of an artist driven to create” (Begley, 7). The Village Voice calls Powell’s Diaries not its favorite book of journal entries but its “favorite book about books” (“Our 25,” SS23). Still, not everyone praised them: the composer and diarist Ned Rorem, in an 1999 interview called “The Art of the Diary No. 1,” was asked whether he admired Powell’s diaries, which were located in plain view on his bookshelf. Rorem answered, “There are certain things I can’t get the point of. Bagels, for instance. Why do people like them? I can’t get the point of Berlioz. I can dislike a composer, while admitting what others see in him or her. But not Berlioz. Likewise Dawn Powell” (McClatchy).
Most other commentators disagree, among them Teachout, who says that, from the very first entry, the diaries are not only a pleasure to read but are in fact “a writer’s notebook, concerned less with earthshaking events and true confessions than with the raw material of what later became her novels” (“Far,” 4). And so I turn to them here, not only to be entertained, not only to learn about the life, personality, friends, and associates of the woman who wrote them, but to learn something about Powell’s creative process. The diaries, “an engrossing if painful account of a writer’s life” (S. Keen, 25), allow readers to observe the author as she plots and strategizes, includes and discards, works and reworks, writes and rewrites. For example, as Powell begins thinking about Turn, Magic Wheel, readers of the diaries can clearly see her thoughtful plotting of the novel, her testing out of the many scenes and sketches that she may or may not some day include in this book or the next, and events from her life that she later will transform into fiction.8
In “A Diamond to Cut New York,” a 1995 New Yorker article attributed to the long-deceased Powell, the unnamed columnist describes the included diary selections, which were chosen by Tim Page, as “vignettes of the bohemian low life and the literary high life, and evidence of how one woman managed to fit an entire city into her classic social satires” (104). Reading the diaries, one is able to see the ways in which the city both shapes the novels and informs them. The vibrant Manhattan becomes a character in her best New York novels and in her diaries as well.
Powell’s journals may aptly be termed “A Writer’s Diary,” as Leonard Woolf titled Virginia Woolf’s private writings, for “that’s exactly what Powell’s diary is, a workshop, where the author is practicing her chops” (Dyer, “After Dawn,” 3).9 Indeed, Powell’s diaries are of much value in their own right, certainly not only for shedding light on her fiction but as a fine example of the genre: Phillip Lopate, who includes entries from Powell’s diaries in his anthology Writing New York, finds her an exceptional diarist (xx), while Page in his introduction cites their “extraordinary value as autobiography, literature, social history, and psychological study” (ix). Like any good diary collection, this one offers not only scholars but general readers valuable insight into Powell’s life and craft.
SELECTED LETTERS OF DAWN POWELL, 1913–1965
The letters of Dawn Powell are brave, funny, and smart as hell. You’ll wish you could write her back.
—John Waters10
The Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965, which Tim Page in his introduction calls “the record of a courageous, dramatic, and productive life” (ix), assists my examination of the novels, and particularly my examination of 1925’s Whither, in part because there are no diaries of that early period to turn to. The adult Powell did not begin keeping a proper diary until January 1, 1931. Before that time, beginning sometime in the same year the first novel was published, she had begun keeping “diaries of sorts,” though they were “little more than appointment books, with terse commentary thrown in here and there” (Diaries, 4). So if diaries are lacking for a given period, we happily have this collection of “epistolary wit” (Newsday), which is full of delightful, often lengthy accounts of her impressions of the city and its inhabitants along with the author’s hopes, dreams, observations, adventures, encounters. The letters, spanning forty-two years—1913 through 1965—cover eighteen years more than the diaries do, though they lack the emotional range of the diaries.11 In addressing her correspondents, Powell most often left her blacker moments unremarked. Lorrie Moore finds the “lightheartedness” Powell brings to her letters, in spite of her serious personal woes, “the utmost generosity” (2). Powell did not wish to burden her friends, acquaintances, or family members with her most serious difficulties. Indeed, Richard Bernstein writes that “one of the strongest elements of these letters . . . is their steadily cheery tone, the absence of references to domestic travails” (1), while Page explains, “If Powell’s diaries reflect the emotional turmoil that was such a large part of her psychological makeup, her letters tend to show the witty persona she constructed as a shield” (Letters, ix–x). Though she expressed her darkest troubles in her diaries, “throughout [the letters], she tends to put a comical gloss on her tribulations, with the tears of things peeking out through the cracks” (Bernstein, 1). The humorist in Powell would never allow her to sound gloomy for long: as the reviewer for the New Yorker observes, the letters’ “darkest moments are almost reflexively transformed by her supple wit” (137), so much so that that the volume reads as “a glorious and supremely funny record of her long struggles and . . . lasting triumphs” (Marcus, 1). Powell preferred to present a happy face to the world, much like the characters in Angels on Toast, who, she writes, put up a “jovial, openhanded, wisecracking front that is so seldom let down that they themselves aren’t sure what’s under it” (Letters, 110). Though she knew exactly what remained hidden underneath the front she had created for herself, she was determined not to allow others to see it.
The Letters, like the Diaries, have been well received, Lorrie Moore regretting the lateness of their release: “One cannot help believing that if [Powell] had been male and Ivy League educated, her career would never have fallen into disarray—not with 15 novels—and we would have had these letters years ago” (3). An anonymous reviewer in Publishers Weekly calls the letters
A posthumous triumph . . . in many ways the perfect record of a difficult life lived with pluck, intelligence and verve. . . . [They] record a sense of humor, a political acuity and a down-to-earth genius for friendship, love and getting by that is nothing less than invigorating. The great flaw of this volume is that there isn’t more of it. . . . What letters we have may win Powell even deeper admiration than The Diaries of Dawn Powell. (1)
Like many of the diary entries, some of the letters have been printed elsewhere: a letter Powell wrote to John Dos Passos describing Gerald Murphy’s funeral, for example, appears in Linda Patterson Miller’s Letters from the Lost Generation (341), but not in the Selected Letters of Dawn Powell. Howard Mansfield, editor of the 2006 volume Where the Mountain Stands Alone: Stories of Place in the Monadnock Region, includes excerpts from a 1949 letter that a peevish but funny Powell wrote to Joe from New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony. Originally published in Page’s Selected Letters, it appears in Mansfield’s collection under the title “And Not So Well for Others” (285), as Powell considered life in the artists’ colony too rigid for “so lax a person as myself” (286).
Unfortunately for readers approaching the fiction, few letters mention Whither, the first novel, at all; none shows her working at it or plotting it. Nonetheless, small episodes or character sketches first seen in the letters will emerge in a later novel or play, some in fact in Whither. One incident recorded in a letter of 1918 appears several years later in her first novel. Just two months arrived in New York, Powell wrote to her college friend Charlotte Johnson:
[A man] asked where we were on the subway and because I smiled back he grabbed my arm and told me he had just inherited half a million dollars from an uncle down in the Honduras and it was his guardian, the vice consul for the Honduras, that he was now on his way to. He was so handsome! And so young! And so—gee! He came to see me twice, then his boat left for the South and I know I’ll never see him again. (33)
In Whither, a friend of main character Zoe meets just such a young man, at a soda fountain instead of in the subway, but the story is the same. Also, in Whither, some elements of the main character’s voice and tone are