unlikable, or troubled they were.
Another contemporary reviewer, one S.L.R. writing in the Boston Evening Transcript, found much to like about the novel:
Sophistication and good humor are not usually associated, yet Mrs. [sic] Powell has managed to make them boon companions for three-hundred pages. Whither is a satire upon New York’s great army of Discontent—these thousands of girls who go to the city from Great Harrington, or Moline, or Hoosack Corners for their “great opportunity” which, because they are never willing to work up to it, never arrives. And so the years pass, waiting for Ethel Barrymore to die or the idea for the greatest novel of the decade to happen along. (5)
The New York Times review was partially positive as well, maintaining that the book had “real value” in its depiction of the struggle writers too often face between security and artistry, and in its “deft and lively characterizations” (“New York Adventures,” 19). But light sales and her own evaluation of the novel convinced her that the book was a failure.
Powell’s hometown Ohio paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also spilled a few lines of ink on Whither,73 though reviewer Ted Robinson was not impressed:
For the romantically inclined sweet young things who will “do” their two weeks at the sundry seasides and shadynooks this summer and who demand “snappy”74 fiction in which young or youngish heroines, “living their own lives,” brusquely choose their mates without consulting the brutes, or who feverishly carve out careers—letting the chips fall where they may—here is some new fiction of that sort. (9)
The first novel he mentions “of that sort” is Whither, which he calls simply “The romance of a small-town girl in New York’s Bohemia” (9). Books he includes alongside Powell’s are the rather undistinguished-sounding titles Last Year’s Nest75 and Singing Waters,76 among others. Whither, too, is a none-too-impressive title; in fact, many of Powell’s titles are less than intriguing.
For years the novelist would claim that her second publication, the Ohio novel She Walks in Beauty, was her first (Diaries, 12), much like Willa Cather before her, who admitted in “My First Novels (There Were Two)” having done the same thing. In 1943, eighteen years after the publication of Whither, in a brief autobiography to be included with the short story “You Should Have Brought Your Mink” in Story Magazine, Powell still refused to acknowledge Whither as her first novel:
My mother’s people, the Shermans, have lived [in Ohio] for five generations around Morrow County. This makes every person north of Columbus my cousin. Graduated from Lake Erie College. Did publicity and magazine writing in New York. First novel, She Walks in Beauty, appeared in 1938, and after that came The Bride’s House, Dance Night, Tenth Moon, Story of a Country Boy, all stories of a changing Ohio . . . and the last one published last August A Time To Be Born. Have contributed to various magazines, New Yorker, etc., and have done some work for the theatre. Have one husband, Joseph Gousha, and one son, Joseph, Jr., age 18. (103)
The author was so harsh in her assessment of Whither that many of today’s reviewers follow her lead and rarely mention it.77 Anne T. Keene, however, did scare up a copy and included it in her essay in Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books. She wrote that “what became the classic elements of Dawn Powell’s work were in evidence from the outset” (232). The book is now available on a print-on-demand basis on Amazon.com, a fact that would surely horrify Powell.
Many of Powell’s next publications would be fairly well received; in fact, as Page says, the critical “neglect of Powell during her own lifetime has been overstated” (At Her Best, xvi). The Ohio works were often praised for their lyricism, realism, and believability: She Walks in Beauty, the first Ohio novel, was called, on its 1928 release, “very well written” by the Saturday Review, its characters “striking and complete” (869). The Bride’s House, published in 1929, “a strong, direct, and seemingly very intimate book about a woman torn between affection for her husband and passion for a dashing and mysterious stranger” (Bio, 66), received some positive critical attention, including this line from the New York Times: “A striking story, macabre in its intensity, [the author] painting her characters with a remarkable sureness and precision” (Bio, 90). Her fourth novel, 1930’s Dance Night, always one of Powell’s favorites of the Ohio books, received some encouraging commentary, though for such a fine piece not nearly as much as it should have.78 In one of the few positive notices it received, an unnamed New York Times commentator appreciated its “unforgettably real people drawn with an unerring instinct for characterization” (Bio, 115), but others faulted what they considered her unsavory characters and contrived ending. The next work, 1932’s Tenth Moon (which Powell had titled Come Back to Sorrento) was lauded by Harold Stearns in the Sunday Tribune for its “fusing of the new stream-of-consciousness school and the directly realistic” (Diaries, 53); another reviewer of the same novel, Powell happily recorded, likened it to “the sound of a flute heard across water at twilight, like a lark at sunrise” (Diaries, 54).79
A handful of her short stories received some recognition: “Such a Pretty Day” was included in the New Yorker’s “pretty swell garland of reading” (Poore, “Books: Short Stories”), the 1940 anthology of sixty-eight of the best short stories it had published in its first fifteen years, placing Powell in the company of John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, Sherwood Anderson (to whom John Updike likened her) and Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara and James Thurber. The story would become so well known that Powell more than a decade later would complain that “somebody is always saying, ‘Miss Powell, did you write anything besides that New Yorker short story “Such a Pretty Day”?’” (Letters, 204). On the 1952 appearance of her collection of short fiction, Sunday, Monday and Always, one reviewer said that Powell’s “observation is merciless, her style a marvel of economy, her pen double-edged” (Nerber, 5); another reviewer, William Peden, called it “a welcome rarity in today’s book world, a volume of humorous short stories” that are “deftly and expertly put together” (10).80
. . .
When more than a decade after Whither was published and Powell again began setting her novels in New York, critics sometimes found her a skilled portraitist and a gifted satirist. Charles Poore, in 1940 reviewing the newly released Angels on Toast, found it not only “hilarious” and “blistering” but “warmhearted and yet singularly penetrating” (“Diversity,” 19). Similarly, Alice Morris, a contemporary of the author’s, said of another Powell novel written in that decade,
If the art of satire at Miss Powell’s hands is less baleful, less knife-edged and glittering than when Mr. Evelyn Waugh puts his hand to it, it is equally relevant, and more humane. In The Locusts Have No King, Miss Powell pins down her locusts—some New York barflies, bigwigs and gadabouts—with drastic precision, but never without pity. She laughs at them, but never laughs against them. . . . The combination of a waspish sense of satire with a human sense of pathos results in a novel that is highly entertaining and curiously touching. (1)
Comparisons with Waugh would surface again; Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker wrote that “Dawn Powell’s novels are among the most amusing being written, and in this respect quite on a level with those of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark. . . . Miss Powell’s books are more than merely funny; they are full of psychological insights that are at once sympathetic and cynical” (“Dawn Powell,” 236).
Another contemporary of the author’s, also reviewing The Locusts Have No King, spoke of “the justice of Miss Powell’s satire . . . the human honesty of her insights, [and] her wit . . .” all
