Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha, were married . . . they thought, the bride said later, they would “vindicate [Ohio-born novelist] Fannie Hurst,” who had been married in 1915 but who kept her marriage a secret for five years.
Accordingly Mr. Gousha returned to the home of his mother, brother and two sisters at number 540 81st Street Brooklyn, while the twenty-four-year-old Mrs. Gousha, pretty and brunette, continued living with a girl friend at number 549 West End Avenue.
But—
It took them only two weeks to find out that their . . . minds are quite elastic on the subject.
This was said by Mrs. Gousha at a “New York Night” before going to Pelham, where the two were “enchanted” to pass the New Year holiday with friends. (“Wed to Vindicate”)
The article continues in this same upbeat vein, ending with a flighty poem Powell had written, called “Inspiration,” and the couple’s earnest pronouncement that “they are not at all Greenwich Villagers” but that what they enjoyed most thus far about married life was “going on walks and seeing what we can’t own.” As it happens, they never would be able to afford much, though they would become stalwart Villagers.
In fact, it was only a short time later that they moved to their first Greenwich Village residence at 9 East Tenth Street (a plaque commemorating Powell’s living there was erected at Page’s urging and then later stolen); the couple subsequently moved to West Ninth, a street on which countless “wordsmiths” could be seen “shuffling up and down . . . like a pack of cards in pursuit of Lady Luck” (Loschiavo, 2). It was here, primarily, that Powell wrote her first novel, Whither. Later, in the summer of 1926, the young family moved to 106 Perry Street, also in the West Village, where they would remain for over a decade. The building, which still stands, is something of a literary landmark for those in the know, as it is here for the most part that Powell wrote “Dance Night, completed most of The Tenth Moon . . . and began Turn, Magic Wheel” (Bio, 100). Delighted to be living in the Village, where all the real artists lived and the place she would always consider her “creative oxygen” (Diaries, 391), Powell wrote, in 1934,
This little room is [the] loveliest thing I ever had. Upstairs here at night you see the towers of lower Manhattan lit up, the Woolworth, etc., and the voices of extra-news in the street, bouncing from wall to wall: “Russia—oom-pah chah! Russia—oom pah chah!” These sounds mingle with the far-off skyscraper lights, distant boat whistles and clock chimes and across the street in the attic of the Pen and Brush Club35 I see girls hanging out their meager laundry. (94–95)
In the early years the couple seems to have been very happy. But the marriage would be unconventional, Dawn having deep relationships with two other men, among them screenwriter/playwright John Howard Lawson, later one of the Hollywood Ten.36 Lawson’s son Jeffrey, in a telephone conversation with me in August 2012, recalled that in the 1930s Powell had been a frequent visitor to the Lawsons’ Long Island home, where heavy drinking continued long into the evenings. Jeffrey, maybe seven or eight years old, would be given “a glass of ginger ale to join them.” His beautiful mother, Sue Edmond Lawson, would occasionally get into physical fights with Powell. “After all the heavy drinking,” he said, “inhibitions would slip away and they’d start in on each other’s shortcomings. My mother more than once punched Dawn in the face. I always thought that Dawn wished my father had married her instead of my mother.” In a diary entry of December 5, 1933, Powell wrote that she “didn’t want to go anywhere with the Lawsons now that I see they are really dangerously insane so far as I am concerned” (Diaries, 78), though she did not explain further. But she would recall violent altercations with Sue Lawson even into the 1950s; one letter to Wilson tells of a surprise visit from an understandably upset Sue, her husband having been imprisoned for failing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Suddenly she hauled off and started beating up Canby,”37 then choking Margaret De Silver.38 As Powell tried to pull Sue off Margaret, she “got a sock in the face.” She added, parenthetically, “I gave [Sue] a good kick personally and pushed her into a chair where she sat with insane blazing eyes, face distorted with hate” (169–70). The younger Lawson concurs that his mother was “probably an alcoholic, flighty and temperamental, though very different and sort of sad in the afternoons when she was sober.” Though Powell and Sue Lawson had a stormy relationship, Lawson recalls that his mother “seemed to be fascinated by her: I remember her standing outside of Scribner’s whenever we were in New York, looking at the Dawn Powell books stacked in pyramids in the windows,” despite the fact that he also remembers Powell referring more than once to his mother as “a Southern bimbo, or something like that” (personal e-mail, July 24, 2012).
Powell also likely had an affair with travel writer, translator, and editor Coburn “Coby” Gilman, born on September 3, 1893, in Denver, Colorado.39 But Joe, too, was known to indulge in the occasional fling; as Page puts it, both of them “enjoyed a succession of lovers on the side” (Bio, 44). The marriage was a rocky one, after time, yet despite serious financial difficulties and painful misunderstandings, Powell’s drinking and persistent health problems,40 Gousha’s alcoholism, the above-mentioned infidelities on both sides, and sometimes lengthy separations, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha would remain married until his death. Following a long battle with cancer during which she dutifully cared for him, Joe died in St. Vincent’s Hospital on Valentine’s Day, 1962. The marriage had lasted forty-two years. After his death Powell would fondly reflect, “He was the only person in the world I found it always a kick to run into on the street” (Diaries, 436). Never fully recovering from his death, she often meditated on the loss in her diaries and would follow him in death just three years later.
A beloved, astonishingly smart little boy
—Bio, 50
On August 22, 1921, when Powell was twenty-four years old, her only child, a boy, was born. From her bed at St. Luke’s Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, Dawn wrote a letter to her sisters, Mabel and Phyllis, about the difficult birth: “I had a terrible time and it was just as hard on the baby. He is awfully husky but being born was a tough business for him and just before he came out his heart went bad.” Further, Powell said that she “didn’t dilate at all” (Letters, 46). The infant would suffer a blood clot on his brain and bruising caused by the doctor’s forceps, she wrote. Even while having to deliver such terrible news, Powell’s trademark humor surfaced in the next lines: “Doctors said I should have had my babies five or six years ago. That would have been awkward, as I would have had some difficulty in explaining them” (46).
Despite the difficult birth, the young mother went on lovingly to describe her child: “He has coal-black hair and big blue eyes and a tiny little nose and a beautiful mouth and one ear flat and the other sticks out. He is unusually tall. Got that from me.41 He has a fat little face—looks just like a Chinese mandarin but very very beautiful” (47). Obviously, Dawn Powell was a proud new mother.
Sadly, Joseph Jr., who would always be called Jojo, suffered from a disability perhaps caused, at least in part, by his difficult birth. From about the time he turned three years old, it became apparent that something was terribly wrong. Though there was never any clear diagnosis, he was sometimes thought to be suffering from schizophrenia, sometimes mental retardation, sometimes cerebral palsy, often a combination of the three (Bio, 49). Edmund Wilson in The Fifties referred to the “defective” (435) boy as Powell’s “spastic son” (637); a cousin, Phyllis Poccia, remembers him as something of “an idiot savant” (Bio, 49); even Gore Vidal, as late as 1996, described him as “retarded” (“Queen,” 18). Today one might refer to the boy’s condition as autism, though the disease was not understood then and not even named until the 1940s. Powell friend Matthew Josephson described Jojo’s case effectively. Soon enough after the boy’s birth, he wrote, Dawn and Joe “discovered that their child
