See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  Page’s devotion is a moving thing. Though he never met Dawn Powell, he is, without academic affiliation or other sponsorship, her ultimate scholar, biographer, fan: many of her letters are from Page’s personal collection, just as many of the photographs in his 1998 biography of her are his own property as well, and he has written warm and perceptive introductions to new editions of her books. Tim Page is the kind of reader Powell never knew she could or would have. Even during her own lifetime, her struggling though productive career seems to have been in constant semirevival. Novels fell quickly out of print; reviews of her new ones often wondered why no one read her more. Perhaps it was because of her name, one British reviewer suggested, which made one think of a romance writer instead of the brilliant satirist she was. (Powell herself thought her name sounded like that of an “unsuccessful stripper.”) Although Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal eventually wrote long appreciations of her work, it is Page’s diligent resuscitation and guardianship that have been by far the most successful, and tireless. When they meet in literary heaven, surely Powell will buy all his drinks—and not let go of his hand.

  She will also introduce him to everyone, for Powell, born in 1896, the same year as Scott Fitzgerald, seems to have known everyone: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Sara and Gerald Murphy, E. E. Cummings, Maxwell Perkins, Malcolm Cowley, J. B. Priestley, Dorothy Parker, Libby Holman, Jean Stafford, A. J. Liebling, Franz Kline. To name some. On her only trip to Europe, which was to Paris in 1950, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett (“one of Peggy Guggenheim’s lovers”). Powell had a social gift—a combination of skill, appetite, and habit—and it makes her surviving letters mesmerizing reading. The vices of a small-town gossip, she felt, quite rightly, were virtues in a writer.

  The letters start in 1913, shortly before she began attending Lake Erie College, a women’s college in Painesville, Ohio. Powell wrote home often to her aunt Orpha May Steinbrueck, who had raised her (her mother died when Powell was only seven, and at fourteen she ran away to her aunt’s boardinghouse in order to escape a wicked stepmother). With these letters to her Auntie May she begins her lifelong habit of sounding like the fun, amusing, clever girl she often was. (Later in life people who knew her tended to describe her simply as “nice.”) Of her drama club tryout, she wrote to her aunt: “I was thwarted in my design to be the Angry Mob. I am a foundling instead and also a chorus.” (Powell’s ardent love of theater—much more than any deep involvement with books—is everywhere in her correspondence.) Gregarious and petite, she was cast as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It seems a lifelong role, for the Puckish, pluckish voice of her letters rarely abates. Here she is writing from her Connecticut suffragist work in 1918: “I met a man the other day who was some remote connection of General Sherman. I confessed modestly that I was too—am I?—that the General was in fact own mother to my granddad, if not closer.” Once Powell moves to Manhattan she writes to a friend:

  There are three stages you go through in regard to the Village. First and foremost “Oh-so-this-is-Bohemia!! My dear! Don’t you just love it all? Everything is so—well, so absolutely spontaneous.”…Stage No. 2…you begin to see it with jaded eyes. Everyone…wants to be noticed—does everything for effect and down in his heart is worse than ordinary—is in fact a 10-cent rube like yourself….Stage No. 3—you combine and condense and admire and sift.

  So current and alive is Powell’s epistolary voice, even in the earliest letters, that one is tempted to suggest that what we now think of as the contemporary American voice—in journalism and the arts—is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking, and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York just after the First World War. Its roots are oral, in an intelligent vernacular, for Powell despised writing that had people speaking in ways that no one actually spoke. She loved the salty and the anecdotal and in letter after letter is indefatigably given over to entertaining her friends. Her lightheartedness seems the utmost generosity. From her only trip abroad: “I have figured out the way Paris is laid out, now—and ‘laid out’ is right.” Of some diet pills, she wrote, “A woman I knew got very thin on them and has stayed so for years but advises everybody against them as she’s had liver, onions, kidneys and other disorders ever since.” “I am really fascinated by the aging process,” Powell later wrote to her sister, “even if the victim is me.” Only at the very end, when Powell is tired, ill, and prey to bitterness and block, do self-pity and ugliness creep into the letters. One can only guess at the exhaustion that caused her in 1965 to write this stupidity to John Dos Passos: “I am sick of Civil Rights and well-heeled ‘underprivileged’ types screaming for justice when writers are the worst-privileged and…underpaid and oppressed of any race.”

  Although her writer friends may not have always served her well—Dos Passos probably encouraged a politically conservative streak in her; Edmund Wilson, at a time when she most needed championing, refused to blurb her books and actually wrote a negative review of her novel My Home Is Far Away—still she had fun with them. Especially in letters to others. Sartre is “the Hopalong Cassidy of France…a commercial enterprise like cornflakes or Shirley Temple.” Of Jean Stafford, she wrote: “I never do get these lady writers who are Foremost of All Writers, Ladies, and go to bed in their laurels the way I go to bed in my roller skates….Oh well, I suppose we can’t all be riffraff.” She added, “I would cut my throat but the house is such a mess.” To Edmund Wilson, she wrote of the biographer Andrew Turnbull, who interviewed her about Hemingway’s coarse letters and Fitzgerald’s gentlemanly ones. Powell claims to have responded that “perhaps Ernest was not writing to him (Turnbull) but to his friend Scott, and that perhaps Scott was not writing to Hemingway but to him (Turnbull—i.e., posterity).”

  What is clear from Powell’s letters is that she was indeed writing to those named—not to posterity, not really. By turns dutiful, cheerful, and irreverent, they are not the great, meditative letters of Gustave Flaubert or Flannery O’Connor. What they offer is something equally if differently satisfying, and that is a portrait of a hardworking, resilient female artist and professional.

  In fact, Powell’s life is deeply interesting both for its ordinariness (she is middle-class wife, mother, sister, and drinking buddy) and for the weird specificity of its troubles. When he was twenty, her mentally ill son—otherwise gentle and eccentrically brilliant—beat her so severely she was hospitalized for two weeks. Her own ill health included colon cancer, alcoholism, anemia, and a tumor with teeth and hair (a teratoma) attached to her heart. (“I was very glad,” she wrote of the tumor, “that he hadn’t popped out of my chest during a formal dinner party, me in my strapless and him grabbing my martini.”) Her rocky marriage (to an ad executive), not much discussed in these letters, persisted mysteriously. Financial problems stalked her—she was briefly homeless—yet like many writers she could not maintain a taste for good business decisions. Among the Hollywood offers she rejected were projects that eventually became The Wizard of Oz and Funny Girl. “I turned down an offer from MGM for $2,000 a week for 18 weeks,” she wrote to her sister in 1938. “I think if they’d offered me 50 cents or something I could have understood I would have snapped it up. As it was it just annoyed me to think of having to lug all that money around.” Her forays into her beloved New York theater world were dispiriting flops. And she was published badly, even by—especially by—the esteemed Maxwell Perkins. There is a gently if icily weeping letter to him about it.

  Powell wrote fifteen novels and is primarily known for The Wicked Pavilion and My Home Is Far Away, her best titles if not her best books. She was skilled at the quick, acidic portrait, the rhythmically set forth and psychologically astute observation. If one had to criticize Powell’s novels for anything, it might be that in both narrative strategy and satirical content they sometimes lack a sustained point of view. They are “dart-throwing fiestas,” to
borrow one critic’s words. The Wicked Pavilion, for instance, is on the brittle brink of being mere mood—mean and elegant, but whose?

  There are, however, no point-of-view problems in Powell’s endlessly engaging letters. A reader comes to the last of them already missing their company (her diaries contain a less composed version of their voice). One cannot help believing that if she’d been male and Ivy League–educated her career would never have fallen into disarray—not with fifteen novels—and we would have had these letters years ago. In the final line of this amazing collection, Powell says to her cousin Jack Sherman, “I admire your guts in the midst of strangers.” It is the writing life, sitting back and speaking eloquently—in a letter—of itself.

  (1999)

  Best Love Song of the Millennium

  Opinions on music can be stubborn and lonely things. I believe, for instance, that the twentieth century’s most intoxicating waltz is “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins. But don’t ask me, with any strenuousness, to justify it, or I will gnaw my fist and stare forlornly out the window. Nonetheless, a calm certitude can descend when considering the finest love song of the millennium. Such a song is really a matter less of opinion than of clear fact, the determination of which can be helped along by the following scientific method.

  A millennium is a long time. Very few love songs written in the first three-quarters of it have we even heard of. These, therefore, we automatically eliminate. The few we do know are dubious confections, peppered with Hey nonnies or Ho nonnies or else strange, violent deaths befalling the lovers—briars and vine roses sprouting from the corpses. The slaying and planting of people is poison to the love message of a song. It is a corruption, too much antithesis for the thesis. If death is imminent and about, it will always steal focus from love. And then we have a death song, more than a love one. A love song with no death in it, love that is not a fatal bargain or an addiction: that is a love song for the ages.

  And so if we continue in this vein and eliminate from consideration all the songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which death quickly befalls the singing lover, we can really make some progress. All the Liebestods and would-be Liebestods gone: most of Puccini, all of Wagner, even “As Long as He Needs Me” from Oliver! (Did I fail to mention we are doing only Western music, and despite the marvelous “You’re a Hard Dog to Keep Under the Porch,” no country-western music at all? In fact, we are scarcely venturing outside the category of show tunes. Science has its demands.)

  This brings us closer to the lighter popular song of the twentieth century, and even here there is much pruning to do. “You Belong to Me” is too possessive, even materialistic; “You Were Meant for Me” is sweet but fraught with the hopeless yearning of bachelors secretly in love with solitude. “On the Street Where You Live” is the theme song of a stalker. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” is a gorgeous laundry list of what to pack in the heart’s knapsack when fate forecloses on love; its genius is to rhyme the emotional souvenirs “the way you hold your knife” and “the way you changed my life.” But it can be sung terribly, and too often is. Then there are the blues, which, although full of the language of failed negotiations, can be friendly and delicious. But they are really about the long, slow dying of the singer, and not purely love songs at all.

  Which brings us, finally, to the only logical choice for the greatest love song of the millennium: the final trio from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, of course. Here we have one of the most beautiful things ever written; if it can be sung at all, it will not be sung badly. It occurs at the opera’s penultimate moment, when the older woman (the Marschallin) elegantly gives up her young lover (Octavian) upon glimpsing him newly in love with someone his own age (Sophie). Love, in the story by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is simultaneously embraced and selflessly surrendered—what are trios for? Light and wise, the song has the melodic depths and passion of Wagner but the libretto and spirit of Mozart. It is, as superlative musical things often are, a building upon, a historical summation, the borrowing by genius from genius. And in its breathtaking high notes it surely contains the music of the spheres; if the angels have teakettles they whistle like this. “I chose to love him in the right way,” sings the Marschallin, “so that I would love even his love for another!... Most things in this world are unbelievable when you hear about them. But when they happen to you, you believe them and don’t know why….So be it.” The clock has run out on the Marschallin’s romantic life. She has had her chance, her time, and now she must bow out—how suited to the close of this last thousand years. It is a knowing, queenly love song, in its exquisite sweetness and generosity, not unlike Dolly Parton’s sublime valedictory “I Will Always Love You.”

  And so here I must stop: I have landed on country-western music again, surely the opposite of science.

  (1999)

  Titanic

  I sometimes think of female adolescence as the most powerful life force human nature has to offer, and male adolescence as its most powerful death force, albeit a romantic one. For those of you who thought rationality and women’s studies courses had gotten rid of such broad and narratively grotesque ways of thinking, welcome. Coffee is available at the back of the room.

  I will admit up front that I have often had a hard time getting people to go to the movies with me. My taste in movies is not a completely inexplicable thing, though perhaps I should insist preemptively that it is, so as not to tempt someone’s brutally analytical eye. I am interested in the cinematic grapplings of Eros and Thanatos as performed, attractively, by young people. Such dramas comprise a kind of middle-aged pornography, which is usually made by middle-aged American men such as John Hughes (that “Chekhov of high school,” to quote one critic). But I have been afflicted with a taste for this sort of film for decades, and for several years dated someone who refused to go with me to those “stupid teenage girl movies you like so much.” So I grew accustomed to going alone, which made my experience of each one all that much more intense, overwhelming, and perhaps even sick. Passion in isolation is passion indeed.

  So, without further ado, let me say this. By the third time one sees James Cameron’s Titanic, believe me, its terrible writing is hardly even noticeable. The appalling dialogue no longer appalls. The irritating and obtrusive framework that surrounds the central narrative and that gives the viewer long, lingering gazes at a minor actress with whom the director is having an affair tumbles away. By this time, too, one clearly no longer cares that not one adult one knows and respects doesn’t despise the film; nor does one care what any of these respectable adults might think about anything. Love misunderstood—the heart societally, perhaps cosmically, rebuked—is one’s theme.

  What is to be most appreciated about Titanic has little to do with its poster boy, Leonardo DiCaprio, though he is a brilliant actor for someone carrying on with Mariel Hemingway’s face and such a thin, awkwardly pitched voice. What is to be appreciated about this film is that supported—and not overpowered—by a stunningly executed visual spectacle (surely unsurpassed in moviemaking) is an ephemeral little love story—part Wild Kingdom, part Lady Chatterley’s Lover—in which we are allowed to see something very compelling that in real life can be awful and dispiriting to see: what young women in love are willing to do.

  Certainly, at the end, DiCaprio as Jack gives Kate Winslet as Rose the best seat on their bit of flotsam, and upon his apparent death she does pluck him too precipitously from his post; still, it is Rose who surprises not just her mother but surely love itself and leaps from the safety of a lifeboat, through water, through air, to save her man, madly swimming upstream, through the corridors of a sinking ship (oh, girls, don’t we know it) like a salmon to spawn. The hormonal conviction of it is exhilarating to watch, and much more reminiscent of walruses than of Edwardians.

  Such ardor is an athletic enactment of grace (unanticipated, unearned, as grace always is). It is love that exceeds th
e deserts of the beloved. (The Germans got this down wonderfully, too, in Run Lola Run.) Writers from Shakespeare on have adored this idea of a young woman’s macho cupidity, and why wouldn’t they? Who wouldn’t? It flatters everyone. It is, shall we say, fantastic. Juliet, dagger plunged to chest, was pure machismo compared to Romeo and his delicate, mishandled poison. A young woman in love is a titanic force—at least it is time-honored theater to think so.

  And so we—or I—go to the movies.

  The successful communication of feeling is dependent on timing. Timing is dependent on editorial instinct. The dramatic last hour of Titanic entails glorious editing. Has there been a movie that so rhythmically and succinctly joins the smashing up of a great groaning ship with the astonishing range of brutish panic and altruistic courtesy with which our species greets catastrophe? The frenzied rush to the ropes and lifeboats, the demented elegance of Mr. Guggenheim, the small moments of fellowship and concern among the ship’s musicians, the helplessness of the terrified crew; the gentle words between mother and child are not imagined in any original fashion, yet, perfectly spliced, their heartbreaking accuracy cannot be doubted.