again” (Bio, 275). In her last novel, The Golden Spur, an artist character “was always so glad to get back to Manhattan . . . that he started walking as soon as he hit the beloved pavements so as to get the empty, clean smell of the country sunshine out of his system and let God’s own dirt back in” (83). Like the character, Powell always “hated going to the country, she used to say, and could not breathe well until she had returned to the polluted air of New York” (Josephson, 48). She did return to Ohio a few more times after her father’s death, once in the spring of 1940, having accepted an invitation from her alma mater to speak at a college assembly. Of her doings in New York since her graduation, she said with characteristic wit and modesty, “I did publicity work and book reviewing, I married and now have a son and a player piano” (Farnham, 3). Of course by then she had done much more than some “publicity work and book reviewing”: by 1940 she had written and published nine novels, to say nothing of the many other pieces she had produced.
Other trips from Manhattan served to make her miss it all the more; a jacket blurb on the first edition of her Sunday, Monday and Always quotes her as saying, “The past winter spent in Paris has only increased my passion for New York. I explore it endlessly. The fact that it is getting more and more bedlamish, dirtier, more dangerous, and more impossible seems to heighten my foolish infatuation with it.” She answered friends who questioned her distaste for traveling away from the city, “There was no place on earth I wouldn’t go if I lived anyplace but New York” (Diaries, 302). Why should she leave New York? she would ask. Though she would always consider herself a “permanent visitor” to Manhattan, she genuinely believed she belonged nowhere else. As Richard Lingeman writes, “She was the classic New Yorker from somewhere else . . . a self-styled ‘permanent visitor’ who observed the natives with the sophistication of an insider and the wide-eyed innocence of an eternal small-towner” (40). Or as Wilson said of Powell in a letter to Alfred Kazin, who had written a piece about New York transplants from the Midwest for Harper’s, she “is the perfect example of the Westerner coming to New York and becoming a New Yorker, but observing it with the eye of someone who has come to it from outside” (Letters on Literature, 699).56
And nowhere else could she write as skillfully, though it was a difficult balancing act to shift from the small and large tragedies of her daily life to the comic sensibility of the satire she wrote. The balancing act became particularly difficult in later decades: on Christmas Day 1957, Powell wrote of Gousha’s imminent “retirement” from the advertising agency, to occur in January of the next year, and bemoaned the fact that he would no longer be drawing a salary (Diaries, 378). By then nurse Louise Lee had died, and their finances were now far too depressed for them to afford help anyway. Soon enough, Powell would begin spending several years tending to Joe as he lay dying of cancer.
Her last novel, the almost universally lauded The Golden Spur, was published in 1962, the same year that her husband died, despite her having been “so harassed with a dozen piddling things” (Letters, 295). While caring for Joe, she complained in a petulant letter to her sister Phyllis: “I have to do EVERYTHING. Get up, cook, wash dishes, make beds, rush to get chapter ready and then take off for two o’clock appointment uptown, rush back and do book review for Post, rush to deliver THAT myself downtown, back to pick up stuff for supper, swig a drink and fall asleep” (295).
Even when she herself was suffering from cancer, she continued reading and reviewing the latest publications. In her last year she contributed a “jacket valentine” to the newest novel of fellow writer and editor friend Morris Philipson (Poore, “Young,” 29),57 provided commentary for the Washington Post on Joseph Mitchell’s new publication, Joe Gould’s Secret,58 and reviewed novels for the New York Post. At the same time she continued working on an unfinished play, The Brooklyn Widow; a fragmentary novel, Summer Rose; and even an incomplete children’s book about cats, called Yow (Bio, 223, 307). In the same year she published her essay about her first date with Joe, “Staten Island, I Love You,” and gave what is the only surviving taped interview we know of to a young reporter who had no idea that she was dying. “She offered me whisky,” he wrote, “but would herself drink only ice water: later I learned that she was dying of stomach cancer, a fact no word, no inflection revealed” (Hethmon, “Memories,” 40). Friends hovered about to comfort her in her last weeks. Matthew Josephson reported that “whereas she had been made terribly insecure by the want of love in her childhood, she did not lack for it at the end” (50). Hannah Green and Jacqueline Miller Rice cared for her daily, and even “the very aged Coburn Gilman now made heroic efforts to curb his drinking habits and attended her at her bedside every night like a nurse” (50).59
The final entry in her Diaries appeared on September 30 (477); the last letter she is known to have written is dated October 22 (Letters, 350–51). That final letter, written to her beloved cousin John Franklin “Jack” Sherman, to whom Page almost always refers as “one of the world’s great gentlemen,” expresses Powell’s wonder at not being able to “even dodder to the living room without difficulty—let alone nip out into the gay world” of Manhattan (350). As painful as that realization must have been to her, she nevertheless did not let on, refusing to sound morose in this last letter she would write.60
On November 14, 1965, just two weeks shy of her sixty-ninth birthday, Dawn Powell died at St. Luke’s,61 the same hospital where she had given birth to her only child so many years before. She left her eyes to New York’s Eye Bank and the rest of her body to Cornell Medical Center. Her final remains were later taken to Potter’s Field on Hart Island, where they were interred in a mass pauper’s grave bearing no name.62
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Matthew Josephson said I was the wittiest woman in New York. Impossible!
—Diaries, 34
Powell certainly enjoyed some successes; she was also admired by many of the top writers, artists, and critics of the day and knew many notables who resided in or visited New York while she lived there. Although she never made the bestseller lists, “her books weren’t exactly neglected in her lifetime; par for her was a sale of around 5000 copies” (Lingeman, 38). To some the very “personification of Manhattan” (Vidal, “Queen,” 25), Powell enjoyed close friendships, as we have seen, not only with Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Matthew Josephson but also with Malcolm Cowley, John Latouche,63 Sara and Gerald Murphy, Malcolm Lowry, Dwight Fiske,64 and her editor, Max Perkins, widely considered “the most distinguished editor in the book business” (Cowley, “Unshaken” II, 30). She was acquainted with many other noteworthies, among them Robert Benchley, Djuna Barnes,65 e. e. cummings, Rex Stout, Sherwood Anderson, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, and Theodore Dreiser. Edmund Wilson, who had met Powell in 1933 and referred to her as “one of his only real friends” (Sixties, 64),66 wrote in a New Yorker article of her “gift of comic invention and individual accent that make her books unlike all others” (“Dawn Powell,” 233). Ernest Hemingway, who called Powell his “favorite living writer” (Diaries, 226), told Lillian Ross that Powell “has everything that Dotty Parker is supposed to have [but] is not tear-stained” (Ross, 69–70). Malcolm Cowley in a 1963 Esquire piece spoke of his “lasting gratitude” for Powell’s works and for those of “one or two other women of the generation” but added rather presciently that those same women writers “have been less widely read than male contemporaries of no greater talent” (78). John Dos Passos, who always admired Powell’s work, admired the writer as well: in his autobiography, he named her “one of the wittiest and most dashingly courageous women I ever knew” (154). “Dos,” as she and all his other friends always called him, was proud that his friendship with Powell had lasted from their meeting in the 1920s until her death. A publisher friend said Powell had a “New York following that considered her in the class of Madame Recamier,67 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Dorothy Parker” (Crichton, 84). She was famous enough that her name sometimes appeared in gossip columns and in such places as the New York Times’ “Books and Authors” feature, which on September 28, 1930, offered readers this curious tidbit:
Dawn