books of Ohio, because including all of Powell’s novels is beyond the scope of this project.6 Also because the Ohio publications are generally considered very different from the New York, both in theme and in tone, they should be considered separately: for one commentator, they are so dissimilar that “it is not surprising that many of Powell’s greatest admirers have resorted to writing off one group or the other of her novels and basing their admiration on only half her work” (Hensher, “Country,” 1). The New York books, overall, are more satiric, more comic, than the lyrical Ohio novels are, and it is in the New York works that Powell writes about “the Midnight People,” who, like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, “drink and dance and rattle and are ever afraid to be silent” (Lewis, 327). Still, the Ohio series has much to say for itself. As one critic writes, “While the Manhattan novels are unquestionably wittier—urban pretensions and disputes seem to offer readier targets than rural—the Ohio novels are far from being simple accounts of grim life on the late Middle Border. The human comedy is no less comical” in Ohio than in New York (R. Miller, “Reintroducing,” E8). Vidal, like many other Powell fans, preferred the New York novels: he said that it is with them that Powell “comes into her own, dragging our drab literature screaming behind her” (“Dawn Powell: American,” xiii). Both cycles have much to recommend them, and a lengthy study of the Ohio novels still needs to be written.
As readers see in the Diaries, the Selected Letters, and Page’s Biography, Powell’s New York is largely the Village, a location that, Ross Wetzsteon reminds us, “has held such a mythic place in the American imagination that it has often served as a kind of iconographic shorthand. A novelist need only to write ‘then she moved to the Village’ to evoke an entire set of assumptions—she’s a bit rebellious, artistically inclined, sexually emancipated, and eager to be on her own” (x). All of these characteristics prove true not only of the novelist’s Village characters but of Powell and many of her friends themselves. Wetzsteon adds that “the mythology of the place has been created in large part by those who moved there from elsewhere,” as Powell did and as nearly all of her principal characters do. Powell’s love of the city she had known since her arrival there in 1918 never diminished; in novels from the 1930s to the 1960s she expresses her heartache about her once-vibrant but speedily deteriorating Manhattan.
I also look at the characters, including those based on the “real” people who populated the city, placing them beside the biographical facts of the author’s life and using not only Page’s biography but also Powell’s own diaries and letters and other available sources. All of the players by now having long since departed, I discuss the real-life “victims” on whom she at least partly based some of her characters, among them Clare Boothe Luce, Ernest Hemingway, John Chapin Mosher, Dwight Fiske, Peggy Guggenheim, and others. Further, I place the works alongside the writings of some of her contemporaries, including Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Ruth McKenney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, to whom Powell is most often compared—a Dos Passos biographer even calls Powell “the poor man’s Dorothy Parker” (Carr, 283)—though many commentators agree that the Round Tabler “had a comparatively modest talent” (Begley, 7). Parker’s witty lines have come down to us largely because she voiced them in earshot of her newspaper chums, who took note of them and reported them posthaste.7 Powell, however, as friend, writer, and critic Matthew Josephson remembers, uttered many of her best lines “before a bibulous company whose powers of recall became clogged” (25). Which is not to say that Parker’s companions were sober—far from it. Instead, the Algonquin crowd had to hasten from their lunch table to their typewriters, if they were to remain employed, Parker’s witticisms fresh in mind, rapidly jotting them down to flesh out a column. Powell and her friends, on the other hand, returned to their garrets or typewriters to finish the paintings and novels on which they had been working. Once pressed during a 1999 NPR interview to compare Powell to Parker, Tim Page said, “What [writings] do we really remember of Dorothy Parker’s? . . . In my own opinion, there’s no comparison whatsoever. . . . I don’t think Parker was fit to carry Powell’s typewriter.” Despite the differences in their literary output and creative talent, Powell always “lived under the burden of being known as the second Dorothy Parker”; the comparison was so unsavory to her that, according to friend Jacqueline Miller Rice, “If someone called her another Dorothy Parker, she’d hit them” (Guare, x). To Powell the comparison may have seemed even more belittling because, as Wetzsteon writes, this “stress on her wit reduced her carefully crafted comedies of manners to glib collections of one-liners” (510); further, it exasperated her to think that anyone would believe that there could be but one female at a time writing satire in New York. And the playing field is hardly even for the two women writers who shared the same initials: Parker wrote very little, Powell wrote volumes; one critic says that Powell “out-Parkers Queen Dorothy” at every turn (Salter). And though it may seem that Powell disliked her more famous contemporary, the two were actually quite friendly, often going out together. If Powell objected to being compared to Parker, it was because of the latter’s negligible writing production, not because she disliked the woman; in fact, she admired Parker’s generosity. In a 1963 letter to her sister Phyllis, Powell wrote, “I used to have some good times with Dorothy Parker who gets too much credit for witty bitchery and not enough for completely reckless philanthropy—saving many people, really without a thought” (Letters, 316). Parker, who would die two years after Powell, left her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Foundation; the funds went to the NAACP following King’s assassination in 1968.
. . .
Even though Powell on occasion maintained that what she wrote was not satire but the truth, often with a capital T, she more often did call it satire, as do many of her readers. Attempting to explain why the novelist never achieved the readership or the recognition she should have achieved, Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Ann T. Keene’s introduction to Mark Carnes’s edition of Invisible Giants, says that “satire as meticulous, as adroit, as downright prosecutorial as that of Powell’s stands little chance of popularity in any era, regardless of its tastes, so long as its author, and more importantly its victims, draw breath” (230).
Although I have long been a voracious reader, student of literature, and a film and theatre buff, I had never heard of Dawn Powell until a snowy Sunday morning in 2002 when I turned to the Arts section of the New York Times. The black-and-white photograph of the interesting-looking woman I saw there, under the headline “More Than a Witty Novelist, She Wrote Plays, Too,” caught my eye.8 The headline made it clear that the writer, Jonathan Mandell, presupposed that readers already knew Dawn Powell as a novelist. How was it, then, that I had never heard of her? The article provoked me to dig further, to order a collection of the novels, the biography, the letters. Reading her, I knew at once that I had encountered a most remarkable writer—a buried treasure, in fact.
Among Powell fans, an essay widely recognized as responsible for first reviving relatively recent interest in her appeared years before that 2002 Times article. In 1987 Gore Vidal’s piece, “Dawn Powell, the American Writer,” was published in the New York Review of Books.9 In it he called Powell “our best comic novelist,” adding that, as he spoke the words, he could almost hear Powell “snarling” that “the field is not exactly overcrowded” (1). It is noteworthy that he called her not our best woman comic novelist, but our best comic novelist, period. Vidal, who had known Powell in New York in the 1950s, had admired both the author and her books.10 On the strength of Vidal’s recommendation, a few of Powell’s fifteen novels—The Locusts Have No King, A Time to Be Born, and her last, The Golden Spur—were reissued in 1989 under the title Three by Dawn Powell. The book, though, “quickly slid into remainderdom” (Lingeman 39). In the Nation, George Scialabba had this to say of Vidal’s “find”:
Dawn Powell’s novels were all out of print in 1987 when Vidal’s long appreciation in The New York Review of Books pronounced her “our best comic novelist.” Her studies of genuine Midwestern dullness and ersatz Manhattan gaiety, rendered with fearless, pungent wit and entirely without sentimentality or euphemism, may have been, as Vidal claimed, “Balzacian” and as good a portrait as we have of mid-twentieth-century America. But in this they were fatally unlike