attractive as the money always was, writing film scripts, Powell said, “makes you hate yourself” (Josephson, 40). Instead she would stay home and continue working on what she considered her first real New York novel, the book that would become Turn, Magic Wheel.45
She also loathed the celebrity book promotion circuit, believing that what made one a writer was writing rather than all the posturing that, in her view, too frequently accompanied it. As Suzanne Keen says, “Powell has little patience with those who believe in their myths of self-presentation” (24). Her first novel, Whither, focuses on the idea; Turn, Magic Wheel explores it fully, lampooning a celebrated writer based on Ernest Hemingway; A Time to Be Born rips it apart, lambasting a character inspired by Clare Boothe Luce.
Powell’s father had been a traveling salesman, her Auntie May a department store buyer, her husband an advertising man, and she herself had worked in publicity. Given this background, it should come as no surprise that the fostering of consumer desire emerges in nearly all of her writings. But, for Powell, the marketing of merchandise was one thing; the peddling of one’s art was another. Close friend Edmund Wilson wrote of her “complete indifference to self-promotion,” noting that “she rarely goes to publishers’ lunches or has publishers’ parties given her; she declines to play the great lady of letters, and she does not encourage interviews” (“Dawn Powell,” 233). Vidal, similarly, recalled that Powell was “not about to ingratiate herself with book reviewers like the New York Herald Tribune’s Lewis Gannett,” whom Vidal considered “as serenely outside literature as his confrere in the daily New York Times, Orville Prescott, currently divided into two halves of equal density” (“Queen,” 23). Despite Vidal’s vitriol, Gannett was quite a fine critic. Still, Powell was more apt to tell critics what she thought of their reviews than to attempt to curry favor with them, even though she knew that their favor might have resulted in more positive commentaries. As Sanford Pinsker says, with “a bit of horn-tooting she might well have unseated Dorothy Parker as the wickedest wit in town” (67), adding, “When the literati might have done her some good, she held their feet to the fire rather than sucking up” (68). Although in her diary she would comically lament that “all my life has been spent killing geese that lay golden eggs, and it’s a fine decent sport,” she still refused to seek out the spotlight or to do anything she would label “false” to achieve it. In fact, she so disliked being “the observed instead of the observer” (Diaries, 453) that she would paint in Turn, Magic Wheel a portrait of a female character terribly uneasy under observation, while fictional author Dennis Orphen, based on Powell herself, observes her unremittingly. For Powell, as for Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s literary alter ego, the artist remains a “tranquil watcher of the scenes before him”; it is the novelist’s job to watch and to study rather to be watched and studied. As Powell noted in a diary entry of March 8, 1963, “I realize I have no yen for any experience (even a triumph) that blocks observation, when I am the observed instead of the observer” (453). Writing to Gerald Murphy, purportedly about his sister and her good friend, Esther Murphy, Powell wrote, “Some people don’t want to be the action—they really want to be spectator” (L. Cohen, 135), revealing more about herself, perhaps, than about her friend.
Instead of putting on airs or lusting after fame, Powell quite simply, as Page says, “lived to write” (Diaries, 1). It was true: she rarely felt comfortable without at least one, or more often several, sizable writing projects underway at a time. In a letter of August 4, 1940, in the space of one small paragraph, she wrote of the many genres in which she was working simultaneously: “I have been frantically finishing and reading proofs on my novel Angels on Toast which is coming out next month so my theatrical itch has been under control. I do have a half-idea for a new play but am trying to hold its head under water until I get some short stories done” (Letters, 109).
To attempt to understand these fevered undertakings, one should note that Powell found solace and sanity in writing and felt especially lost whenever working on anything but a novel, the genre that would calm her “hysterics” and give them a place to exist “instead of rioting all over my person” (Diaries, 90). For Powell, “the novel is my normal breath . . . my lawful married mate” (69). If writing was her sanity and her solace, she found it also a grueling task: one diary entry says simply, “Wonderful day—murderous hard work but results” (427). Writing was the only activity she knew of that would help keep her demons at bay. Frances Keene,46 who had met the novelist in the 1950s, understood that writing for Powell “was the bulwark against the chaos and tragedy of her life” (Bio, 266). Powell’s diary entry of February 3, 1936, for example, records the following account of trying to write in the presence of her fourteen-year-old son:
This is the longest period of Jojo being completely hopeless. I can scarcely remember any time since fall that he has put through a calm normal day. He requires the most intense control, for from morning to night he bursts in, plants himself before me and shouts meaningless sentences over and over. (113)
Free time was a precious commodity, even though Powell and her husband, about three years after Jojo’s birth, had hired a day nurse, Louise Lee, to come in to tend to the boy. Lee would remain with the family for thirty-three years, until a stroke prevented her from continuing. The arrangement worked out well for all concerned: Jojo was relatively content in her care, Gousha felt less burdened, and Powell gained a few hours of freedom each day that enabled her to go elsewhere to write. Before she was married, the young author had often escaped the noise of the boardinghouse in which she lived to write in comparative solitude in Central Park; now she chose the children’s room of the New York Public Library at Forty-Second Street, because “they have those low tables in there that are just the right height for me. And it is always quiet in the children’s room. Children aren’t allowed there, so far as I know” she quipped (Van Gelder, “Some Difficulties,” 102).47 Writer Hope Hale Davis,48 who like Powell had published short pieces in Snappy Stories49 (Davis, 70), recalled in an essay requested by Steerforth shortly before her death often seeing the young author crouched over the small tables hard at work, but rarely interrupting her, knowing that for Powell “every undisturbed moment” had to count (Bio, 52).
Later, when she and her family had moved to an apartment near University Place, Powell would often escape to the relative peace of the rooftop to write. Fleur Cowles, associate editor at Look and, later, founder and editor of Flair magazine,50 remembers the author sitting up there writing all day, coming out only at night “to take a quizzical look at what’s going on” (5).
Dedicated to her work, Powell took in nightlife as much for observation and camaraderie as for entertainment, though surely she enjoyed her evenings on the town. Matthew Josephson wrote that in the café of the Hotel Lafayette, formerly located at University Place and Ninth Street, Powell “set up a little café society of her own . . . where she had people laughing with her for more than thirty years” (19) until the hotel was razed to make way for apartment buildings. Dos Passos biographer Virginia Spencer Carr writes similarly that Powell’s “ear was privy to almost every literary and theatrical grapevine” holding “forth at a corner table” there (283). Another favorite haunt was the nearby Hotel Brevoort, owned, like the Lafayette, by Raymond Orteig;51 the Brevoort, at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, had been in existence since 1854, the Lafayette since the 1870s. The little society who would meet at the stylish Lafayette café consisted not only of Powell’s many literary friends, but also of “theatre people and some notable artists of the American school, such as Niles Spencer,52 Stuart Davis,53 and Reginald Marsh,54 as well as assorted Bohemians and tipplers” (Josephson, 20)—and it did far more than keep people laughing: it provided Powell a never-ending supply of material for her writings and a convenient place to meet and consult with other artists. But after the gaiety of her evenings at the Lafayette, the equally well-loved Brevoort, or elsewhere in the city, Powell would always return home to the troubles awaiting her there.
She rarely longed to escape from New York, however. From the time she arrived in Manhattan until her death, she would almost always hate to leave her adopted home. When her father suffered a stroke in July 1926, Powell returned to Ohio but wrote, “I was just sick as we pulled away from