by Gore Vidal
The Ohio cycle begins with She Walks in Beauty, which is dedicated to her husband, Joe. The story is set in Powell’s youth before the First World War. The book was written in 1927. Popular writers of the day: Thornton Wilder had published The Bridge of San Luis Rey in the same year as Powell’s first but really second novel. Louis Bromfield received the Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn (a favorite Bromfield phrase, “candy pink and poison green,” occasionally surfaces in Powell) while Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop was also published in 1927. The year 1925, of course, had been the most remarkable in our literary history. After commemorating life in the Midwest, Sinclair Lewis brought his hero Arrowsmith to New York City, a pattern Powell was to appropriate in her Ohio cycle. Also in that miraculous year alongside, as it were, Whither: Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is interesting that Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and the popular Bromfield were all, like Powell, midwesterners with a dream of some other great good place, preferably Paris but Long Island Sound and social climbing would do.
Powell briskly shows us the town of Birchfield. Dorrie is the dreamy, plain, bright sister (always two contrasting sisters in these early novels); she stands in for Powell. Linda is the vain, chilly one. Aunt Jule keeps a boardinghouse. The Powell old lady makes her debut: “She pinned her muslin gown at the throat, dropped her teeth with a cheerful little click in the glass of water on the table, and turned out the gas.” The “cheerful” launches us on the Powell style. The story is negligible: Who’s going to make it out of the sticks first. In the boardinghouse there is an old man who reads Greek; his son has already made it to the big city, where he is writing a trilogy. Powell doesn’t quite see the fun of this yet. But Dorrie falls for the young man, Dorrie “with that absurd infantile tilt to her nose” (Dawn to a T). Also Dorrie’s tact is very like her creator’s. A theatrical couple of a certain age are at the boardinghouse. The actress, Laura, tries on a hat. “‘It will look wonderful on Linda,’ Dorrie vouchsafed pleasantly. ‘It’s too young for you, Aunt Laura.’” The adverb “pleasantly” helps make the joke, a point of contention between no-adverbs Graham Greene and myself. I look to the adverb for surprise. Greene thinks that the verb should do all the work.
Dorrie observes her fellow townspeople—nicely? “He had been such a shy little boy. But the shyness had settled into surliness, and the dreaminess was sheer stupidity. Phil Lancer was growing up to be a good Birchfield citizen.” Points of view shift wildly in Powell’s early books. We are in Linda’s mind, as she is about to allow a yokel to marry her. “Later on, Linda thought, after they were married, she could tell him she didn’t like to be kissed.” The book ends with Dorrie still dreaming that the trilogist will come and take her off to New York.
In 1929 came The Bride’s House. One suspects that Powell’s own wit was the result of being obliged for so long to sing for her supper in so many strange surroundings: “Lotta’s children arrived,…three gray, horrid-looking little creatures and their names were Lois and Vera and Custer…‘We’ve come to stay!’ they shouted…. ‘We’ve come to stay on the farm with Uncle Stephen and Aunt Cecily. Aren’t you glad?’” No one is, alas. But these children are well-armored egotists. “‘She tells lies,’ Lois hissed in George’s ear. ‘I’m the pretty one and she’s the bright one. She told the conductor we lived in the White House. She’s a very bad girl and mother and I can’t do a thing with her…. Everything she says is a lie, Cousin Sophie, except when it hurts your feelings then it’s true.’” A child after absolutely no one’s heart.
Unfortunately, Powell loses interest in the children; instead we are told the story of Sophie’s love for two men. The grandmother character makes a dutiful appearance, and the Powell stock company go rather mechanically through their paces. Powell wants to say something original about love but cannot get the focus right: “A woman needed two lovers, she finally decides, one to comfort her for the torment the other caused her.” This is to be a recurring theme throughout Powell’s work and, presumably, life: Coby versus Joe? or was it Coby and Joe?
Dance Night (1930) is the grittiest, most proletarian of the novels. There are no artists or would-be artists in Lamptown. Instead there is a railroad junction, a factory, the Bon Ton Hat Shop, where the protagonists, a mother and son, live close to Bill Delaney’s Saloon and Billiard Parlor. Like the country, the town has undergone the glorious 1920s boom; now the Depression has begun to hit. Powell charts the fortunes of the mother-milliner, Elsinore Abbott, and her adolescent son, Morry. Elsinore’s husband is a traveling salesman; he affects jealousy of his wife, who has made a go of her shop but given up on her life.
Morry gets caught up in the local real estate boom. He also gets involved with a waif, Jen, from an orphanage, who has been adopted by the saloon-keeper as a sort of indentured slave. Jen dreams of liberating her younger sister, Lil, from the home where their mother had deposited them. Jen is not much of an optimist: “People last such a little while with me. There’s no way to keep them, I guess, that’s why I’ve got to go back for Lil because I know how terrible it is to be left always—never see people again.” It took Powell a long time to work all this out of her system. Happily, farce intrudes. A young swain in a romantic moment “slid his hand along her arm biceps and pressed a knuckle in her arm-pit. ‘That’s the vein to tap when you embalm people,’ he said, for he was going to be an undertaker.”
The highest work for a Lamptown girl is telephone operator, then waitress, then factory hand. Powell has a Balzacian precision about these things; and she remembers to put the price tag on everything. Money is always a character in her novels, as it was in Balzac’s. In fact, Powell makes several references to Balzac in her early books as well as to his Eugénie Grandet.
Morry grows up and his mother hardly notices him: “She had moved over for Morry as you would move over for someone on a street car, certain that the intimacy was only for a few minutes, but now it was eighteen years and she thought, why Morry was hers, hers more than anything else in the world was.” This revelation shatters no earth for her or for him; and one can see how distressing such realism must have been—as it still is—for American worshipers of the family. Love, too.
Morry gets involved with a builder who indulges him in his dreams to create handsome houses for a public that only wants small lookalike boxes jammed together. Meanwhile, he loves Jen’s sister, Lil, while Jen loves him: a usual state of affairs. The only bit of drama, indeed melodrama, is the return of Morry’s father; there is a drunken fight between father and son, then a row between father and Elsinore, whom he accuses, wrongly, of philandering. Finally, “wearing down her barriers,” she reaches for a pistol: “This was one way to shut out words…. She raised the gun, closed her eyes and fired.” Although everyone knows that she killed her husband the town chooses to believe it was suicide, and life goes on. So does Morry who now realizes that he must go away: “There’d be no place that trains went that he wouldn’t go.”
In 1932, Powell published The Tenth Moon. This is a somewhat Catheresque novel composed with a fuguelike series of short themes (the influence of her ex-music-critic husband?). Connie Benjamin is a village Bovary, married to a cobbler, with two daughters; she once dreamed of being a singer. Connie lives now without friends or indeed a life of any kind in a family that has not the art of communication with one another. Connie daydreams through life while her daughters fret (“They went to bed at ten but whispered until twelve, remembering through all their confidences to tell each other nothing for they were sisters”). The husband works in amiable silence. Finally, Connie decides to have a social life. She invites to supper her daughter’s English teacher; she also invites the music teacher, Blaine Decker, an exquisite bachelor, as adrift as Connie in dreams of a career in music that might have been.
Powell now introduces one of her major themes: the failed artist who with luck, might have been—what? In dreams, these chara
cters are always on stage; in life, they are always in the audience. But Blaine has actually been to Paris with his friend, a glamorous one-shot novelist, Starr Donnell (Glenway Wescott?). Blaine and Connie complement and compliment each other. Connie realizes that she has been “utterly, completely, hideously unhappy” for fifteen years of marriage. Yet each pretends there are compensations to village life and poverty. “‘Isn’t it better, I’ve often thought,’ she said, ‘for me to be here keeping up with my interests in music, keeping my ideals, than to have failed as an opera singer and been trapped into cheap musical comedy work?’” To hear them tell it, they are as one in the contentment of failure.
But Blaine still hears his mother’s voice from offstage, a Powellesque killer: “I sometimes wonder, Blaine, if I didn’t emphasize the artistic too much in your childhood, encouraging you and perhaps forcing you beyond your real capacity in music. It was only because you did so poorly in school, dear….” Powell always knows just how much salt a wound requires.
Although the dreamers “talked of music until the careers they once planned were the careers they actually had but given up for the simple joys of living,” knowing “success would have destroyed us,” Connie goes too far. First, she tries indeed to sing and, for an instant, captures whatever it was she thought that she had and promptly hemorrhages—tuberculosis. Second, she confides to Blaine that she lost a career, home, virginity to Tony the Daredevil, a circus acrobat, who abandoned her in Atlantic City, where the kindly cobbler met and married her. He needed a wife; she could not go home. Blaine is made furious by the truth.
Then daughter Helen runs off with a boy, and the dying Connie pursues her. She finds that Helen has not only managed to get herself a job with a theatrical stock company but she is about to drop the boy; and Connie “knew almost for a certainty that Helen would climb the heights she herself had only glimpsed.” Connie goes home to die, and Powell shifts to the dying woman’s point of view:
When Dr. Arnold’s face flashed on the mirror she thought, “This must be the way one dies. People collect on a mirror like dust and something rushes through your mind emptying all the drawers and shelves to see if you’re leaving anything behind.”…What a pity, she thought, no one will ever know these are my last thoughts—that Dr. Arnold’s mouth was so small.
At the end Connie is spared nothing, including the knowledge that her husband never believed that she came of a good family and studied music and only fell once from grace with an acrobat. Blaine goes off to Paris as a tour guide.
With The Story of a Country Boy (1934) she ends the Ohio cycle. This is the most invented of the novels. There is no pretty sister, no would-be artist, no flight from village to city. Instead Powell tells the story of a conventional young man, a country boy, who becomes a great success in business; then he fails and goes home to the country, no wiser than before. Ironically, Powell was doing the exact reverse in her own life, putting down deep lifelong roots in that village called Greenwich, far from her own origins. In a sense, this book is a good-bye to all that.
Again, one gets the boom and bust of the Twenties and early Thirties. Chris Bennett is the all-American boy who makes good. He is entirely self-confident and sublimely unaware of any limitations. Yet, in due course he fails, largely because he lacks imagination. There is a good deal of Warren Harding, Ohio’s favorite son, in his makeup. He is more striking in appearance than reality. Also, Powell was becoming more and more fascinated by the element of chance in life, as demonstrated by Harding’s incredible election (those were simple times) to the presidency. “Chris could not remember ever being unsure of himself except in little details of social life where his defects were a source of pride rather than chagrin.” He also wonders “if pure luck had brought him his success.” He is right to wonder: It has. When he finally looks down from the heights he falls. No fatal flaw—just vertigo.
A splendid new character has joined the stock company, a former U.S. senator who sees in Chris the sort of handsome mediocrity that, properly exploited, could be presidential. John J. Habbiman’s drunken soliloquies are glorious:
“Tell them I died for Graustark,” said the Senator in a faraway voice. He sombrely cracked peanuts and ate them, casting the shells lightly aside with infinite grace. “What wondrous life is this I lead. Ripe apples drop about my head.”
Powell also developed an essayistic technique to frame her scenes. A chapter will begin with a diversion:
In the utter stillness before dawn a rat carpentered the rafters, a nest of field mice seduced by unknown applause into coloratura ambitions, squeaked and squealed with amateur intensity…. Here, at daybreak, a host of blackbirds were now meeting to decide upon a sun, and also to blackball from membership in the committee a red-winged blackbird.
Unfortunately, her main character is too schematic to interest her or the reader. In any case, except for one final experiment, she has got Ohio out of her system; she has also begun to write more carefully, and the essays make nice point counterpoint to the theatricality of her scene writing.
The theater is indeed the place for her first New York invention, Jig Saw (1934), a comedy. The gags are generally very good but the plotting is a bit frantic. Claire is a charming lady, whose eighteen-year-old daughter, Julie, comes to stay with her in a Manhattan flat. Claire has a lover; and a best woman friend to make the sharper jokes. Julie “is a very well brought up young lady—easy to see she has not been exposed to home life.” Again it takes two to make a mate: “It takes two women to make your marriage a success.” To which Claire’s lover, Del, responds, “Have it your way—then Claire and I have made a success of my marriage to Margaret.”
A young man, Nathan, enters the story. Both mother and daughter want him. Julie proves to be more ruthless than Claire. Julie moves in on Nathan and announces their coming marriage to the press. He is appalled; he prefers her mother. But Julie is steel: “I can make something of you, Nate. Something marvelous.” When he tries to talk her out of marriage, she declares, “I expect to go through life making sacrifices for you, dear, giving up my career for you.” When he points out that she has never had a career, she rises to even greater heights: “I know. That’s what makes it all the more of a sacrifice. I’ve never had a career. I never will have. Because I love you so much.” Nate is trapped. Claire wonders if she should now marry Del, but he advises against it: “You’re the triangular type….” With a bit of the sort of luck that so fascinated Powell by its absence in most lives, she might have had a successful commercial career in the theater. But that luck never came her way in life, as opposed to imagination. Finally, Powell’s bad luck on Broadway was to be our literature’s gain.
3
The New York cycle begins with Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), dedicated to Dwight Fiske, a sub-Coward nightclub performer for whom Powell wrote special material. Powell now writes about a writer, always an edgy business. Dennis Orphen is a male surrogate for Powell herself. He is involved with two women, of course. He is also on the scene for good: He reappears in almost all her books, and it is he who writes finis to The Golden Spur, some twenty years later, as the Lafayette Hotel is being torn down and he realizes that his world has gone for good. But in 1936 Dennis is eager, on the make, fascinated by others: “his urgent need to know what they were knowing, see, hear, feel what they were sensing, for a brief moment to be them.” He is consumed by a curiosity about others which time has a pleasant way of entirely sating.
Corinne is the profane love, a married woman; Effie is the sacred love, the abandoned wife of a famous writer called Andrew Callingham, Hemingway’s first appearance in Powell’s work. Effie is a keeper of the flame; she pretends that Andrew will come back: “Why must she be noble, frail shoulders squared to defeat, gaily confessing that life was difficult but that was the way things were?” Dennis publishes a roman à clef, whose key unlocks the Callingham/Hemingway story, and he worries that Effie may feel herself betrayed because Dennis completely dispels her illusion that the great man
will return to her. As Dennis makes his New York rounds, the Brevoort Café, Longchamps, Luchow’s, he encounters Okie, the ubiquitous man about town who will reappear in the New York novels, a part of their Balzacian detail. Okie edits an entertainment guide magazine, writes a column, knows everyone, and brings everyone together. A party is going on at all hours in different parts of the town, and Powell’s characters are always on the move, and the lines of their extramarital affairs cross and recross. The essays now grow thoughtful and there are inner soliloquies:
Walter missed Bee now but sometimes he thought it was more fun talking to Corinne about how he loved Bee than really being with Bee, for Bee never seemed to want to be alone with him, she was always asking everyone else to join them. In fact the affair from her point of view was just loads of fun and that was all. She never cried or talked about divorce or any of the normal things, she just had a fine time as if it wasn’t serious at all.
Powell is much concerned with how people probably ought to behave but somehow never do. The drinking is copious: “Corinne went into the ladies room and made up again. It was always fun making up after a few Pernods because they made your face freeze so it was like painting a statue.” Of course, “Walter was as mad as could be, watching the cunning little figure in the leopard coat and green beret patter out of the room.” Whenever “cunning” or “gaily” or “tinkling” is used, Powell is stalking dinner, with the precision of a saber-toothed tiger. She also notes those “long patient talks, the patient civilized talks that, if one knew it, are the end of love.”