One of the older and sillier conventions in the literary world is that a woman writer must make her female characters likable or even comic in order for her fame to endure. That piece of bad advice has been antiquated at least since Sappho. Or as Somerset Maugham phrased it when passing on that dubious notion, make the reader "laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured." That thesis has been convincingly refuted once again by the continuing popularity of Dawn Powell, whose great character is not a person but a whole neighborhood: Greenwich Village in the 1960s.
All of which came back, alive and vivid, on re-reading some of Ms. Powell's tales of those days in the Village when even young store clerks aspired to be intellectuals who read Turgenev while waiting for their next customer.
The phenomenon is not limited to New York City, for did you notice that photo by the Democrat-Gazette's John Sykes in the paper not long ago? It showed a young man named Steve Appleton braving downtown Little Rock's midday heat to read not Turgenev but C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. So much for Mr. Maugham's dubious counsel.
In her day, Dawn Powell was described as "a writer's writer," and a hilarious one at that. She predicted, quite wrongly, that her fame would have to come only after she was gone. Despite her roster of enthusiastic--and discriminating--fans even while she lived. Including Ernest Hemingway and Diana Trilling. For even in her time she was being likened to talents like Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh, yet she stubbornly insisted that she was fated to be one of those writers who must wait for death "to make them socially desirable." But even then she was being described as a writer's writer. A term that, as V.S. Naipal once noted, refers to people who believe other people are reading the writer, but in truth, few if any are. It's less of a compliment than a death sentence.
Back in 2001, the Library of America published nine of Dawn Powell's novels, yet she remains largely unknown outside of a select circle of readers, more a cultivated taste than a popular one. But it's not the gross number of readers a writer attracts but the quality of their own, highly individual judgment. And it is a compliment to that judgment when they're Dawn Powell fans.
Among her novels worth re-reading have to be: Angels on Toast about two dodgy characters who bounce back and forth between their wives and lovers, The Locusts Have No King about a couple of sharpsters whose con games wreck the life of an obscure historian who just wants to get on with his work, and A Time to Be Born, her fictional portrayal of Amanda Keeler Evans, a barely disguised depiction of the real-life Claire Booth Luce, who clambers aboard the old order's collapse "as if it were her own yacht."
Dawn Powell wondered if the explanation for her wholly imagined obscurity lay in her name, which she once claimed "conjured up the image of an unsuccessful stripper." She also invented a League for Cultural Foundation that, as the Second World War was drawing to a close, was full of earnest, middle-aged students who wondered what it would be like to "have an idea" and returning "servicemen's wives resolved to be prepared in case their warrior husbands had learned something suddenly."
Or as Ms. Powell herself once explained in her sharp, concise way: "Satire is people as they are; romanticism people as they would like to be; realism people as they seem with their insides left out." Her own life was no comedy, for she had fled from a wicked stepmother in Ohio to take refuge in the Village with her husband, Joseph Gousha, an advertising copywriter who would later turn out be a confirmed drunk. She would struggle all her life to pay the medical bills for her disabled son, yet she didn't complain but rose above it all to just look around and report it all with what she once described as "unqualifying affection." It seems that love, like labor, conquers all.
------------v------------
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 09/21/2016