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
