The Diaries of Dawn Powell edited by Tim Page
Keen, Suzanne
A WRITER'S LONG LAMENT The Diaries of Dawn Powell Edited and with an introduction by Tim Page Steerforth Press, $32,512 pp. Suzanne Keen The author of fifteen novels, including the recently...
...We catch glimpses of Powell's quirky sense of humor in the odd scenes and overheard conversations she collects, and we hear in her epigrammatic pronouncements a comic's control of tone: "All my life seems to have been spent killing geese that lay golden eggs and it's a fine decent sport...
...In her diaries Powell spills out her frustration at the friends and family members who distract her from her work, as if their demands, and not her chronic drinking and depression, most grievously interfere with her productivity...
...Diaries give readers a false sense of intimacy...
...What fun to see the unappreciated genius put Hemingway in his place...
...She has little sympathy for conventional pieties...
...Yet two seductive myths-of the woman writer's thwarting by daily life...
...How strange that people like the work of Katherine Anne Porter and Mary McCarthy and Eudora Welty...
...Her husband worked, but he contributed only erratically to the maintenance of the household and to the costs of caring for their mentally disabled son...
...I am not sure that Tim Page makes the right choice when he deletes the entries written "in what was clearly a state of intoxication," because, in his view, Powell would not "want incoherent first drafts published to the world...
...and the unappreciated author's destruction by misunderstanding and neglect-undergird Powell's presentation of her own woes...
...I do not mean to suggest that Powell's difficulties were imaginary...
...Nor, I am compelled to say, should Powell's complaints disguise the fact that she never had to get an ordinary job, always enjoyed a lively social life, frequently went to plays, and never had to clean her own apartment...
...Readers interested in the New York literary scene of the thirties, forties, and fifties will find familiar names in many of Powell's anecdotes, and Tim Page's edition of the diary includes a very helpful appendix describing the individuals, famous and obscure, to whom Powell refers...
...His footnotes identify the stories and novels when Powell alludes to them without their titles, or under working titles...
...Yet if Page intends to protect Powell, he goes only so far...
...It's hard to know whether Powell would have wanted to be cleaned up in this way, since she writes with such scorn of the posthumous reinvention of writers (Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald) by critics, biographers, and friends...
...Powell has little patience with those who believe in their myths of self-presentation, and her diaries demolish the self-styled Hostess, Patron of the Arts, Prescient Publisher, and Successful Author...
...It seems to me that omitting, in the 25 percent of the diaries obscured from view, the unedited and perhaps un-pleasant drunken passages makes it harder to see the anguish that often motivates Powell's vituperative outbursts...
...Evaluating a diary comes perilously close to judging a person, and I feel uneasy about the fact that I disapprove of some of what I see in the Dawn Powell of the diaries...
...Though she stayed married for forty-two years to a sarcastic, out-of-control alcoholic, and constantly endeavored to improve the life of her brain-damaged son Jojo, her true sentiment comes through in her diary: "Any barroom brawl is better," she writes, "than the persistent pinpricks of the happy little family...
...Suzanne Keen The author of fifteen novels, including the recently re-issued Vintage editions of Angels on Toast, The Wicked Pavilion, and The Golden Spur, Dawn Powell (1897-1965) would laugh sardonically at the prospect of her posthumous revival...
...Though she depended upon sales of short stories to women's magazines, Powell never compromised her satirist's vision of American manners by pandering to a popular audience...
...Before her death the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored her for her lifelong achievement in literature...
...A separate chronology of the major events of Powell's life, including dates of publication, would have been handy, but overall Page has produced a book that should be useful to students of Powell's writing, as well as completely accessible to readers interested in an engrossing, if painful account of a writer's life...
...Like many women writers whose work has been rediscovered, Powell was compelled to employ her gift to earn money...
...Again and again Powell insists that middle-class readers, even middle-class Bohemian readers, cannot tolerate humor based on the exposure of the foibles of their kind...
...Her drinking cannot have helped much...
...In truth, she may not have known how to...
...How hard it is to have to chat with the patron who pays your way...
...In response to reading Virginia Woolfs diary, Powell writes, "In diaries, revealing the innermost soul, the entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy...
...While Powell's diary often records her sudden awakening into a happy mood, and recounts the good days of writing (with their optimistic predictions of good sales and reviews), the preponderance of entries show her worried, harried, jealous, or hurt...
...I wince when she kites yet another check or "draws a blank" (drinks so much that she can't remember what she did or said...
...Perpetually in debt, and incapable of living within her fluctuating means, Powell wrote her stories, reviews, magazine features, plays, and novels with an eye to the earnings that would allow her to avert eviction, placate the bankers and the IRS, and stave off the bailiffs...
...Yet I imagine that she had other feelings that do not make it onto the page, but expend themselves in buoying her up...
...He retains the caustic remarks Powell makes about her friends, and the cutting criticism of her rivals, since one of the attractions of a private journal made public ostensibly lies in its uncensored opinions...
...Yet Powell's frequent ranting about the burden of home and family, and her melancholy about low sales figures, indifferent publishers, and uncomprehending reviews ought not to obscure the fact that she had, by any measure, a successful career for a serious literary novelist...
...Indeed, she endured a miserable childhood and suffered throughout her adult life from what seems like a bipolar disorder...
...The characters she describes as gay, witty, and engaging, strike her contemporaries as miserable, desperate wretches, or so she often records in her diary...
...Subject to a variety of afflictions, she had surgery on more than one occasion before her death of cancer (ironically, her wasting disease finally made her slim...
...She struggled with a weight problem...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 4
