a character in her best New York novels and in her diaries as well.
Powell’s journals may aptly be termed “A Writer’s Diary,” as Leonard Woolf titled Virginia Woolf’s private writings, for “that’s exactly what Powell’s diary is, a workshop, where the author is practicing her chops” (Dyer, “After Dawn,” 3).9 Indeed, Powell’s diaries are of much value in their own right, certainly not only for shedding light on her fiction but as a fine example of the genre: Phillip Lopate, who includes entries from Powell’s diaries in his anthology Writing New York, finds her an exceptional diarist (xx), while Page in his introduction cites their “extraordinary value as autobiography, literature, social history, and psychological study” (ix). Like any good diary collection, this one offers not only scholars but general readers valuable insight into Powell’s life and craft.
SELECTED LETTERS OF DAWN POWELL, 1913–1965
The letters of Dawn Powell are brave, funny, and smart as hell. You’ll wish you could write her back.
—John Waters10
The Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, which Tim Page in his introduction calls “the record of a courageous, dramatic, and productive life” (ix), assists my examination of the novels, and particularly my examination of 1925’s Whither, in part because there are no diaries of that early period to turn to. The adult Powell did not begin keeping a proper diary until January 1, 1931. Before that time, beginning sometime in the same year the first novel was published, she had begun keeping “diaries of sorts,” though they were “little more than appointment books, with terse commentary thrown in here and there” (Diaries, 4). So if diaries are lacking for a given period, we happily have this collection of “epistolary wit” (Newsday), which is full of delightful, often lengthy accounts of her impressions of the city and its inhabitants along with the author’s hopes, dreams, observations, adventures, encounters. The letters, spanning forty-two years—1913 through 1965—cover eighteen years more than the diaries do, though they lack the emotional range of the diaries.11 In addressing her correspondents, Powell most often left her blacker moments unremarked. Lorrie Moore finds the “lightheartedness” Powell brings to her letters, in spite of her serious personal woes, “the utmost generosity” (2). Powell did not wish to burden her friends, acquaintances, or family members with her most serious difficulties. Indeed, Richard Bernstein writes that “one of the strongest elements of these letters . . . is their steadily cheery tone, the absence of references to domestic travails” (1), while Page explains, “If Powell’s diaries reflect the emotional turmoil that was such a large part of her psychological makeup, her letters tend to show the witty persona she constructed as a shield” (Letters, ix–x). Though she expressed her darkest troubles in her diaries, “throughout [the letters], she tends to put a comical gloss on her tribulations, with the tears of things peeking out through the cracks” (Bernstein, 1). The humorist in Powell would never allow her to sound gloomy for long: as the reviewer for the New Yorker observes, the letters’ “darkest moments are almost reflexively transformed by her supple wit” (137), so much so that that the volume reads as “a glorious and supremely funny record of her long struggles and . . . lasting triumphs” (Marcus, 1). Powell preferred to present a happy face to the world, much like the characters in Angels on Toast, who, she writes, put up a “jovial, openhanded, wisecracking front that is so seldom let down that they themselves aren’t sure what’s under it” (Letters, 110). Though she knew exactly what remained hidden underneath the front she had created for herself, she was determined not to allow others to see it.
The Letters, like the Diaries, have been well received, Lorrie Moore regretting the lateness of their release: “One cannot help believing that if [Powell] had been male and Ivy League educated, her career would never have fallen into disarray—not with 15 novels—and we would have had these letters years ago” (3). An anonymous reviewer in Publishers Weekly calls the letters
A posthumous triumph . . . in many ways the perfect record of a difficult life lived with pluck, intelligence and verve. . . . [They] record a sense of humor, a political acuity and a down-to-earth genius for friendship, love and getting by that is nothing less than invigorating. The great flaw of this volume is that there isn’t more of it. . . . What letters we have may win Powell even deeper admiration than The Diaries of Dawn Powell. (1)
Like many of the diary entries, some of the letters have been printed elsewhere: a letter Powell wrote to John Dos Passos describing Gerald Murphy’s funeral, for example, appears in Linda Patterson Miller’s Letters from the Lost Generation (341), but not in the Selected Letters of Dawn Powell. Howard Mansfield, editor of the 2006 volume Where the Mountain Stands Alone: Stories of Place in the Monadnock Region, includes excerpts from a 1949 letter that a peevish but funny Powell wrote to Joe from New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony. Originally published in Page’s Selected Letters, it appears in Mansfield’s collection under the title “And Not So Well for Others” (285), as Powell considered life in the artists’ colony too rigid for “so lax a person as myself” (286).
Unfortunately for readers approaching the fiction, few letters mention Whither, the first novel, at all; none shows her working at it or plotting it. Nonetheless, small episodes or character sketches first seen in the letters will emerge in a later novel or play, some in fact in Whither. One incident recorded in a letter of 1918 appears several years later in her first novel. Just two months arrived in New York, Powell wrote to her college friend Charlotte Johnson:
[A man] asked where we were on the subway and because I smiled back he grabbed my arm and told me he had just inherited half a million dollars from an uncle down in the Honduras and it was his guardian, the vice consul for the Honduras, that he was now on his way to. He was so handsome! And so young! And so—gee! He came to see me twice, then his boat left for the South and I know I’ll never see him again. (33)
In Whither, a friend of main character Zoe meets just such a young man, at a soda fountain instead of in the subway, but the story is the same. Also, in Whither, some elements of the main character’s voice and tone are not unlike the very young Powell’s.
Another passage from the same letter appeared half a dozen years later in the writer’s 1931 play Walking down Broadway. It seems that Powell either had an uncanny memory—a gift she furnishes alter ego Marcia with in the autobiographical My Home is Far Away—or that she kept copies of the letters she sent. The following episode recounted in the letter reads much as it does in the play:
It makes me dizzy to think of all the warm friendships and Passionate Affairs I’ve been through in three months.12 . . . And all the men say “I love you” and look at you with long wistful “I-surely-am-hit-now” gaze and you kiss them and say this is the first time I’ve ever cared like this and then you never see each other again. (33)
Several additional passages in the letters will turn up in the later novels as well, all of them providing a glimpse into Powell’s personal life, her skills at observation, her disciplined writing habits. The keen sense of humor for which the author is known surfaces in the letters again and again also. For example, on hearing the news of her grandmother Julia Sherman’s recent marriage, young Dawn writes from college, “You can imagine how surprised I was just now to learn from Auntie May’s letter that I had a Grandpa born all of a sudden. In fact I had to sit down and be fanned. But of course I am very glad, since my grandparents are rather scarce—your being the only one up until the fatal hour Wednesday” (7).
Years later, in a hilarious letter to Dos Passos, Powell wrote:
. . . We have been boycotting [the Brevoort] all summer but it is very expensive. It began one day when a few friends on the terrazzo started going to the Gents’ room through the window instead of the formal door and the waiter and the papa-waiter
