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Why is it that the novels of Miss Dawn Powell are so much less well known than they deserve to be? This is, I believe, partly due to her complete indifference to publicity. She rarely goes to publishers' lunches or has publishers' parties given her; she declines to play the great lady of letters, and she does not encourage interviews or the appearance of her photograph on book jackets. No effort has been made to glamorize her, and it would be hopeless to try to glamorize her novels. For in these novels—another reason that they have not been more popular—she does nothing to stimulate feminine daydreams. The woman reader can find no comfort in identifying herself with Miss Powell's heroines. The women who appear in her stories are likely to be as sordid and absurd as the men. There are no love scenes that will rouse you or melt you. It is true that in her more recent books she has been relenting a little. In The Locusts Have No King, she did close on a note of enduring affection, though an affection sorely tried and battered—"In a world of destruction," the author concludes, "one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern"—and in her last book but one, A Cage for Lovers, there are actually a young man and a young woman who, though kept apart by an ogress, are benevolently united at the end.
But love is not Miss Powell's theme. Her real theme is the provincial in New York who has come on from the Middle West and acclimated himself (or herself) to the city and made himself a permanent place there, without ever, however, losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society. Like Miss Powell, who was born in Ohio, these immigrants find themselves vividly aware of elements of Manhattan life that the native of New York takes for granted, since he has usually no very intimate experience of anything else to contrast with them. To such recent arrivals in town, the New Yorkers seem giddy and unreliable, their activities confused and often pointless; yet once the transplantation has taken root, they may enjoy in the very amorality of this life a certain relaxation, and freedom, a certain convivial comfort in the assurance that, whatever you do, no one—though lovers and spouses may occasionally make themselves disagreeable—is really going to call you to account. Such a world has great comic possibilities if one has enjoyed it on its own terms and yet observed it from a point of view that does not quite accept these terms as normal, and Miss Powell has exploited these possibilities with a wit, a gift of comic invention and an individual accent that make her books unlike any others. The mind, the personality behind them, with all its sophistication, is very stout and self-sustaining, strong in Middle Western common sense, capable of toughness and brusqueness; yet a fairyland strain of Welsh fantasy instills into everything she writes a kind of kaleidoscopic liveliness that renders even her hardheadedness elusive.
Miss Powell has explored several New York milieux. In A Time To Be Born, she was dealing with a successful uptown world of big journalistic publishing and insatiable careerist women; in Angels on Toast, with a somewhat lesser world of delirious advertising men and their equally unstable mates; in A Cage for Lovers, with a mansion on the Hudson and the dead weight of inherited money. But in her new book, The Golden Spur, she returns to a favorite field, which has figured in others of her novels: the Bohemian downtown world of writers, painters and professional drinkers, with their feminine consorts and hangers-on, which has its center in Greenwich Village. She has given us already, in other books, the Village in several of its phases. Of the earlier romantic and radical phase, which was certainly the most creative, she has had little first-hand knowledge, and she has not attempted this, but she has condensed the atmosphere of its later ones in images that do not always keep their contours yet that live as they are blown down the wind; and it is a proof of her quality as a literary artist that she does not depend directly on gossip and never writes a roman à clef. The reviewer has been pretty well acquainted with a good many people of the kind that have provided Miss Powell's material, yet he has almost never found Miss Powell exploiting a personality among them whom he was able to recognize. She has imagined and established for her readers her own Greenwich Village world, which is never journalistic copy and which possesses a memorable reality of which journalistic fiction is incapable. Her chronicle extends from the days of such old-fashioned resorts as the Brevoort and the Lafayette, with their elegant and well-served French restaurants and domino-playing cafés, which encouraged the dignity of love and art and afforded a comfortable setting for leisurely conversations; the days of those small cheap and decent hotels in which thrifty conscientious craftsmen and cultivated ladies of slender means could go on living for years arid decades without having their habits disturbed—her chronicle, perhaps rather her poem, extends from the era of this tranquil quarter, now almost entirely destroyed to make way for huge apartment buildings, to the era of those noisy abysmal bars, which, though graded from better to worse, have all a certain messy turbidity. In these hangouts, the hack writer, the talentless artist, the habitual cadger of loans can drift on in a timeless existence of lamplit emboothed drinking, with a backdrop of bright-labelled bottles standing by like a smartly costumed guard against the mirror that expands the room beyond its crowded narrow limits in space, and in the casual but dependable companionship of the bartender and the other habitués, while the girls who inspire speculation by their constant exchange of partners and their possible availability laugh and brighten after leaving the office or perfunctorily keeping house in the studio, and thus provide a fitful play of romance.
In The Golden Spur we see the Village at a point of its decline that is rather squalid: bearded beatniks and abstract painters have seeped in among the Guggenheim fellows, the raffish N.Y.U. professors and the adult-education students. It is a phase with which Miss Powell is evidently not so intimate and not so sympathetic as she was with the Village of an earlier time but which she nevertheless accepts as still more or less cozy and more or less fun in the good old Village tradition. If one does not have the benefit at one's favorite bar, as one sometimes did with the cafés of the past, of a lobby with a telephone girl who always knew whom everybody was looking for and who would never be indiscreet, one can still give this bar as a mailing address or a place where one can be reached by telephone and be granted a certain latitude in the matter of hanging up tabs.
The Golden Spur is such a bar, which dates, however, from an earlier period. Jonathan Jaimison, of Silver City, Ohio, has learned from an aunt at home that he is an illegitimate child, the son of his now deceased mother by someone she had known in New York during a legendary time in her youth when she had had a brief fling in the East. She had supported herself by typing and thus had met distinguished people of whom she was to talk ever after. But she had never told anyone who her lover was, and the boy has come on to find out, with no clues save a few names and the knowledge that the Golden Spur had been a place that his mother had frequented. Gradually he makes connections with her former employers and friends: a clever alcoholic professor who leads rather a miserable life between a wife who has tricked him into marrying her and a mistress who wants to marry him; a successful, somewhat stuffed-shirt lawyer with a wife who has taken him over and set him up in suburban Connecticut; and a demoralized best-selling novelist whose pride receives a serious blow when the wife whom he has ridiculed and neglected runs away on a yacht with a title. None of them has a son, and when the first and the last of the three come to understand that Jonathan is looking for a father, the novelist and the professor both try to imagine that they may have begotten him in some now forgotten moment: this would give them a new bond and interest, help to bolster up their disappointing lives. The boy is good-looking and bright, a fine upstanding product of Ohio, as different as possible from themselves. The rich lawyer has always known what he was doing and cannot cherish any such delusion, but, having only one daughter, in whom he is quite uninterested and who is quite uninterested in him, he would be glad to attach to himself such an evidently able young fellow, whom he would train in his own law office and who would thus become dependent on him and succeed him in his profession. Jonathan, admiring and gratified, hopes greatly that he has now found his father. I ought not to reveal whose son the boy unexpectedly turns out to be, but Miss Powell, who has sometimes been criticized for the formlessness of her novels and their inconclusive endings, has constructed here a very neat plot, and for once in her career played Santa Claus and made her hero a generous present. She then has him reject, however, the privileges of the social position to which he is now entitled and flee from the opening of an uptown gallery that he has undertaken to subsidize, in company with an erratic and much esteemed painter—you never know in Miss Powell's novels whether the painters are really any good—who has become its principal star but who prefers to the patronage of the affluent a lodging in a rickety warehouse near Houston Street, on the lower West Side. Jonathan escapes to the Golden Spur, to which by this hour, as he knows, "the old crowd must be heading ... for post-mortems and wakes." In the cab with him and the painter is the lawyer's unappreciated daughter, who has succeeded in persuading her parents to let her live in New York on her own, and who has even managed to go on the stage without their knowing about it; who has, in fact, been leading a double life between suburban correctitude on the one hand and abandoned Bohemianism on the other. Jonathan, who has met her in both of her roles, has fallen deeply in love with her, and he doesn't really care at that point that she has also been sleeping with the painter and lying to him about it: "The truth had no part in love anyway, except for the truth of finding each other at the right moment."
I have said that Dawn Powell must be less at home in the "beat" than in the old Village, yet it is interesting to find that in The Golden Spur she has succeeded in modulating without too much strain from the charming Lafayette café to its so much less distinguished successor, and that the beatnik's dread of the "square" comes to seem here the natural extension of the old Greenwich Villager's attitude toward the traditional artists' enemy: "uptown."
I hope that the tone of this article—sociological and somewhat nostalgic—will not obscure the fact that Dawn Powell's novels are among the most amusing being written, and in this respect quite on a level with those of Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Miss Powell's success in England shows, I think, that she is closer to this high social comedy than to any accepted brand of American humor—and the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive. Miss Powell's books are more than merely funny; they are full of psychological insights that are at once sympathetic and cynical, and they have episodes that are rather macabre, which seem to hint at something close to embitterment. The recurring types in these books—with whom the innocent provincial is confronted—are the discouraged alcoholic, the creepy homosexual, the unscrupulous feminine "operator" and the tyrannous woman patron, and Miss Powell can make them all look very gruesome. All are present in The Golden Spur, but not in their most repellent forms, and here as elsewhere one can always be sure that some sudden new comic idea will give a twist to the situation, which has seemed to be irretrievably uncomfortable, and introduce an arbitrary element that will lend the proceedings a touch of ballet. There are few real happy endings in Dawn Powell's novels, but there are no real tragedies, either. These beings shift and cling and twitch in their antic liaisons and ambitions, on their way to some undetermined limbo out of reach of any moral law. But don't those wide-eyed boys and girls from Ohio survive and redeem the rest? Don't be too sure of that.
Originally published in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962.'Dawn Powell: Greenwich Village in the Fifties' from The Bit Between My Teeth by Edmund Wilson. Copyright ©1965 and copyright renewal 1993 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
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