up her notes from the original production, a copy of which Allie Mulholland generously provided me.
. . .
Jig Saw, produced by the Theatre Guild,86 was more favorably received than its predecessor Big Night had been, but then what play wasn’t? Roy S. Waldau judges that the play, which starred Spring Byington, Earnest Truex, and Cora Witherspoon, “was barely distinguishable from the majority of commercial entertainments that Broadway provides yearly” (187), but that lukewarm appraisal is a far cry from the lambasting that Big Night had received. Waldau goes on to cite a somewhat favorable Brooks Atkinson review that appeared in the New York Times immediately after the play opened:
Miss Powell has learned her craft by close attention to the accepted patterns. She knows when to be daring, when to be perverse, what foibles are most risible and how to twist lines into laughs. . . . Jig Saw may be dull under the surface, but it is bright on top, where facile humors are displayed to best advantage. (187)
Though the review is by no means a rave, neither is it a pan. Powell may have come to learn stagecraft better than she had known it previously, or she had succumbed to convention more thoroughly by that time, and she was fortunate to have left the Group Theatre. Closing after forty-nine performances, this second stage effort was a “modest” little achievement (Sheehy, 126). Jig Saw, in all its “extra-dry urbanity,” was “nearly Big Night’s counterpoint in every way,” quite different in “tone . . . temperament, [and] tactics” from “the scrappy, urgent comedy of Big Night” (Sheehy, 126).
Years after that production of Jig Saw, sounding frustrated with her failure at writing for the stage, Powell had a thing or two to say, whether fairly or no, about theater critics: “The fault it not that they know little about drama, it’s that they know so little else. ‘Life-like’ is a word they use for a form of life they have seen sufficiently on the stage for it to seem normal to them” (Diaries, 191). Soon enough, however, the author realized that the novel was her forte.
. . .
By 1936 she had become accustomed to hearing the same line of criticism of her novels that she had heard about her first play. For example, awaiting the publication of that year’s Turn, Magic Wheel, she feared that the book would “probably . . . annoy people as ‘Big Night’ did, according to the way Carol87 and Halliday88 react. . . . ‘Unpleasant, dreadful people’—what they always say when I have congratulated myself on capturing people who need no dressing up or prettifying to be real” (Diaries, 112). Although the novel earned many glowing notices, it received its share of complaints, too. Edith H. Walton, in an otherwise positive review, wrote that “Amusing and witty as it is, this tale of publishers and writers, of night-club addicts and the padded rich, is not precisely comfortable to read” (“Ironic,” 7).
Worse criticism awaited her second (or third, if we count Whither) New York novel, The Happy Island, published in 1938. In the New Yorker’s “Briefly Noted” column, an unsigned review chided the author for choosing to write about the “doings of a pretty worthless and ornery lot of people,” even though she “serves it all up with a dash of wit” (94). Still another complained of the “dimwitted” “playboys and playgirls who cavort through its pages” (Walton, “Café,” 7). In a final insult, William Soskin, of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that Powell seemed to dislike people so much that “the smell of men and women is a stench in her nostrils” (3).89 Soskin clearly had missed Powell’s response, in the very novel he was reviewing, to this exact sort of criticism: The Happy Island’s playwright character, Jefferson Abbott, newly transplanted to New York from a small town in Ohio, has been savagely attacked by the critics as full of “brutality and bitterness,” a despiser of humankind, to which he replies, “I never set out to be a literary Elsa Schiaparelli, dressing up human nature to hide its humps” (118). These words echo Powell’s own response to the familiar charge, but they somehow missed the reviewer.
A less favorable commentary on Angels on Toast than Charles Poore’s, above, found the Chicago/New York novel “cleverly surprising” and Powell a writer with an “exceptionally keen ear for dialogue,” but ultimately faulted the writer for creating “characters who are pretty hopeless because nothing much worth hoping for ever caught their attention” (Van Gelder, “Business,” 6).
A few years later, Powell’s next novel, A Time to Be Born, was called “another of her very enjoyable books about very disagreeable people” (Sherman, 6). Why this line of criticism, one wonders? Clearly O’Neill90 was writing much more sordid characters than Powell was, as were Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dreiser, and other contemporary American playwrights and novelists. It was almost becoming a mantra, as if each reviewer were repeating what each had said before and echoing what each was saying now. As Heather Joslyn says, Powell “was criticized in her time (and still is by some ’90s readers) for her propensity for ‘unpleasant’ characters, but they’re not so much unpleasant as unvarnished. Her small-town portraits owe more to Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Her big-city swells don’t just utter precious witticisms between sips of martini; they exploit each other, bed-hop, and social-climb” (“Bright”).
Even Diana Trilling, who usually championed Powell’s novels, criticized the writer of The Locusts Have No King for “the insignificance of the human beings upon which she directs her excellent intelligence” (“Fiction in Review,” 611). Powell responded in her diary to the familiar complaint: “Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn’t visit my folks, they’d visit theirs” (271). Teachout said of the comment, “Trilling is nobody’s fool, but she went to see the wrong family” (“Far,” 6).
Forty years after Trilling’s review first appeared, it annoyed Gore Vidal, who wrote,
Trilling does acknowledge the formidable intelligence, but because Powell does not deal with morally complex people (full professors at Columbia in mid-journey?),91 “the novel as a whole fails to sustain the excitement promised by its best moments.” Apparently to be serious a novel must be about very serious—even solemn—people rendered in a very solemn—even serious—manner. (“American,” 2)
Always considering herself a “serious novelist,” Powell wrote in her diary that her habit was simply “telling the truth. It’s very odd that [critics] should say you hate people because you don’t prettify them. But I like them the way they are, not gussied up for company” (213). If what she did was satire, as her reviewers often said, then why fault her for telling the truth? One of her favorite works, which she read over and over again, was Frances Trollope’s 1832 travel memoir Domestic Manners of the Americans.92 She defended Mrs. Trollope’s initially controversial book largely on the grounds that it told the truth of the new country rather than sugar-coat it, precisely what Powell always aimed to do.
As for her own works being labeled satires, she famously wrote, “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out” (Diaries, 119). Though she wrote again and again of her unhappiness with the critical indictment that too often was leveled at her, she did not answer the charges publicly, preferring to confine her feelings to her diaries, just as she confined her personal troubles there.
By the 1940s the author had begun to believe that she was writing in “an age that Can’t Take It”; it seemed to her that readers and critics alike were always crying “Where’s our Story Book? . . . Where are our Story Book people?” (Diaries, 188). For Powell, the public was uncomfortable with her clear eye and sharp wit; for them, as J. B. Priestley wrote, her work was more like “asperges vinaigrettes [than] a chocolate sundae” (Bio, 246).93 Again in her diaries, Dawn Powell sought to explain her technique:
