Later, in letters and diaries, she regularly referred to Joe as “Adorable,” “Most Adorable” (Letters, passim), and “that loving golden Leo lad” (Bio, 278). The two were heavy drinkers even then, and their drinking would only escalate over the years. Of their first date, a walking tour of Staten Island, Powell wrote: “It was a Prohibition year, so naturally part of the hiking equipment was a hip flask of some exquisite blend of lemonade and henbane with a zest of metal rust” (“Staten Island,” 121).
If her New York novels are filled with images of drinking and bars—James Wolcott says of them, “Squeeze their pages and you can almost hear them squish” (46)—her life story is full of boozy nights at home and out on the town. In The Thirties, Edmund Wilson related the events of a party at Bill Brown’s27 Village apartment, during which an inebriated Powell “pour[ed] her drink down the back of a girl who was sitting on the stairs” (304); he later famously mentioned one of many “knock-down and drag-out” parties at Powell’s place (405). In the next decade, when Powell was hospitalized awaiting the removal of a large tumor in her lungs, Wilson was surprised to see her looking “fresher and younger” than he had ever seen her, without “rings or pouches around her eyes,” a fact he attributed to her being unable to drink there (Forties, 304). Her own diaries are full of references to drunken parties and nasty hangovers: she tells of one evening that began “at the Café Royale” (the actual spelling was Royal),28 where she had been “drinking ferociously”; the evening ended hours later with Powell “spilling [her] drinks all over Peggy’s29 sofa, occasionally roused into consciousness by being very wet” (Diaries, 87). Gore Vidal remarked on the gin-filled aquarium he saw in Powell’s apartment at 35 East Ninth Street in the summer of 1950 (Golden Spur, xi), though Page believes that the story is probably untrue: Powell, a cat owner, never once mentioned having owned either fish or aquarium, and that she would have gone to the expense of an aquarium is unlikely (phone call, March 7, 2013). But imbibe she did: Matthew Josephson writes that she “drank copiously for the joy of living” (21).30 Still, Powell was not to be likened to the uptown Algonquin lunch set who drank away their afternoons and wrote comparatively little: she would in fact become angry if an acquaintance asked her to lunch. “Did they think she was the Village playgirl? she’d shout. Didn’t they know she had some writing to do?” (Page, “Resurrection,” 3).31 Like Willa Cather, who believed that “the business of an artist’s life” is “ceaseless, unremitting labor” (Benfey, 4), Powell had no tolerance for those artists who would squander their talent or waste their time, an intolerance she demonstrated in novels from 1925’s Whither on. In her Diaries she complained of friends who “like to pester people who are working” and of those who are “happy to gnaw away at the bones of your energy and talent” (229). One simply could not write while entertaining or being entertained; in fact, from the time she was a child, she relished the sanctity of isolation. For writers, she said, “there is nothing to equal the elation of escaping into solitude” (228). Looking back, she would fondly recall the “sheer exhilaration” she had felt as a child when she had “got up into the attic or in the treetop or under a tree way off by the road where I was alone with a sharp pencil and notebook” (228–29). The serious artist always required seclusion, sobriety, and silence to produce.
At night . . . I waken and see his dear yellow head on the pillow.
—Diaries, 4
Some nine months after their first date, on November 20, 1920, Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha were married at the Little Church around the Corner,32 located on Twenty-Ninth Street between Fifth and Madison. To Powell’s delight, her beloved Auntie May traveled to New York from Ohio to attend the wedding (Letters, 51), after which the young couple honeymooned at the brand-new Hotel Pennsylvania33 on Seventh Avenue (Bio, 43), then the world’s largest hotel (Hirsh, Manhattan, 80). Both the church and the hotel stand today.
Powell’s new husband, who like Dawn had been left to fend for himself from an early age, gave up his ambitions of becoming a critic, a poet, or a playwright, deciding that Dawn was the more talented of the two. Poet and friend Charles Norman remembers Joe’s saying, “I married a girl with more talent than I have, and I think she should have the chance to develop it” (Poets, 51). It may be that this portrait of Gousha is overly kind: he was already deep in the throes of alcoholism by that time and was unable to produce what work he might otherwise have done. Whatever the reason, the couple agreed that Powell should quit her job and write, and that Joe, whom Norman describes as possessed of “charming old world manners” (51), would support the family with his work at a New York advertising agency, later as an executive with the firm.34
After first deciding to live apart in what was considered the “new Bohemian fashion,” they ultimately changed their minds and rented their first apartment together at 31 Riverside Drive. An article without a byline that made the third page of the Evening World of January 3, 1921—this article, in which Powell received top billing, might have been so well placed because of the pair’s work in publicity—had the following to say of the couple:
When two nice young poets, Miss Dawn Powell and Joseph Gousha, were married . . . they thought, the bride said later, they would “vindicate [Ohio-born novelist] Fannie Hurst,” who had been married in 1915 but who kept her marriage a secret for five years.
Accordingly Mr. Gousha returned to the home of his mother, brother and two sisters at number 540 81st Street Brooklyn, while the twenty-four-year-old Mrs. Gousha, pretty and brunette, continued living with a girl friend at number 549 West End Avenue.
But—
It took them only two weeks to find out that their . . . minds are quite elastic on the subject.
This was said by Mrs. Gousha at a “New York Night” before going to Pelham, where the two were “enchanted” to pass the New Year holiday with friends. (“Wed to Vindicate”)
The article continues in this same upbeat vein, ending with a flighty poem Powell had written, called “Inspiration,” and the couple’s earnest pronouncement that “they are not at all Greenwich Villagers” but that what they enjoyed most thus far about married life was “going on walks and seeing what we can’t own.” As it happens, they never would be able to afford much, though they would become stalwart Villagers.
In fact, it was only a short time later that they moved to their first Greenwich Village residence at 9 East Tenth Street (a plaque commemorating Powell’s living there was erected at Page’s urging and then later stolen); the couple subsequently moved to West Ninth, a street on which countless “wordsmiths” could be seen “shuffling up and down . . . like a pack of cards in pursuit of Lady Luck” (Loschiavo, 2). It was here, primarily, that Powell wrote her first novel, Whither. Later, in the summer of 1926, the young family moved to 106 Perry Street, also in the West Village, where they would remain for over a decade. The building, which still stands, is something of a literary landmark for those in the know, as it is here for the most part that Powell wrote “Dance Night, completed most of The Tenth Moon . . . and began Turn, Magic Wheel” (Bio, 100). Delighted to be living in the Village, where all the real artists lived and the place she would always consider her “creative oxygen” (Diaries, 391), Powell wrote, in 1934,
This little room is [the] loveliest thing I ever had. Upstairs here at night you see the towers of lower Manhattan lit up, the Woolworth, etc., and the voices of extra-news in the street, bouncing from wall to wall: “Russia—oom-pah chah! Russia—oom pah chah!” These sounds mingle with the far-off skyscraper lights, distant boat whistles and clock chimes and across the street in the attic of the Pen and Brush Club35 I see girls hanging out their meager laundry. (94–95)
In the early years the couple seems to have been very happy. But the marriage would be unconventional, Dawn having deep relationships with two other men, among them screenwriter/playwright John Howard Lawson, later one of the Hollywood Ten.36 Lawson’s son Jeffrey, in a telephone conversation with me in August 2012, recalled that in the 1930s Powell had been a frequent visitor to the Lawsons’ Long Island