Another delighted thank-you goes to David Earle, associate professor of the University of West Florida, who has located many if not all of Powell’s early stories from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s and who most graciously shared two of them with me, even giving me permission “to quote away” from them.
Thanks also go to Christine A. Lutz, staff member of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, for her unflagging work on my behalf in trying to identify a rare wartime photograph of Dawn Powell, Bennett Cerf, Ludwig Bemelmans, and others. I must also thank my departed feline friend Mr. “Buncie” Benchley (namesake of the more famous Mr. Robert Benchley, friend and admirer of Powell’s) for sitting on this keyboard and rarely leaving my side throughout the many years I have spent on this project.
I owe much gratitude to Dr. Nina Rulon-Miller for her unfailing support, advice, and invaluable editorial and pictorial assistance; to Dr. Gerry Smith Wright and Kathie Brown for their unflinching belief in me over these many years; to Dr. Sloane Drayson Knigge for her considerable encouragement and assistance in procuring interlibrary-loan and other materials; to Joyce Ann Goldberg and Jeana Taylor Schorr for their never-tiring corresponding with me and for becoming true Dawn Powell aficionados in their own right; to valued friend and champion Dr. Bob Thayer; and to Jessica Levee and Rebecca Mull for their unflagging friendship.
I would of course be remiss not to mention the fine folks at Ohio University Press, among them the first there to encourage me in this work: the attentive and thoughtful David Sanders, formerly of the Press; Director Gillian Berchowitz, for her empathy, understanding, patience, and encouragement; Rick Huard, also of the Press, who gently, tirelessly, and always promptly guided me through the daunting maze of attaining copyrights and permissions; Beth Pratt, cheerful director of production there; and Nancy Basmajian, for her prompt and reliable editorial assistance.
I owe much also to M. George Stevenson, former literary agent and beneficent legal adviser, for generously giving me so much time and attention; to Elsa Dorfman, for granting me permission to include her photograph of Hannah Green; and to the intelligent and always kind Katherine Degn of New York’s Kraushaar Galleries for her friendship, for reliably prompt responses to my queries, and for granting me permission to reproduce drawings by Peggy Bacon of Powell, their cats, and Powell’s close friend, Coburn Gilman.
Finally I wish to thank my dear friend, the late Regina Crimmins, one of two persons who upon our first meeting had already read Powell, for her inspired and inspiring idea that we celebrate the completion of this project in Greenwich Village, Dawn Powell’s favorite home. It was a grand affair, one that even Tim Page attended.
ABBREVIATIONS
| Bio | Dawn Powell: A Biography, by Tim Page (New York: Henry Holt, 1998) |
| Diaries | The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, edited by Tim Page (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1995) |
| Letters | Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, edited by Tim Page (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) |
CHAPTER ONE
“ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE YOU”
If you are asking yourself, “Who is Dawn Powell?” allow me to introduce you to one of the great American novelists of [the twentieth] century.
—Carleen M. Loper, “Discovering Dawn Powell,” 2
Ohio-born writer Dawn Powell, who lived from 18961 to 1965, was always prolific, writing fifteen novels;2 more than a hundred short stories; a dozen or so plays; countless book reviews; several radio, television, and film scripts; volumes of letters and diary entries; even poetry.3 So productive was she that, following one spate of housecleaning, she wrote to her editor at Scribner’s, Max Perkins, “I was appalled by the mountains of writing I had piled up in closets and file cases and trunks. . . . It struck me with terrific force that I just wrote too goddam much. Worse, I couldn’t seem to stop” (Letters, 134). Weighing her literary output against that of some of her contemporaries, Powell joked to her close friend, writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, “If I don’t write for five years I may make quite a name for myself and if I can stop for ten I may give Katherine Anne [Porter] and Dorothy Parker a run for their money” (129). If in her lifetime Powell never did make either the name for herself or the money she had hoped, she did enjoy certain successes. In the year before her death, she was awarded the American Institute of Arts and Letters’ Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement; a few years before that, she was granted an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Lake Erie College for Women. In 1963 her last novel, The Golden Spur, was nominated for the National Book Award; she appeared in a television interview with Harry Reasoner to discuss the novel, though it did not win. So far as I know, that interview is unavailable.
After she moved from Ohio to Manhattan in 1918 and began writing the many works that today are divided into the Ohio and the New York novels (with the exceptions of Angels on Toast, sometimes called a Chicago novel, and A Cage for Lovers, set in Paris), Malcolm Cowley hailed her as “the cleverest and wittiest writer in New York”; Diana Trilling called her “one of the wittiest women around”; and J. B. Priestley openly supported her work, as we shall see below. Other friends and admirers included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Matthew Josephson, the afore-mentioned Edmund Wilson, and many more. Some of her books sold adequately, many less than adequately; none were blockbusters by any means, and virtually all were out of print by the time of her death in 1965.
Thanks to the late Gore Vidal and Tim Page—her biographer, the Pulitzer prize–winning former Washington Post music critic and professor in both the Annenberg School of Journalism and the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California—twelve of her novels, a volume of her letters, a collection of her diaries, and some of her plays and short stories have in recent decades been reissued to critical acclaim. Several of her plays have been either restaged or produced for the first time, and a 1933 film, Hello Sister, loosely based on Powell’s play Walking down Broadway, was in the 1990s released on VHS, if only out of interest in its famous director, Erich von Stroheim; it was shown in a Greenwich Village cinema in 2012.
Of course, more important than quantity of writing is quality. Powell’s novels are filled with astute observations, wry commentaries, spot-on characterizations. Despite her reputation as a tough and unflinching satirist, she is capable of moving tenderness and pathos, particularly in the Ohio novels. In an article originally published in the New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout called My Home Is Far Away, one of the Ohio novels, a “permanent masterpiece of childhood” (“Far from Ohio,” 6). Few novelists are better at depicting young children than is Powell; one need read but the first several chapters of My Home Is Far Away to see that. Edmund Wilson found her books “at once sympathetic and cynical” (“Dawn Powell,” rpt., 236); Powell can make a reader weep in a brief portrait, as she does when describing old Mrs. Fox in She Walks in Beauty,4 or when in the same early Ohio novel she conveys the humiliation young Dorrie endures at the hands of her classmates. But most remarkable perhaps is her sense of humor. Few writers are wittier, more scathing, more insightful than Powell. Not only Gore Vidal, Terry Teachout, and Diana Trilling, but Margo Jefferson, John Updike, Michael Feingold, and many other distinguished authors and critics have found much to like in the novelist. As Jefferson writes:
So, we say to ourselves, another nearly forgotten writer exhumed, cleaned up, reissued and put on display with endorsements from Edmund Wilson, Diana Trilling, and Gore Vidal. Then a friend says no, she’s terrific, read her, and we do, and here it is, that infinitely distinguished thing,5 a dead writer so full of charm and derring-do that literature’s canon