that Powell either had an uncanny memory—a gift she furnishes alter ego Marcia with in the autobiographical My Home is Far Away—or that she kept copies of the letters she sent. The following episode recounted in the letter reads much as it does in the play:
It makes me dizzy to think of all the warm friendships and Passionate Affairs I’ve been through in three months.12 . . . And all the men say “I love you” and look at you with long wistful “I-surely-am-hit-now” gaze and you kiss them and say this is the first time I’ve ever cared like this and then you never see each other again. (33)
Several additional passages in the letters will turn up in the later novels as well, all of them providing a glimpse into Powell’s personal life, her skills at observation, her disciplined writing habits. The keen sense of humor for which the author is known surfaces in the letters again and again also. For example, on hearing the news of her grandmother Julia Sherman’s recent marriage, young Dawn writes from college, “You can imagine how surprised I was just now to learn from Auntie May’s letter that I had a Grandpa born all of a sudden. In fact I had to sit down and be fanned. But of course I am very glad, since my grandparents are rather scarce—your being the only one up until the fatal hour Wednesday” (7).
Years later, in a hilarious letter to Dos Passos, Powell wrote:
. . . We have been boycotting [the Brevoort] all summer but it is very expensive. It began one day when a few friends on the terrazzo started going to the Gents’ room through the window instead of the formal door and the waiter and the papa-waiter refused all drinks so we boycotted it and went to the Lafayette. The next day, as we were sitting on the terrace, boycotting again, a big man wheeled a little baby past and Coby Gilman said, “Why, what a cunning little son of a bitch.” So the big man shook his perambulator at us and said, “If you wait till I get this little bastard home I’ll settle with you for calling my child a son of a bitch,” at which he wheeled it stormily up the street shaking his fist at the same time while the little snort screamed and dangled by its snaps. (88)
The letter continues in this vein for some time, ending only once Powell, having related one ludicrous mishap after another, writes, “This is all the fault of the Brevoort. So we are organizing boycotters all over the world—we have even a group who are boycotting the Brevoort from the Australian bush” (88–89). As in the Diaries, the bright portraits, sharp humor, drunken incidents recorded here add up not only to rich material for the novels but also to agreeable diversions for the reader of Powell’s delightful Selected Letters.
. . .
A decade after this volume was published, a half dozen letters and other items from Powell to Gilman appeared in a Literary Miscellany at the William Reese Company in New Haven, Connecticut. This find is a major one, given that Page notes in his introduction to the Selected Letters his disappointment that “only a scant four letters to Coburn Gilman seem to have survived, though he was one of Powell’s closest confidants for many years” (xi). The letters sold for amounts ranging from $600 to $4,000 each; a first-edition Hemingway novel, inscribed “somewhat drunkenly” to Powell (“to Dawn, from where all the characters in this book are drawn—Ernest Hemingway”), sold for $1,500.00; and an “unpublished, illustrated manuscript,” called “The Teen Age / Murder Book / by Aunt Bossy Powell / For Children Between 5 and 7:15 / Quiet Please,” went for $7,500. The letters from Powell to Gilman are tantalizingly described: I reproduce a partial description of one of the letters here, given that the Powell/Gilman relationship is of interest to many:
382. Powell, Dawn. Autograph Letter, Signed. New York / Dated only “Monday.” Ca. 1930.
A high-pitched, possibly somewhat inebriated personal letter from Powell to one of her favorite drinking buddies of the time, and eventually, for much of her remaining life, one of her closest intimate friends, “Dearest Coby . . . signed “Love, Dawn.”13
Thanks to Tim Page, I now have copies of those letters in their entirety and intend to reproduce them fully at a later date.
SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS
Talk about ambition, story ideas, etc.—you do a lot better when you’re among people you know.
—Letters, 39
Page notes in his biography, “Although Powell wrote well over a hundred short stories during her lifetime, only a few dozen have been identified to date” (338). Aided by Internet resources unavailable when Page began conducting research for his biography, I have located about a dozen more published short pieces that to my knowledge have never been republished. Powell contributed short fiction frequently to the New Yorker, particularly in the 1930s: one such un-republished story, “Bon Voyage,” came out in April 1933; it was written with recognizable Powell humor. A spring allergy sufferer, unable to sleep,
experimented desperately with all manner of sleep-inducers. She counted sheep but always stopped at five, since it was ridiculous to suppose that in these times anyone could afford more than five sheep. She might as well stop at one, and even then she realized perfectly that it wasn’t a real sheep but two men fixed up to look that way (17).
Another un-republished New Yorker item I located, “The Daisy Chain,” appeared in September that same year. In it Powell demonstrates her satiric sensibility and again jabs at snobbish consumerism and at the all-knowing young New York career girl:
Finally they decided on 146, since Elinor could have her shrimps there, and Violet could be seen in a suitably expensive light by her newest client, a Mr. Bule, and what [newcomer] Sarah preferred didn’t matter anyway. In the taxi, the two business-women examined Sarah rather critically, and Violet suggested a darker lipstick and tying those ribbons on the left shoulder rather than right in front.
“Look, Honey,” commanded Elinor, taking both hands to yank Sarah’s hat around, “this is the way to wear that hat” (19).
Powell would go on to publish at least five other short pieces for the magazine, four in 1933: the above-mentioned three and “Blue Hyacinths.” (We cannot be certain, as she sometimes published under pseudonyms.) Other New Yorker stories include “Artist’s Life” (1935), which in its tension between observer and observed seems something of a precursor to her novel Turn, Magic Wheel; “Can’t We Cry a Little”; and “The Comeback”; they and “Blue Hyacinths” would be reissued in the collection of short stories selected by Powell herself, 1952’s Sunday, Monday and Always. “Such a Pretty Day” would be republished there and in two other compilations: Short Stories from the New Yorker: A Collection of Sixty-Eight Notable Stories, in 1940; and in Tim Page’s 1994 collection, Dawn Powell at Her Best.
Earlier, in the 1920s, Powell was publishing short stories in Munsey’s Magazine, three of which I have located: “The Little Green Model” (February 1924); “Precious” (January 1928), and “Orchids for Rosanie” (March 1928). Powell sounded upbeat in a 1922 letter to Aunt Orpha May about having had a story accepted by the magazine, but by November 1928 she was complaining to her aunt that “like a fool I’d been signing something with Munsey’s from time to time which gave them all rights” (68). After publishing two final pieces in Munsey’s in 1928, she ended her involvement with that periodical. She added in the same letter to her aunt, “I wouldn’t even have a word to say if they sold it to the movies. The best magazines don’t do that but Munsey’s, it seems, gets away with whatever it can” (68).
I have also turned up several other short stories, essays, and reviews that before now had not been identified, among them the short story “Elegy,” published in transition 8 in November 1927 by Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. The periodical has been called
the most important of all the “little magazines” that popularized the expatriate community’s works. This issue, like most of them, reads like a “Who’s Who” in its table of contents, featuring among others James Joyce (“Continuation of a Work in Progress”—later published as “Finnegans Wake”), Dawn Powell (“Elegy”), William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and poems by Andre Gide, Alfred Kreymborg and others. (transition)