often mistake for malice. For instance, take the funeral of a much-loved family woman, a mother. Treating this romantically, one writes only of the sadness in the people’s hearts, their woe, their sense of deprivation, their remembrance of her. This is true, but it is not as true as I would do it, with their private bickers over the will . . . as they all gorge themselves at the funeral meals, as the visiting sisters exchange recipes . . . as pet vanities emerge.
Yet in giving this picture, with no malice in mind, no desire to show the grievers up as villains, no wish more than to give people their full statures, one would be accused of “satire,” of “cynicism,” instead of looking without blinders, blocks, ear mufflers, gags, at life. (118–19)
Powell believed that her critics did not understand satire when they spoke of it; instead, she said, they were actually speaking of “whimsy” (Diaries, 215). And despite the fact that her reviewers too often seemed not to “get it,” she came to be proud to be writing satire. In a diary entry of 1943 she wrote that “satire [is] social history,” that “the only record of a civilization is satire,” especially works like Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, which “gives a completely invaluable record of Paris, its face and its soul, its manners and its talk of 1840” (215) and, again, works like Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners. Powell created an important record of small-town Ohio during the early years of the twentieth century, and of New York in the first half of the same century. As Carleen M. Loper notes, “Following her wit, the second great gift Dawn Powell left us was her sense of place. If one is feeling nostalgic for an America that no longer exists, for a Greenwich Village of the ’30s and ’40s, or a mill town in the Midwest, one need look no further than the pages of her novels or diaries” (4).
The novelist wrote of what she observed and what she knew. Possessed of a talent for psychological insight, she was able to capture the inner workings of the minds of the people she was acquainted with, those she observed every day on the streets and in the cafés of the Village, those she had met and lived with in the remote farming towns and railroad junctions of Ohio. She knew about the small-town midwestern nobody and his lofty dreams, his disappointments, his despair. She understood the strivers and the seekers, the liars and the phonies, the rogues and the scoundrels who populated the rat-race worlds of advertising and publishing, theaters and saloons, art and commerce, and so she chose to write about them, just as they were. These characters populate her fiction with an authenticity that put some readers off; perhaps the fact that she presented them so realistically made some of her readers and critics perceive flaws in themselves. Whenever editors asked that she prettify her characters, she would tell them that they did not need to be prettified; still, their response always was, “But yes, . . . they do; before the reader will identify himself, he must be changed so that no one else will recognize him” (Diaries, 112). But, for the author, what was the point in writing the unrecognizable? She wanted to write the truth of her characters, the truth as she found it. Regardless of the social status, gender, moral practices, or professions of her characters, Powell longed for reviewers to respond to what she had put on the page or the stage, not to what they wished to see there.
The familiar charge never strayed far from her mind. Even as late as 1956 she recorded a humorous diary entry entitled “The Secret of My Failure.” While other authors, she said, would write something like “‘Last time Gary saw Cindy she was a gawky child; now she was a beautiful woman . . .’ I can’t help writing ‘Last time Fatso saw Myrt she was a desirable woman; now she was an old bag . . .’” (356). She would not romanticize the truth. “I believe true wit should break a wise man’s heart,” she once said. “It should strike at the exact point of weakness and it should scar. It should rest on a pillar of truth, . . . The truth is not so shameful that it cannot be recorded” (Josephson, 28). For Powell, writing was always about just that: telling the truth.
She finesses her way into your heart with fresh charm—[reading her] is like revisiting an old friend, or making a new one.
—Ann Geracimos, 1
In 1981, nearly two decades after Powell’s death, the first full-length study of her life and works was written. Judith Faye Pett, in her dissertation “Dawn Powell: Her Life and Fiction,” interpreted Powell more kindly than most of the novelist’s contemporaries did. Perhaps it is the distance of years and the changed attitudes of Pett’s generation that enabled her to perceive the compassion in the author’s portrayals as opposed to what had previously been perceived as vitriol, disapproval, and dislike. Pett recognized her “empathy, her sympathy for her characters” even while the novelist was simultaneously able to “see through or anticipate the results of their actions” (66). For Pett, Powell “accepts the world as it is” rather than seeking to change it. As Gail Pool wrote in 1990, Powell never made “life or people out to be any better than they are. Her great talent was for evoking so precisely what—in all their humor and sadness—they are” (20). In 1990, Michael Feingold explained that Powell’s “complexly acid vision was never wholly appreciated in her own time, perhaps because she reflected her time too accurately. Butterflies, even after they’re preserved and pinned, can’t be expected to wax enthusiastic about the woman with the net. How lucky the 1990s are that Powell’s multicolored collection . . . has reached the light again, in all its brilliant hues” (14). Reading Pett, Pool, Feingold, and the reviewers who follow them, one cannot help but think that Powell had been born several decades too soon.
A slightly earlier posthumous commentary on Powell, this one written in 1973 by her friend Matthew Josephson, spoke of the writer with an eye to posterity. “The good humorists dealing with the comedy of manners play a most useful part in helping us to see that which is real and that which is sham in our social behavior,” he wrote. “Casually, in a tone of levity, her books told the plain truth about the changing mores of the urban American during a long span of time extending from the 1920s through the 1950s” (19). It well may be that the upheaval of the times contributed to the discomfort that many Powell contemporaries felt as they read—or did not read—her novels.
More recent critics are generally delighted with Powell. Comparisons with Waugh persist: into the 1990s, the New York novels would be compared to his Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies (Feingold, 13); another recent commentator says, “Think of [Powell] as a homegrown Evelyn Waugh, with an added soupçon of Yankee asperity” (Marcus, 1). Joseph Coates writes, “Rediscovering a good but neglected writer is both exhilarating and depressing. Here is this terrific novelist, Dawn Powell, a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and more prolific than the two put together, who has left a whole shelf of funny, entertaining books that few had ever heard of before Vidal” (3).94 Library Journal calls Powell “one of the great American women writers of the twentieth century [who] at her best is better than most, male or female” (60). Novelist, columnist, and art critic Philip Hensher, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, concurs: “Powell is a supremely deserving candidate for admission to the Library of America, a writer of consistent and startling pleasure, cruelty, and ingenuity. Next to her the celebrated wits of the Algonquin look self-conscious and willful, their exercises in pathos whiny and thin . . . Powell belongs on the shelf with the masters of the novel” (“Country,” 135). The ballyhoo, once again, had begun.
THE DAWN POWELL REVIVALS
For decades Dawn Powell was always on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion.
—Gore Vidal, “Dawn Powell, the American Writer,” 195
Two or even three Powell “revivals” have taken place in recent decades, the first precipitated by an editorial in the fall 1981 issue of the Antioch Review. Editor Robert S. Fogarty had asked several well-known writers to name a forgotten author who should be recommended to readers of the Review. Two of the five he questioned, Roger Angell (writer and stepson of E. B. White) and Gore Vidal, replied simply, “Dawn Powell.” In the brief interview that follows, Vidal said that Powell is “as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens”
