long-suffering shade. (n.p.)
Not long afterward, in the early 1990s, Tim Page discovered Powell after reading in Edmund Wilson’s 1965 essay collection, The Bit between My Teeth, an article called “Dawn Powell: Greenwich Village in the Fifties.” Like Page, Vanity Fair contributor James Wolcott attributes his initial interest in Powell to that same piece in the same volume, which he had read a short time before the Vidal article appeared. Wilson’s essay had originally been published, during Powell’s lifetime, in a November 1962 edition of the New Yorker, a magazine to which Powell herself had contributed at least seven pieces of short fiction.11
“Dawn Powell: Greenwich Village in the Fifties” opened with a question that is still asked today: “Why is it that the novels of Miss Dawn Powell are so much less well known than they deserve to be?” (233). Because most of her works were out of print by the time of Page’s discovery of her, it was difficult for him—and for Wolcott—to find copies of them, even though the afore-mentioned handful of paperback reissues had appeared. But still, where were the other thirteen? Dawn Powell at Her Best, a hardcover collection of two of her novels, several short stories, and an essay appeared in 1994, introduced and edited by Page; and the following year, a well-received volume of Powell’s diaries, also edited by Page, was issued. By 1996 three of her novels—Angels on Toast, A Time to Be Born, and The Wicked Pavilion—had been published by Vermont’s Steerforth Press at Page’s urging. Though Page says that Angels on Toast is “a weird hybrid of a novel; not really an Ohio novel, not really a New York,” (telephone call, March 7, 2013) and though I do agree with him, I place it here with the New York novels because I believe it merits examination alongside the others Powell sets in Manhattan and because scenes in it do take place in New York, characters travel to the city on trains, and the acerbic, satirical wit here is more akin to that of the New York series than the Ohio.
Thanks to Page, other novels followed from Steerforth throughout 2001 until all but three had been reissued: Whither, Powell’s first novel, which she disclaimed almost immediately upon its 1925 release; She Walks in Beauty, published in 1928; and A Cage for Lovers, first issued in 1957 (it was reissued in paperback several times). In 1998, Page’s biography of Powell—called simply Dawn Powell: A Biography—was published, generating much critical acclaim. Gore Vidal, whose words appear on the book’s jacket, had this to say: “Tim Page’s biography of Dawn Powell is not only a distinguished work in itself but illuminates one of our most brilliant—certainly most witty—novelists, whose literary reputation continues to grow long after her death: we are catching up to her.” Publishers Weekly called it “a meticulously researched, well-written and sympathetic portrayal of Powell’s life.” Following the release of the biography came a volume of diaries and a book of her letters, both edited by Page; a collection of four of her plays soon followed, edited by Page and Michael Sexton. Notably, in 2001 the Library of America published nine of Powell’s novels, selected by Page, in two volumes. Today interest in Powell seems to be climbing again (see “The Dawn Powell Revivals” section of chapter 2, below).
CHAPTER TWO
“HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW”
An Overview of Her Life and Career
“Ten years from now I will still be Dawn Sherman Powell—but girls, that name will be famous then. Ten years from now, I will have arrived.”
—Diaries, 21
BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT
Dawn Powell was born on November 28, 1896, in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, to Elroy “Roy” King Powell, a charming rogue of a traveling salesman, and his young wife, Hattie Blanche Sherman Powell, by all accounts a doting mother to her three daughters. The first six years of Dawn’s life seem to have been serene and generally uneventful, except that the clever little girl started reading at four and writing “from the time she was big enough to hold a pencil” (Farnham, 3).2 But tragedy struck the tranquil household when her twenty-nine-year-old mother died on December 6, 1903, just eight days after Dawn’s seventh birthday. From that moment forward, Dawn’s childhood would be difficult; indeed, the next several years would be so brutal as to be almost unbearable. Through it all, she developed a determination and self-reliance that would serve her well for the rest of her life. She learned never to take anything too seriously, finding comedy in even the most tragic situations.3 Good friend Jacqueline Miller Rice4 remembers that the adult Powell always “hid her fear and despair. She showed her best face to the world. And what a glorious face it was” (Guare, x). Powell would consign her fear and despair to her diaries, which she kept faithfully most of her life.
Her mother’s death, evidently of a botched abortion, left Dawn’s irresponsible but generally well-meaning father alone to care for Dawn and her sisters: Mabel, who was older than Dawn by sixteen months, and Phyllis, who was three years younger. Because Roy Powell traveled for a living, the three young girls were frequently shuttled from one relation to another, among them Aunt Dawn Sherman Gates, whom the young girls adored and for whom Dawn had been named. But tragedy would soon strike again: Aunt Dawn died, presumably also as the result of an abortion, when she was just twenty and young Dawn merely ten years old. Page writes that a slip of paper found among Powell’s papers upon her death read, “When I was 10 and Aunt Dawn died, I swore I at least would always remember. I did” (Bio, 16).5
The novelist would later would recall “liv[ing] around with other relatives in various villages and factory towns all over central Ohio” and staying “in grandmother’s rooming house in Shelby and often called in by transient theatrical troupes to take part in plays” (Letters, 81). Still later, in an autobiographical entry for Twentieth-Century Authors, she wrote of “a year of farm life with this or that aunt, life in small-town boarding houses, life with very prim strict relatives, to rougher life in the middle of little factory towns” (1123). Those nomadic years would prove to be happier than the ones that would follow, however, when, in August 1907, Dawn’s father married the wealthy but miserly and coldhearted Sabra Stearns. The family moved about ten miles southwest of Cleveland to Sabra’s large farmhouse in North Olmsted, then a small farming community.
An observant child who did well in school, young Dawn loved to read, especially the novels of Dickens, Dumas, and Hugo.6 From an early age, she developed a clear eye for the pretensions and airs of the adults she saw around her, filling notebook after notebook with sketches, poems, and stories of her observations. Dawn kept these books carefully hidden under the porch of the North Olmsted house, fearing her stepmother’s rage if she found out about her writing. When Dawn was thirteen, her stepmother did discover the notebooks and immediately burned them7—calling them Dawn’s “trash”—in an act so cruel that it prompted the girl to leave home a short time later, immediately following her graduation from the eighth grade (Diaries, 186). Later, in her most autobiographical novel, 1944’s My Home Is Far Away, Powell painted a harrowing picture of Sabra Stearns Powell, renamed Idah Hawkins Willard for the fictionalized portrait, although, according to biographer Page, Powell “seems actually to have understated Sabra’s cruelty” (Bio, 197). “Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I . . . diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives” (Diaries, 222), Powell admitted.
The fictional stepmother’s way of bringing up the girls was to take a “stand,” yet
[her] “stand” was so elaborate, and involved so many contingencies, that her new family despaired of ever getting it straight. First, they were to stay out of the house except for sleeping and eating. Second, they were not to sit out on the lawn mooning where everybody could see them, nor were they to go visiting relatives or school friends or have them call. They were not to use their school paper for games, because it cost money, nor were they to keep reading in their school readers for fun after their lesson was learned. . . . They were not to go places where townspeople would talk about their ragged clothes, but they were not allowed to use their sewing boxes either, because needles and thread cost money.