very intimate book about a woman torn between affection for her husband and passion for a dashing and mysterious stranger” (Bio, 66), received some positive critical attention, including this line from the New York Times: “A striking story, macabre in its intensity, [the author] painting her characters with a remarkable sureness and precision” (Bio, 90). Her fourth novel, 1930’s Dance Night, always one of Powell’s favorites of the Ohio books, received some encouraging commentary, though for such a fine piece not nearly as much as it should have.78 In one of the few positive notices it received, an unnamed New York Times commentator appreciated its “unforgettably real people drawn with an unerring instinct for characterization” (Bio, 115), but others faulted what they considered her unsavory characters and contrived ending. The next work, 1932’s Tenth Moon (which Powell had titled Come Back to Sorrento) was lauded by Harold Stearns in the Sunday Tribune for its “fusing of the new stream-of-consciousness school and the directly realistic” (Diaries, 53); another reviewer of the same novel, Powell happily recorded, likened it to “the sound of a flute heard across water at twilight, like a lark at sunrise” (Diaries, 54).79
A handful of her short stories received some recognition: “Such a Pretty Day” was included in the New Yorker’s “pretty swell garland of reading” (Poore, “Books: Short Stories”), the 1940 anthology of sixty-eight of the best short stories it had published in its first fifteen years, placing Powell in the company of John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, Sherwood Anderson (to whom John Updike likened her) and Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara and James Thurber. The story would become so well known that Powell more than a decade later would complain that “somebody is always saying, ‘Miss Powell, did you write anything besides that New Yorker short story “Such a Pretty Day”?’” (Letters, 204). On the 1952 appearance of her collection of short fiction, Sunday, Monday and Always, one reviewer said that Powell’s “observation is merciless, her style a marvel of economy, her pen double-edged” (Nerber, 5); another reviewer, William Peden, called it “a welcome rarity in today’s book world, a volume of humorous short stories” that are “deftly and expertly put together” (10).80
. . .
When more than a decade after Whither was published and Powell again began setting her novels in New York, critics sometimes found her a skilled portraitist and a gifted satirist. Charles Poore, in 1940 reviewing the newly released Angels on Toast, found it not only “hilarious” and “blistering” but “warmhearted and yet singularly penetrating” (“Diversity,” 19). Similarly, Alice Morris, a contemporary of the author’s, said of another Powell novel written in that decade,
If the art of satire at Miss Powell’s hands is less baleful, less knife-edged and glittering than when Mr. Evelyn Waugh puts his hand to it, it is equally relevant, and more humane. In The Locusts Have No King, Miss Powell pins down her locusts—some New York barflies, bigwigs and gadabouts—with drastic precision, but never without pity. She laughs at them, but never laughs against them. . . . The combination of a waspish sense of satire with a human sense of pathos results in a novel that is highly entertaining and curiously touching. (1)
Comparisons with Waugh would surface again; Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker wrote that “Dawn Powell’s novels are among the most amusing being written, and in this respect quite on a level with those of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark. . . . Miss Powell’s books are more than merely funny; they are full of psychological insights that are at once sympathetic and cynical” (“Dawn Powell,” 236).
Another contemporary of the author’s, also reviewing The Locusts Have No King, spoke of “the justice of Miss Powell’s satire . . . the human honesty of her insights, [and] her wit . . .” all of which make for “an accomplished and engaging novel” (A. Morris, 2). Such praise met many others of her books as well. The Wicked Pavilion, when released in 1954, was even “given pride of place on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Book Review” (Page, Intro At Her Best, xvi).
Yet Powell suffered many bitter professional disappointments; as Vidal says, she endured a “lifetime of near misses” (“Queen,” 23). In her own day, as in this, she was never as well known or as widely read as many believe she deserved to be. Often critics contemporary to Powell wrote mixed reviews of her novels and plays, praising her wit, intelligence, and skill while railing at her so-called cynicism. In her diary Powell responded to the charge: “The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism’” (Diaries, 273). Reviewers too often faulted not her characterizations but, curiously, her characters, calling them unsavory, objectionable, hardly worthy of the reader’s notice. It was the complaint that most exasperated Powell; one sees her over and over again in her diaries wrestling with it, at one time trying to understand the charge, at another to respond to it.
I have always been fond of drama critics . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know nothing about it.
—Noel Coward
The same sort of unfavorable commentary that greeted her novels met her first produced play, Big Night, which she had originally called The Party. It was a satire of the advertising industry that Powell wrote in response to her husband’s having been fired from his position in the late 1920s. Produced by the Group Theatre in 1933, the play, Group Theatre cofounder Harold Clurman remembered, had seemed “very funny” to the actors when first they read it (81); Wendy Smith, too, says that before the Group got hold of it, it was “a tough, bitingly funny drama” (81). A terrible disappointment, it closed after only nine performances. Director Robert “Bobby” Lewis recalled that of all those working at the Group Theatre, “nobody understood Dawn’s characters, her sophisticated dialogue, her wit” (Bio, 128). Sitting in on a rehearsal one afternoon, Powell quipped, “Isn’t that remarkable? . . . That was a funny line when I wrote it” (W. Smith, 115).
Clifford Odets, who recalled landing the bit part of a doorman in the play, spoke of Clurman’s plodding take on Powell’s piece:
It was astonishing how he could take this little comedy with its bitter undertone and relate it to all of American life. In fact, sometimes in rehearsal it became necessary to say, “Don’t try to act all of this solemn stuff, because this is after all a light comedy. Don’t load it all down with these significances. To the contrary, this has to be played as if it’s a series of cartoons in The New Yorker.” (Hethmon, “Days,” 190)
Clurman admitted that the Group had not known what they were doing when they staged the play (100), after which, he recalled, the press “ran screaming” from the performance, “like so many maiden aunts” (100).81 Richard Schickel, in his biography of Elia Kazan, wrote of the play that “Powell thought it was a comedy. The Group thought it was a waste of its idealism” (19). The biographer goes on to say that Group cofounder Cheryl Crawford, “who started directing it, and Clurman, who finished it, kept sobering it up, thus betraying what merits the play had. As Powell, a merry and shrewd social observer, put it, ‘The Group has put on a careful production with no knowledge whatever of the characters—as they might put on a picture of Siberian home life—made up bit by bit of exact details but [with] the actual realism of the whole missing’” (20).
Even though she recognized that the produced play had little to do with what she had written, Powell believed that the critics had roundly censured Big Night for being “too brutal, too real,” her characters faulted for being too seedy, too sordid (Letters, 285).82 Answering the critical complaints, Robert Benchley, “who adored Powell” (Guare, x), wrote in his New Yorker review of the comedy that other contemporary plays such as “Dinner at Eight83 and Dangerous Corner84 are about unpleasant people for the most part, but they wear evening clothes. Are we only to have high-class cads on our stage?” (26).85 A drama critic for the New York Evening Post went so far as to call the play’s cast of characters a “tiresome”