expected to wax enthusiastic about the woman with the net. How lucky the 1990s are that Powell’s multicolored collection . . . has reached the light again, in all its brilliant hues” (14). Reading Pett, Pool, Feingold, and the reviewers who follow them, one cannot help but think that Powell had been born several decades too soon.
A slightly earlier posthumous commentary on Powell, this one written in 1973 by her friend Matthew Josephson, spoke of the writer with an eye to posterity. “The good humorists dealing with the comedy of manners play a most useful part in helping us to see that which is real and that which is sham in our social behavior,” he wrote. “Casually, in a tone of levity, her books told the plain truth about the changing mores of the urban American during a long span of time extending from the 1920s through the 1950s” (19). It well may be that the upheaval of the times contributed to the discomfort that many Powell contemporaries felt as they read—or did not read—her novels.
More recent critics are generally delighted with Powell. Comparisons with Waugh persist: into the 1990s, the New York novels would be compared to his Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies (Feingold, 13); another recent commentator says, “Think of [Powell] as a homegrown Evelyn Waugh, with an added soupçon of Yankee asperity” (Marcus, 1). Joseph Coates writes, “Rediscovering a good but neglected writer is both exhilarating and depressing. Here is this terrific novelist, Dawn Powell, a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and more prolific than the two put together, who has left a whole shelf of funny, entertaining books that few had ever heard of before Vidal” (3).94 Library Journal calls Powell “one of the great American women writers of the twentieth century [who] at her best is better than most, male or female” (60). Novelist, columnist, and art critic Philip Hensher, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, concurs: “Powell is a supremely deserving candidate for admission to the Library of America, a writer of consistent and startling pleasure, cruelty, and ingenuity. Next to her the celebrated wits of the Algonquin look self-conscious and willful, their exercises in pathos whiny and thin . . . Powell belongs on the shelf with the masters of the novel” (“Country,” 135). The ballyhoo, once again, had begun.
THE DAWN POWELL REVIVALS
For decades Dawn Powell was always on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion.
—Gore Vidal, “Dawn Powell, the American Writer,” 195
Two or even three Powell “revivals” have taken place in recent decades, the first precipitated by an editorial in the fall 1981 issue of the Antioch Review. Editor Robert S. Fogarty had asked several well-known writers to name a forgotten author who should be recommended to readers of the Review. Two of the five he questioned, Roger Angell (writer and stepson of E. B. White) and Gore Vidal, replied simply, “Dawn Powell.” In the brief interview that follows, Vidal said that Powell is “as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens” (400), high praise indeed—and, in fact, maybe praise too high to be easily swallowed.96 Half a dozen years later, as we have seen, Vidal again lauded the writer, this time in a sustained commentary published in the New York Review of Books, which later appeared in the reissue of Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur. It is in this seminal essay that Vidal referred to Powell as “our best comic novelist” (L). He went on to say:
But despite the work of such cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been.97 . . . In her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O’Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. (1–2)
James Wolcott tells of busily rescuing long-neglected Powell volumes from dusty shelves and mouse-infested back rooms just before Vidal wrote his essay, Wolcott’s aim being to “write a piece that would place Powell in her proper berth” (42). But then the Vidal piece appeared, and Wolcott, not having yet finished amassing his collection, knew that he had been trumped. In 1989 David Streitfeld of the Washington Post credited Vidal with almost single-handedly bringing Powell to our notice (before Tim Page came along), saying that, “if there’s no Dawn Powell revival soon, you won’t be able to blame Gore Vidal. He’s done everything except hawk her books on street corners” (X15). The Vidal essay aroused enough interest in Powell that by the early 1990s New York’s Yarrow Press had reissued the first of the two Powell novels it would release. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, in 1989 published three works in a Quality Paperback Book Club edition, Three by Dawn Powell, introduced by Vidal. He admitted that he felt “incredibly smug” and “proprietary” (“Queen,” 17) about these releases. One only wishes that he had written about Powell earlier; if he had, perhaps he would have rescued her all the sooner from her long existence as “a secret handshake among the chosen few” (Boston Globe, “Dawn Powell Has Arrived,” 3).
Though Powell’s reissued novels received fine notices upon their re-release, this first “revival” soon lost steam. According to Philip Hensher, writing in the Spectator in 2002, “Many of the best American writers,” among whom he includes Dawn Powell, “somehow ‘don’t count’” (“Groping,” 30). And for British reviewer Nick Rennison, the novelist “may well be the best-kept secret in twentieth-century American literature and the one most worth unlocking” (II, 1).
. . .
By the mid-1990s, the second revival had begun, this time thanks to Tim Page, who has not only sung Powell’s praises in many a locale, but who wrote the only published biography of the author, brought out a collection of her well-received diaries, and edited and issued her remarkable letters. Even before all this activity, Page was responsible for the 1994 collection Dawn Powell at Her Best, a hardcover volume of two of her novels,98 several short stories, and an essay, along with a useful introduction. Page, as a newsman, knew that for this first reissue to receive any serious critical attention, it would have to be published in hardcover. The collection received so much favorable notice that at Page’s urging Vermont’s Steerforth Press later reissued twelve of Powell’s novels, a collection of her short stories, and four of her plays, all in paperback editions and all to much critical notice.
Terry Teachout, writing in 1995, summed up this next revival: “Every decade or so, somebody writes an essay about Dawn Powell, and a few hundred more people discover her work, and are grateful. And that’s it. Few American novelists have been so lavishly praised by so many high-powered critics to so little effect” (“Far,” 3). He added that Powell “remains today what she was a half-century ago: a fine and important writer adored by a handful of lucky readers and ignored by everyone else” (3). “If there is any justice,” he continued, “she will soon receive her due” (6).
A few years later, in a 1999 essay entitled “Big Lights, Big City: Dawn Powell and the Glory of Revival,” Heather Joslyn found Powell’s works noteworthy not only because of their sheer volume but because they were “both of and far ahead of her time.” She wrote:
Her body of novels form a continuing social history of the American Century’s first half, depicting how restless searchers left their flyspeck rural hometowns and flooded into their country’s big cities, how they reinvented themselves there, and how they inevitably re-created the gossipy insularity of the villages they’d escaped inside the foreboding concrete canyons of their new frontier. (“Bright”)
Following the Steerforth reissues, Page saw to it that The Library of America release nine of Powell’s novels in two volumes.99 Lauren Weiner of the New Criterion, originally hesitant to believe that another “full-fledged Powell revival [was] in progress,” came by 1999 to see “the evidence piling up” and finally to “accept the idea,” adding that two of Powell’s novels, A Time to Be Born and The Locusts Have No King, “deserve to be on a short list of the best comic novels in American literature” (“Fruits,” 23). In a lengthy 2002 essay praising the novelist, Alice Tufel noted that this second revival “is a dream come true too late” (155).
But the revivals, short-lived or no, have made something of a lasting imprint. Today Powell’s reissued books are readily available in bookstores and on online auction