A Few Notes on Dawn Powell

 

I'm not sure where I first came across Dawn Powell's books.  Most likely I spotted one in a used bookstore and brought it home with me and then did a little Googling on her life and became intrigued by her story.  She's probably more famous for her satires set in New York City's Greenwich Village where she lived most of her life, but it's one of her earlier Ohio novels, Dance Night, that I've just read for the Slaves.  During her lifetime she wrote fifteen novels, over one hundred short stories, six plays, and thousands of letters as well as kept diaries.  She was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio in 1896 and by her death in 1965 nearly all of her work was out of print.  She might well have remained forgotten had it not been for the notice of intellectual Gore Vidal (among others) and the championing of her work by Tim Page who has written a biography of her, edited her diaries, written introductions to many of her books and basically through his efforts working with her estate instigated the reissuing of her work.  It seems as though it was an essay by Gore Vidal published in the NYRB in 1987 that started the ball rolling.  In it he writes:

"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion.  But despite the work of such dedicated 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.  In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular.  Today, of course, 'popular' means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers.  Powell failed on both counts.  She needs no interpretation and 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.  But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final downpayment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up."  

When Powell was only seven her mother died and she and her sisters spent part of their childhood bouncing between relatives until her father remarried.  Her stepmother wasn't especially good with children, Powell's father not being at home often as he was a traveling salesman, she did little to endear the children to her (according to her diaries her stepmother would lock the girls outside after breakfast--not sure what to do with them).  After her stepmother burned ledgers she used to write in, Powell ran away from home.  In the end the girls were raised by their mother's sister.  After graduating from Lake Erie College Powell moved to New York City, where she spent the remainder of her life.  She married and had a son who was mentally and emotionally impaired (likely autism).  It sounds as though her life was a difficult one--an unsteady childhood, her own child suffering from health problems, a husband with drinking issues (and perhaps drinking issues of her own).  I know an author's books should always stand on their own, but I can't help but be interested in an author's life as often life and literature are intertwined and certainly Powell's earlier novels are in part autobiographical.     

I read somewhere, and I found it interesting, that Powell was an American writer who wrote about America but did so from her vantage point in New York City.  Unlike many of her contemporaries, she never lived the expatriate life.  In the 1920s Powell was busy writing her Ohio cycle of books (which includes Dance Night).  

"The year 1925, of course, has been the most remarkable in our literary history.  After satirizing life in the Midwest, Sinclair Lewis brought his hero Arrowsmith to New York City, a pattern Powell was to appropriate in her Ohio cycle.  Also that miraculous year alongside, as it were, Wither (Dawn Powell's first novel): Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Dos Passo's Manhattan Transfer, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  It is interesting that Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and the popular (Louis) Bromfield were all, like Powell, midwesterners with a dream of some other great good place, preferably Paris, but Long Island Sound and social climbing would do." (Gore Vidal)

Although her work may have gone out of print by the end of her life, she did have admirers and did receive some acclaim.  

"She wrote about the people and places she observed, rather than trying to emulate the model du jour.  Many of her novels received favorable reviews, and The Wicked Pavilion was given the plum cover spot in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book review in September 1954.  Although Powell herself said that her work was 'neither literary nor intellectual', in 1964, she was awarded the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement; such an honor was the very thing she had dreamed of as a child in rural Ohio." (Marcelle Smith Rice)

So, what I'm trying to say in this very haphazard way, and I'll stop before this really begins looking like an outline for a theme paper, is that my first experience with Dawn Powell's work  has been a positive one, and I think I have her best work ahead of me still. I've been fortunate as the library where I work not only has Tim Page's biography Dawn Powell (which I'd like to read in its entirety rather than skimming here and there), Gore Vidal's essay which was collected in At Home: Essays 1982-1988 but also Twayne's (criticism) Dawn Powell by Marcelle Smith Rice (though oddly few of her novels).  All are now littered with post-it note arrows.  I want to share everything I've read, but have tried to pick out the few choicest morsels, or the ones that really caught my attention.  I'm afraid this is not an especially well thought out post (just what can be squeezed in on a Sunday afternoon),  but perhaps this will give you a small sense of Dawn Powell (or send you off looking for yourself).  I do plan on writing about Dance Night, but will try to do so in a more orderly fashion.    

Check out Library of America's very imformative pages on Dawn Powell (they publish her work in lovely hardcover editions).  I also came across a photo of one of Dawn Powell's NYC homes.    

And yes, I will be reading more of her work. 

Comments

[Dorothy W.]

Thank you for all this great information! I knew absolutely nothing about Powell before this. I'm annoyed at Elaine Showalter for leaving Powell out of her survey of American women writers -- I think she really deserves a spot. I'm very intrigued to find that she wrote satires of Greenwich Village life -- I think those would be lots of fun to read.

[Danielle]

Dorothy--I was going to go and look, but I didn't think Showalter included her, which is a real pity. She really seems like a prime choice for that period. I'd like to read her NYC novels as well--she's been compared to Dorothy Parker, so I bet they're very witty!

[litlove]

This is all so fascinating! And I love to know some of the biography behind a writer's work. I've just finished Dance Night and loved it, and know now that those painful scenes of alienation at the heart of families were written with experience borne in mind.

[JaneGS]

Thanks for an interesting post--never heard of Dawn Powell, but she sounds like she was a significant American author, and female to boot. I will have to put Dance Night on the list.

[Stefanie]

Thanks for all the marvelous information! I haven't even begun reading the book because school has kept me so busy and I thought I would skip it entirely but now I think I have changed my mind.

[Danielle]

Litlove--I think her ealier work is very much autobiographical. I dipped into a biography of her but just read bits and pieces--I'd like to read the whole thing!
JaneGS--I'm glad her work has been brought back into print. Her work is very good and she's deserving of an audience. I've read Dance Night was her favorite of all her novels.
Stefanie--I had a feeling that school was going to preempt reading time. Too bad the dates fell like they did. I hope you will try her work, I think everyone (that I've heard from anyway) has liked the book so far!