Dawn of an Icon?
Dear Tim,
You're right. There is not A Dawn for All Seasons. If
novels were furniture, I would not try to sell her to people who insist on
Mission, or Shaker. To some, her work will feel too busy and gewgawed-up. A
smart reader I know snarled, "Her stuff feels so dated." I didn't even bother
to rush to the defense. (By the way, that was one of my favorite letters--the
one where Powell complains about the challenge of working with timely material.
"When I started that book the hero could get a telephone call for a nickel ...
I would read over a chapter and think of my vast teenage reading public saying,
'What's a nickel, mommy?'")
Part of me, I admit, doesn't want to share her. It's
like having a newspaper broadcast the address of your favorite quiet little
restaurant. Hard not to wince at the notion of belonging to a Dawn cult.
The novelist Tom Mallon, who has written a book on
diaries and is working on a book about letters, e-mailed me: "I like Dawn
Powell, though she's now one of those writers in the curious position of being
known more for her life than her work. I've read or browsed more of the letters
and diaries and biography than I have her books. As Paul Bowles is supposed to
have said about his rediscovery as an old man: 'It's too much too late.'" The
Bowles analogy is an interesting one. He was hipper than the hippies who
embraced him, and the charm is that he got there first. Similarly, Powell seems
to have understood things about the culture--about ambition, about sexual
politics--ahead of her time.
I have mixed feelings about a writer's becoming
iconographic in this way. My first reaction is to fear it's the death of a
writer once he's in a position to do his own Gap ads (what product does John
Irving model: Rolexes?). On the other hand, maybe it's a good thing, if it
eventually leads people to the work. You lure college coeds in black with nose
rings to Plath through The Bell Jar and the
hullabaloo over her marriage to Hughes, and sooner or later they're going to
actually confront the ferocious, complex poems. (And by the way, Plath, too, is
often funny. Almost typed "hysterically" funny; the etymology of that word
reminds us about the problems of being a witty woman.)
Generally, I'm not very interested in what writers are
"really" like. I know a slew of 'em, and can attest that there's no "irony" in
a writer's being better--or at least different--on the page than in person. All
of us are. That's what motivates us to write, after all: the rifts between our
actual lives and the much richer imagined possibilities. So I don't generally
enjoy writers' biographies. Like Powell, who admitted that she probably knew
John Dos Passos too intimately to evaluate his work, it often sours things for
me to have insider information about a writer's inspirations or source
material. Just as an example: I almost wish I didn't know that the inscription
Emma Bovary put on the walking stick she gave to her lover, Rodolphe, was
stolen verbatim from a gift that Gustave Flaubert got himself, from his lover
Louise Colet. Gus was a boor and a hick and probably deserved his horrible
syphilitic death. Nevertheless, Madame Bovary is a
great book.
My anti-biography bias confessed, I'd also say that
Powell's life and art seem unusually seamless. You meet the same cleareyed,
jaunty, generous, doleful, complicated people in many of her characters that
she offers in person. Or at least as close to "in person" as letters and
diaries can get us. It's hard to say this without embarrassment, so Girl
Scout-y does it sound, but she's as close as I've found to a Role Model. (Must
be a common sentiment among her minions. Gerald Howard called his excellent
piece about her in Salon "How Dawn Powell Can Save
Your Life.")
I've really enjoyed talking to you. I would ask you to
fax me through a sample of Dawn's handwriting, so I could do some amateur
graphology. But maybe that's too hagiographic, too Elvis- or Princess
Diana-adoring, even for this fan. Anyhow, I know you're on the road, with the
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. How a music guy became this involved with a
novelist is a very intriguing question that we never got to here. But I trust
that your outsider status would have pleased her enormously.
Warmly,
Lisa
