TWO REVIEWS AND COMMENTARY

ON DAWN POWELL'S WORKS AND LIFE

• by LISA ZEIDNER, NYTBR 1998
• by MICHAEL DIRDA, WASHINGTON POST 1990

COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL FOR USE ONLY BY ENGLISH 52A STUDENTS

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Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times

November 15, 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Correction Appended

SECTION: Section 7; Page 10; Column 1; Book Review Desk 

LENGTH: 1450 words

HEADLINE: Angel on Toast

BYLINE:   By Lisa Zeidner;   Lisa Zeidner is a professor of English at
Rutgers University. Her fourth novel, "Layover," will be published in June.

BODY:
   
Dawn Powell
A Biography.
By Tim Page.
Illustrated. 362 pp. New York:
Henry Holt & Company. $30.

A S far as I know, Dawn Powell's novels are not on a syllabus at any
American university. Yet she is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the
rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in
her evocation of the heartland and has a more supple control of satirical
voice than Evelyn Waugh, the writer to whom she's most often compared.

Those in the market for a feminist icon could do worse than Dawn Powell. She
prided herself on being a survivor, not a victim. She supported herself as a
writer through the Depression and two world wars while nursing an autistic
son, an alcoholic husband and her own parade of illnesses. She took lovers
as boldly as a man and hobnobbed with the influential artists of her time.
From this life, she produced 16 novels, many of them great, not to mention
10 plays and over 100 stories.

So why is she not better known? You could accept Tim Page's explanation, in
"Dawn Powell: A Biography," that her "dark, mordant attitude toward the
world . . . rankled." She was simply too unsparing in her satire, offending
the very people who might embrace her. As Powell wrote in her diary: "I
think my great handicap and strongest slavery is my insistence on freedom. I
require it."

Page, the chief music critic for The Washington Post, has done more than
write the first Powell biography. To a large extent, we must thank Page for
allowing us to read her at all. Only fitfully successful during her
lifetime, she was almost completely out of print following her death in
1965. Yet she was not without admirers: in a 1987 essay, Gore Vidal extolled
Powell as a better satirist than Twain. In 1991, after reading a tribute to
Powell by Edmund Wilson, Page stumbled upon a used copy of one of her novels
and became instrumental in seeing her work reprinted. He edited her diaries
for publication and is now the executor of her literary estate. Outside of
her family, no one loves this complicated woman or her work as much as Page.

Dawn Powell's childhood reads like a parable about overcoming hardship. Born
in 1896 in the small town of Mount Gilead, Ohio, Powell was the middle of
three girls. Her mother died, of a botched abortion, when Powell was 7.
Powell's father, an alcoholic traveling salesman, remarried and left the
girls in the care of a genuine wicked stepmother -- a woman not only cruel
but quite seriously disturbed. (She forced Dawn's sister Phyllis to watch
her exhume the coffin of a premature newborn so she could change the
corpse's outfit -- into the dress of Phyllis's only doll.)

By 13, Powell had already read Schopenhauer but had been forbidden to go to
high school. She ran away from home to finish school and live with a
nurturing aunt, Orpha May, in Shelby, Ohio, then sweet-talked herself into a
work-study scholarship at Lake Erie College for Women before arriving in
Manhattan in 1918.

"There is really one city for everyone just as there is one major love,"
Powell wrote. Novels like "A Time to Be Born" dissect the city's social
codes with almost anthropological precision. For most of her time as a
passionate New Yorker, Powell lived in Greenwich Village with her husband,
the adman Joseph Gousha, and, when he was not institutionalized, her son,
Joseph Gousha Jr., called Jojo. (The autism that afflicted him had not yet
been identified as a condition; the boy was first thought to be retarded.)

Although Powell contended that she wrote "because there is no one to talk
to," her social life was a whirl of dinners and parties with good friends
like Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos. She knew Nabokov, Hemingway, Dorothy
Parker and Stella Adler. She could be brutal in exposing poseurs and had a
delectably nasty wit. Yet she was also ferociously loyal to her family and
to old school chums. And she was never a snob or a social climber. She
befriended Margaret Burnham De Silver at a mental hospital. (Jojo was in
love with De Silver's daughter, a schizophrenic.) De Silver was an heiress
whose anarchist lover would later be assassinated by the mob -- just the
kind of bizarre connections that Powell's Manhattan offers. The critic who
once huffily complained that there was "not a wholly normal character" in a
Powell novel would probably be equally offended by her life.

Powell wrote steadily, sometimes in jubilation, but more often in a
nattering funk. She viewed her career as a horrid Sisyphean rock. Page
chronicles the stupid, ungenerous reviews -- many written by so-called
friends -- and the foolhardy marketing ploys. (Her publisher actually tried
to pawn off the family at the center of the hard-edged "My Home Is Far Away"
as "happy-go-lucky.") In spite of spotty recognition, Powell retained a
lucid assurance about the value of her vision.

About her characters, Powell said: "I give them their heads. They furnish
their own nooses." Page captures one of the chief appeals of Powell's
fiction: how her ruthless exposure of her characters coexists with her
buoyant affection for them. Her realism, Page asserts, "did not push her
work into either gloom or didacticism." In fact, her crisply nuanced social
satire has more in common with Jane Austen than with the contemporaries to
whom she is usually compared. One almost has to stretch back to Austen to
find heroines as confident, complex and sympathetic. In Austen, and Powell,
it's a hard, cold world -- yet nice girls can still sometimes finish first.

By the time Page began this biography, virtually all of Powell's intimates
were dead. This fact has obviously hindered his ability to dig up fresh
dirt. "Dawn Powell" does debunk one morsel of gossip: that she conducted a
lifelong affair with the debonair, droll editor Coburn (Coby) Gilman,
cohabiting with him and Joseph Gousha in virtually a menage a trois.

Powell's attitude toward sex was, as Page puts it, "fundamentally sportive."
She had no patience for women who whined about romance. Yet Page reveals
that Powell did suffer one major heartbreak: her failed affair with the
playwright John Howard Lawson. Her stubborn longing for Lawson haunted her
and clearly informed much of her best work. But, maddeningly, the affair was
so covert that Powell would not even make reference to it in her diaries,
Page's main (indeed, in many cases, only) source of information.

In lieu of fresh revelations, the biography attempts to plant Powell firmly
in American cultural history: in the hard-drinking, money-grubbing,
politicized context of her times. But Page is not a historian. The
biography's only weakness is that Page does not always clarify, or seem able
to evaluate, which of his subject's decisions about love and money were
bravely eccentric, which standard protocol for a Greenwich Village bohemian.
What did Powell's contemporaries make of her declining a spectacular salary
to write for Hollywood at the depth of the Depression -- especially when she
was always strapped for cash, at one point virtually homeless? Or of
enduring a sexless if companionable marriage more worthy of a Henry James
novel than one of her own bawdy, bed-hopping confections?

In her elusive relationship to the values of her era lies Powell's greatness
-- yet this is also, paradoxically, her most damning liability. She could be
neither marketed as breathlessly of-the-moment nor lionized as timelessly
classical. As usual, she knew the score. "The Golden Spur," published three
years before her death, contains a scathing self-parody in which Claire, a
failed writer and lonely old crone, brags that "really good clothes never go
out of style" -- oblivious of the fact that people flee from her as if she's
a bag lady.

Page exposes Powell for lying about her age. As she hit 30, she seems to
have decided to become a year younger. And he has some gentle fun with her
health bugbears, like her tendency to look upon any hospitalization, even
for the removal of a tumor so large it cracked open her ribs one by one, as
a pampered vacation. But short of that, this biography is unabashedly
celebratory. After all, Page named one of his sons after Jack Sherman,
Powell's cousin. We confirmed Powellists (Dawnites?) can only applaud him.

His devotion is eerily prefigured in one of Powell's best novels, "Turn
Magic Wheel," in which a male writer is spellbound by a mysterious older
woman. Since it's a Powell novel, the ending is not triumphant or tragic but
qualified and enigmatic. For Page to become such a vigorous champion allows
a satisfying fairy-tale coda to Powell's career -- not the kind that she
herself would have envisioned, but the kind that she deserves.


LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1998

Copyright 1990 The Washington Post  
The Washington Post

March 18, 1990, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; PAGE X10

LENGTH: 1393 words

HEADLINE: Satyricon in Manhattan

SERIES: Occasional

BYLINE: Michael Dirda

BODY:
   THE LOCUSTS HAVE NO KING

By Dawn Powell

Yarrow Press. 286 pp. $ 9.95, paperback

THE GOLDEN SPUR

By Dawn Powell

Vintage. 274 pp. $ 8.95, paperback

ANGELS ON TOAST

By Dawn Powell

Vintage. 273 pp. $ 8.95, paperback

ISAAC BABEL once remarked that there is no iron that can enter a human heart
like a period in just the right place. He might have been describing Dawn
Powell's novels: the killer aphorisms and sharp observations rain down like
well-placed sniper fire. Turning the pages of these satiric group portraits
of New York bohemians and Babbitt-like businessmen is like listening to,
say, Gore Vidal at his most serenely malicious. Certainly it is no accident
that Vidal has been Powell's champion -- he calls her our finest comic
novelist -- and the efficient cause behind the republication of several of
her books.

Dawn Powell (1897-1965) wrote 13 novels, a couple of plays and was sometimes
unkindly called the second Dorothy Parker. She spent most of her adult life
in Greenwich Village, where much of her fiction takes place. Not quite
period pieces, her novels are bittersweet screwball comedies, where the
characters all drink like maenads at a bacchanal and the race under the
table is always to the wittiest.

Powell's books typically take the reader on a tour of some glamorous,
decadent locale, and feature dozens of characters. Sometimes there's a
sympathetic central figure, but more often everyone is on the make, on a
roll or falling down drunk. She is exceptionally dazzling in her
descriptions, often the dullest parts of modern novels. A young gold-digger
in a bar "was evidently proud of her extreme slenderness for her
gray-striped green wool dress followed every bone and sinew snugly, and from
the demure way she thrust out her high-pointed breasts you would have
thought they were her own invention, exclusive with her."

This darling, Dodo by name, soon snuggles up to a public relations man who
"might be engaged in the world's most degrading occupation but at least he
was better at it than anyone else." Later she tricks the novel's hero, a
medievalist named Frederick Olliver, into taking her to a soiree held by a
rich but stingy publisher. Frederick eventually escapes her clutches to find
himself "peacefully wandering around the Beckley library in the upper
reaches of the house, looking at the glass cabinets of rare manuscripts,
viewing the sumptuous canyons of books, the portraits of beagle-nosed
Beckleys each firmly clasping an exquisitely bound book as if to keep the
artist from stealing it."

All these quotes occur in the first 20 pages of The Locusts Have No King
(1948), and the remaining 250 pages are just as wicked. Powell claimed that
The Satyricon was her favorite novel and she adopts very much its style in
her own work: life as a sideshow; terrific party scenes; easy sexual
liaisons; an atmosphere of brittle wit, desperation and venality; an airy,
tart prose; plot developments growing out of continual misunderstanding;
mini-disquisitions about art, life, fortune. In truth, you don't so much
read these satiric romances as look down into them from some quite lofty
Olympian heights. Your friend Dawn merely points out the antic goings-on, as
you both chuckle and weep and mumble "What fools these mortals be!"

In Locusts Lyle Gaynor, who loves Frederick, is married to a creepy
bed-ridden playwright. The invalid makes a pitch to go on a trip to the
Southwest. "I could ride through the mountains," he explains, "and join up
with the Penitentes, maybe, offer myself for crucifixion, really enjoy
myself, for once." Hoping for some help with his career, Frederick meanwhile
visits a book-chat wheeler-dealer named Tyson Bricker who "beamed at
Frederick with the honest affection one could feel toward a man who will
never be a rival, a man one is sure will never be anything but a
distinguished failure, a man one can praise freely and honestly without
danger of sending him zooming up the ladder ahead of oneself."

As it happens, Frederick unexpectedly becomes a literary hot ticket and
after a series of contretemps drifts away from his beloved Lyle; he then
finds himself infatuated with Dodo. Powell is especially fine in describing
love gone wrong, the birth of jealousy and the gray sorrowfulness that
invades the soul. Frederick breaks Lyle's heart and then admires "the new
pallor emphasizing the contrast of brown eyes and red-gold hair" while "the
aura of secret sadness made her extraordinarily beautiful." Later, in a
paragraph worthy of Proust, he gets on a bus to go back to his office, as
Lyle crosses the street:

"He caught a glimpse of her from his window and before he was conscious of
it the old aching rush of love for her swept over him. He saw how thin she
was, how sad her face, and as he watched she made a troubled gesture toward
her eyes. He wanted to cry out to her, to beg her to wait, only wait -- but
for what? Tears came to his eyes as the bus carried him on."

Most of Locusts is powered by the various misunderstandings that prevent
these two lovers from getting back together, but this simple device --
straight out of French farce -- allows the novel to embrace most of artsy
New York during the late '40s: Spanish poets, magazine editors married to
Russian emigres, ad execs, camp followers, night school litterateurs.
Eventually Frederick starts to quarrel with Dodo; once while they are
getting ready for bed, he shivers before "her slim body in the half
unfastened purple jersey as taut as an arrow about to whizz through him."
The affair finally over, Frederick finds himself "so exhausted that he could
not trust his sense of relief. It was the relief of the tired mother when
the baby stops crying at last; the realization of its death comes later."
Anyone could write the first part of that last sentence; it takes genius to
add the final chilling twist. BRILLIANT as The Locusts Have No King is, its
excellence is typical of Powell. The Golden Spur -- her last book, published
in 1962 -- is somewhat softer, kinder, in its portrait of New York ways. A
young Candide comes to a bar called The Golden Spur looking for his real
father among the New Yorkers his long-dead mother once hung out with. Naive,
handsome and winning, he soon attracts the attention of a couple of young
sophisticates who invite him to move in with them: Lize, with her
close-cropped hair and boyish figure, "drew the interest of men of all
sexes"; while Darcy seemed to exemplify midwestern practicality. In fact,
her practicality "exhibited itself in tender little cries of 'But you'll be
sick, honey, if you don't eat something after all that bourbon! You must
eat! Here, eat this pretzel.' "

A classic innocent, Jonathan Jamieson changes the life -- for the better --
of everyone he meets. The faded lady novelist, the hack writer, the
desperate art dealer, the legendary painter, the aspiring actress, the
alcoholic professor, the haunted attorney, the world-famous novelist -- all
of them decide to be a mother or a father or a lover to the young man. It's
just like a fairy tale, told by Scott Fitzgerald, with a suitable happy
ending for Jonathan in the arms of a young girl in the back of a taxi
heading for The Golden Spur.

Besides these forays into bohemia (another is The Wicked Pavilion, Vintage,
$ 8.95), Powell's range also includes business satire a' la John O'Hara or
Tom Wolfe. In Angels on Toast she eviscerates a pair of two-timing
businessmen who ride the night trains back and forth between Chicago and New
York, balancing love affairs, wives, mistresses, elaborate schemes and
golden daydreams. As usual she sets up a full dramatis personae, shifting
among its members to make her satirical thrusts. At one point, the two
anti-heroes encounter a pseudo-British, name-dropping sharpy named T.V.
Truesdale. Powell captures him forever in a sentence:

"He paid for his beer very carefully from a frayed ancient pigskin wallet,
and this too he fondled as he had his briefcase, as if these were all that
had been rescued of his priceless treasures when the palace was destroyed."

Everything is wonderful in that sentence, from the balance of phrases to the
simile that makes us smile. A writer as good as this merits more than
rediscovery: She deserves readers. Lots of them.

Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

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