and the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California—twelve of her novels, a volume of her letters, a collection of her diaries, and some of her plays and short stories have in recent decades been reissued to critical acclaim. Several of her plays have been either restaged or produced for the first time, and a 1933 film, Hello Sister, loosely based on Powell’s play Walking down Broadway, was in the 1990s released on VHS, if only out of interest in its famous director, Erich von Stroheim; it was shown in a Greenwich Village cinema in 2012.
Of course, more important than quantity of writing is quality. Powell’s novels are filled with astute observations, wry commentaries, spot-on characterizations. Despite her reputation as a tough and unflinching satirist, she is capable of moving tenderness and pathos, particularly in the Ohio novels. In an article originally published in the New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout called My Home Is Far Away, one of the Ohio novels, a “permanent masterpiece of childhood” (“Far from Ohio,” 6). Few novelists are better at depicting young children than is Powell; one need read but the first several chapters of My Home Is Far Away to see that. Edmund Wilson found her books “at once sympathetic and cynical” (“Dawn Powell,” rpt., 236); Powell can make a reader weep in a brief portrait, as she does when describing old Mrs. Fox in She Walks in Beauty,4 or when in the same early Ohio novel she conveys the humiliation young Dorrie endures at the hands of her classmates. But most remarkable perhaps is her sense of humor. Few writers are wittier, more scathing, more insightful than Powell. Not only Gore Vidal, Terry Teachout, and Diana Trilling, but Margo Jefferson, John Updike, Michael Feingold, and many other distinguished authors and critics have found much to like in the novelist. As Jefferson writes:
So, we say to ourselves, another nearly forgotten writer exhumed, cleaned up, reissued and put on display with endorsements from Edmund Wilson, Diana Trilling, and Gore Vidal. Then a friend says no, she’s terrific, read her, and we do, and here it is, that infinitely distinguished thing,5 a dead writer so full of charm and derring-do that literature’s canon makers should sit back, smile and say, Dawn Powell, where have you been all our lives? (1)
In this project I examine Powell’s New York novels as separate from her haunting books of Ohio, because including all of Powell’s novels is beyond the scope of this project.6 Also because the Ohio publications are generally considered very different from the New York, both in theme and in tone, they should be considered separately: for one commentator, they are so dissimilar that “it is not surprising that many of Powell’s greatest admirers have resorted to writing off one group or the other of her novels and basing their admiration on only half her work” (Hensher, “Country,” 1). The New York books, overall, are more satiric, more comic, than the lyrical Ohio novels are, and it is in the New York works that Powell writes about “the Midnight People,” who, like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, “drink and dance and rattle and are ever afraid to be silent” (Lewis, 327). Still, the Ohio series has much to say for itself. As one critic writes, “While the Manhattan novels are unquestionably wittier—urban pretensions and disputes seem to offer readier targets than rural—the Ohio novels are far from being simple accounts of grim life on the late Middle Border. The human comedy is no less comical” in Ohio than in New York (R. Miller, “Reintroducing,” E8). Vidal, like many other Powell fans, preferred the New York novels: he said that it is with them that Powell “comes into her own, dragging our drab literature screaming behind her” (“Dawn Powell: American,” xiii). Both cycles have much to recommend them, and a lengthy study of the Ohio novels still needs to be written.
As readers see in the Diaries, the Selected Letters, and Page’s Biography, Powell’s New York is largely the Village, a location that, Ross Wetzsteon reminds us, “has held such a mythic place in the American imagination that it has often served as a kind of iconographic shorthand. A novelist need only to write ‘then she moved to the Village’ to evoke an entire set of assumptions—she’s a bit rebellious, artistically inclined, sexually emancipated, and eager to be on her own” (x). All of these characteristics prove true not only of the novelist’s Village characters but of Powell and many of her friends themselves. Wetzsteon adds that “the mythology of the place has been created in large part by those who moved there from elsewhere,” as Powell did and as nearly all of her principal characters do. Powell’s love of the city she had known since her arrival there in 1918 never diminished; in novels from the 1930s to the 1960s she expresses her heartache about her once-vibrant but speedily deteriorating Manhattan.
I also look at the characters, including those based on the “real” people who populated the city, placing them beside the biographical facts of the author’s life and using not only Page’s biography but also Powell’s own diaries and letters and other available sources. All of the players by now having long since departed, I discuss the real-life “victims” on whom she at least partly based some of her characters, among them Clare Boothe Luce, Ernest Hemingway, John Chapin Mosher, Dwight Fiske, Peggy Guggenheim, and others. Further, I place the works alongside the writings of some of her contemporaries, including Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Ruth McKenney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, to whom Powell is most often compared—a Dos Passos biographer even calls Powell “the poor man’s Dorothy Parker” (Carr, 283)—though many commentators agree that the Round Tabler “had a comparatively modest talent” (Begley, 7). Parker’s witty lines have come down to us largely because she voiced them in earshot of her newspaper chums, who took note of them and reported them posthaste.7 Powell, however, as friend, writer, and critic Matthew Josephson remembers, uttered many of her best lines “before a bibulous company whose powers of recall became clogged” (25). Which is not to say that Parker’s companions were sober—far from it. Instead, the Algonquin crowd had to hasten from their lunch table to their typewriters, if they were to remain employed, Parker’s witticisms fresh in mind, rapidly jotting them down to flesh out a column. Powell and her friends, on the other hand, returned to their garrets or typewriters to finish the paintings and novels on which they had been working. Once pressed during a 1999 NPR interview to compare Powell to Parker, Tim Page said, “What [writings] do we really remember of Dorothy Parker’s? . . . In my own opinion, there’s no comparison whatsoever. . . . I don’t think Parker was fit to carry Powell’s typewriter.” Despite the differences in their literary output and creative talent, Powell always “lived under the burden of being known as the second Dorothy Parker”; the comparison was so unsavory to her that, according to friend Jacqueline Miller Rice, “If someone called her another Dorothy Parker, she’d hit them” (Guare, x). To Powell the comparison may have seemed even more belittling because, as Wetzsteon writes, this “stress on her wit reduced her carefully crafted comedies of manners to glib collections of one-liners” (510); further, it exasperated her to think that anyone would believe that there could be but one female at a time writing satire in New York. And the playing field is hardly even for the two women writers who shared the same initials: Parker wrote very little, Powell wrote volumes; one critic says that Powell “out-Parkers Queen Dorothy” at every turn (Salter). And though it may seem that Powell disliked her more famous contemporary, the two were actually quite friendly, often going out together. If Powell objected to being compared to Parker, it was because of the latter’s negligible writing production, not because she disliked the woman; in fact, she admired Parker’s generosity. In a 1963 letter to her sister Phyllis, Powell wrote, “I used to have some good times with Dorothy Parker who gets too much credit for witty bitchery and not enough for completely reckless philanthropy—saving many people, really without a thought” (Letters, 316). Parker, who would die two years after Powell, left her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Foundation; the funds went to the NAACP following King’s assassination in 1968.
. . .
Even though Powell on occasion maintained that what she wrote was not satire but the truth, often with a capital T, she more often did call it satire, as do many of her readers. Attempting to explain why the novelist never achieved the readership or the recognition she should have achieved, Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Ann T. Keene’s introduction to Mark Carnes’s edition of Invisible
