and other contemporary American playwrights and novelists. It was almost becoming a mantra, as if each reviewer were repeating what each had said before and echoing what each was saying now. As Heather Joslyn says, Powell “was criticized in her time (and still is by some ’90s readers) for her propensity for ‘unpleasant’ characters, but they’re not so much unpleasant as unvarnished. Her small-town portraits owe more to Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Her big-city swells don’t just utter precious witticisms between sips of martini; they exploit each other, bed-hop, and social-climb” (“Bright”).
Even Diana Trilling, who usually championed Powell’s novels, criticized the writer of The Locusts Have No King for “the insignificance of the human beings upon which she directs her excellent intelligence” (“Fiction in Review,” 611). Powell responded in her diary to the familiar complaint: “Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn’t visit my folks, they’d visit theirs” (271). Teachout said of the comment, “Trilling is nobody’s fool, but she went to see the wrong family” (“Far,” 6).
Forty years after Trilling’s review first appeared, it annoyed Gore Vidal, who wrote,
Trilling does acknowledge the formidable intelligence, but because Powell does not deal with morally complex people (full professors at Columbia in mid-journey?),91 “the novel as a whole fails to sustain the excitement promised by its best moments.” Apparently to be serious a novel must be about very serious—even solemn—people rendered in a very solemn—even serious—manner. (“American,” 2)
Always considering herself a “serious novelist,” Powell wrote in her diary that her habit was simply “telling the truth. It’s very odd that [critics] should say you hate people because you don’t prettify them. But I like them the way they are, not gussied up for company” (213). If what she did was satire, as her reviewers often said, then why fault her for telling the truth? One of her favorite works, which she read over and over again, was Frances Trollope’s 1832 travel memoir Domestic Manners of the Americans.92 She defended Mrs. Trollope’s initially controversial book largely on the grounds that it told the truth of the new country rather than sugar-coat it, precisely what Powell always aimed to do.
As for her own works being labeled satires, she famously wrote, “Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out” (Diaries, 119). Though she wrote again and again of her unhappiness with the critical indictment that too often was leveled at her, she did not answer the charges publicly, preferring to confine her feelings to her diaries, just as she confined her personal troubles there.
By the 1940s the author had begun to believe that she was writing in “an age that Can’t Take It”; it seemed to her that readers and critics alike were always crying “Where’s our Story Book? . . . Where are our Story Book people?” (Diaries, 188). For Powell, the public was uncomfortable with her clear eye and sharp wit; for them, as J. B. Priestley wrote, her work was more like “asperges vinaigrettes [than] a chocolate sundae” (Bio, 246).93 Again in her diaries, Dawn Powell sought to explain her technique:
I merely add a dimension to a character, a dimension which gives the person substance and life but which readers often mistake for malice. For instance, take the funeral of a much-loved family woman, a mother. Treating this romantically, one writes only of the sadness in the people’s hearts, their woe, their sense of deprivation, their remembrance of her. This is true, but it is not as true as I would do it, with their private bickers over the will . . . as they all gorge themselves at the funeral meals, as the visiting sisters exchange recipes . . . as pet vanities emerge.
Yet in giving this picture, with no malice in mind, no desire to show the grievers up as villains, no wish more than to give people their full statures, one would be accused of “satire,” of “cynicism,” instead of looking without blinders, blocks, ear mufflers, gags, at life. (118–19)
Powell believed that her critics did not understand satire when they spoke of it; instead, she said, they were actually speaking of “whimsy” (Diaries, 215). And despite the fact that her reviewers too often seemed not to “get it,” she came to be proud to be writing satire. In a diary entry of 1943 she wrote that “satire [is] social history,” that “the only record of a civilization is satire,” especially works like Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, which “gives a completely invaluable record of Paris, its face and its soul, its manners and its talk of 1840” (215) and, again, works like Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners. Powell created an important record of small-town Ohio during the early years of the twentieth century, and of New York in the first half of the same century. As Carleen M. Loper notes, “Following her wit, the second great gift Dawn Powell left us was her sense of place. If one is feeling nostalgic for an America that no longer exists, for a Greenwich Village of the ’30s and ’40s, or a mill town in the Midwest, one need look no further than the pages of her novels or diaries” (4).
The novelist wrote of what she observed and what she knew. Possessed of a talent for psychological insight, she was able to capture the inner workings of the minds of the people she was acquainted with, those she observed every day on the streets and in the cafés of the Village, those she had met and lived with in the remote farming towns and railroad junctions of Ohio. She knew about the small-town midwestern nobody and his lofty dreams, his disappointments, his despair. She understood the strivers and the seekers, the liars and the phonies, the rogues and the scoundrels who populated the rat-race worlds of advertising and publishing, theaters and saloons, art and commerce, and so she chose to write about them, just as they were. These characters populate her fiction with an authenticity that put some readers off; perhaps the fact that she presented them so realistically made some of her readers and critics perceive flaws in themselves. Whenever editors asked that she prettify her characters, she would tell them that they did not need to be prettified; still, their response always was, “But yes, . . . they do; before the reader will identify himself, he must be changed so that no one else will recognize him” (Diaries, 112). But, for the author, what was the point in writing the unrecognizable? She wanted to write the truth of her characters, the truth as she found it. Regardless of the social status, gender, moral practices, or professions of her characters, Powell longed for reviewers to respond to what she had put on the page or the stage, not to what they wished to see there.
The familiar charge never strayed far from her mind. Even as late as 1956 she recorded a humorous diary entry entitled “The Secret of My Failure.” While other authors, she said, would write something like “‘Last time Gary saw Cindy she was a gawky child; now she was a beautiful woman . . .’ I can’t help writing ‘Last time Fatso saw Myrt she was a desirable woman; now she was an old bag . . .’” (356). She would not romanticize the truth. “I believe true wit should break a wise man’s heart,” she once said. “It should strike at the exact point of weakness and it should scar. It should rest on a pillar of truth, . . . The truth is not so shameful that it cannot be recorded” (Josephson, 28). For Powell, writing was always about just that: telling the truth.
She finesses her way into your heart with fresh charm—[reading her] is like revisiting an old friend, or making a new one.
—Ann Geracimos, 1
In 1981, nearly two decades after Powell’s death, the first full-length study of her life and works was written. Judith Faye Pett, in her dissertation “Dawn Powell: Her Life and Fiction,” interpreted Powell more kindly than most of the novelist’s contemporaries did. Perhaps it is the distance of years and the changed attitudes of Pett’s generation that enabled her to perceive the compassion in the author’s portrayals as opposed to what had previously been perceived as vitriol, disapproval, and dislike. Pett recognized her “empathy, her sympathy for her characters” even while the novelist was simultaneously able to “see through or anticipate the results of their actions” (66). For Pett, Powell “accepts the world as it is” rather than seeking to change it. As Gail Pool wrote in 1990, Powell never made “life or people out to be any better than they are. Her great talent was for evoking so precisely what—in all their humor and sadness—they are” (20). In 1990, Michael Feingold