drinking habits and attended her at her bedside every night like a nurse” (50).59
The final entry in her Diaries appeared on September 30 (477); the last letter she is known to have written is dated October 22 (Letters, 350–51). That final letter, written to her beloved cousin John Franklin “Jack” Sherman, to whom Page almost always refers as “one of the world’s great gentlemen,” expresses Powell’s wonder at not being able to “even dodder to the living room without difficulty—let alone nip out into the gay world” of Manhattan (350). As painful as that realization must have been to her, she nevertheless did not let on, refusing to sound morose in this last letter she would write.60
On November 14, 1965, just two weeks shy of her sixty-ninth birthday, Dawn Powell died at St. Luke’s,61 the same hospital where she had given birth to her only child so many years before. She left her eyes to New York’s Eye Bank and the rest of her body to Cornell Medical Center. Her final remains were later taken to Potter’s Field on Hart Island, where they were interred in a mass pauper’s grave bearing no name.62
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Matthew Josephson said I was the wittiest woman in New York. Impossible!
—Diaries, 34
Powell certainly enjoyed some successes; she was also admired by many of the top writers, artists, and critics of the day and knew many notables who resided in or visited New York while she lived there. Although she never made the bestseller lists, “her books weren’t exactly neglected in her lifetime; par for her was a sale of around 5000 copies” (Lingeman, 38). To some the very “personification of Manhattan” (Vidal, “Queen,” 25), Powell enjoyed close friendships, as we have seen, not only with Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Matthew Josephson but also with Malcolm Cowley, John Latouche,63 Sara and Gerald Murphy, Malcolm Lowry, Dwight Fiske,64 and her editor, Max Perkins, widely considered “the most distinguished editor in the book business” (Cowley, “Unshaken” II, 30). She was acquainted with many other noteworthies, among them Robert Benchley, Djuna Barnes,65 e. e. cummings, Rex Stout, Sherwood Anderson, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, and Theodore Dreiser. Edmund Wilson, who had met Powell in 1933 and referred to her as “one of his only real friends” (Sixties, 64),66 wrote in a New Yorker article of her “gift of comic invention and individual accent that make her books unlike all others” (“Dawn Powell,” 233). Ernest Hemingway, who called Powell his “favorite living writer” (Diaries, 226), told Lillian Ross that Powell “has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have [but] is not tear-stained” (Ross, 69–70). Malcolm Cowley in a 1963 Esquire piece spoke of his “lasting gratitude” for Powell’s works and for those of “one or two other women of the generation” but added rather presciently that those same women writers “have been less widely read than male contemporaries of no greater talent” (78). John Dos Passos, who always admired Powell’s work, admired the writer as well: in his autobiography, he named her “one of the wittiest and most dashingly courageous women I ever knew” (154). “Dos,” as she and all his other friends always called him, was proud that his friendship with Powell had lasted from their meeting in the 1920s until her death. A publisher friend said Powell had a “New York following that considered her in the class of Madame Recamier,67 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Dorothy Parker” (Crichton, 84). She was famous enough that her name sometimes appeared in gossip columns and in such places as the New York Times’ “Books and Authors” feature, which on September 28, 1930, offered readers this curious tidbit:
Dawn Powell, whose novel of an Ohio boomtown, Dance Night, is to be published October 10 by Farrar and Rinehart, is becoming known in literary circles as a clever entertainer. One of her best stunts is to give an imitation of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson,68 a cannibal, a cannibal’s wife, a wounded lion, three dead elephants, and a movie camera. The elephants, we presume, are silent, as in rigor mortis. (BR8)
Evidently her antics at some party or other had drawn sufficient attention to find their way into the Times. Her name also appeared in such columns as Frank Sullivan’s annual New Yorker Christmas poem, “Greetings, Friends!” in which he would mention various celebrities of the days whose names were recognizable to his readers (Sullivan, 27),69 and in a silly poem attributed to one Walgrove Snood in reviewer Charles Poore’s “Books of the Times” column of December 4, 1932 (39). Clearly, Dawn Powell had before long achieved more than a little renown in her adopted city.
As we have noted, she was uncomfortable playing up to reviewers and preferred the role of observer; she was similarly uncomfortable with the adulation of fans, when she did come upon them. Charles Norman recounted one memorable encounter Powell had with an admirer: “At a party I gave on Perry Street,” he wrote, “there was a woman who sat on the floor. Dawn was in a chair yards away from her, but little by little the woman came closer, crawling with a glass in her hand, and looking up admiringly at Dawn. Soon she was beside Dawn, who jumped up. ‘I didn’t want a lapful of ears,’ she told me” (Poets, 53). As always, Powell remained uneasy in the spotlight.
. . .
If critics today almost uniformly sing Powell’s praises, many well-known commentators of her day did so as well. J. B. Priestley, who said he “never misses anything Dawn Powell writes” (Bio, 246), saw in her work “an admirable mixture, not often found, of humour, genuine sentiment (born of compassion), and very shrewd and sharp satire” (“Dawn Powell”). Diana Trilling famously wrote that “Miss Powell, one of the wittiest women around, suggests the answer to the old question, ‘Who really makes the jokes that Dorothy Parker gets the credit for?’” (“Four Recent Novels,” 243). Powell may have approved of Trilling’s comment, even though her carefully constructed novels and Parker’s slick one-liners had little in common.
The Second Novel as First . . .
Despite Powell’s distaste for her first novel, Whither, the book earned some fairly positive notices on its release. The author herself so firmly disliked it that she thereafter always disavowed it, saying, in the entry she wrote for Twentieth-Century Authors, that she “preferred to let the error be forgotten” (1123). Thirty-five years after the publication of Whither, when Hannah Green70 found a copy in a secondhand bookstore, Powell was not at all pleased (Diaries, 4). Still, four noteworthy publications—the New York Times, the Literary Review, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Boston Evening Transcript—considered it important enough to merit reviews in their pages. Friend and the New York Evening Post’s Charles Norman wrote that “Whither is a much finer conception of the jazz age than even [ John Howard Lawson’s] Processional is.71 There is an ironic, tender mockery in Miss Powell’s book, and a delicate, refreshingly humorous satire. I laughed aloud over many paragraphs. For escape from the heavy, all-observing (and all-recording) popular novels, I recommend Whither” (“Jazz,” 5).72 Two days after Norman’s piece appeared, Powell recorded in her diary, “Macy’s, Brentano’s, and Womrath begin to move Whither as a result of Charles’ review. Things look brighter” (5).
For a time Powell held out hope for the novel, though she was disappointed to find that a commentary soon to follow in the Saturday Review of Literature was less positive:
. . . While the author writes with earnestness, and evident sincerity and produces a thoroughly readable story, the book is neither searching in its insight into character, nor conspicuous as a study of life. The plot is thoroughly conventional in texture and the ending departs not at all from the usual, and if there be anything to distinguish the book it is a certain freshness with which the author writes and a certain engaging air of being deeply and seriously concerned about her characters and their lives. (694)
Though
