the city that is a goal” (17–18). Having achieved her goal of moving to New York, she immediately felt that she had finally landed in the place she was meant to be. She delighted in New York from the moment she arrived, eager to “jump right in” (Letters, 26) and to savor all it had to offer, though she had brought with her little more than her determination, her talent, and fourteen dollars (26). The “slight, impoverished, and wide-eyed woman of twenty-one,” as Tim Page describes her (Bio, 35),23 first settled in a woman’s boardinghouse on West Eighty-Fifth Street, a slightly fictionalized version of which is depicted in both her 1925 novel, Whither, and her 1931 play, Walking down Broadway. “Promptly and somewhat improbably,” Page writes, “she found work as an ‘assistant efficiency manager’ with the Butterick Company” (36), which published then as now dress patterns24 and in Powell’s days an array of ladies’ magazines, including Women’s and the Delineator. A young Theodore Dreiser had served in managerial positions at Butterick and the Delineator before Powell spent time there. In 1930, long after she had left the Butterick Company’s employ, the Delineator published a short piece of hers called “Discord in Eden,” paying her $1,000; Powell says she had seen it “rejected 13 times” before (Diaries, 15).
After only five weeks she left Butterick for the better-paying job of “second-class yeomanette” (Lake Erie College, “Early 1900s,” 1) with the United States Navy, offices at 44 Whitehall Street (B. H. Clark). When World War I ended, her “navy work [having] lost its urgency” (Bio, 38), she found a position in the promotion department of the Red Cross; a short time later she landed a publicity job with the Interchurch World Movement, a group founded after the war, with aspirations to create a better world.25 It was in this position that she met Joseph Roebuck Gousha, a young blond-haired and blue-eyed writer, born in 1890, who had lived in Pottstown, Norristown, Oil Town, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked as “a drama and music critic on the Sun” (Bio, 42). The two were immediately attracted to one another; in fact, Powell in the last months of her life would write in an article for Esquire that she had decided before their first date that he was the man she was going to marry (“Staten Island,” 121). Gousha, who like Powell had recently moved to New York, seemed to take as much pleasure in Manhattan as Dawn did. Enjoying a conventionally romantic courtship, the pair frequently dined out together, went to the theater, took carriage rides in Central Park, and “drank at some of the embryonic speakeasies that were springing up in Greenwich Village” (Bio, 42). So taken with him was she that she began keeping a little booklet that she named “The Book of Joe” (Diaries, 3–4), an undated sample from which reads
I went to Joe’s house for dinner and we walked to the Bay. . . . I made a peach pie—the very first and my Adorable said it was good. I love him so much and I will be so happy when we are together for always . . . My Dearest took me to the Bretton Hall26 for lunch and then we rode in a hansom lined with plum color through the park. (Diaries, 3)
Later, in letters and diaries, she regularly referred to Joe as “Adorable,” “Most Adorable” (Letters, passim), and “that loving golden Leo lad” (Bio, 278). The two were heavy drinkers even then, and their drinking would only escalate over the years. Of their first date, a walking tour of Staten Island, Powell wrote: “It was a Prohibition year, so naturally part of the hiking equipment was a hip flask of some exquisite blend of lemonade and henbane with a zest of metal rust” (“Staten Island,” 121).
If her New York novels are filled with images of drinking and bars—James Wolcott says of them, “Squeeze their pages and you can almost hear them squish” (46)—her life story is full of boozy nights at home and out on the town. In The Thirties, Edmund Wilson related the events of a party at Bill Brown’s27 Village apartment, during which an inebriated Powell “pour[ed] her drink down the back of a girl who was sitting on the stairs” (304); he later famously mentioned one of many “knock-down and drag-out” parties at Powell’s place (405). In the next decade, when Powell was hospitalized awaiting the removal of a large tumor in her lungs, Wilson was surprised to see her looking “fresher and younger” than he had ever seen her, without “rings or pouches around her eyes,” a fact he attributed to her being unable to drink there (Forties, 304). Her own diaries are full of references to drunken parties and nasty hangovers: she tells of one evening that began “at the Café Royale” (the actual spelling was Royal),28 where she had been “drinking ferociously”; the evening ended hours later with Powell “spilling [her] drinks all over Peggy’s29 sofa, occasionally roused into consciousness by being very wet” (Diaries, 87). Gore Vidal remarked on the gin-filled aquarium he saw in Powell’s apartment at 35 East Ninth Street in the summer of 1950 (Golden Spur, xi), though Page believes that the story is probably untrue: Powell, a cat owner, never once mentioned having owned either fish or aquarium, and that she would have gone to the expense of an aquarium is unlikely (phone call, March 7, 2013). But imbibe she did: Matthew Josephson writes that she “drank copiously for the joy of living” (21).30 Still, Powell was not to be likened to the uptown Algonquin lunch set who drank away their afternoons and wrote comparatively little: she would in fact become angry if an acquaintance asked her to lunch. “Did they think she was the Village playgirl? she’d shout. Didn’t they know she had some writing to do?” (Page, “Resurrection,” 3).31 Like Willa Cather, who believed that “the business of an artist’s life” is “ceaseless, unremitting labor” (Benfey, 4), Powell had no tolerance for those artists who would squander their talent or waste their time, an intolerance she demonstrated in novels from 1925’s Whither on. In her Diaries she complained of friends who “like to pester people who are working” and of those who are “happy to gnaw away at the bones of your energy and talent” (229). One simply could not write while entertaining or being entertained; in fact, from the time she was a child, she relished the sanctity of isolation. For writers, she said, “there is nothing to equal the elation of escaping into solitude” (228). Looking back, she would fondly recall the “sheer exhilaration” she had felt as a child when she had “got up into the attic or in the treetop or under a tree way off by the road where I was alone with a sharp pencil and notebook” (228–29). The serious artist always required seclusion, sobriety, and silence to produce.
At night . . . I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow.
—Diaries, 4
Some nine months after their first date, on November 20, 1920, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha were married at the Little Church around the Corner,32 located on Twenty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Madison. To Powell’s delight, her beloved Auntie May traveled to New York from Ohio to attend the wedding (Letters, 51), after which the young couple honeymooned at the brand-new Hotel Pennsylvania33 on Seventh Avenue (Bio, 43), then the world’s largest hotel (Hirsh, Manhattan, 80). Both the church and the hotel stand today.
Powell’s new husband, who like Dawn had been left to fend for himself from an early age, gave up his ambitions of becoming a critic, a poet, or a playwright, deciding that Dawn was the more talented of the two. Poet and friend Charles Norman remembers Joe’s saying, “I married a girl with more talent than I have, and I think she should have the chance to develop it” (Poets, 51). It may be that this portrait of Gousha is overly kind: he was already deep in the throes of alcoholism by that time and was unable to produce what work he might otherwise have done. Whatever the reason, the couple agreed that Powell should quit her job and write, and that Joe, whom Norman describes as possessed of “charming old world manners” (51), would support the family with his work at a New York advertising agency, later as an executive with the firm.34
After first deciding to live apart in what was considered the “new Bohemian fashion,” they ultimately changed their minds and rented their first apartment together at 31 Riverside Drive. An article without a byline that made the third page of the Evening World of January 3, 1921—this article, in which Powell received top billing, might have been
