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
