people . . . it seems increasingly an effort to step from this reality into a storybook world. On the other hand, I hate to use real people and hurt them but I have reached the point where I must sacrifice my tender feelings for reality. It’s a decision against personal life for the crueler pleasures of artistic exactness” (98–99). Readers will see the same ambivalence at work in Turn, Magic Wheel, where Powell-like novelist Dennis Orphen sometimes regrets having cruelly exposed friend Effie Callingham, but in the end both authors’ decisions to write the truth wins out.
Powell, understandably, chose to write about subject matter that spoke to her. For example, she often referred to Balzac as one of her favorite novelists, and comparisons with Balzac surfaced in commentaries by Warfel (345) and others, including Gore Vidal (see chapter 1, above) and Glenway Wescott (Diaries, 285). Powell’s Ohio works tell the tale of provincials at home, often longing to escape; and her New York cycle features similar provincials having made their escape and working to make it in New York. All of her New York novels feature outsiders like Powell herself—those who have come to the city from small-town midwestern locations, full of impossible dreams. Her most interesting characters are those who strive but never do make it: the losers, the graspers, the drinkers, the misfits, the homeless, the heartbroken, the nameless souls who wander the city carrying crumbling suitcases and broken dreams. Powell’s “heartaches of the street” (Broyard, 33), wretched as they often are, nevertheless remain hopeful, clinging to their dreams despite long odds. Understanding and sympathizing with her characters as she does, they always ring true.
Satire was her mode, and satire, Powell wrote again and again, was a recounting of the truth. She realized that her favorite literary technique was also her most effective weapon for exposing folly and vice; she maintained in her diaries that “the lashing of . . . evil can only be done by satire” (Diaries, 213). She prided herself in being, so far as she knew, “the only person” in the early 1940s who was “doing contemporary social satire” (213). For example, the novelist felt a certain satisfaction in having roundly “slashed” Clare Boothe Luce in her recent book, A Time to Be Born, for she felt that such wickedness as Luce had later executed in her smearing of Henry Wallace (Diaries, 213n), U.S. vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, must at all costs be exposed. Though the incident occurred after her novel came out, the fact that Powell had ridiculed Luce in her book made her believe that at least her satire had damaged Luce’s credibility.
But Powell was generally not a political writer. More often her satire was reminiscent of the comedies of manners of previous centuries, though hers were stingingly contemporary. In her diary she contemplated the fact that, in “modern writing,” too many authors “avoid [writing of ] contemporary manners”:
In the last century, Thackeray, Dickens, Edith Wharton, James, all wrote of their own times, [so] we have reliable records. Now we have only the escapists, who write of happenings a hundred or three hundred years ago, false to history, false to human nature. Among contemporary writers, only John O’Hara writes of one very small section of 52nd Street or Broadway. We have Hemingway, who writes of a fictional movie hero in Spain with the language neither Spanish nor English. When someone wishes to write of this age—as I do and have done—critics shy off—the public shies off. (188)
Later she said that when asked why she wrote “this or that,” her answer most often was that she felt “a sense of historical duty to get a picture of a fleeting way of life. Probably began with my youthful joy in vignettes of ancient Rome or Greece, which made life real instead of re-embalming dead life” (Diaries, 452). The truth for Powell came from what she knew from first-hand observation, what she divined from her extraordinary gift for psychological perception, what she had turned over and over in her mind and written about in her diaries or letters. To depict those she knew and those she saw about her, she looked neither to the history books nor to her imagination as much as to the world she lived in, the streets, the saloons, the shops, the offices, the cafés. Her fiction was not about romancing or beautifying; the truth, for Powell, needed no makeup, no surgical treatment, no sleight of hand. As she explained in her diary, “‘Satire’ is the technical word for writing of people as they are; ‘romantic,’ the other extreme of people as they are to themselves” (118). However painful, she maintained, reality was never too horrid to be faced squarely:
True gaiety is based on a foundation of realism. All right, we know we’re dying, we know we’re poor, that is off our minds—we eat, sleep, make merry but we are not kidding ourselves that we are rich and beautiful. . . . There is only sorrow in people making believe—sorrow and sordidness in stories of [an] invincible, Peter Pan fairy-godmother world. Gaiety should be brave, it should have stout legs of truth, not a gelatine base of dreams and wishes. (Diaries, 162)
Gaiety, delight, humor all derived from simply telling the truth. She wrote characters and their motivations as she saw them: “whether writing about the rural heartland or cosmopolitan Gotham, she gave it to us straight like a pitchfork in a haystack or a well-chilled martini, hold the vermouth” (Roberts, 2). The delighted reader of Powell’s novels witnesses all at once the truth of her observation, her insightful understanding of her subjects, the empathy and tolerance with which she exposes her targets. “As natural and skillful a satirist as American literature has ever produced” (Howard, 1), Dawn Powell left her readers two gifts: her lilting novels of Ohio, and her satirical novels of New York.
Young Dawn Powell with hand on heart. Used by permission of Tim Page and Estate of Dawn Powell
Young Dawn Powell in profile, ca. 1920s.Used by permission of the Estate of Dawn Powell
Lobby card for Footlights and Shadows, a 1920 film starring Olive Thomas and Ivo Dawson. Powell appeared in the film as an extra.
Ernest Truex and Spring Byington onstage in 1934’s Jig Saw, produced by the Theatre Guild. Used by permission of the Associated Press
Powell friend and portraitist Peggy Bacon, ca. 1920
Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Powell, 1934, with inscription. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.
Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Powell, 1934. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.
Peggy Bacon charcoal drawing of Coburn “Coby” Gilman, 1934. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.
Peggy Bacon drawing of cats Perkins vs. Calhoun, Peggy Bacon’s cat. Used by permission of Kraushaar Galleries, Inc.
Powell drawing of cat in bed. Used by permission of Tim Page and Estate of Dawn Powell