with her greatest role model” (Bio, 14). Auntie May’s influence on Dawn was far reaching: without her, Powell may never have been able to attend even high school, let alone college; it is likely that she also would never have had the opportunity to flee small-town Ohio for New York City.
Some years later, after Powell had settled in New York, she would invite her aunt for a visit in a letter that reveals the free-spirited sense of humor of both women: “Unless we take another girl you can sleep in our living room,” Dawn wrote, “or if Helen’s father comes to see us you can sleep with him. He is a widower—a doctor—and has oil wells in Texas so you could do worse” (Letters, 43). Not only was her aunt unconventional and open minded, but she so believed in Dawn that she encouraged her to pursue her ambitions as no one else had done before. When Dawn was about to graduate from high school, Auntie May encouraged the girl to follow her dreams and go on to college, a luxury they could ill afford.15 She suggested that her young charge write a letter seeking admittance to Lake Erie College for Women, founded in 1856, in Painesville, Ohio. And so Dawn wrote to Vivian Small, president of the college, promising to work hard in exchange for any tuition remission she might receive.16 Though the letter no longer survives, early friend and college roommate Eleanor Farnham recalls that Powell had written something along the lines of “I’ll do anything to work my way through, from scrubbing back stairs to understudying your job” (Gross, 111).17 President Small, who believed that rich and poor alike were entitled to an education, saw to it that Dawn was admitted to Lake Erie College. The college, just five years before Powell’s death, would award her an honorary Doctor of Literature degree.
Auntie May paid for some of Dawn’s college expenses,18 a lawyer friend of Dawn’s aunt also contributed, and, according to Powell, “everybody in town helped me gather proper equipment for this mighty project, so that my borrowed trunk would scarcely close over the made-over dresses, sheets and towels blotted with my signature, tennis racket with limp strings, and a blue serge bathing suit in four sections, 1900 model, contributed by a fat neighbor on the assumption that going to ‘Lake Erie’ meant I would be spending most of my time in the water” (Letters, 249). The college assisted its new student financially: President Vivian Small herself made a personal loan to Powell; in a 1919 note to her friend and former Lake Erie College classmate Charlotte Johnson, Powell mentioned still owing President Smith $55.00 (38). Despite the financial assistance she received, still Dawn had to help pay her way, always putting in “five hours a day to earn her expenses,” as she wrote in her entry for Twentieth-Century Authors (1123). She worked in the school’s general office, where her duties included “answering doorbell [and] telephone, putting out mail, ringing bells for class and running a rotten, rheumatic old hydraulic elevator,” which requires “some muscle” to operate and which “nearly kills my back” (Letters, 15).19 She also found employment in the college library, and in the summer of 1915, between her freshman and sophomore years, she served as maid and waitress at the Shore Club in Painesville,20 where she began keeping a diary addressed to Mr. Woggs, an imaginary confidant; those early journals are a precursor to the diaries Powell would keep until her death.
Resolved as she was to succeed academically, Dawn earned unremarkable marks at Lake Erie, partly because she kept herself involved in nearly everything the campus had to offer. She not only worked part time, but she also wrote for both the college yearbook and the school literary magazine, the Lake Erie Record, serving as literary editor from her sophomore year and as editor in chief in her final year.21 She also put out an “anonymous, dissenting newspaper called The Sheet that competed with the [school] magazine” (Gross, 111); the paper offers glimpses of the wittily irreverent writer Dawn Powell would later become. Active with the school’s theatrical group, she portrayed Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Letters, 21); an unnamed role in Mice and Men22 (9–10); and Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest (15). She even wrote of masquerading as a performing dog with “a whisk-broom tail” one Halloween (15). As busy as she was, she still found time to write and perform skits for her classmates (17), donating the extra money she earned from them to the war effort or funding excursions into Cleveland to see such plays as The Little Minister with Maude Adams (15). Classmate Eleanor Farnham later said she felt sorry for anyone who had not attended Lake Erie while Dawn was enrolled there, for the lively Powell “turned everything upside down” (Gross, 111). Familiar with stories passed down about the famous alumna, today’s Lake Erie College Lincoln Library director, Christopher Bennett, wrote to me in a personal letter (August 31, 2006) that “Dawn really did shake up things on this campus for those four years.” Dawn herself, in a diary entry from the time of her sophomore year, insisted that a humdrum existence was not for her. “I must have days of rushing excitement,” she wrote (2).
One yearns to go someplace where the band plays all the time and life is not so simple.
—Letters, 26
In September 1918, following her graduation from college, Dawn Powell did precisely what she had always firmly believed “the gods” had “written” for her (Letters, 26): she moved to New York, and the city did not disappoint. Powell contemporary E. B. White would write decades later of three New Yorks: the one of the native, the one of the commuter, and finally the one of the person who moves to Manhattan from somewhere else. “Of these three trembling cities,” he said, “the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal” (17–18). Having achieved her goal of moving to New York, she immediately felt that she had finally landed in the place she was meant to be. She delighted in New York from the moment she arrived, eager to “jump right in” (Letters, 26) and to savor all it had to offer, though she had brought with her little more than her determination, her talent, and fourteen dollars (26). The “slight, impoverished, and wide-eyed woman of twenty-one,” as Tim Page describes her (Bio, 35),23 first settled in a woman’s boardinghouse on West Eighty-Fifth Street, a slightly fictionalized version of which is depicted in both her 1925 novel, Whither, and her 1931 play, Walking down Broadway. “Promptly and somewhat improbably,” Page writes, “she found work as an ‘assistant efficiency manager’ with the Butterick Company” (36), which published then as now dress patterns24 and in Powell’s days an array of ladies’ magazines, including Women’s and the Delineator. A young Theodore Dreiser had served in managerial positions at Butterick and the Delineator before Powell spent time there. In 1930, long after she had left the Butterick Company’s employ, the Delineator published a short piece of hers called “Discord in Eden,” paying her $1,000; Powell says she had seen it “rejected 13 times” before (Diaries, 15).
After only five weeks she left Butterick for the better-paying job of “second-class yeomanette” (Lake Erie College, “Early 1900s,” 1) with the United States Navy, offices at 44 Whitehall Street (B. H. Clark). When World War I ended, her “navy work [having] lost its urgency” (Bio, 38), she found a position in the promotion department of the Red Cross; a short time later she landed a publicity job with the Interchurch World Movement, a group founded after the war, with aspirations to create a better world.25 It was in this position that she met Joseph Roebuck Gousha, a young blond-haired and blue-eyed writer, born in 1890, who had lived in Pottstown, Norristown, Oil Town, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked as “a drama and music critic on the Sun” (Bio, 42). The two were immediately attracted to one another; in fact, Powell in the last months of her life would write in an article for Esquire that she had decided before their first date that he was the man she was going to marry (“Staten Island,” 121). Gousha, who like Powell had recently moved to New York, seemed to take as much pleasure in Manhattan as Dawn did. Enjoying a conventionally romantic courtship, the pair frequently dined out together, went to the theater, took carriage rides in Central Park, and “drank at some of the embryonic speakeasies that were springing up in Greenwich Village” (Bio, 42). So taken with him was she that she began keeping a little booklet that she named “The Book of Joe” (Diaries, 3–4), an undated sample from which reads
I went to Joe’s house for dinner and we walked to the Bay. . . . I made a peach pie—the very first and my Adorable said it was good. I love him so much