There are amusing incidents rather than a plot of the sort that popular novels required in those days: Effie is hurt by Orphen’s portrayal of her marriage in his book; Corinne vacillates between husband and lover; the current Mrs. Callingham goes into the hospital to die of cancer. There are publishers who live in awe of book reviewers with names like Gannett, Hansen, Paterson. One young publisher “was so brilliant that he could tell in advance that in the years 1934–35 and–36 a book would be called exquisitely well-written if it began: ‘The boxcar swung out of the yards. Pip rolled over in the straw. He scratched himself where the straw itched him.’” Finally, the book’s real protagonist is the city:
In the quiet of three o’clock the Forties looked dingy, deserted, incredibly nineteenth century with the dim lamps in dreary doorways; in these midnight hours the streets were possessed by their ancient parasites, low tumble-down frame rooming houses with cheap little shops, though by day such remnants of another decade retreated obscurely between flamboyant hotels.
That city is now well and truly gone.
“Fleetingly, Effie thought of a new system of obituaries in which the lives recorded were criticized, mistaken steps pointed out, structure condemned, better paths suggested.” This is the essence of Dawn Powell: The fantastic flight from the mundane that can then lead to a thousand conversational variations, and the best of her prose is like the best conversation where no escalier is ever wit’s receptacle. As a result, she is at her best with The Party; but then most novels of this epoch were assembled around The Party, where the characters proceed to interact and the unsayable gets said. Powell has a continuing hostess who is a variation on Peggy Guggenheim, collecting artists for gallery and bed. There is also a minor hostess, interested only in celebrities and meaningful conversation. She quizzes Dennis: “‘Now let’s talk,’ she commanded playfully [Powell’s adverbs are often anesthetic preparatory for surgery]. ‘We’ve never really had a nice talk, have we, Dennis? Tell me how you came to write? I suppose you had to make money so you just started writing, didn’t you?’” Callingham himself comes to The Party. Powell’s affection for the real Hemingway did not entirely obscure his defects, particularly as viewed by an ex-wife, Effie, who discovers to her relief “there was no Andy left, he had been wiped out by Callingham the Success as so many men before him had been wiped out by the thing they represented.” Effie frees herself from him and settles back into contented triangularity with Dennis and Corinne. Cake had; ingested, too.
In 1938, with The Happy Island, the Powell novel grows more crowded and The Party is bigger and wilder. This time the rustic who arrives in the city is not a young woman but a young man. Powell is often more at home with crude masculine protagonists, suspecting, perhaps, that her kind of tough realism might cause resentment among those who think of women as the fair sex.
A would-be playwright, Jeff Abbott (related to Morry?), arrives on the bus from Silver City; a manager has accepted his play with the ominous telegram, CASTING COMPLETE THIRD ACT NEEDS REWRITING [like that of Jig Saw] COME IMMEDIATELY. Jeff has two friends in the city. One is Prudence Bly, a successful nightclub singer; the other is Dol, a gentleman party giver and fancier of young men. At the book’s end, Dol gives great offense by dying, seated in a chair, at his own party. How like him! the guests mutter.
Prudence is the most carefully examined of Powell’s women. She is successful; she drinks too much; she is seldom involved with fewer than two men. But it is the relationships between women that make Powell’s novels so funny and original. Jean Nelson, a beautiful dummy, is Prudence’s best friend; each needs the other to dislike. At the novel’s beginning, Jean has acquired Prudence’s lover Steve. The two girls meet for a serious drunken chat over lunch. “You aren’t jealous of me, are you, Prudence?” “Jealous? Jealous? Good God, Jean, you must think this is the Middle Ages!” Prudence then broods to herself:
Why do I lunch with women anyway?…We always end up sniveling over men and life and we always tell something that makes us afraid of each other for weeks to come…. Women take too much out of you, they drink too much and too earnestly. They drink the way they used to do china painting, and crewel work and wood burning.
In the restaurant things grow blurred: “‘You’re so good to everyone,’ sighed Jean. ‘You really are.’ Nothing could have enraged Prudence more or been more untrue.” Finally, Jean goes: “Prudence looked meditatively after Jean as she wove her way earnestly through tables and knees. The girl did look like a goddess but the trouble was she walked like one, too, as if her legs had been too long wound in a flag.”
Prudence’s forebears include, yet again, the eccentric grandmother. This one is rich, and “Prudence was always glad her grandmother had been neither kind nor affectionate.” The escape from Silver City had been easy. The grandmother was indifferent to everyone, including “her surly young Swedish chauffeur.” A great traveler, Mrs. Bly “always wanted to buy one dinner with two plates, as if he were a Pekinese, and, more alarming still, to take one room in the hotels where they stayed…. After all, she explained, she always slept with her clothes on so there was nothing indecent in it.” In addition, Mrs. Bly is a sincere liar, who believes that she was on the Titanic when it was sunk; and was courted by the czar.
Jeff Abbott and Prudence meet. They have an affair. Jeff is sublimely humorless, which intrigues Prudence. He is also a man of destiny, doomed to greatness in the theater. “‘I never yet found anything to laugh at in this world,’ said Jeff. ‘You never heard of a great man with a sense of humor, did you? Humor’s an anesthetic, that’s all, laughing gas while your guts are jerked out.’” Since they are not made for each other, marriage is a real possibility. Prudence is growing unsure of herself:
She could not find the place where the little girl from Ohio, the ambitious, industrious little village girl, merged into the Evening Journal Prudence Bly, The Town and Country Bly. There were queer moments between personalities, moments such as the hermit crab must have scuttling from one stolen shell to the next one…. Prudence Bly was not so much a person as a conspiracy.
Then Powell, in a quick scuttle, briefly inhabits her own shell:
Prudence slew with a neat epithet, crippled with a true word, then, seeing the devastation about her and her enemies growing, grew frightened of revenge, backed desperately, and eventually found the white flag of Sentimentality as her salvation. For every ruinous mot she had a tear for motherhood.
The failure of Jeff’s powerful play does not disturb him, and Prudence is somewhat awed since worldly success is the only thing that makes the island happy. But “he belongs to the baffling group of confident writers who need no applause. For them a success is not a surprise but cause for wonder that it is less than international…. A failure proves that a man is too good for his times.” When he says he wants to buy a farm in the Midwest and settle down and write, Prudence is astonished. When he does exactly that, she goes with him. Integrity at last. No more glamour. No more happy island. Only fields, a man, a woman. In no time at all, she is climbing the walls and heading back to New York where she belongs. Since Jean has let go of Steve, he receives her amiably (but then hardly anyone has noticed her departure). The book ends with: “Prudence’s looks, [Steve] reflected with some surprise, were quite gone. She really looked as hard as nails, but then so did most women eventually.” That excellent worldly novelist Thackeray never made it to so high a ground.
Angels on Toast (1940); war has begun to darken the skyline. But the turning wheel’s magic is undiminished for Ebie, a commercial artist, whose mother is in the great line of Powell eccentrics. Ebie lives with another working woman, Honey, who “was a virgin (at least you couldn’t prove she wasn’t), and was as proud as punch of it. You would have thought that it was something that had been in the family for generations.” But Ebie and Honey need each other to talk at, and in a tavern
where O. Henry used to go…they’d sit in the dark smoked-wood booth drinking old-fashioneds and telling ea
ch other things they certainly wished later they had never told and bragging about their families, sometimes making them hot-stuff socially back home, the next time making them romantically on the wrong side of the tracks. The family must have been on wheels back in the Middle West, whizzing back and forth across tracks at a mere word from the New York daughters.
Brooding over the novel is the downtown Hotel Ellery. For seventeen dollars a week Ebie’s mother, Mrs. Vane, lives in contented genteel squalor.
BAR and GRILL: it was the tavern entrance to a somewhat medieval looking hotel, whose time-and-soot-blackened façade was frittered with fire-escapes,…its dark oak-wainscotting rising high to meet grimy black walls, its ship windows covered with heavy pumpkin chintz…. Once in you were in for no mere moment…. The elderly lady residents of the hotel were without too much obvious haste taking their places in the grill-room, nodding and smiling to the waitresses, carrying their knitting and a slender volume of some English bard, anything to prop against their first Manhattan…as they sipped their drinks and dipped into literature. It was sip and dip, sip and dip until cocktail time was proclaimed by the arrival of the little cocktail sausage wagon.
In its remoteness, this world before television could just as easily be that of St. Ronan’s Well.
It is also satisfying that in these New York novels the city that was plays so pervasive a role. This sort of hotel, meticulously described, evokes lost time in a way that the novel’s bumptious contemporary, early talking movies, don’t.
Another curious thing about these small, venerable, respectable hotels, there seemed no appeal here to the average newcomer. BAR and GRILL, for instance, appealed to seemingly genteel widows and spinsters of small incomes…. Then there were those tired flashes-in-the-pan, the one-shot celebrities, and, on the other hand, there was a gay younger group whose loyalty to the BAR and GRILL was based on the cheapness of its martinis. Over their simple dollar lunches (four martinis and a sandwich) this livelier set snickered at the older residents.
Ebie wants to take her mother away from all this so that they can live together in Connecticut. Mrs. Vane would rather die. She prefers to lecture the bar on poetry. There is also a plot: two men in business, with wives. One has an affair with Ebie. There is a boom in real estate; then a bust. By now, Powell has mastered her own method. The essay-beginnings to chapters work smartly:
In the dead of night wives talked to their husbands, in the dark they talked and talked while the clock on the bureau ticked sleep away, and the last street cars clanged off on distant streets to remoter suburbs, where in new houses bursting with mortgages and the latest conveniences, wives talked in the dark, and talked and talked.
The prose is now less easygoing; and there is a conscious tightening of the language although, to the end, Powell thought one thing was different than another while always proving not her mettle but metal.
Powell is generally happiest in the BAR and GRILL or at the Lafayette or Brevoort. But in A Time to Be Born (1942) she takes a sudden social leap, and lands atop the town’s social Rockies. Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid. There are many reasons. First, since the Depression, the owners of the Great Republic prefer not to be known to the public at large. Celebrities, of the sort that delight Powell, fill the newspapers while the great personages are seldom, if ever, mentioned; they are also rarely to be seen in those places where public and celebrities go to mingle. “Where,” I asked the oldest of my waiter-acquaintances at the Plaza (we’ve known each other forty years), “have the nobles gone?” He looked sad. “I’m told they have their own islands now. Things”—he was vague—“like that.”
As I read my way through Powell I noted how few names she actually does drop. There is a single reference to the late Helen Astor, which comes as a mild shock. Otherwise the references are no more arcane than Rockefeller equals money (but then John D. had hired the first press agent). In a sense, midwesterners were the least class-conscious of Americans during the first half of the twentieth century and those who came from the small towns (Hemingway, Dreiser, Powell herself) ignore those drawing rooms where Henry James was at home amongst pure essences, whose source of wealth is never known but whose knowledge of what others know is all that matters. Powell, agreeably, knows exactly how much money everyone makes (not enough) and what everything costs (too much). As for value, she does her best with love, but suspects the times are permanently inflationary for that overhyped commodity. Powell never gets to Newport, Rhode Island, in her books but she manages Cape Cod nicely. She inclines to the boozy meritocracy of theater and publishing and the art world both commercial and whatever it is that Fifty-seventh Street was and is.
But in A Time to Be Born, she takes on the highest level of the meritocracy (the almost-nobles) in the form of a powerful publisher and his high-powered wife, based, rather casually, on Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce. At last Powell wil have a fling at those seriously important people Diana Trilling felt that she was not up to writing about. But since one person is pretty much like another, all are as one in art, which alone makes the difference. Humble Ebie is neither more nor less meaningful than famous Amanda. It’s what’s made of them in art. Powell does have a good deal of fun with Julian and Amanda Evans, and the self-important grandeur of their lives. But Powell has no real interest in power or, more to this particular point, in those whose lives are devoted to power over others. Powell is with the victims. The result is that the marginal characters work rather better than the principals. One never quite believes that Julian owns and operates sixteen newspapers. One does believe Vicki Haven, who comes from the same Ohio town as Amanda, authoress of a Forever Amber best-seller that has been written for her by the best pen-persons and scholar-squirrels that Julian’s money can buy. Ken Saunders, a reasonably failed hack, gets Powell’s full attention: he is a friend of Dennis Orphen, who makes an obligatory appearance or two as does the great novelist, Andrew Callingham, still hugely at large.
Powell sets A Time (magazine?) to Be Born in that time not to be born, the rising war in the West:
This was a time when the true signs of war were the lavish plumage of the women; Fifth Avenue dress shops and the finer restaurants were filled with these vanguards of war. Look at the jewels, the rare pelts, the gaudy birds on elaborate hair-dress and know that war was here; already the women had inherited the earth. The ominous smell of gunpowder was matched by a rising cloud of Schiaparelli’s Shocking. The women were once more armed, and their happy voices sang of destruction to come…. This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in cafés and in country homes and accused each other over their brandies or their California vintages of traitorous tendencies. This was a time for them to band together in mutual antagonism, a time to bury the professional hatchet, if possible in each other…. On Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump; hundreds waited with craning necks and thirsty faces as if this single person’s final gesture would solve the riddle of the world. Civilization stood on a ledge, and in the tension of waiting it was a relief to have one little man jump.
I know of no one else who has got so well the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one’s life.
Again the lines of love and power cross and recross as they do in novels and often, too, in life. Since Julian publishes newspapers and magazines and now propaganda for England, much of it written in his wife’s name, there is a Sarrautesque suspicion of language in Powell’s reflections. A publisher remarks, “A fact changes into a lie the instant it hits print.” But he does not stop there. “It’s not print, it’s the word,” he declares. “The Spoken Word, too. The lie forms as soon as the breath of thought hits air. You hear your own words and say—‘That’s not what I mean….’” Powellis drawing close to the mystery of literature, life’s quirky—quarkish—reflection.
Amanda’s power world does not con
vince quite as much as the Village life of Vicki and Ken and Dennis Orphen. Earlier readers will be happy to know that cute Corinne “had considered leaving her husband for Dennis Orphen for two or three years, and during her delay” the husband had divorced her “with Corinne still confused by this turn of events…. She wanted a little more time to consider marrying Dennis.” When in doubt, do nothing, is the Powellesque strategy for life. Ken goes back and forth between Amanda and Vicki. For a time Amanda is all-conquering:
She knew exactly what she wanted from life, which was, in a word, everything. She had a genuine distaste for sexual intimacy…but there were so many things to be gained by trading on sex and she thought so little of the process that she itched to use it as currency once again.
This time with the great writer-hunter Callingham. As it is, ironically, she gets knocked up by Ken and falls out with Julian. But she is never not practical: On the subject of writing, she believes that “the tragedy of the Attic poets, Keats, Shelley, Burns was not that they died young but that they were obliged by poverty to do all their own writing.” Amanda’s descendants are still very much with us: sweet lassies still saddened at the thought of those too poor to hire someone who will burn with a bright clear flame, as he writes their books for them.
It is plain that Powell was never entirely pleased with the Ohio cycle. She had a tendency to tell the same story over and over again, trying out new angles, new points of view, even—very occasionally—new characters. Finally, in mid-war, she made one last attempt to get Ohio (and herself) right. My Home Is Far Away (1944) is lapidary—at least compared to the loose early works. New York has polished her style; the essays glitter convincingly. The rural family is called Willard. A Civil War veteran for a grandfather; missing the odd eye, limb. Two sisters again: Lena the pretty one, Marcia the bright one. Powell again holds up the mirror to her past: “The uncanniness of [Marcia’s] memory was not an endearing trait; invariably guests drew respectfully away from the little freak and warmed all the more to the pretty unaffected normalcy of little Lena.” The book begins when father, mother, daughters leave a contented home. Suddenly, there is a nightmare vision: A man in a balloon floats across a starry sky. Home is now forever faraway.