letters, that one is tempted to suggest that what we think of as the contemporary American voice—in journalism and the arts—is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York” (2). As soon as Powell arrived, she cheerfully settled in. A 1931 letter from her to her cousin Jack Sherman praises the city breathlessly (Letters, 75): for the writer, it was a place where anything was possible, where humble beginnings did not matter, where a young poverty-stricken nobody from a tiny midwestern town had every opportunity to make her dreams come true.2
The Diaries, according to critic Bill Buford, revealed that “Powell had a brilliant mind and a keen wit, and [that] her humor was never at a finer pitch than in her diaries. And yet her story is a poignant one—a son emotionally and mentally impaired, a household of too much alcohol and never enough money, and an artistic career that, if not a failure, fell far short of the success she craved. All is recorded here—along with working sketches for her novels, and often revealing portraits of her many friends (a literary who’s who of her period)—in her always unique style and without self-delusion.” This evaluation of Powell’s diaries, in so few words, is as spot-on an assessment of this edition of her diaries as any to date.
With the publication of Tim Page’s biography of Powell, and with all of her best works now back in print, it would appear that Dawn Powell has clearly “arrived” and taken her deserved place in American letters. Her remarkable Diaries will stand as one of her finest literary achievements; indeed, they are among the finest achievements of the genre.
Of course, Tim Page’s Dawn Powell: A Biography also assists readers in this undertaking. Praised as “meticulously researched, well written, and sympathetic,” the biography does “a superb job of establishing [Powell’s] right to an honored place in the pantheon of American letters” (Bing, 61). Today’s readers and students of the author are fortunate to have these three sources available to them. They have proven indispensable in providing a window into the working mind of the author.
THE DIARIES OF DAWN POWELL, 1931–1965
The thrills of a writer’s diary
—Susan Salter Reynolds, 10
If it is true, as A. A. Milne said in 1919, that diaries are “so rarely kept nowadays” because “nothing ever happens to anybody” (A. Taylor, ix), it would follow that because so much did happen to Dawn Powell, she had little choice but to record it all. Or perhaps she kept a diary because, as the narrator of 1962’s The Golden Spur says, people “who have no one they trust to understand them” keep journals (94). Her own diaries, which are “poignant, sometimes devastating, in tone” (Lopate, Writing, 538), read like a Who’s Who of the theater, art, and literary worlds: famous names from Stella Adler to Thomas Wolfe appear and reappear, yet the diaries are much more than calculated jottings meant to impress or amaze. Diary anthologist Alan Taylor maintains that “the best diaries are those in which the voice of the individual comes through untainted by self-censorship or a desire to please” (ix), just as the voice does here. The Village Voice remarks that “the brilliant” diarist Powell never “samples the consolations of dishonesty—a true miracle” (“Our 25,” SS23). The diaries not only record her many encounters with the rich and famous but also register the ordinary, the mundane, the frightening, the embarrassing, the devastating—everything, it seems, but her intimate life. Family matters, personal worries, money troubles, childcare woes, drunken brawls, health problems are given as much if not more attention here as are weekends with Libby Holman (182), parties with Lillian Hellman (355), or dinners with Langston Hughes (445). At their best, the diaries delight with witty character vignettes, overheard conversations, intuitive observations. The frightful, the comic, and the tragic all mingle among the pages. As Terry Teachout says, “there is much heartbreak in these diaries, and more mirth” (“Far,” 5). A disturbing entry of 1933 reads
The shock of my life today. This little tiny constant pain in my heart, the X-ray and Dr. Witt says, is a tumor or cyst over it and between the lungs. Nothing to worry about, he says, just a question of waiting. And waiting for what? . . . Nothing to worry about! . . . I walked down Madison Avenue not looking in shops for the first time because I thought it extravagant to buy or even want things for so short a while. It doesn’t matter what the corpse wears. (69)
If the entry sounds self-pitying, the next one, four days later, says simply, “Finished play ‘Jig-Saw’” (69). Powell had taken no time off to lament: despite the terrifying news, the disciplined writer continued working. A few pages later, readers are treated to a taste of something quite different, one of countless examples of the “mirth” Teachout mentions:
To dinner at Catalan’s3 with Sue4 and Esther5—down under Brooklyn Bridge. Lots of fun with some men eager to be gay. One told me he ran a column. “Where? I’ll read it,” I said. “Don’t be silly, Baby, you never read a word in your life,” he said. In fact by his comments I judged I looked more a fine lay than an intelligentsia. He said to Sue, “You’re a waitress, aren’t you, sister?” and since anybody would rather look like a tart than a waitress Sue was secretly mad at me.6 (76–77)
Powell moves from one entry to the next with ease, one day wretched, the next joyous, sometimes a combination of the two, much as she moved from the tragedy of her own life to working on yet another comic piece. Richard Selzer, reviewing the Diaries in the Wilson Quarterly, praises her “intuition for the relationship between tragedy and folly” (77), as readers see in the following passage. Writing of an overly talkative woman whom she has just met at a cocktail party, Powell at first wishes “to escape the incessant bombardment of her chatter” (114), then softens at hearing of the woman’s insane son:
People were very gay. It was odd for two women in the middle of this confusion, sandwiches and martinis politely being passed . . . to find that strange bond in common—a 14-year-old only son—one 20 years ago and the other now—quivering on the brink of a nightmare future. I understood then her incessant gay chatter—for 20 years she had sparkled and chattered to drown the roar of her own tragedy, a little boy raving mad. (115)
The Diaries, widely varied in subject matter, mood, and tone as they are, provide a living, colorful portrait of Manhattan and its inhabitants, all its delightful multiplicity mirrored in the reach of the prose. That Powell could so easily in the space of a day or two move from paralyzing dread—“Fear is such an utterly disrupting force—fears of no publisher, fear of cringing once more before debtors, fear of being trapped in the Middle West again and dependent on relatives” (100) to the ludicrous: “At Lafayette, Berkeley Tobey,7 [age] 50, begged us to drink to Eloise, his very young wife, who is at last to have a baby. ‘Whose?,’ we all wondered, as we drank reverently” (100)—is remarkable and at the same time understandable. For Powell, as she said many times in her journals, “the oxygen of humor” (456) was the only thing that made life bearable.
Powell herself ruminated on the habit of diary writing in an entry of February 5, 1954:
Virginia Woolf’s diary. People keep diaries because they don’t enjoy exposing themselves in conversation and furthermore they trust no one to understand. As soon as a writer finds a group that does understand him he stops writing and starts hamming. In diaries, revealing the innermost soul, the entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy. Diaries tell nothing—chips from a heroic statue. (335)
But Powell’s diaries reveal more than she knew, or more than she was prepared to say, as readers clearly see.
A brief, unsigned New Yorker review of the Diaries sums the volume up nicely:
Socialist theatre, all-night parties, advice-dispensing taxi drivers, perfume girls at Bergdorf’s: as a diarist, Powell was an urban magpie, and a little bit of everything ended up in her journals. They are also brimming with agonizings, professional and domestic, and razor-sharp remarks (“Lou feels that a cold wife who has a headache is a pure one, a high-class one.”) But, as much as anything, these diaries read like a love letter to the city itself. (120)