One of her best stunts is to give an imitation of Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson,68 a cannibal, a cannibal’s wife, a wounded lion, three dead elephants, and a movie camera. The elephants, we presume, are silent, as in rigor mortis. (BR8)
Evidently her antics at some party or other had drawn sufficient attention to find their way into the Times. Her name also appeared in such columns as Frank Sullivan’s annual New Yorker Christmas poem, “Greetings, Friends!” in which he would mention various celebrities of the days whose names were recognizable to his readers (Sullivan, 27),69 and in a silly poem attributed to one Walgrove Snood in reviewer Charles Poore’s “Books of the Times” column of December 4, 1932 (39). Clearly, Dawn Powell had before long achieved more than a little renown in her adopted city.
As we have noted, she was uncomfortable playing up to reviewers and preferred the role of observer; she was similarly uncomfortable with the adulation of fans, when she did come upon them. Charles Norman recounted one memorable encounter Powell had with an admirer: “At a party I gave on Perry Street,” he wrote, “there was a woman who sat on the floor. Dawn was in a chair yards away from her, but little by little the woman came closer, crawling with a glass in her hand, and looking up admiringly at Dawn. Soon she was beside Dawn, who jumped up. ‘I didn’t want a lapful of ears,’ she told me” (Poets, 53). As always, Powell remained uneasy in the spotlight.
. . .
If critics today almost uniformly sing Powell’s praises, many well-known commentators of her day did so as well. J. B. Priestley, who said he “never misses anything Dawn Powell writes” (Bio, 246), saw in her work “an admirable mixture, not often found, of humour, genuine sentiment (born of compassion), and very shrewd and sharp satire” (“Dawn Powell”). Diana Trilling famously wrote that “Miss Powell, one of the wittiest women around, suggests the answer to the old question, ‘Who really makes the jokes that Dorothy Parker gets the credit for?’” (“Four Recent Novels,” 243). Powell may have approved of Trilling’s comment, even though her carefully constructed novels and Parker’s slick one-liners had little in common.
The Second Novel as First . . .
Despite Powell’s distaste for her first novel, Whither, the book earned some fairly positive notices on its release. The author herself so firmly disliked it that she thereafter always disavowed it, saying, in the entry she wrote for Twentieth-Century Authors, that she “preferred to let the error be forgotten” (1123). Thirty-five years after the publication of Whither, when Hannah Green70 found a copy in a secondhand bookstore, Powell was not at all pleased (Diaries, 4). Still, four noteworthy publications—the New York Times, the Literary Review, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Boston Evening Transcript—considered it important enough to merit reviews in their pages. Friend and the New York Evening Post’s Charles Norman wrote that “Whither is a much finer conception of the jazz age than even [ John Howard Lawson’s] Processional is.71 There is an ironic, tender mockery in Miss Powell’s book, and a delicate, refreshingly humorous satire. I laughed aloud over many paragraphs. For escape from the heavy, all-observing (and all-recording) popular novels, I recommend Whither” (“Jazz,” 5).72 Two days after Norman’s piece appeared, Powell recorded in her diary, “Macy’s, Brentano’s, and Womrath begin to move Whither as a result of Charles’ review. Things look brighter” (5).
For a time Powell held out hope for the novel, though she was disappointed to find that a commentary soon to follow in the Saturday Review of Literature was less positive:
. . . While the author writes with earnestness, and evident sincerity and produces a thoroughly readable story, the book is neither searching in its insight into character, nor conspicuous as a study of life. The plot is thoroughly conventional in texture and the ending departs not at all from the usual, and if there be anything to distinguish the book it is a certain freshness with which the author writes and a certain engaging air of being deeply and seriously concerned about her characters and their lives. (694)
Though by no means a rave, the review did capture one of the hallmarks of Powell’s writings that critics would thereafter comment upon, for better or worse: her empathy for her characters, no matter how difficult, unlikable, or troubled they were.
Another contemporary reviewer, one S.L.R. writing in the Boston Evening Transcript, found much to like about the novel:
Sophistication and good humor are not usually associated, yet Mrs. [sic] Powell has managed to make them boon companions for three-hundred pages. Whither is a satire upon New York’s great army of Discontent—these thousands of girls who go to the city from Great Harrington, or Moline, or Hoosack Corners for their “great opportunity” which, because they are never willing to work up to it, never arrives. And so the years pass, waiting for Ethel Barrymore to die or the idea for the greatest novel of the decade to happen along. (5)
The New York Times review was partially positive as well, maintaining that the book had “real value” in its depiction of the struggle writers too often face between security and artistry, and in its “deft and lively characterizations” (“New York Adventures,” 19). But light sales and her own evaluation of the novel convinced her that the book was a failure.
Powell’s hometown Ohio paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also spilled a few lines of ink on Whither,73 though reviewer Ted Robinson was not impressed:
For the romantically inclined sweet young things who will “do” their two weeks at the sundry seasides and shadynooks this summer and who demand “snappy”74 fiction in which young or youngish heroines, “living their own lives,” brusquely choose their mates without consulting the brutes, or who feverishly carve out careers—letting the chips fall where they may—here is some new fiction of that sort. (9)
The first novel he mentions “of that sort” is Whither, which he calls simply “The romance of a small-town girl in New York’s Bohemia” (9). Books he includes alongside Powell’s are the rather undistinguished-sounding titles Last Year’s Nest75 and Singing Waters,76 among others. Whither, too, is a none-too-impressive title; in fact, many of Powell’s titles are less than intriguing.
For years the novelist would claim that her second publication, the Ohio novel She Walks in Beauty, was her first (Diaries, 12), much like Willa Cather before her, who admitted in “My First Novels (There Were Two)” having done the same thing. In 1943, eighteen years after the publication of Whither, in a brief autobiography to be included with the short story “You Should Have Brought Your Mink” in Story Magazine, Powell still refused to acknowledge Whither as her first novel:
My mother’s people, the Shermans, have lived [in Ohio] for five generations around Morrow County. This makes every person north of Columbus my cousin. Graduated from Lake Erie College. Did publicity and magazine writing in New York. First novel, She Walks in Beauty, appeared in 1938, and after that came The Bride’s House, Dance Night, Tenth Moon, Story of a Country Boy, all stories of a changing Ohio . . . and the last one published last August A Time To Be Born. Have contributed to various magazines, New Yorker, etc., and have done some work for the theatre. Have one husband, Joseph Gousha, and one son, Joseph, Jr., age 18. (103)
The author was so harsh in her assessment of Whither that many of today’s reviewers follow her lead and rarely mention it.77 Anne T. Keene, however, did scare up a copy and included it in her essay in Invisible Giants: Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books. She wrote that “what became the classic elements of Dawn Powell’s work were in evidence from the outset” (232). The book is now available on a print-on-demand basis on Amazon.com, a fact that would surely horrify Powell.
Many of Powell’s next publications would be fairly well received; in fact, as Page says, the critical “neglect of Powell during her own lifetime has been overstated” (At Her Best, xvi). The Ohio works were often praised for their lyricism, realism, and believability: She Walks in Beauty,