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We are at the moment in the middle of a Dawn Powell revival; the last fifteen years have seen the phoenix-like rise of her reputation out of the ashes of oblivion. The story of Powell's emergence since her death in 1965 as an important, or at least a more conspicuous, figure is one of luck, timing, and the advocacy of two of Powell's admirers, Gore Vidal and Tim Page. Fifteen years ago, none of the novels were in print and Powell was little more than an easily missed entry in reference books on American literature. Then, in 1987, Vidal published a lengthy evaluation in The New York Review of Books entitled, "Dawn Powell: The American Writer." The revival began soon thereafter, with the reissue of five Powell novels in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These editions went out of print quickly, however, and it was only when Tim Page, the music critic for the Washington Post, became devoted to Powell that her cause gained its necessary momentum. With Page's assistance, Steerforth Press has published sixteen Powell titles under its imprint in the last seven years, including an edited version of the diaries after the belated release of Powell's papers. Page has also written the first biography of Powell and edited a selection of her letters, released in 1999.
An Ohio-born novelist who came to New York in 1918 at the age of twenty-one, Powell setttled in Greenwich Village for the rest of her life, a "permanent visitor," to use her own phrase. Acclaimed among those who knew her for her wit, she frequented bohemian circles and cultivated a glamorous and extended circle of friends—the index to her diaries reads like a directory of New York cultural life in the middle decades of the century. Among those closest to her were John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and Hemingway's second wife Virginia Pfeiffer (Hemingway, with characteristic insincerity, once called Powell his favorite writer). Her life had its share of tragedies. She drank heavily; had a difficult—and open—marriage; lived with a mysterious tumor on her heart for twenty years, which afflicted her with intermittent pain and forebodings of sudden death; bore an autistic son, whose care despite Powell's love was at times an intolerable strain; and lived precariously in hotels for a span of her later life. She was buried on Hart Island, New York City's potter's field. Her life's work consists of fourteen novels, nine plays, numerous short stories and reviews, and one of the remarkable American diaries of the century.
She wrote almost exclusively about the two places she knew intimately, Ohio and New York City. The generally somber Ohio novels evoke a stifling, small-town midwestern life; the New York books, in contrast, are shrewd, high-spirited satires of Manhattan, paced to the city's jagged syncopations. The split in Powell's work is roughly chronological, with five of the six Ohio novels written between 1928 and 1934, when she felt, according to a 1932 diary entry, that her "whole success [was] in emotions and sensitive grades." By the mid-1930s, after a frustrating if modestly successful debut as a comic playwright on Broadway with plays like Big Night (1932) and Jig-Saw (1934), Powell turned away from the lyricism of novels like The Bride's House and The Tenth Moon (recently reissued by Steerforth under Powell's preferred title, Come Back to Sorrento) and reinvented herself as a novelist, publishing seven Manhattan satires between 1935 and 1962. (She returned to the Ohio setting for the 1944 novel My Home Is Far Away.) The New York novels attracted the small but devoted following, both here and in England, that Powell enjoyed during her lifetime.
The period flavor of her work is unmistakable.The nearly journalistic attention to detail in the New York books is always attuned to her contemporary moment: "I know of no one else," Gore Vidal remarks of A Time to Be Born (1942), "who has got the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one's life." But precisely because these books are so keen to the singularity of the time in which they were written, they address us now from a considerable distance. As lamented most poignantly through the destruction of the Café Julien in The Wicked Pavilion (1954) and the Wanamaker department store in The Golden Spur (1962), the Greenwich Village she knew and loved has long ceased to exist. Her gin-besotted advertising men, middling artists, and mercenary social climbers have their counterparts in today's Manhattan, but the peculiar etiquette that governs their relations—even in the breach—has long since been obsolete. She stands plainly on the other side of the cultural divide that gaped open at about the time of her death in the mid-sixties, for even though she wrote repeatedly about sex and dissipation among urban sophisticates, subjects treated endlessly in contemporary literature and musical theater, she possessed a reticence marked by what one friend, the English art historian Bryan Robertson, called "a near-Edwardian sense of propriety." Is there a single writer contemporary with Powell who would opt for the abstemious spelling "f—k" even in her personal correspondence?
Powell is not, that is, one of those prescient authors who seems to be "our contemporary," thus explaining perhaps the neglect of her own contemporaries. Even so, the Powell revival is in full swing, particularly as previously unseen material such as her letters and her plays have become available. This ensures some measure of attention from reviewers, which seems especially important given the still muted academic interest in Powell. But the revival will end eventually, whatever Powell's immediate fortunes, and it will be interesting to see how and to what extent her work is read in, say, fifteen years. The bleakest scenario is that Powell will be regarded as a writer of metropolitan satire of merely historical interest, her idiom trapped in a past even now nearly alien to us. (By the same token, her Ohio novels risk being read as a footnote to the midwestern fiction of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.)
An unfortunate possibility. Because beyond her social portraiture lies something else—a hungry embrace of experience combined with a temperamental, ultimately unshakable pessimism. It is, I think, this friction of curiosity and pessimism that distinguishes her work. Despite difficulties that easily could have soured her, Powell never lost her habitual inquisitiveness, as her diaries make plain. A 1931 remark—that "with me the basic urge to write is neither knowledge nor the desire to expound but pure curiosity"—is echoed in her 1959 sketch of the "industrious, go-getting little writer" Elizabeth Janeway, who
does not intend to enlarge her field by noting people, places or ideas alien to her experience or present knowledge; she does not expect to be interested in anything she is not already interested in. When I hear someone talking about bridge building in Chinotka or politics in St. Thomas, I like to jot down their speech, rhythm and exact beat, as a musician jots down native chords and airs, pure compositional scholarship research.
A sixty-three-year-old Powell wrote this entry in her diary during a period of acute financial distress, living temporarily in one of a string of rundown residence hotels after her eviction from her 12th Street apartment the previous year. But there is no reason to interpret the entry, for all its offhand whimsy, as anything less than a sincere, impassioned profession of interest in the "speech, rhythm, and exact beat" of the remotest of strangers.
To look and to listen with such sustained attention is an endorsement of the world beneath her immediate gaze. From a writer with such fundamental curiosity, one might expect an affirmative vision of the reality she evokes. But the generosity that initially prompts her gaze usually ends in her acknowledgment of the deficiency of whatever she sees. This tension between curiosity and pessimism is never resolved in her work, as it is for example in Zola's novels, where the sociological sweep of the reportage is subsumed under a generalizing theory of human nature. Nor does her hunger for observation produce an irreducible complexity of character, as it does in later James; instead of suggestive, nuanced portraits, Powell presents a series of depthless sketches in a loose collage of narrative events. Her characters remain stubbornly flat, their limitations anatomized through some telling absurdity or flimsy, self-justifying illusion. In the Ohio books, her characters blend into the raw bleakness of their provincial world, while in the New York novels they provoke wicked laughter. What remains constant in all of her works is an insistence on human weakness and folly.
Powell is a great chronicler of weakness, and in this she is working against a characteristic American optimism about the individual's capacity for change and self-improvement. Take, for example, the musings of Madeleine Greaves in The Story of a Country Boy (1934), when she thinks about "the way human beings change or if it was true that they changed—if it was not truer that each year further unveils the reality, and the final bones are never lovely." Her characters rarely evolve in response to the changes occurring around them. They tend, rather, and with hefty doses of self-deception, to make fragile, barely workable pacts with reality, designed to accommodate their fears and frailties. Their accommodations never last, and the leisurely narrative drive of Powell's best fiction measures the slow deterioration of her characters' illusions. With significant exceptions, like the writer Dennis Orphen in Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), Powell's characters usually meet the onset of change with the desperate hope that what has gotten them this far might last a little longer. This desire for stasis prompts behavior inevitably shrill and distorted—but often savagely funny.
Only a reader of conspicuous numbness would fail to laugh at the barbs in Powell's comic novels and her published diaries. Not all of her contemporaries were comfortable with their laughter. Diana Trilling, writing about the figures in The Locusts Have No King (1948), complains that "not a single individual among them ... suggests any human ideal which justifies a writer bothering with the human race at all." Similar criticisms were leveled at most of Powell's New York novels. Anticipating Trilling's comment, reviewer Edith Walton of the New York Times—who had been disturbed by the "peculiarly sharp and ruthless edge" of Powell's wit in Turn, Magic Wheel—writes that in The Happy Island (1938) "there is hardly a character who seems really human." She goes on to remark disapprovingly of Powell's "stinging contempt," adding that "one has the covert suspicion that [the novel] was not worth her time." Though the judgment here is rather dismissive, it does raise an inevitable issue when evaluating Powell's work. What the reviewer presumably means by "really human characters" are characters in whom she could identify herself. Powell's books usually thwart such efforts, often through their sheer banality. She provides little consolation, except laughter, for the weaknesses she exposes—and they often seem like our own weaknesses.
The razor-sharp social comedy of the New York novels might be taken, then, as an attempt to instruct by negative example. And yet Powell was averse to moralizing in any form, and she can be especially hard on people who spout self-assured moral precepts. Besides, by the time she began writing, didacticism in the novel had pretty well been junked. Powell rejected the traditional authority of the satirist, and the comedy in the New York novels can be called satiric only in a very loose sense. "In Petronius, John Donne, in Aristophanes, Molière and Restoration plays," she wrote in her diary on 1 September 1933, "the vitality of the satire is derived from the completeness of the picture—not one acting part or thought represents the norm, the audience, the critic or the author—there is, in a word, no voice, no pointer to the moral." As is sometimes the case, her sense of literary history is a little fuzzy—it's hard to accept that there is "no pointer to the moral," say, in the elegant entertainments of Molière. That aside, it's important that she means to emphasize the vitality of satire to exceed any claim to moral instruction. Powell was never interested in advocating an explicit system of beliefs through the lampooning of others: "the enjoyment of satire," her entry continues, "is that of ninepins—seeing the ball strike truly and the pins go down." The modest, rather coy metaphor signals that Powell did not want her comedy to teach us anything, or anything very obvious.
Her thoughts on satire raise more questions than they answer. To return, though in a more generous spirit, to the issue raised by the Times's reviewer, we might ask whether Powell created her unsympathetic figures simply out of the writer's peculiar form of arrogance. The stories of Dorothy Parker, a writer to whom Powell has too often been compared, suffer frequently from this authorial patronization. Powell complained to Edmund Wilson that Nabokov displayed a similar haughtiness because he was "motivated by a compulsion to denigrate his heroes and thus strut his own superiority." In diary entries from the 1950s Powell seems puzzled at her inability to create characters that invited sympathy, particularly since her much coveted commercial success might have been more likely had readers found it easier to identify with them.
That Powell was sensitive to the writer's potential high-handedness in the treatment of her own characters suggests that she was not much inclined to the contempt Ms. Walton of the Times attributed to her. The writing, in the novels and diaries, bears this out. One usually gets the sense from her novels that her characters just might become a little better than they first appear to be. As she finished The Wicked Pavilion in February 1954, she wrote that in her last chapter "the truth is not what the beloved failed to do—the hurt, the wound, the betrayal—but the lovely gift he intended to give, the faithfulness he would have wished to give, the nobility he would have liked to show." If the diary entry of March 30, 1958, is to be believed, in which Powell wrote deprecatingly of one of her "deep faults" as a novelist, she often developed her characters through a sustained (if failed) attempt to make them likable: "I frequently choose a hero or heroine I do not like myself purely as a personal exercise in trying to understand that kind of person. I never end up liking them any better." Her characters usually fail to change for the better, but Powell doesn't like to foreclose their possibilities in advance.
In the diaries, Powell subjected many of her contemporaries to the corrosive acid of her wit. And yet, the sting of Powell's portraiture rarely seems mean-spirited or petty. Take, for example, a biting entry on Genevieve Taggard, the poet and anthologist. The two fell out after developing a close friendship during the late 1920s. The entry dated 3 January 1936 reads:
Genevieve Taggard is changed. Happiness as a rule brings out the worst in people's characters. No longer afraid, they radiantly flaunt their smugness, small vices and worst sentimentalities. For years, G. was troubled by lack of humor and ponderous foot. A light conversation made her wretched, a twinkle in the eye made her aware of something going on that she was missing and, loud as she could laugh, she secretly feared her lack was conspicuous; strain as she could, she still missed everything and it depressed her.
But now, happy in marriage, secure in love, and conventional above all, she can say what's so funny? and who cares?; recklessly she can be pompous and patronizingly pedagogic. She doesn't need to see whimsy any more for she's safe above it. Fearlessly, she can leap into an old-style genteel lady's discussion of Art in Life, The Poet in a Crass Age. Her eyes flash ecstasy as she cries "But Art is Life! And Life is Art!" No wedge for the arty cliché is left ignored, her voice is raised in unctuous defense of Culture, a missionary hope ticks behind her words of bringing—even forcing—Culture, Art, Poetry, on the Man in the Street. Her clichés, her little pets that a sophisticated group of friends once shamed her into hiding, can all be brought out again, and she can stand bravely, self-righteously, up to a twinkle or a light word, and bludgeon it down with Integrity, Sincerity of Purpose, Honor. Happiness has given her a sword; respectability has given her the right to be stupid.
The techniques of disparagement displayed here are quite remarkable in their artfulness, given the fact that the writing is essentially private. It is true that Powell incorporated entire passages from her diaries verbatim into the novels and hoped, as most diarists do, that they would eventually be read. But the diaries do not draw their considerable potency from the imagined response of some future reader or from the usefulness of detailed notebooks to the novelist. Their energy is too immediate, responding to the ephemera of her experience with an intensity that reveals a need to master that experience, first and foremost, through craft. In the diaries and the novels, Powell remains faithful to a sharp and unsentimental brand of scrutiny that exposes the illusion behind the act, the affectation behind the gesture. She maintains a nearly impersonal standard of judgment based on her voracious appetite for observation and an exacting, never conspicuously "literary," sense of style. Her judgments, harsh as they often are, never seem gratuitously cruel.
Powell's novels were composed in the wake of the varied mannerisms of modernist experiment while being apparently indifferent to them. She was skeptical of the premises of a great deal of modernist writing, with its ambitions to rebuild a shattered world through conspicuous formal innovation. She never assumed, in fact, that the world was really and newly fragmented in the modern age or in special need of revolutionary literary gestures. Though her taste was never parochial, her hostility to modernism was often palpable. She comments in her diary on the "sickening funereal smell" of Proust and "the constipation of English letters" in Woolf's The Years. She was drawn to earlier models of fiction, particularly Dickens and the nineteenth-century French novelists, from Benjamin Constant through Balzac and the Flaubert of L'Education Sentimentale. "As late as 19th century a writer didn't decide to write, he was one," she wrote in her diary in 1958, adding, "The most facile story by de Maupassant, Sarah Orne Jewett, throws off a glow of wisdom, human observation. Pressure cooking and electric logs"—a lovely deflation of modernist heroics—"make the same color but glow does not come through." Surely this contributed, and may do still, to the critical neglect of her work. Characteristic works of modern fiction also opposed to modernism—the proletarian novel, the protest novel, regional writing—are all more tendentious than Powell's are ever inclined to be. They often rest on sentimental assumptions inimical to her. (As if to prove the rule, her attempt at a political novel, The Story of a Country Boy, is possibly her least satisfying book.)
Powell's characters are needy, often disarmingly so. Lopsided erotic pairings are at the core of nearly all of her novels, exploring as they do the psychology of what might be called voluptuous helplessness, notably in the Ohio books. The startling vacuity of Elsinore Abbott in Dance Night (1930) is a case in point. Proprietress of a millinery shop in dismal Lamptown, a grimy industrial hamlet where everything takes place in the shadow of the local factory, Elsinore becomes adulterously obsessed with Harry Fischer, the itinerant dance instructor who presides over the town's weekly dances. Her unrequited desire for Fischer seizes her absolutely—though what such desire displaces isn't entirely clear, since apart from her erotic obsession she seems insubstantial. Even her shop is run, for all intents and purposes, by her young assistant, the spirited if annoyingly smug Nettie Farrell. As a mother, Elsinore is indifferent to the fate of her only child, Morry. The unbidden thought comes to her in a state of drowsy inattention that "she had moved over for Morry as you would move over for someone on a street car, certain that the intimacy is only for a few minutes, but now it was eighteen years and she thought why, Morry was hers, hers more than anything in the world was." But her alienation from her role as mother isn't, as with the familiar "mother-women" passage in Chopin's The Awakening, made a counterpart to a search for greater autonomy or self-fulfillment than her era allowed: she accepts her husband's "domination without demanding any of its practical benefits....In Elsinore's scheme a husband was always a husband."
This husband, Charley Abbott, is a carefree but brutal traveling salesman for a candy wholesaler who announces his returns to Lamptown with fairy-tale menace by sending postcards signed "The Candyman." Curiously, he seems incidental to Elsinore's cultivation of her adulterous desire, even as his jealousy carries the plot to its climax in murderous violence. Elsinore's most characteristic attitude is escapist reverie:
If she permitted Charles's slowly developing jealousy to worry her, then it might creep in her mind when she was dreaming of really vital things, of Fischer, for instance. There had never been a moment that Charles existed in her imagination. Charles— well Charles was. He was not real. His letters—his jealousy— these things were, and things that were could not enter Elsinore's mind except it gave her pleasure. She wondered if Fischer himself were as real as her thoughts of him.
When she sat fashioning a hat silently, there was no room in her for fretting over an absent husband's suspicion; there was room only to listen to the mechanical rhythm of Mr. Sanderson's piano thumping, there was room only to see Fischer at the Casino, or in the Palace, in Marion, or Akron, or Cleveland, demonstrating a pirouette with his shining patent-leather feet.
Elsinore is passive, even infantile, her erotic daydreams blinding her to the threat of her husband's escalating jealousy. Hers is an absolute withdrawal from reality into a world of self-gratifying desire, and Powell, who understood sex as well as any writer of her generation and was free from even the slightest puritanism, isn't condemning that desire. Rather, she is condemning Elsinore's regressive self-absorption. It is no accident that the climactic scene of violence between husband and wife occurs not during an encounter with Fischer (which never happens) but in the fevered aftermath of one of Lamptown's dances, as Elsinore retreats to her bedroom to recall, as if in a masturbatory trance, "the feel of his thick white hand grasping hers, the sensation was far clearer in memory than it had been in actuality":
In another minute she could think—she'd be alone....She pushed open the bedroom door and the noise of the fan made her catch her breath with the shock of reality....The lovely thing about to happen...she clung to its vanishing shadow, but everything beautiful was fleeing desperately, there was only Charles Abbott, collarless and red-faced, sprawling drunkenly over her bed. She put her hand over her eyes to dispel this bad dream. Charles awkwardly sat up, blinking at her with bloodshot eyes. It was terrifying, the spectacle of the immaculate Candyman with his starched striped shirt rumpled, his black hair tousled and hanging over his eyes, his thin mouth sagging loosely. His coat and hat trailed on the floor, his sample cases were open and bonbons spilled all over the rug. Elsinore shook with blind fury, she wanted to tear him to pieces with her hands.
Violence, Powell seems to suggest, is the inevitable outcome of such a stubborn retreat from reality as hers, along with the suffocating restrictions of small-town Ohio: Elsinore shoots Charley with his revolver. It had responded to her touch, Powell tells us, with "a vision of paradise of solitude and privacy forever." From a writer who often dreaded her own solitude, such a "paradise" offers ironic solace at best.
Of all of Powell's characters, Elsinore is the emptiest and most disturbing. Powell would never again imagine a character so eerily vapid, inhabited by a desire that is as abstract in its totality as it is ferocious in its physical possession. There are echoes of Elsinore in the heroine of Powell's next novel, Come Back to Sorrento, Connie Benjamin, who also withdraws into a haze of yearning that leads to death (in this case, her own). Here the characterization is softer, even sentimental, and Connie at least has a genuine history—not the summarily sketched past of Elsinore's submission to her husband but one defined by an exceptional if squandered talent for singing. "I studied in convents in the East, then I sang one day before Morini, who was to teach me," she eagerly confesses early in the novel. Unlike Thea Kronberg of Cather's The Song of the Lark, who transforms her talent through self-sacrifice and exile, Connie's abilities remain raw and untested. They ultimately slip away from her, except in memory, where the meeting with the "great man" who'd said she possessed "the throat of an artist" becomes the measure of her wasted potential. After Connie's pregnancy and abandonment by a circus acrobat, she had married a local boy to protect her reputation. The "seventeen years of kind numbness" that followed has led her to "bask in her own society without compunction." Occasionally she reprimands herself that she "must live more outside the family" for the sake of her daughters, whose classmates make them aware of their mother's eccentricity. But for the most part Connie, like Elsinore Abbott, has withdrawn into a private world.
Connie's emptiness and passivity cause her to become desperately dependent on Blaine Decker, the newly-arrived music teacher who gives her "a personality for herself, a beautiful role into which she gratefully stepped." Decker's own situation mirrors Connie's. He is unable to liberate himself from memories of a year of Parisian bliss with his friend and implied lover, a man named Starr Donnell. The two create their own world of fragile, rather defensive snobbery, as Connie hangs on Decker's every name-dropping anecdote of his life in Europe and his judgments about opera, wine, and fabled performers. Although they do not allow their bond to become sexual (Decker is homosexual, and probably exclusively so), his presence rejuvenates Connie's long-dormant sexuality, prompting her to place desperate ads in Billboard searching for the acrobat who had abandoned her nearly two decades before. Though Come Back to Sorrento is more compassionate than Dance Night, the two novels are remarkably similar in their portrayals of insubstantial heroines who respond to a sudden overwhelming desire with reckless and desperate submission.
In these novels, the deficiencies of the characters are made to seem the inevitable result of the provincial setting. The only real alternative to complacency or despair is escape. Powell's worldly characters, however, tend to be as limited as their small-town counterparts. Setting aside Powell's enthusiasm for the Petronian attractions of the city, the New York novels are as bleak in their way as the Ohio books. In Powell's Manhattan, practically everyone is in thrall to the idea of success. Conformity, hypocrisy, and sycophancy are all in abundant evidence. In order to achieve success, or merely to sustain it, Powell's characters become entangled in some kind of compromising relationship, usually of mutual dependence. The characters that matter in these novels, as opposed to the more caricaturish figures (however entertaining and caustic Powell's characterizations may be), are those who chafe at such dependence. Their struggles to articulate a style of their own, however imperfect, prevent the New York novels from becoming an exercise in cynicism on her part.
The character who is best able to avoid the snares of the city is Dennis Orphen, the hero of Turn, Magic Wheel. Like Powell herself, Orphen is a restless, pleasure-loving novelist who is enchanted with the vulgar energies of Manhattan street life. That Powell regarded him as her mouthpiece is evident in her 1 December 1934 diary entry: "How much sharper and better to have the central figure [Orphen] a man rather than a woman—a man in whom my own prejudices and ideas can easily be placed, whereas few women's minds ... flit as irresponsibly as that." Orphen's "irresponsible" mind is nevertheless accompanied by a rigorous conscience that, when he cares to acknowledge it, is quick to identify self-serving illusions, especially those of the artist. From the opening of Turn, Magic Wheel, Powell sets Orphen's curiosity against a nagging sense of guilt about the flaneurie required of the writer's life. "Some fine day I'll have to pay," thinks Orphen in the novel's first sentence, "you can't sacrifice everything in life to curiosity"; he berates himself that curiosity is "the demon behind every deed" and the "motivating vice of his career." But if Orphen chastises himself for his curiosity he is unable to disavow it. He reflects that he never chose to become a writer, he "just seems to have written," and in the first of several mock-epic touches, a reference to Orphen's "Muse" of curiosity suggests that his desire to know is beyond his power to renounce it. His self-reproaches are followed by an extended pursuit of a "little peroxide Jewess" through East Side streets teeming with sensations—pushcart figs, gypsy fortune-tellers, "five o'clock people" rushing toward mysterious nightly pleasures. Orphen hungrily takes everything in; moral scrupulousness is no match for the city's vitality. Like the other New York books, Turn, Magic Wheel follows the logic of the diarist or even the poet—one thinks of O'Hara walking around Manhattan—and the transient impression takes precedence over the stricter demands of novelistic form. This comes at a certain cost, specifically a scattered quality in her fiction that has sometimes irritated critics.
Orphen has just finished a novel transparently based on the relationship between his friend Effie Thorne and her long-absent husband, Andrew Callingham, a character loosely modeled on Hemingway. The possibility that Orphen's novel would humiliate Effie threatens to paralyze Orphen as a writer: "Time he started work again on his new book, but each time he faced that Page 1 it seemed incredible he had ever got beyond it ... Now he would never be able to write again, he declared fiercely, he would be afraid of each written word now that words had destroyed Effie Thorne." Orphen's dilemma organizes the loose structure of Turn, Magic Wheel, allowing room for a good number of sharp vignettes and glittering glimpses of a now-vanished Manhattan filtered through his eager gaze.
Ultimately Orphen receives Effie's blessing, even gratitude, when what she comes to regard as the truth of his novel liberates her from Callingham's charm and draws her to Orphen himself. Orphen's vindication, however, is curiously anticlimactic. "Alarmed" at losing control of Effie as a character, under the hypnotic spell of his own achievement, he makes some high-sounding, rather hollow vows: "He felt exalted and strangely bodiless around her, filled with vague high purpose. He would do something magnificent for her, something beyond mortal power." Fortunately, such a "bodiless" feeling is brief; in the last paragraphs of the novel, Orphen roams the streets of Manhattan, confidently preparing to return to his novel after a visit to his lover, the zestfully sensual (if somewhat insipid) Corrine Barrow.
Orphen's return, as it were, to the spontaneous joy of his own body is a more significant self-vindication than the absolution he receives from Effie. The chief threats to his writing are the "vague high purposes" he associates with her. Elsewhere in the novel this tendency toward dullness and abstraction is embodied in Callingham, whose thundering pomposities ("America is dead") call into question his flourishing reputation as an "important" expatriate writer. As much as Powell quite reasonably sought fame herself, she was acutely aware that celebrity can turn writers into Personages whose self-importance blunts their perceptions. Orphen's attitude of keen inquisitiveness allows him to succeed where so many of Powell's other characters fail: he has fashioned, to cite a phrase from another Powell novel, a "technique of living."
This phrase occurs toward the end of The Happy Island, the novel, it will be remembered, that prompted the indignation of Ms. Walton of the Times. Here, even Tim Page's enthusiasm for Powell wanes: the novel lacks "legs," he remarks. He values it only for its enlightened attitude toward homosexuality, commenting that it "is among the first books written after Roman antiquity that is peopled with gay and bisexual characters but is neither a hate tract, a psychological study, an apologia, a plea for tolerance, nor an under-the-counter titillation." Very true; but this tally of what the novel is not ignores the novel's other achievements, particularly its characterization of Prudence Bly, a well-known nightclub singer. In typical Powell fashion, and unlike the charismatic Dennis Orphen, Prudence is difficult to like: she is puffed up with the vanity of the minor celebrity, tends to be distrustful of others, and her "destructive wit" brutalizes the members of her social set. Through Prudence, it is tempting to suggest, Powell is caricaturing—exorcising?—some of her own harsher tendencies: "Prudence slew with a neat epithet, crippled with a too true word, then, seeing her devastation about her and her enemies growing, grew frightened of revenges, drew back desperately and eventually found the white flag of Sentimentality as her salvation." But however calculating, Prudence is better than she first appears. At least part of the time, she wants to change her life—and suffers as a result from sporadic insights into her peculiar circumstances:
In the ten years of her fame the printed word about her had come to be the woman, and even her private thoughts had now a publicity angle. Sometimes in her bath, Prudence would have a brief ghastly thought that this little body under scented suds had no more to do with herself than a window doll's, two Prudences separated under water; and for the life of her she could not find the time or place where the little girl from Ohio, the ambitious, industrious little village girl, merged into the Evening Journal's Prudence Bly, the Town and Country Bly. These were queer moments between personalities, moments such as the hermit crab must have scuttling from one stolen shell to the next one. In these nightmare seconds Prudence wondered if one could permanently become the third person singular, lose oneself, be nothing but one's name in a society column, one's photograph in Vogue.
As in Turn, Magic Wheel, fame threatens to sever the celebrity from any underlying reality, anything to which she might have responded with élan or wit. Unlike Callingham, Prudence feels these "queer moments between personalities" as nightmare, however fleetingly, and ultimately her pangs of self-estrangement lead her into the arms of Jeff Abbott, an earnest playwright fresh off the Greyhound bus from Silver City, Prudence's home town. Brusque, work-obsessed, and scornful of any charm with the slightest whiff of superficiality, Abbott arrives in the city with defiantly ill-fitting clothes and an angry play that instantly flops on Broadway. Jeff's presence in the city strikes a raw nerve with Prudence—back home they used to neck behind the freight yard—and she comes to regard him as the embodiment of some unambiguous "reality" associated with her origins. Feeling "afraid as if her invented façade was cracking up," she concludes that "Jeff was underneath everything she had built, he was Silver City, he was herself." Her career suddenly in a tailspin, she decides to move back to Silver City with Jeff, who flees New York after the failure of his play and buys a farm where he can write free from the distractions—he would say the decadence—of city life.
Prudence, in short, hopes to relieve her own bewilderment by accepting by Jeff's pastoral fantasy. Even before she returns to Ohio, however, it's plain that the lovers' idyll will fail. Jeff responds to her letters from Manhattan by asking, "What fun do you get out of being so damnably wise?":
Trying to disguise her trained reactions from Jeff, since he found them ugly, baffled her. Experience became a hump, her truth a deformity that was a barrier to love.... The wisdom she had was for human failings, of sin, corruption and betrayal; none of these surprised her, and she loved the world accepting this. But now, with Jeff's recoil from her, she wondered about the other knowledge beyond this, a superior sophistication, warm confidence in human goodness for it struck her that it required more bravery to bear that simple banner in a world of sin than to go forever wisely armed.
Betraying her own wisdom, Prudence lies to herself in order to accommodate Jeff's reductive and sentimental vision of things. Her bad-faith acceptance of the "superior sophistication" of human goodness leads her back to Silver City and the conventional role of countrified homemaker to which, needless to say, she is ill suited. Immediately she misses Manhattan; only her desire for Jeff sustains her on the farm, while to him "she was only a restless woman whose language he neither spoke nor cared to learn." In the novel's penultimate chapter, after Jeff and his buddies (excluding Prudence) discuss his latest play and speculate whether he should travel to China or Spain on the play's option money, Prudence experiences another spell of vertiginous confusion:
She was lost between her worlds; and if Jeff went away, there would be nothing left, not that real self he was so proud of rescuing, small, unhappy reality that it was, nor that cruel swaggering false self that at least had perfected a technique of living, a way of using a mask as a shield behind which she might go about her secret destiny.
Here, as always in Powell, "reality" is a slippery term. Prudence is more dead than alive in the "small, unhappy reality" tethered to Jeff's limited outlook; her "cruel swaggering false self" is far more vital—more "real"—than the woman who was rescued by Jeff and delivered to the pastoral hell of the Ohio farm. Prudence is unable to recover her former style—as is suggested by the novel's final scene, where her lover Steve Eastabrook thinks that she looks "as hard as nails" and Prudence herself, back in Manhattan, remarks that "nobody's funny anymore." Her "technique of living" seems destined to end in bitterness.
Given Powell's pessimistic outlook, Prudence's end is hardly surprising. Powell doesn't flinch from the consequences made inevitable by the weaknesses of her characters; she has the courage to do so without redeeming them in a perfunctory manner. It is this, at last, that accounts for the steadiness of nerve behind the writing. Her characters' failures, deficiencies, and the occasional hard-fought triumphs reveal the depth of her tough-minded vision, a vision all the more extraordinary for the sparkling surface of the prose. Always sharp, never cranky, and with a pagan's delight in the pleasures of this world, Powell's work elaborates the human comedy with a vigor matched only by its unpretentious wisdom. Much less might have been expected from a figure now emerging from so long a period of neglect.
Reprinted by permission from Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 142–159 (Summer 2000). Copyright © by Raritan, 31 Mine Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.
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