by Gore Vidal
Too clever by more than half and too much obliged throughout a peripatetic childhood to sing for a supper prepared by tone-deaf strangers, Powell hammered on the comic mask and wore it to the end. But when the dying mother has a horrendous vision of the man in the balloon, the mask blinks—for the last time.
Aunt Lois has a boardinghouse. The girls work. The old ladies are more than ever devastating. “‘A grandmother doesn’t like children any more than a mother does,’ she declared. ‘Sometimes she’s just too old to get out of tending them, that’s all, but I’m not.’” Lena goes first. Then Marcia leaves town, as Powell left town, and catches that train “which will go everywhere on earth that is not home.” On a foggy pane of glass, she writes, with her finger, Marcia Willard. Dawn Powell.
4
After the war, Powell returned to the New York cycle for good. She published a book of short stories, Sunday, Monday and Always (1952). There are occasional ill-omened visits back home but no longer does she describe the escape; she has escaped for good. There are some nice comic moments. Edna, a successful actress, comes home to find her rustic family absorbed in radio soap operas. Although she is quite willing to describe her exciting life, the family outmaneuvers her. “‘Well, Edna,’ cackled Aunt Meg, hugging her. ‘I declare I wouldn’t have known you. Well, you can’t live that life and not have it show, they tell me.’” The “they tell me” is masterful. Powell’s ear for the cadences of real-life talk only improved with time.
The final New York novels, The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962), demonstrate Powell’s ultimate mastery of subject, art, self. Where the last two are near-perfect in execution, The Locusts Have No King (“yet they, all of them go forth by bands”: Proverbs) shares some of the helter-skelterness of the early books. It is as if before Powell enters her almost-benign Prospero phase, she wants to cut loose once more at The Party.
This time the literary scene of the Forties gets it. The protagonist, Frederick Olliver, is a young man of integrity (a five-hundred-dollar-advance man) and literary distinction and not much will. He has been having an affair with Lyle, part of a married team of writers: Lyle is all taste and charm. But Frederick Olliver meets Dodo in a bar. Dodo is deeply, unrepentantly vulgar and self-absorbed. She says, “Pooh on you,” and talks baby talk, always a sign for Powell of Lilithian evil. They meet in one of Powell’s best bars downtown, off Rubberleg Square, as she calls it. The habitués all know one another in that context and, often, no other: parallel lives that are contiguous only in the confines of a cozy bar.
Frederick takes Dodo to a publisher’s party (our friend Dennis is there) and Dodo manages to appall. Lyle is hurt. Everyone is slightly fraudulent. A publisher who respects Frederick’s integrity offers him the editorship of Haw, a low publication which of course Frederick makes a success of. Lyle writes her husband’s plays. There is a literary man who talks constantly of Jane Austen, whom he may not have read, and teaches at the League for Cultural Foundations (a.k.a. The New School), where “classes bulged with middle-aged students anxious to get an idea of what it would be like to have an idea.” But under the usual bright mendacities of happy island life, certain relationships work themselves out. The most Powellesque is between two commercial artists, Caroline and Lorna:
Ever since their marriages had exploded Caroline and Lorna had been in each other’s confidence, sharing a bottle of an evening in Lorna’s studio or Caroline’s penthouse. In fact they had been telling each other everything for so many years over their cups that they’d never heard a word each other had said.
In an ecstasy of female bonding, they discuss their lost husbands:
They told each other of their years of fidelity—and each lamented the curse of being a one-man woman. Men always took advantage of their virtue and Caroline agreed with Lorna that, honestly, if it could be done over again, she’d sleep with every man who came along instead of wasting loyalty on one undeserving male. After a few drinks, Caroline finally said she had slept with maybe forty or fifty men but only because she was so desperately unhappy. Lorna said she didn’t blame anyone in Caroline’s domestic situation for doing just that, and many times wished she had not been such a loyal sap about George, but except for a few vacation trips and sometimes being betrayed by alcohol she had really never—well, anyway, she didn’t blame anyone.
Revelations bombard deaf ears. “Frequently they lost interest in dinner once they had descended below the bottle’s label and then a remarkable inspiration would come to open a second bottle and repeat the revelations they had been repeating for years to glazed eyes and deaf ears.” Finally, “Both ladies talked in confidence of their frustrations in the quest for love, but the truth was they had gotten all they wanted of the commodity and had no intention of making sacrifice of comfort for a few Cupid feathers.” Powell was a marvelous sharp antidote for the deep-warm-sincere love novels of that period. Today she is, at the least, a bright counterpoint to our lost-and-found literary ladies.
Powell deals again with the, always to her, mysterious element of luck in people’s careers. When one thinks of her own bad luck, the puzzlement has a certain poignancy. But she can be very funny indeed about the admiration that mediocrity evokes on that happy island where it has never been possible to be too phony. Yet when Frederick, free of his bondage to Dodo, returns to Lyle, the note is elegiac: “In a world of destruction one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.” We all tended to write this sort of thing immediately after Hiroshima, mon assassin.
The Wicked Pavilion (1954) is the Café Julien is the Lafayette Hotel of real life. The title is from The Creevey Papers, and refers to the Prince Regent’s Brighton Pavilion, where the glamorous and louche wait upon a mad royal. Dennis Orphen opens and closes the book in his by now familiarly mysterious way. He takes no real part in the plot. He is simply still there, watching the not-so-magic wheel turn as the happy island grows sad. For him, as for Powell, the café is central to his life. Here he writes; sees friends; observes the vanity fair. Powell has now become masterful in her setting of scenes. The essays—preludes, overtures—are both witty and sadly wise. She has also got the number to Eisenhower’s American, as she brings together in this penultimate rout all sorts of earlier figures, now grown old: Okie is still a knowing man about town and author of the definitive works on the painter Marius; Andy Callingham is still a world-famous novelist, serene in his uncontagious self-love; and the Peggy Guggenheim figure is back again as Cynthia, an art gallery owner and party giver. One plot is young love: Rick and Ellenora who met at the Café Julien in wartime and never got enough of it or of each other or of the happy island.
A secondary plot gives considerable pleasure even though Powell lifted it from a movie of the day called Holy Matrimony (1943) with Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields, from Arnold Bennett’s novel Buried Alive. The plot that Powell took is an old one: A painter, bored with life or whatever, decides to play dead. The value of his pictures promptly goes so high that he is tempted to keep on painting after “death.” Naturally, sooner or later, he will give himself away: Marius paints a building that had not been built before his “death.” But only two old painter friends have noticed this, and they keep his secret for the excellent reason that one of them is busy turning out “Marius” pictures, too. Marius continues happily as a sacred presence, enjoying in death the success that he never had in life: “Being dead has spoiled me,” he observes. It should be noted that the painting for this novel’s cover was done by Powell’s old friend, Reginald Marsh.
A new variation on the Powell young woman is Jerry: clean-cut, straight-forward, and on the make. But her peculiar wholesomeness does not inspire men to give her presents; yet “the simple truth was that with her increasingly expensive tastes she really could not afford to work…. As for settling for the safety of marriage, that seemed the final defeat, synonymous in Jerry’s mind with a
sking for the last rites.” An aristocratic lady, Elsie, tries unsuccessfully to launch her. Elsie’s brother, Wharton, and sister-in-law, Nita, are fine comic emblems of respectable marriage. In fact, Wharton is one of Powell’s truly great and original monsters, quite able to hold his own with Pecksniff:
Wharton had such a terrific reputation for efficiency that many friends swore that the reason his nose changed colors before your very eyes was because of an elaborate Rimbaud color code, indicating varied reactions to his surroundings…. Ah, what a stroke of genius it had been for him to have found Nita! How happy he had been on his honeymoon and for years afterward basking in the safety of Nita’s childish innocence where his intellectual shortcomings, sexual coldness and caprices—indeed his basic ignorance—would not be discovered…. He was well aware that many men of his quixotic moods preferred young boys, but he dreaded to expose his inexperience to one of his own sex, and after certain cautious experiments realized that his anemic lusts were canceled by his overpowering fear of gossip…. Against the flattering background of Nita’s delectable purity, he blossomed forth as the all-round He-man, the Husband who knows everything…. He soon taught her that snuggling, hand-holding, and similar affectionate demonstrations were kittenish and vulgar. He had read somewhere, however, that breathing into a woman’s ear or scratching her at the nape of the neck drove her into complete ecstasy…. In due course Nitabore him four daughters, a sort of door prize for each time he attended.
The Party is given by Cynthia now, and it rather resembles Proust’s last roundup: “There are people here who have been dead twenty years,” someone observes, including “the bore that walks like a man.” There is a sense of closing time; people settle for what they can get. “We get sick of our clinging vines, he thought, but the day comes when we suspect that the vines are all that hold our rotting branches together.” Dennis Orphen at the end records in his journal the last moments of the wicked pavilion as it falls to the wrecker’s ball:
It must be that the Julien was all that these people really liked about each other for now when they chance across each other in the street they look through each other, unrecognizing, or cross the street quickly with the vague feeling that here was someone identified with unhappy memories—as if the other was responsible for the fall of the Julien.
What had been a stage for more than half a century to a world is gone and “those who had been bound by it fell apart like straws when the baling cord is cut and remembered each other’s name and face as part of a dream that would never come back.”
In 1962, Powell published her last and, perhaps, most appealing novel, The Golden Spur. Again, the protagonist is male. In this case a young man from Silver City, Ohio (again), called Jonathan Jaimison. He has come to the city to find his father. Apparently twenty-six years earlier his mother, Connie, had had a brief fling with a famous man in the Village; pregnant, she came home and married a Mr. Jaimison. The book opens with a vigorous description of Wanamaker’s department store being torn down. Powell is now rather exuberant about the physical destruction of her city (she wrote this last book in her mid-sixties, when time was doing the same to her). There is no longer a Dennis Orphen on the scene; presumably, he lies buried beneath whatever glass-and-cement horror replaced the Lafayette. But there are still a few watering holes from the Twenties, and one of them is The Golden Spur, where Connie mingled with the bohemians.
Jonathan stays at the Hotel De Long, which sounds like the Vanderbilt, a star of many of Powell’s narratives. Jonathan, armed with Connie’s cryptic diary, has a number of names that might be helpful. One is that of Claire van Orphen (related to Dennis?), a moderately successful writer, for whom Connie did some typing. Claire now lives embalmed in past time. She vaguely recalls Connie, who had been recommended to her by the one love of her life, Major Wedburn, whose funeral occurs the day Jonathan arrives at the De Long. Claire gives Jonathan possible leads; meanwhile, his presence has rejuvenated her. She proposes to her twin sister, Bea, that they live together and gets a firm no. The old nostalgia burned down long ago for the worldly Bea. On the other hand, Claire’s career is revived, with the help of a professionally failed writer who gets “eight bucks for fifteen hundred words of new criticism in a little magazine or forty for six hundred words of old criticism in the Sunday book section.” He studies all of Claire’s ladies’ magazine short stories of yesteryear; he then reverses the moral angle:
“In the old days the career girl who supported the family was the heroine and the idle wife was the baddie,” Claire said gleefully. “And now it’s the other way round. In the soap operas, the career girl is the baddie, the wife is the goodie because she’s better for business…. Well, you were right. CBS has bought the two [stories] you fixed, and Hollywood is interested.”
Powell herself was writing television plays in the age of Eisenhower and no doubt had made this astonishing discovery on her own.
Jonathan is promptly picked up by two girls at The Golden Spur; he moves in with them. Since he is more domestic than they, he works around the house. He is occasionally put to work in bed until he decides that he doesn’t want to keep on being “a diaphragm-tester.” Among his possible fathers is Alvine Harshawe alias Andrew Callingham alias Ernest Hemingway. Alvine is lonely; “You lost one set of friends with each marriage, another when it dissolved, gaining smaller and smaller batches each time you traded in a wife.” Alvine has no clear memory of Connie but toys with the idea of having a grown son, as does a famous painter named Hugow. Another candidate is a distinguished lawyer, George Terrence, whose actress daughter, unknown to him, is having an affair with Jonathan. Terrence is very much school of the awful Wharton of The Wicked Pavilion, only Terrence has made the mistake of picking up a young actor in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis Hotel; the actor is now blithely blackmailing him in a series of letters worthy of his contemporary Pal Joey. Terrence welcomes the idea of a son but Jonathan shies away: He does not want his affair with the daughter to be incestuous.
Finally, Cassie, the Peggy Guggenheim character, makes her appearance, and The Party assembles for the last time. There are nice period touches: girls from Bennington are everywhere. While Cassie herself “was forty-three—well, all right, forty-eight, if you’re going to count every lost weekend—and Hugow’s betrayal had happened at birthday time, when she was frightened enough by the half-century mark reaching out for her before she’d even begun to have her proper quota of love.” Cassie takes a fancy to Jonathan and hires him to work at her gallery. He has now figured out not only his paternity but his maternity and, best of all, himself. The father was Major Wedburn, who was, of course, exactly like the bore that his mother, Connie, married. The foster father appears on the scene, and there is recognition of this if not resolution. As for Connie, she had slept with everyone who asked her because “she wanted to be whatever anybody expected her to be, because she never knew what she was herself.” Jonathan concludes, “That’s the way I am.” At an art gallery, he says, “I have a career of other people’s talents.”
The quest is over. Identity fixed. The Party over, Jonathan joins Hugow in his cab. “He was very glad that Hugow had turned back downtown, perhaps to the Spur, where they could begin all over.” On that blithe note Powell’s life and lifework end; and the wheel stops; the magic’s gone—except for the novels of Dawn Powell, all of them long since out of print just as her name has been erased from that perpetually foggy pane, “American Literature.”
The New York Review of Books
November 5, 1987
MONTAIGNE
“In every work of genius,” wrote Emerson, “we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” After four centuries, Montaigne’s curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one’s own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own t
ime as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.
For thirty years I have kept Donald M. Frame’s translation of The Complete Works of Montaigne at, if not bedside, hand. There are numerous interlocking Olympic circles on the maroon binding where glasses were set after I had written some no longer decipherable commentary in the margin or, simply, “How true!” I never actually read all of The Complete Works, but I did read here and there, and I reread favorite essays rather more than I ever tried to read the famous “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” who needed, I used to think, neither apology nor indeed memorial. But the generation of the twenty-first century is now in place, and to celebrate its entry into the greenhouse there is a new translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by M. A. Screech who, years ago, so ably—even sternly—led me through Rabelais.