Christmas Idyll” in the Chicago Tribune in 1963; and the seriocomic “Weekend in Town,” printed in the Saturday Evening Post in the year before her death. That story features two young women, roommates who get along well because “they wore different size clothes,” again in a line reminiscent of Whither, written nearly four decades earlier. The girls in the story had “good jobs and a really charming apartment overlooking a garden on West Twelfth Street. It was fixed up like a decorator’s dream with ‘gravy’—the latest in sample fabrics . . . and the newest in gadgets” (58). Consumerism was rarely far from Powell’s mind.
Recently, an online resource called “The FictionMags Index,” edited by William G. Contento, posted a list of Powell stories it had located. David Earle, of the University of West Florida, has “found just about all of [her] pre-1930 stories from various pulp magazines—it amounts to 15 or so stories, all pretty wonderful and very flapperish” (Earle, personal e-mail) Professor Earle kindly sent me copies of two: one, published in Breezy Stories in 1921, called “And When She Was Bad—” and the other, “Not the Marrying Kind,” about which a cryptic Powell diary notation, dated April 6, 1925, reads: “Letter about ‘The Marrying Kind’ saying ‘This Dawn Powell writes so attractively I hate to return her story.’ He did” (Diaries, 5). It is unclear who the “he” was.
But still, decades after the biography appeared, many if not most of her short works remain elusive; though scattered mentions of these pieces appear throughout her letters and diaries, they are often mentioned in passing, without date or name of publication, making them all but impossible to trace.
POWELL ON SATIRE
The enjoyment of satire is that of nine-pins—seeing the ball strike truly and the pins go down.
—Diaries, 75
Writing the truth, for Dawn Powell, was always most important. She wrote that “truth seems to me the most beautiful form of art in the world” (Diaries, 154), and the best means of telling the truth, for Powell, was satire. Powell’s habit of telling the truth in her comedies earned her the charges of cynicism she too often heard from her critics (see chapter 1). Of course her satires were sharply funny, too. As Amanda Vaill says, “Powell’s gift” was “not to repress, not to transcend, but to tell the truth and then to laugh, however ruefully” (“Laughing,” X06). As the novelist said over and over again, the truth was what she was always after. Today, many critical commentators understand that point: “Readers are first attracted to Powell’s books because they are funny,” Richard Dyer writes, but “later they realize that they are funny because they are true” (“After Dawn,” 37).
Seeking to explain in her diary the difference between satire and romanticism, Powell wrote simply, “A man endows a hospital in a small town; actually his motive is political and social advancement in the town. His vision is helping his fellow men in their suffering. Emphasis on the one is satire, on the other romance; both are true and truer than the middle course of ‘realism’” (118). Not much later, in a 1940 New York Times interview with the author, Robert Van Gelder sought to assist Powell as she attempted to explain her writings up through Angels on Toast. Introducing the New York cycle, Van Gelder wrote, “They are very witty satires that, perhaps unfortunately, satirize those people who, to the bulk of the public, must seem the stuff that dreams are made of—fashionable chanteuses, radio big names, advertising contact men, successful commercial artists, popular playwrights, mistresses who have attained Park Avenue addresses” (“Some Difficulties,” 102). For Van Gelder, and for many others as well, Powell too often breaks hearts, shatters dreams, crushes expectations. Fully aware of the charge, Powell explained, as Van Gelder notes,
The way of the satirist is made difficult by the fact that “you both confuse and anger people if you satirize the middle class. It is considered jolly and good-humored to point out the oddities of the poor or of the rich. The frailties of millionaires or garbage collectors can be made to seem amusing to persons who are not millionaires or garbage collectors. Their ways of speech, their personal habits, the peculiarities of their thinking are considered fair game. I go outside the rules with my stuff because I can’t help believing that the middle class is funny, too.” (“Some Difficulties,” 102)
Though Powell sometimes satirized the very wealthy, as she did in Turn, Magic Wheel, for example, more often it was the commonplace advertising man or the young secretary on the make who captured her interest and at whom she pointed her pen. Powell more often than not chose to focus on the regular folks she saw about town.
In her journal of the same year she repeated dictums she had heard over and over again:
The rules for satire as laid down by reviewers are purely materialistic. Let no mockery interfere with the budget! Flay with “good-natured fun” the antics of the poor or the rich, but never say the pleasures of the middle class are a little ridiculous, too. The middle class comes in large families, and if you must record them, say they are earnest; say they eat simple apple pies and honest roast turkeys; say they till the soil, quibble over wills, snub new neighbors, juggle their accounts, cheat their partners (through family necessity), disown sons for unsavory marriages—but show that these vices are necessary, and are accompanied by worry, harassment and groans, never by laughter. Say that these sins (if sins they be, since they are at least solemn sins) are done with dignity, unlike the sins of the rich or the very poor. (Diaries, 180)
Like her artist friend Reginald Marsh, she most often preferred portraying the “not glamorous or affluent New Yorkers, but those of the lower and middle and lower classes. It was the Bowery bums, burlesque queens, Coney Island musclemen, park denizens, subway riders, and post-flapper-era sirens” (B. Haskell, 6) who captured both her imagination and Marsh’s. These people were her focus, her family, the people about whom she cared and whom she understood. Marsh and Powell were well acquainted with each other and with each other’s most frequent subjects: in fact, Marsh would illustrate the cover of Powell’s 1948 novel, The Locusts Have No King.
It is through her “wonderfully incisive satire” that her portraits always convince.
—Tom Sellar
As much as the author longed for more positive commentary, she nevertheless refused to bow to the wishes of her reviewers or the public and sought instead always to refrain from romanticizing her characters or their motivations. As always, Powell would “draw her people with accuracy and honesty, refusing to assign to them noble intentions when they have none” (Sexton, 7). Because writing satire and telling the truth were so closely related for Powell, and because the author fancied herself nothing if not a satirist, writing what she knew was so important to her that she would always base her novels on some sort of autobiographical reality. In 1935, while writing Turn, Magic Wheel, she confided in her diary, “Since I can write so fluidly and with such pleasure about real people . . . it seems increasingly an effort to step from this reality into a storybook world. On the other hand, I hate to use real people and hurt them but I have reached the point where I must sacrifice my tender feelings for reality. It’s a decision against personal life for the crueler pleasures of artistic exactness” (98–99). Readers will see the same ambivalence at work in Turn, Magic Wheel, where Powell-like novelist Dennis Orphen sometimes regrets having cruelly exposed friend Effie Callingham, but in the end both authors’ decisions to write the truth wins out.
Powell, understandably, chose to write about subject matter that spoke to her. For example, she often referred to Balzac as one of her favorite novelists, and comparisons with Balzac surfaced in commentaries by Warfel (345) and others, including Gore Vidal (see chapter 1, above) and Glenway Wescott (Diaries, 285). Powell’s Ohio works tell the tale of provincials at home, often longing to escape; and her
