Taking Pictures, similarly contains a sly nod to Powell (289), who also receives much attention in Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture, Catherine Keyser’s 2011 publication. Historian John Joseph delivered a well-attended speech on Powell on December 11, 2014, entitled “Dawn Powell: An Often Overlooked Literary Great,” under the auspices of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Most prominently, perhaps, on June 2, 2015, Powell was presented a prestigious award from Rocco Staino and the Empire State Center for the Book. In October of the same year, David Earle, amasser of Powell’s earliest short publications, wrote “Dawn Powell, Flapper Stories, and the Pulps”; and Terry Teachout published an essay, “Little Miss Wolfsbane,” on October 13, 2015, in response to David Pomerantz’s, Robert Nedelkoff’s, and Tim Page’s Facebook announcement that a previously unknown recording of Powell’s voice on a radio show of October 9, 1939, had surfaced. In April 2016, R. Scott Evans, Senior Vice President of Lake Erie College’s Institutional Advancement and Chief of the President’s Staff, along with Lake Erie College English professors Jennifer Swartz-Levine and Adam Stier, hosted a celebration of Dawn Powell scholarship at her alma mater at which Marcy Smith and I spoke. The activity continues.

Yet despite all this praise, despite all this activity, I have still encountered few readers who have heard of Dawn Powell. Perhaps this work will help to shine a little more of the spotlight squarely on Powell; perhaps it will help bring her out of the “perpetual dusk” in which she has too long languished (Wolcott, 42). For novelist Lorrie Moore, it seems not at all unusual that yet another revival might be required for the author to receive her due, for “during [Powell’s] own lifetime, her struggling though productive career seems to have been in constant semi-revival” (1). As we have noted, some activity around Powell is beginning again. Perhaps now the time is finally ripe for Dawn Powell.