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CHAPTER THREE

“EVERY ARTIST WRITES HIS OWN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”

The Diaries, Letters, Short Stories, and Criticism

As for New York City, it’s the only place where people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything.

—Letters, 75–76¹

Because all of Powell’s novels are to some extent autobiographical, those studying her would do well to acquaint themselves with the biography as they approach her fiction. For that reason, among others, it is fortunate that she left us the great many letters and diaries she did, for they help to inform our understanding of what she was attempting to accomplish in each novel, assist us in measuring what she thought she had achieved against what critics then and now believe she did in fact achieve, and shed light on the ways in which certain autobiographical events as they appear in letter or diary are transformed into fiction. Edited by Tim Page, both diary and letter collections have met with praise: Gerald Howard, an editor at Doubleday, calls The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965 “one of the finest interior portraits of the novelist’s art and temper in our literature” (10); and of the Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, novelist Lorrie Moore says, “So current and alive is Powell’s epistolary voice, even in the earliest letters, that one is tempted to suggest that what we think of as the contemporary American voice—in journalism and the arts—is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York” (2). As soon as Powell arrived, she cheerfully settled in. A 1931 letter from her to her cousin Jack Sherman praises the city breathlessly (Letters, 75): for the writer, it was a place where anything was possible, where humble beginnings did not matter, where a young poverty-stricken nobody from a tiny midwestern town had every opportunity to make her dreams come true.²

The Diaries, according to critic Bill Buford, revealed that “Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit, and [that] her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one—a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here—along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who’s who of her period)—in her always unique style and without self-delusion.” This evaluation of Powell’s diaries, in so few words, is as spot-on an assessment of this edition of her diaries as any to date.

With the publication of Tim Page’s biography of Powell, and with all of her best works now back in print, it would appear that Dawn Powell has clearly “arrived” and taken her deserved place in American letters. Her remarkable Diaries will stand as one of her finest literary achievements; indeed, they are among the finest achievements of the genre.

Of course, Tim Page’s Dawn Powell: A Biography also assists readers in this undertaking. Praised as “meticulously researched, well written, and sympathetic,” the biography does “a superb job of establishing [Powell’s] right to an honored place in the pantheon of American letters” (Bing, 61). Today’s readers and students of the author are fortunate to have these three sources available to them. They have proven indispensable in providing a window into the working mind of the author.

THE DIARIES OF DAWN POWELL, 1931–1965

The thrills of a writer’s diary

—Susan Salter Reynolds, 10

If it is true, as A. A. Milne said in 1919, that diaries are “so rarely kept nowadays” because “nothing ever happens to anybody” (A. Taylor, ix), it would follow that because so much did happen to Dawn Powell, she had little choice but to record it all. Or perhaps she kept a diary because, as the narrator of 1962’s The Golden Spur says, people “who have no one they trust to understand them” keep journals (94). Her own diaries, which are “poignant, sometimes devastating, in tone” (Lopate, Writing, 538), read like a Who’s Who of the theater, art, and literary worlds: famous names from Stella Adler to Thomas Wolfe appear and reappear, yet the diaries are much more than calculated jottings meant to impress or amaze. Diary anthologist Alan Taylor maintains that “the best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please” (ix), just as the voice does here. The Village Voice remarks that “the brilliant” diarist Powell never “samples the consolations of dishonesty—a true miracle” (“Our 25,” SS23). The diaries not only record her many encounters with the rich and famous but also register the ordinary, the mundane, the frightening, the embarrassing, the devastating—everything, it seems, but her intimate life. Family matters, personal worries, money troubles, childcare woes, drunken brawls, health problems are given as much if not more attention here as are weekends with Libby Holman (182), parties with Lillian Hellman (355), or dinners with Langston Hughes (445). At their best, the diaries delight with witty character vignettes, overheard conversations, intuitive observations. The frightful, the comic, and the tragic all mingle among the pages. As Terry Teachout says, “there is much heartbreak in these diaries, and more mirth” (“Far,” 5). A disturbing entry of 1933 reads

The shock of my life today. This little tiny constant pain in my heart, the X-ray and Dr. Witt says, is a tumor or cyst over it and between the lungs. Nothing to worry about, he says, just a question of waiting. And waiting for what? . . . Nothing to worry about! . . . I walked down Madison Avenue not looking in shops for the first time because I thought it extravagant to buy or even want things for so short a while. It doesn’t matter what the corpse wears. (69)

If the entry sounds self-pitying, the next one, four days later, says simply, “Finished play ‘Jig-Saw’” (69). Powell had taken no time off to lament: despite the terrifying news, the disciplined writer continued working. A few pages later, readers are treated to a taste of something quite different, one of countless examples of the “mirth” Teachout mentions:

To dinner at Catalan’s³ with Sue⁴ and Esther⁵—down under Brooklyn Bridge. Lots of fun with some men eager to be gay. One told me he ran a column. “Where? I’ll read it,” I said. “Don’t be silly, Baby, you never read a word in your life,” he said. In fact by his comments I judged I looked more a fine lay than an intelligentsia. He said to Sue, “You’re a waitress, aren’t you, sister?” and since anybody would rather look like a tart than a waitress Sue was secretly mad at me.⁶ (76–77)

Powell moves from one entry to the next with ease, one day wretched, the next joyous, sometimes a combination of the two, much as she moved from the tragedy of her own life to working on yet another comic piece. Richard Selzer, reviewing the Diaries in the Wilson Quarterly, praises her “intuition for the relationship between tragedy and folly” (77), as readers see in the following passage. Writing of an overly talkative woman whom she has just met at a cocktail party, Powell at first wishes “to escape the incessant bombardment of her chatter” (114), then softens at hearing of the woman’s insane son:

People were very gay. It was odd for two women in the middle of this confusion, sandwiches and martinis politely being passed . . . to find that strange bond in common—a 14-year-old only son—one 20 years ago and the other now—quivering on the brink of a nightmare future. I understood then her incessant gay chatter—for 20 years she had sparkled and chattered to drown the roar of her own tragedy, a little boy raving mad. (115)

The Diaries, widely varied in subject matter, mood, and tone as they are, provide a living, colorful portrait of Manhattan and its inhabitants, all its delightful multiplicity mirrored in the reach of the prose. That Powell could so easily in the space of a day or two move from paralyzing dread—“Fear is such an utterly disrupting force—fears of no publisher, fear of cringing once more before debtors, fear of being trapped in the Middle West again and dependent on relatives” (100) to the ludicrous: “At Lafayette, Berkeley Tobey,⁷ [age] 50, begged us to drink to Eloise, his very young wife, who is at last to have a baby. ‘Whose?,’ we all wondered, as we drank reverently” (100)—is remarkable and at the same time understandable. For Powell, as she said many times in her journals, “the oxygen of humor” (456) was the only thing that made life bearable.

Powell herself ruminated on the habit of diary writing in an entry of February 5, 1954:

Virginia Woolf’s diary. People keep diaries because they don’t enjoy exposing themselves in conversation and furthermore they trust no one to understand. As soon as a writer finds a group that does understand him he stops writing and starts hamming. In diaries, revealing the innermost soul, the entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy. Diaries tell nothing—chips from a heroic statue. (335)

But Powell’s diaries reveal more than she knew, or more than she was prepared to say, as readers clearly see.

A brief, unsigned New Yorker review of the Diaries sums the volume up nicely:

Socialist theatre, all-night parties, advice-dispensing taxi drivers, perfume girls at Bergdorf’s: as a diarist, Powell was an urban magpie, and a little bit of everything ended up in her journals. They are also brimming with agonizings, professional and domestic, and razor-sharp remarks (“Lou feels that a cold wife who has a headache is a pure one, a high-class one.”) But, as much as anything, these diaries read like a love letter to the city itself. (120)

Yet for all their entertainment value, the diaries provide a view into the mind of the writer, concerned as they are with depicting “the lonely struggle of an artist driven to create” (Begley, 7). The Village Voice calls Powell’s Diaries not its favorite book of journal entries but its “favorite book about books” (“Our 25,” SS23). Still, not everyone praised them: the composer and diarist Ned Rorem, in an 1999 interview called “The Art of the Diary No. 1,” was asked whether he admired Powell’s diaries, which were located in plain view on his bookshelf. Rorem answered, “There are certain things I can’t get the point of. Bagels, for instance. Why do people like them? I can’t get the point of Berlioz. I can dislike a composer, while admitting what others see in him or her. But not Berlioz. Likewise Dawn Powell” (McClatchy).

Most other commentators disagree, among them Teachout, who says that, from the very first entry, the diaries are not only a pleasure to read but are in fact “a writer’s notebook, concerned less with earthshaking events and true confessions than with the raw material of what later became her novels” (“Far,” 4). And so I turn to them here, not only to be entertained, not only to learn about the life, personality, friends, and associates of the woman who wrote them, but to learn something about Powell’s creative process. The diaries, “an engrossing if painful account of a writer’s life” (S. Keen, 25), allow readers to observe the author as she plots and strategizes, includes and discards, works and reworks, writes and rewrites. For example, as Powell begins thinking about Turn, Magic Wheel, readers of the diaries can clearly see her thoughtful plotting of the novel, her testing out of the many scenes and sketches that she may or may not some day include in this book or the next, and events from her life that she later will transform into fiction.⁸

In “A Diamond to Cut New York,” a 1995 New Yorker article attributed to the long-deceased Powell, the unnamed columnist describes the included diary selections, which were chosen by Tim Page, as “vignettes of the bohemian low life and the literary high life, and evidence of how one woman managed to fit an entire city into her classic social satires” (104). Reading the diaries, one is able to see the ways in which the city both shapes the novels and informs them. The vibrant Manhattan becomes a character in her best New York novels and in her diaries as well.

Powell’s journals may aptly be termed “A Writer’s Diary,” as Leonard Woolf titled Virginia Woolf’s private writings, for “that’s exactly what Powell’s diary is, a workshop, where the author is practicing her chops” (Dyer, “After Dawn,” 3).⁹ Indeed, Powell’s diaries are of much value in their own right, certainly not only for shedding light on her fiction but as a fine example of the genre: Phillip Lopate, who includes entries from Powell’s diaries in his anthology Writing New York, finds her an exceptional diarist (xx), while Page in his introduction cites their “extraordinary value as autobiography, literature, social history, and psychological study” (ix). Like any good diary collection, this one offers not only scholars but general readers valuable insight into Powell’s life and craft.

SELECTED LETTERS OF DAWN POWELL, 1913–1965

The letters of Dawn Powell are brave, funny, and smart as hell. You’ll wish you could write her back.

—John Waters¹⁰

The Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, which Tim Page in his introduction calls “the record of a courageous, dramatic, and productive life” (ix), assists my examination of the novels, and particularly my examination of 1925’s Whither, in part because there are no diaries of that early period to turn to. The adult Powell did not begin keeping a proper diary until January 1, 1931. Before that time, beginning sometime in the same year the first novel was published, she had begun keeping “diaries of sorts,” though they were “little more than appointment books, with terse commentary thrown in here and there” (Diaries, 4). So if diaries are lacking for a given period, we happily have this collection of “epistolary wit” (Newsday), which is full of delightful, often lengthy accounts of her impressions of the city and its inhabitants along with the author’s hopes, dreams, observations, adventures, encounters. The letters, spanning forty-two years—1913 through 1965—cover eighteen years more than the diaries do, though they lack the emotional range of the diaries.¹¹ In addressing her correspondents, Powell most often left her blacker moments unremarked. Lorrie Moore finds the “lightheartedness” Powell brings to her letters, in spite of her serious personal woes, “the utmost generosity” (2). Powell did not wish to burden her friends, acquaintances, or family members with her most serious difficulties. Indeed, Richard Bernstein writes that “one of the strongest elements of these letters . . . is their steadily cheery tone, the absence of references to domestic travails” (1), while Page explains, “If Powell’s diaries reflect the emotional turmoil that was such a large part of her psychological makeup, her letters tend to show the witty persona she constructed as a shield” (Letters, ix–x). Though she expressed her darkest troubles in her diaries, “throughout [the letters], she tends to put a comical gloss on her tribulations, with the tears of things peeking out through the cracks” (Bernstein, 1). The humorist in Powell would never allow her to sound gloomy for long: as the reviewer for the New Yorker observes, the letters’ “darkest moments are almost reflexively transformed by her supple wit” (137), so much so that that the volume reads as “a glorious and supremely funny record of her long struggles and . . . lasting triumphs” (Marcus, 1). Powell preferred to present a happy face to the world, much like the characters in Angels on Toast, who, she writes, put up a “jovial, openhanded, wisecracking front that is so seldom let down that they themselves aren’t sure what’s under it” (Letters, 110). Though she knew exactly what remained hidden underneath the front she had created for herself, she was determined not to allow others to see it.

The Letters, like the Diaries, have been well received, Lorrie Moore regretting the lateness of their release: “One cannot help believing that if [Powell] had been male and Ivy League educated, her career would never have fallen into disarray—not with 15 novels—and we would have had these letters years ago” (3). An anonymous reviewer in Publishers Weekly calls the letters

A posthumous triumph . . . in many ways the perfect record of a difficult life lived with pluck, intelligence and verve. . . . [They] record a sense of humor, a political acuity and a down-to-earth genius for friendship, love and getting by that is nothing less than invigorating. The great flaw of this volume is that there isn’t more of it. . . . What letters we have may win Powell even deeper admiration than The Diaries of Dawn Powell. (1)

Like many of the diary entries, some of the letters have been printed elsewhere: a letter Powell wrote to John Dos Passos describing Gerald Murphy’s funeral, for example, appears in Linda Patterson Miller’s Letters from the Lost Generation (341), but not in the Selected Letters of Dawn Powell. Howard Mansfield, editor of the 2006 volume Where the Mountain Stands Alone: Stories of Place in the Monadnock Region, includes excerpts from a 1949 letter that a peevish but funny Powell wrote to Joe from New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony. Originally published in Page’s Selected Letters, it appears in Mansfield’s collection under the title “And Not So Well for Others” (285), as Powell considered life in the artists’ colony too rigid for “so lax a person as myself” (286).

Unfortunately for readers approaching the fiction, few letters mention Whither, the first novel, at all; none shows her working at it or plotting it. Nonetheless, small episodes or character sketches first seen in the letters will emerge in a later novel or play, some in fact in Whither. One incident recorded in a letter of 1918 appears several years later in her first novel. Just two months arrived in New York, Powell wrote to her college friend Charlotte Johnson:

[A man] asked where we were on the subway and because I smiled back he grabbed my arm and told me he had just inherited half a million dollars from an uncle down in the Honduras and it was his guardian, the vice consul for the Honduras, that he was now on his way to. He was so handsome! And so young! And so—gee! He came to see me twice, then his boat left for the South and I know I’ll never see him again. (33)

In Whither, a friend of main character Zoe meets just such a young man, at a soda fountain instead of in the subway, but the story is the same. Also, in Whither, some elements of the main character’s voice and tone are not unlike the very young Powell’s.

Another passage from the same letter appeared half a dozen years later in the writer’s 1931 play Walking down Broadway. It seems that Powell either had an uncanny memory—a gift she furnishes alter ego Marcia with in the autobiographical My Home is Far Away—or that she kept copies of the letters she sent. The following episode recounted in the letter reads much as it does in the play:

It makes me dizzy to think of all the warm friendships and Passionate Affairs I’ve been through in three months.¹² . . . And all the men say “I love you” and look at you with long wistful “I-surely-am-hit-now” gaze and you kiss them and say this is the first time I’ve ever cared like this and then you never see each other again. (33)

Several additional passages in the letters will turn up in the later novels as well, all of them providing a glimpse into Powell’s personal life, her skills at observation, her disciplined writing habits. The keen sense of humor for which the author is known surfaces in the letters again and again also. For example, on hearing the news of her grandmother Julia Sherman’s recent marriage, young Dawn writes from college, “You can imagine how surprised I was just now to learn from Auntie May’s letter that I had a Grandpa born all of a sudden. In fact I had to sit down and be fanned. But of course I am very glad, since my grandparents are rather scarce—your being the only one up until the fatal hour Wednesday” (7).

Years later, in a hilarious letter to Dos Passos, Powell wrote:

. . . We have been boycotting [the Brevoort] all summer but it is very expensive. It began one day when a few friends on the terrazzo started going to the Gents’ room through the window instead of the formal door and the waiter and the papa-waiter refused all drinks so we boycotted it and went to the Lafayette. The next day, as we were sitting on the terrace, boycotting again, a big man wheeled a little baby past and Coby Gilman said, “Why, what a cunning little son of a bitch.” So the big man shook his perambulator at us and said, “If you wait till I get this little bastard home I’ll settle with you for calling my child a son of a bitch,” at which he wheeled it stormily up the street shaking his fist at the same time while the little snort screamed and dangled by its snaps. (88)

The letter continues in this vein for some time, ending only once Powell, having related one ludicrous mishap after another, writes, “This is all the fault of the Brevoort. So we are organizing boycotters all over the world—we have even a group who are boycotting the Brevoort from the Australian bush” (88–89). As in the Diaries, the bright portraits, sharp humor, drunken incidents recorded here add up not only to rich material for the novels but also to agreeable diversions for the reader of Powell’s delightful Selected Letters.

. . .

A decade after this volume was published, a half dozen letters and other items from Powell to Gilman appeared in a Literary Miscellany at the William Reese Company in New Haven, Connecticut. This find is a major one, given that Page notes in his introduction to the Selected Letters his disappointment that “only a scant four letters to Coburn Gilman seem to have survived, though he was one of Powell’s closest confidants for many years” (xi). The letters sold for amounts ranging from $600 to $4,000 each; a first-edition Hemingway novel, inscribed “somewhat drunkenly” to Powell (“to Dawn, from where all the characters in this book are drawn—Ernest Hemingway”), sold for $1,500.00; and an “unpublished, illustrated manuscript,” called “The Teen Age / Murder Book / by Aunt Bossy Powell / For Children Between 5 and 7:15 / Quiet Please,” went for $7,500. The letters from Powell to Gilman are tantalizingly described: I reproduce a partial description of one of the letters here, given that the Powell/Gilman relationship is of interest to many:

382. Powell, Dawn. Autograph Letter, Signed. New York / Dated only “Monday.” Ca. 1930.

A high-pitched, possibly somewhat inebriated personal letter from Powell to one of her favorite drinking buddies of the time, and eventually, for much of her remaining life, one of her closest intimate friends, “Dearest Coby . . . signed “Love, Dawn.”¹³

Thanks to Tim Page, I now have copies of those letters in their entirety and intend to reproduce them fully at a later date.

SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS

Talk about ambition, story ideas, etc.—you do a lot better when you’re among people you know.

—Letters, 39

Page notes in his biography, “Although Powell wrote well over a hundred short stories during her lifetime, only a few dozen have been identified to date” (338). Aided by Internet resources unavailable when Page began conducting research for his biography, I have located about a dozen more published short pieces that to my knowledge have never been republished. Powell contributed short fiction frequently to the New Yorker, particularly in the 1930s: one such un-republished story, “Bon Voyage,” came out in April 1933; it was written with recognizable Powell humor. A spring allergy sufferer, unable to sleep,

experimented desperately with all manner of sleep-inducers. She counted sheep but always stopped at five, since it was ridiculous to suppose that in these times anyone could afford more than five sheep. She might as well stop at one, and even then she realized perfectly that it wasn’t a real sheep but two men fixed up to look that way (17).

Another un-republished New Yorker item I located, “The Daisy Chain,” appeared in September that same year. In it Powell demonstrates her satiric sensibility and again jabs at snobbish consumerism and at the all-knowing young New York career girl:

Finally they decided on 146, since Elinor could have her shrimps there, and Violet could be seen in a suitably expensive light by her newest client, a Mr. Bule, and what [newcomer] Sarah preferred didn’t matter anyway. In the taxi, the two business-women examined Sarah rather critically, and Violet suggested a darker lipstick and tying those ribbons on the left shoulder rather than right in front.

“Look, Honey,” commanded Elinor, taking both hands to yank Sarah’s hat around, “this is the way to wear that hat” (19).

Powell would go on to publish at least five other short pieces for the magazine, four in 1933: the above-mentioned three and “Blue Hyacinths.” (We cannot be certain, as she sometimes published under pseudonyms.) Other New Yorker stories include “Artist’s Life” (1935), which in its tension between observer and observed seems something of a precursor to her novel Turn, Magic Wheel; “Can’t We Cry a Little”; and “The Comeback”; they and “Blue Hyacinths” would be reissued in the collection of short stories selected by Powell herself, 1952’s Sunday, Monday and Always. “Such a Pretty Day” would be republished there and in two other compilations: Short Stories from the New Yorker: A Collection of Sixty-Eight Notable Stories, in 1940; and in Tim Page’s 1994 collection, Dawn Powell at Her Best.

Earlier, in the 1920s, Powell was publishing short stories in Munsey’s Magazine, three of which I have located: “The Little Green Model” (February 1924); “Precious” (January 1928), and “Orchids for Rosanie” (March 1928). Powell sounded upbeat in a 1922 letter to Aunt Orpha May about having had a story accepted by the magazine, but by November 1928 she was complaining to her aunt that “like a fool I’d been signing something with Munsey’s from time to time which gave them all rights” (68). After publishing two final pieces in Munsey’s in 1928, she ended her involvement with that periodical. She added in the same letter to her aunt, “I wouldn’t even have a word to say if they sold it to the movies. The best magazines don’t do that but Munsey’s, it seems, gets away with whatever it can” (68).

I have also turned up several other short stories, essays, and reviews that before now had not been identified, among them the short story “Elegy,” published in transition 8 in November 1927 by Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. The periodical has been called

the most important of all the “little magazines” that popularized the expatriate community’s works. This issue, like most of them, reads like a “Who’s Who” in its table of contents, featuring among others James Joyce (“Continuation of a Work in Progress”—later published as “Finnegans Wake”), Dawn Powell (“Elegy”), William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and poems by Andre Gide, Alfred Kreymborg and others. (transition)

Notably, Powell’s name appears second only to Joyce’s.

I found the politically left “Dynamite in the Office,” which was issued in Coronet in 1938; “Enter Two Girls, Laughing” published in Harper’s Bazaar in January 1939; “I’m Glad She’s Happy” in a 1939 Redbook; a piece in the Partisan Review called “Radio’s Gift to Art,” reviewing Fourteen Radio Plays by Art Oboler; a book review in a 1945 issue of Tomorrow called “Two Historical Novels,” about Young Bess by Margaret Irwin and The Violent Friends by Winston Clewes; another review, called “Mary Petty Presents,” in a 1946 issue of the Nation; an essay, “Speaking of the Younger Generation,” in Harper’s Bazaar in August 1949 (discussed later in this chapter); and a hilarious story, “The Nefarious Triangle,” which appeared in Today’s Woman in November that same year. In July 1950, an issue of Flair included a short essay by Powell called “Vision of Don Juan,” published nowhere else, to my knowledge. Of the piece, Cowles says Powell “began by looking homeward to the first self-styled ladies’ man she ever encountered, [and] brought him up to date through some of the latter-day variations she observes from her downtown New York vantage point.” The first sentence is unmistakably Powell: “I first saw Don Juan sitting in a boardinghouse parlor of Shelby Junction, and he was sitting as close to me as you are” (24).

Other finds are a curious little story featuring a bar, a lobster, and a lion called “A Greenwich Village Christmas Idyll” in the Chicago Tribune in 1963; and the seriocomic “Weekend in Town,” printed in the Saturday Evening Post in the year before her death. That story features two young women, roommates who get along well because “they wore different size clothes,” again in a line reminiscent of Whither, written nearly four decades earlier. The girls in the story had “good jobs and a really charming apartment overlooking a garden on West Twelfth Street. It was fixed up like a decorator’s dream with ‘gravy’—the latest in sample fabrics . . . and the newest in gadgets” (58). Consumerism was rarely far from Powell’s mind.

Recently, an online resource called “The FictionMags Index,” edited by William G. Contento, posted a list of Powell stories it had located. David Earle, of the University of West Florida, has “found just about all of [her] pre-1930 stories from various pulp magazines—it amounts to 15 or so stories, all pretty wonderful and very flapperish” (Earle, personal e-mail) Professor Earle kindly sent me copies of two: one, published in Breezy Stories in 1921, called “And When She Was Bad—” and the other, “Not the Marrying Kind,” about which a cryptic Powell diary notation, dated April 6, 1925, reads: “Letter about ‘The Marrying Kind’ saying ‘This Dawn Powell writes so attractively I hate to return her story.’ He did” (Diaries, 5). It is unclear who the “he” was.

But still, decades after the biography appeared, many if not most of her short works remain elusive; though scattered mentions of these pieces appear throughout her letters and diaries, they are often mentioned in passing, without date or name of publication, making them all but impossible to trace.

POWELL ON SATIRE

The enjoyment of satire is that of nine-pins—seeing the ball strike truly and the pins go down.

—Diaries, 75

Writing the truth, for Dawn Powell, was always most important. She wrote that “truth seems to me the most beautiful form of art in the world” (Diaries, 154), and the best means of telling the truth, for Powell, was satire. Powell’s habit of telling the truth in her comedies earned her the charges of cynicism she too often heard from her critics (see chapter 1). Of course her satires were sharply funny, too. As Amanda Vaill says, “Powell’s gift” was “not to repress, not to transcend, but to tell the truth and then to laugh, however ruefully” (“Laughing,” X06). As the novelist said over and over again, the truth was what she was always after. Today, many critical commentators understand that point: “Readers are first attracted to Powell’s books because they are funny,” Richard Dyer writes, but “later they realize that they are funny because they are true” (“After Dawn,” 37).

Seeking to explain in her diary the difference between satire and romanticism, Powell wrote simply, “A man endows a hospital in a small town; actually his motive is political and social advancement in the town. His vision is helping his fellow men in their suffering. Emphasis on the one is satire, on the other romance; both are true and truer than the middle course of ‘realism’” (118). Not much later, in a 1940 New York Times interview with the author, Robert Van Gelder sought to assist Powell as she attempted to explain her writings up through Angels on Toast. Introducing the New York cycle, Van Gelder wrote, “They are very witty satires that, perhaps unfortunately, satirize those people who, to the bulk of the public, must seem the stuff that dreams are made of—fashionable chanteuses, radio big names, advertising contact men, successful commercial artists, popular playwrights, mistresses who have attained Park Avenue addresses” (“Some Difficulties,” 102). For Van Gelder, and for many others as well, Powell too often breaks hearts, shatters dreams, crushes expectations. Fully aware of the charge, Powell explained, as Van Gelder notes,

The way of the satirist is made difficult by the fact that “you both confuse and anger people if you satirize the middle class. It is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. The frailties of millionaires or garbage collectors can be made to seem amusing to persons who are not millionaires or garbage collectors. Their ways of speech, their personal habits, the peculiarities of their thinking are considered fair game. I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can’t help believing that the middle class is funny, too.” (“Some Difficulties,” 102)

Though Powell sometimes satirized the very wealthy, as she did in Turn, Magic Wheel, for example, more often it was the commonplace advertising man or the young secretary on the make who captured her interest and at whom she pointed her pen. Powell more often than not chose to focus on the regular folks she saw about town.

In her journal of the same year she repeated dictums she had heard over and over again:

The rules for satire as laid down by reviewers are purely materialistic. Let no mockery interfere with the budget! Flay with “good-natured fun” the antics of the poor or the rich, but never say the pleasures of the middle class are a little ridiculous, too. The middle class comes in large families, and if you must record them, say they are earnest; say they eat simple apple pies and honest roast turkeys; say they till the soil, quibble over wills, snub new neighbors, juggle their accounts, cheat their partners (through family necessity), disown sons for unsavory marriages—but show that these vices are necessary, and are accompanied by worry, harassment and groans, never by laughter. Say that these sins (if sins they be, since they are at least solemn sins) are done with dignity, unlike the sins of the rich or the very poor. (Diaries, 180)

Like her artist friend Reginald Marsh, she most often preferred portraying the “not glamorous or affluent New Yorkers, but those of the lower and middle and lower classes. It was the Bowery bums, burlesque queens, Coney Island musclemen, park denizens, subway riders, and post-flapper-era sirens” (B. Haskell, 6) who captured both her imagination and Marsh’s. These people were her focus, her family, the people about whom she cared and whom she understood. Marsh and Powell were well acquainted with each other and with each other’s most frequent subjects: in fact, Marsh would illustrate the cover of Powell’s 1948 novel, The Locusts Have No King.

It is through her “wonderfully incisive satire” that her portraits always convince.

—Tom Sellar

As much as the author longed for more positive commentary, she nevertheless refused to bow to the wishes of her reviewers or the public and sought instead always to refrain from romanticizing her characters or their motivations. As always, Powell would “draw her people with accuracy and honesty, refusing to assign to them noble intentions when they have none” (Sexton, 7). Because writing satire and telling the truth were so closely related for Powell, and because the author fancied herself nothing if not a satirist, writing what she knew was so important to her that she would always base her novels on some sort of autobiographical reality. In 1935, while writing Turn, Magic Wheel, she confided in her diary, “Since I can write so fluidly and with such pleasure about real people . . . it seems increasingly an effort to step from this reality into a storybook world. On the other hand, I hate to use real people and hurt them but I have reached the point where I must sacrifice my tender feelings for reality. It’s a decision against personal life for the crueler pleasures of artistic exactness” (98–99). Readers will see the same ambivalence at work in Turn, Magic Wheel, where Powell-like novelist Dennis Orphen sometimes regrets having cruelly exposed friend Effie Callingham, but in the end both authors’ decisions to write the truth wins out.

Powell, understandably, chose to write about subject matter that spoke to her. For example, she often referred to Balzac as one of her favorite novelists, and comparisons with Balzac surfaced in commentaries by Warfel (345) and others, including Gore Vidal (see chapter 1, above) and Glenway Wescott (Diaries, 285). Powell’s Ohio works tell the tale of provincials at home, often longing to escape; and her New York cycle features similar provincials having made their escape and working to make it in New York. All of her New York novels feature outsiders like Powell herself—those who have come to the city from small-town midwestern locations, full of impossible dreams. Her most interesting characters are those who strive but never do make it: the losers, the graspers, the drinkers, the misfits, the homeless, the heartbroken, the nameless souls who wander the city carrying crumbling suitcases and broken dreams. Powell’s “heartaches of the street” (Broyard, 33), wretched as they often are, nevertheless remain hopeful, clinging to their dreams despite long odds. Understanding and sympathizing with her characters as she does, they always ring true.

Satire was her mode, and satire, Powell wrote again and again, was a recounting of the truth. She realized that her favorite literary technique was also her most effective weapon for exposing folly and vice; she maintained in her diaries that “the lashing of . . . evil can only be done by satire” (Diaries, 213). She prided herself in being, so far as she knew, “the only person” in the early 1940s who was “doing contemporary social satire” (213). For example, the novelist felt a certain satisfaction in having roundly “slashed” Clare Boothe Luce in her recent book, A Time to Be Born, for she felt that such wickedness as Luce had later executed in her smearing of Henry Wallace (Diaries, 213n), U.S. vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, must at all costs be exposed. Though the incident occurred after her novel came out, the fact that Powell had ridiculed Luce in her book made her believe that at least her satire had damaged Luce’s credibility.

But Powell was generally not a political writer. More often her satire was reminiscent of the comedies of manners of previous centuries, though hers were stingingly contemporary. In her diary she contemplated the fact that, in “modern writing,” too many authors “avoid [writing of ] contemporary manners”:

In the last century, Thackeray, Dickens, Edith Wharton, James, all wrote of their own times, [so] we have reliable records. Now we have only the escapists, who write of happenings a hundred or three hundred years ago, false to history, false to human nature. Among contemporary writers, only John O’Hara writes of one very small section of 52nd Street or Broadway. We have Hemingway, who writes of a fictional movie hero in Spain with the language neither Spanish nor English. When someone wishes to write of this age—as I do and have done—critics shy off—the public shies off. (188)

Later she said that when asked why she wrote “this or that,” her answer most often was that she felt “a sense of historical duty to get a picture of a fleeting way of life. Probably began with my youthful joy in vignettes of ancient Rome or Greece, which made life real instead of re-embalming dead life” (Diaries, 452). The truth for Powell came from what she knew from first-hand observation, what she divined from her extraordinary gift for psychological perception, what she had turned over and over in her mind and written about in her diaries or letters. To depict those she knew and those she saw about her, she looked neither to the history books nor to her imagination as much as to the world she lived in, the streets, the saloons, the shops, the offices, the cafés. Her fiction was not about romancing or beautifying; the truth, for Powell, needed no makeup, no surgical treatment, no sleight of hand. As she explained in her diary, “‘Satire’ is the technical word for writing of people as they are; ‘romantic,’ the other extreme of people as they are to themselves” (118). However painful, she maintained, reality was never too horrid to be faced squarely:

True gaiety is based on a foundation of realism. All right, we know we’re dying, we know we’re poor, that is off our minds—we eat, sleep, make merry but we are not kidding ourselves that we are rich and beautiful. . . . There is only sorrow in people making believe—sorrow and sordidness in stories of [an] invincible, Peter Pan fairy-godmother world. Gaiety should be brave, it should have stout legs of truth, not a gelatine base of dreams and wishes. (Diaries, 162)

Gaiety, delight, humor all derived from simply telling the truth. She wrote characters and their motivations as she saw them: “whether writing about the rural heartland or cosmopolitan Gotham, she gave it to us straight like a pitchfork in a haystack or a well-chilled martini, hold the vermouth” (Roberts, 2). The delighted reader of Powell’s novels witnesses all at once the truth of her observation, her insightful understanding of her subjects, the empathy and tolerance with which she exposes her targets. “As natural and skillful a satirist as American literature has ever produced” (Howard, 1), Dawn Powell left her readers two gifts: her lilting novels of Ohio, and her satirical novels of New York.

Young Dawn Powell with hand on heart. Used by permission of Tim Page and Estate of Dawn Powell

Young Dawn Powell in profile, ca. 1920s.Used by permission of the Estate of Dawn Powell

Lobby card for Footlights and Shadows, a 1920 film starring Olive Thomas and Ivo Dawson. Powell appeared in the film as an extra.

Ernest Truex and Spring Byington onstage in 1934’s Jig Saw, produced by the Theatre Guild. Used by permission of the Associated Press

Powell friend and portraitist Peggy Bacon, ca. 1920

Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Powell, 1934, with inscription. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.

Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Powell, 1934. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.

Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Coburn “Coby” Gilman, 1934. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.

Peggy Bacon drawing of cats Perkins vs. Calhoun, Peggy Bacon’s cat. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.

Powell drawing of cat in bed. Used by permission of Tim Page and Estate of Dawn Powell