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The Diaries, 1931-1965
Selections from the diaries of the Ohio-born novelist share her outlook on life, views on writing, and relationships with fellow writers
513 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1995
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634 people want to read
About the author
Dawn Powell
43 books338 followersDawn Powell was an American writer of satirical novels and stories that manage to be barbed and sensitive at the same time.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 28, 2010
I read this very very slowly, a few of her diary entries at a time. I don't think it would be digestible any other way. It's a diary, of course, so it's not always artful, it repeats itself and is sometimes terribly mundane. I wouldn't recommend it as a work of literature; For that, I would read Dawn Powell's novels.
However, I give it all those stars because it made me feel less alone. The major benefit of reading these diaries has been to see that one of the great literary minds of the last century was concerned with all the same stuff we're worried about today as struggling artists. She worries over money and collaborators and making time (and space) for her writing. But then, she also hangs out with the Hemmingways and has all kinds of gossipy things to say about most of the literary figures of the time, many of whom were in her circle. The diaries have this delightful quality of making me feel like I'm just like her and then popping me out of that illusion with a reference to that "young man" Gore Vidal.
However, I give it all those stars because it made me feel less alone. The major benefit of reading these diaries has been to see that one of the great literary minds of the last century was concerned with all the same stuff we're worried about today as struggling artists. She worries over money and collaborators and making time (and space) for her writing. But then, she also hangs out with the Hemmingways and has all kinds of gossipy things to say about most of the literary figures of the time, many of whom were in her circle. The diaries have this delightful quality of making me feel like I'm just like her and then popping me out of that illusion with a reference to that "young man" Gore Vidal.
August 12, 2022
4,5 stars - English Ebook
A prolific novelist, short-story writer and playwright from the 1930s through the '50s, Powell, who was forgotten for 25 years after her death, is now, with the republication of her best work, and praise from Gore Vidal and John Updike, becoming a name to be reckoned with again. She died in the year I was born. Learn from her in England where I srambled on a novel by her hand.
Born in Ohio in 1897, she moved to New York City at age 21 and lived at the heart of its bohemian and literary life until she died of cancer in 1965. It was a hard life: her only son was mentally unstable and frequently institutionalized; her husband was a congenial but hard-drinking wastrel who seemed to understand nothing of Powell's talent and ambition; her health was often fragile; and money was nearly always tight. But she was mentaly the strong wonan the family needed.
Her diaries, sometimes mere jottings, on occasion carefully crafted anecdotes, apothegms and character sketches, reflect a person capable of remarkable observation, steadfastness, courage?and much wit.
Considering that she spent time with the likes of John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway, however, there is comparatively lean pickings for literary gossips; and Powell's lack of interest in external events is startling: no mention of Pearl Harbor, the atom bombs, JFK's assassination.
What is most winning here? Despite the overgenerous, sometimes wearing selection of mundane entries by Page, music critic for the Washington Post?
Is the sense of a powerful, clear-sighted personality asserting an unsentimental vision despite myriad distractions and obstacles. A remarkable woman to me.
A prolific novelist, short-story writer and playwright from the 1930s through the '50s, Powell, who was forgotten for 25 years after her death, is now, with the republication of her best work, and praise from Gore Vidal and John Updike, becoming a name to be reckoned with again. She died in the year I was born. Learn from her in England where I srambled on a novel by her hand.
Born in Ohio in 1897, she moved to New York City at age 21 and lived at the heart of its bohemian and literary life until she died of cancer in 1965. It was a hard life: her only son was mentally unstable and frequently institutionalized; her husband was a congenial but hard-drinking wastrel who seemed to understand nothing of Powell's talent and ambition; her health was often fragile; and money was nearly always tight. But she was mentaly the strong wonan the family needed.
Her diaries, sometimes mere jottings, on occasion carefully crafted anecdotes, apothegms and character sketches, reflect a person capable of remarkable observation, steadfastness, courage?and much wit.
Considering that she spent time with the likes of John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway, however, there is comparatively lean pickings for literary gossips; and Powell's lack of interest in external events is startling: no mention of Pearl Harbor, the atom bombs, JFK's assassination.
What is most winning here? Despite the overgenerous, sometimes wearing selection of mundane entries by Page, music critic for the Washington Post?
Is the sense of a powerful, clear-sighted personality asserting an unsentimental vision despite myriad distractions and obstacles. A remarkable woman to me.
March 13, 2015
When Dawn Powell wrote about her plots for novels, it was forced and uncomfortable. When she wrote about her daily life, it was interesting, heartbreaking, funny and shocking. An indomitable soul.
Poor Jojo, raised by two drunks.
Poor Jojo, raised by two drunks.
November 19, 2022
I warmed up to Dawn Powell very much, particularly as the end of her life approached. It's a little heartbreaking reading the journal of a dedicated writer who learns she is facing death, and still hopes it is not true.
August 11, 2024
As I neared the end of Dawn Powell's diaries, I started going slower and slower. I didn't want them to end, and yet at no point during the reading process could I say that I found them especially good. But they are good, somehow. I'll try to justify this semi-compliment, but I don't have much hope that I will succeed.
First of all, who is Dawn Powell? Dawn Powell was a semi-successful writer of the mid-20th century. By successful I mean only that she made a living, sort of, by writing. She was born in Winesburg, Ohio (Okay, not Winesburg, but it might's well've been). After a typical disaster-filled Winesburg early life (mom died young, evil step-mother, fairy godmother aunt) she moved to NYC. She married a poet, Joe Galuska, who became an advertising guy in the pre-Mad Men era (and got "retired" at the dawn of the Mad Men era, I'm guessing because he was too old and too drunk to compete). They had a son, JoJo who was handicapped in some baffling way - the sources say autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, etc. I have no idea - most of the time he was in institutions, but he had a Rain Man-like ability to function at very high levels (I think he memorized David Copperfield). He could also be violent - beating Powell at least once. Jojo's care and upkeep was very expensive, and Dawn's devotion to her son - while being pretty clear on not being able to care for him at home - is touching and heartbreaking. She treasured his fleeting periods of sanity and the unusual, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bizarre things he said.
The diary gives only occasional, but sometimes alarming glimpses into her on-going catastrophes:
"August 23 (1957) "Jojo home -- splendid shape. Joe stayed sarcastic and plastered and almost obscenely drunk steadily (sic). I must find some out to protect Jojo and myself and work." (p. 374)
Powell never found "some out" - and it is rather heartbreaking to note that the above entry was written when she and her husband were in their early sixties, Jojo in his thirties.
Powell's finances were a mess. At one point in the 1930s she was turning down Hollywood jobs that paid a great deal of money, although she free-lanced from time to time (and went to Hollywood, briefly, where she was well-paid but hated it). Joe made a decent income in the advertising industry, but he was a spendthrift and an alcoholic with predictable financial consequences. And yet they employed a maid for many years (a Black woman named Louise - there are a few, not many, outrageously racist statements by Powell, and her comments about homosexuals would be considered Twitter-shame-worthy nowadays, although she had several close friends who were gay).
Joe and Powell seemed to keep separate accounts throughout their marriage, but the particulars are unclear in Powell's diary entries. There are a lot of entries like this:
"June 4 (1957) Post-dated check for $75 out. Very ominous. Don't know whether to lay low or to get high. Would be at end of rope if could afford rope. Let's say am at end of thread." (p. 370)
Bill collectors call, a lot, and at one moment she actually gets evicted from her apartment, as clarified by this alarming footnote:
(Footnote to rather gnomic entry for Oct. 31, 1958 about King Arthur Express Storage expenses) "*Powell and her husband were evicted -- literally put out on the sidewalk - from 35 East 9th Street in late October for non-payment of rent." (p. 389)
Again, Powell and her husband were in their sixties, after a lifetime as a fairly successful writer and steadily-employed advertising guy, they had nothing. Soon after this, one of Powell's many friends set them up with a kind of trust fund that kept her and her husband from destitution. From this point it was mostly poor health that dogged Powell and her husband, until their deaths a few years later.
As if these calamities were not enough, Powell had terrible health. A tumor in her chest that pressed against her heart and lungs was successfully operated on in the thirties - it was not cancer, but rather a benign mass with fingernails and hair in it - one of those "failed twin" things that generally aren't lethal. She also suffered high blood pressure, massive nosebleeds, and, finally, cancer. She was a heavy drinker - some sources say alcoholic, but she was pretty high-functioning if so.
***
Much of her diaries are taken up with accounts of her struggles with her novels; these are my least-favorite part of the Diaries and not once did any of these accounts make me read one of her novels (at this time, I have read none of her novels). And yet the novels (and stories and plays) are what makes Dawn Powell interesting to us today, presumably.
"February 16 (1944): I am in a curious position about this book, for I haven't the faintest notion of whether it's good or bad but at least now it is going very vast. It pours out spontaneously now that it s more fictionalized. The purity and loyalty of Florrie must be brought out more, the mixture of arrogant selfishness, pride and bravery of Lena; the complete retreat into dream world of Marcia with surprised shock of contact with reality." (p. 226)
Is there such a thing as being too workmanlike? I suppose novelists have to deal this prosaically with their characters - mixing in "purity" and "loyalty" and "bravery" in order to get the right mix. And yet I can't really see, say, Flaubert or Edith Wharton going about their work so formulaically.
Powell is frequently hard on herself, usually for not producing enough, but she often exhibits a fairly healthy self-regard in regards to her work:
"April 9 (1948) I read my book with apprehension and was astonished to find an admirable, superior work - no holes of plot as in other works - and a sustained intelligence dominating the farcical and exaggerated so that it had more unity and structural solidity than anything I ever did. In fact, a unique work, showing indubitable development. Advance sale is 3,000 before New York." (p. 270)
In a way, this is an admirable passage - a master craftswoman regards her latest work. There is none of the modern/postmodern reflexive artistic "despair" that even back in 1948 was ala mode. Powell was not, and didn't apparently try to be, cool, play the poet maudit, the postwar Existentialist. But I always had this sort of vague disappointment when she discussed her own work, I wanted a little more maudit, a little less plot points and character "development."
And yet even as I winced at such passages (and the diary is full of them), I came to understand that Powell was trying to do a difficult thing that is, nowadays, an impossible thing - to be a commercially viable Important Novelist. She wrote during a flourishing period for American fiction - 1920s-early-1960s was a time when a short story in a mass-circulation magazine paid a livable wage. And there were several such magazines in the day - Saturday Evening Post, Collier's were two very desirable goals. F. Scott Fitzgerald made a very good living with his short stories by publishing in these rags. It was tough, and the competition was ferocious, but it could be done.
Sometimes this is looked upon as a Golden Era of American Fiction - Fitzgerald was doing it, so it must be great, right? My guess is most of the fiction was pretty forgettable, or at least no important in a literary sense. Instructive examples of this milieu is Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger, who both broke into the "slicks" early in their career, only to find it disappear in the early 1960s. Salinger had already broken away from this kind of fiction back in the 1940s, and the incredible success of The Catcher in the Rye as well as family money, made it easy for him to abandon the slicks - he simply didn't need the money. Vonnegut on the other hand gave up a PR job at General Electric to make it as a writer, just as this market was withering away (and while he had a large family to provide for). Then came Slaughterhouse Five and Vonnegut's embrace of the college-creative writing scene, saving him from what looked like, around the time of Dawn Powell's death in 1965, a failed writing career.
Powell watched the market, and the culture, carefully. She didn't like what she saw:
"January 11 (1958): The so-called avant-garde are the would-be academics, long-to-be-stuffed-shirts. They blow and blow -- not enough generations of wind behind them, just enough to blow own tiny candle but not enough to stuff a shirt." (p. 380)
"January 12 (1963): Indiana University asks me to conduct creative writing workshop, which is no interest to me but more and more I feel the pressure put on a doer like myself to do things that enhance the watcher's status. Academic friends or relatives can boast in their own circle of close contact with superior academic shot and get preferment themselves. The dower has to keep doing -- seldom enjoys or appreciates the rewards..." (p. 448)
***
Throughout the diaries, Powell blames luck for her misfortunes - I don't mean her personal misfortunes, which did have a lot to do with bad luck - but for her literary misfortunes. Although this perhaps demonstrates her robust self-confidence, her complaints about bad luck often come off as the typical failed writer's lament: "Our Stupid Culture Can't Recognize (MY) Talent," a tune I've whistled a few times strolling past the graveyard.
And yet at other times, Powell could be refreshingly clear-sighted about her situation:
"July 9 (1945) I think my great handicap and strongest slavery is my insistence on freedom. I require it. So I cannot make the suave adjustments to a successful writer's life - right people, right hospitality, right gestures - because I want to be free. So I am tied down and now in middle years almost buried (so far as my career goes) by my freedom." (p. 242)
It are the passages like this one that made this book so thrilling ("(almost) buried by my freedom" would make a really good epitaph). As far back as the 1930s she could've sold out - to Hollywood, to the slicks (by writing more palatably) to various NYC cultural entities - pioneer "culture" radio and television. But she didn't. Of course a lot of artists can claim they never sold out - but how many of them were ever asked to sell out? That this selling-out process has become institutionalized (creative writing programs in the university) makes it less commercial, which, I would argue, makes it worse.
Powell's diaries embody something about writers (and poets) that has largely gone extinct: writers should not be colleagues. They can be friends. They can be enemies. They can be a little bit of both. And whatever their personal attachments, writers are always, always, always rivals. They are never colleagues. Colleagues say "yes" when they want to say "no." Colleagues trade favors, bestow jobs and are careful what they say (especially professorial colleagues - which pretty much describes all "serious" writers and poets these days). Colleagues are primarily evaluated by their careers, not their works. Colleagues are never free; writers have to be free. Writers are evaluated by one thing only: what they write.
***
Historically, some of the most interesting aspects of this diary are Powell's observations on the Greenwich Village / NYC literary-cultural scene. She knew everybody, from the oldsters such as Edmund Wilson (about her age, actually) to the up-and-comers such as Gore Vidal (who revived her moribund posthumous reputation with an influential essay in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987). Her love of NYC is expressed many times, and yet it has an abstract quality because it is difficult to find instances where she liked the people very much. She had a killer eye for pretence, fake talent, cultural insider trading and general bullshit - which left her with few illusions and few real friends.
But let Vidal have the last word, from the essay referenced above:
"One evening back there in once upon a time (February 7, 1957, to be exact) my first play opened at the Booth Theatre. Traditionally, the playwright was invisible to the audience: One hid out in a nearby bar, listening to the sweet nasalities of Pat Boone's rendering of "Love Letters in the Sand" from a glowing jukebox. But when the curtain fell on this particular night, I went into the crowded lobby to collect someone. Overcoat collar high about my face, I moved invisibly through the crowd, or so I thought. Suddenly a voice boomed-tolled across the lobby. "Gore!" I stopped; everyone stopped. From the cloakroom a small round figure, rather like a Civil War cannon ball, hurtled toward me and collided. As I looked down into that familiar round face with its snub nose and shining bloodshot eyes, I heard, the entire crowded lobby heard: "How could you do this? How could you sell out like this? To Broadway! To Commercialism! How could you give up The Novel? Give up the security? The security of knowing that every two years there will be—like clockwork—that five-hundred-dollar advance!" Thirty years later, the voice still echoes in my mind, and I think fondly of its owner, our best comic novelist. "The field," I can hear Dawn Powell snarl, "is not exactly overcrowded."
https://www.dawnpowell.com/dawnpowell...
First of all, who is Dawn Powell? Dawn Powell was a semi-successful writer of the mid-20th century. By successful I mean only that she made a living, sort of, by writing. She was born in Winesburg, Ohio (Okay, not Winesburg, but it might's well've been). After a typical disaster-filled Winesburg early life (mom died young, evil step-mother, fairy godmother aunt) she moved to NYC. She married a poet, Joe Galuska, who became an advertising guy in the pre-Mad Men era (and got "retired" at the dawn of the Mad Men era, I'm guessing because he was too old and too drunk to compete). They had a son, JoJo who was handicapped in some baffling way - the sources say autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, etc. I have no idea - most of the time he was in institutions, but he had a Rain Man-like ability to function at very high levels (I think he memorized David Copperfield). He could also be violent - beating Powell at least once. Jojo's care and upkeep was very expensive, and Dawn's devotion to her son - while being pretty clear on not being able to care for him at home - is touching and heartbreaking. She treasured his fleeting periods of sanity and the unusual, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bizarre things he said.
The diary gives only occasional, but sometimes alarming glimpses into her on-going catastrophes:
"August 23 (1957) "Jojo home -- splendid shape. Joe stayed sarcastic and plastered and almost obscenely drunk steadily (sic). I must find some out to protect Jojo and myself and work." (p. 374)
Powell never found "some out" - and it is rather heartbreaking to note that the above entry was written when she and her husband were in their early sixties, Jojo in his thirties.
Powell's finances were a mess. At one point in the 1930s she was turning down Hollywood jobs that paid a great deal of money, although she free-lanced from time to time (and went to Hollywood, briefly, where she was well-paid but hated it). Joe made a decent income in the advertising industry, but he was a spendthrift and an alcoholic with predictable financial consequences. And yet they employed a maid for many years (a Black woman named Louise - there are a few, not many, outrageously racist statements by Powell, and her comments about homosexuals would be considered Twitter-shame-worthy nowadays, although she had several close friends who were gay).
Joe and Powell seemed to keep separate accounts throughout their marriage, but the particulars are unclear in Powell's diary entries. There are a lot of entries like this:
"June 4 (1957) Post-dated check for $75 out. Very ominous. Don't know whether to lay low or to get high. Would be at end of rope if could afford rope. Let's say am at end of thread." (p. 370)
Bill collectors call, a lot, and at one moment she actually gets evicted from her apartment, as clarified by this alarming footnote:
(Footnote to rather gnomic entry for Oct. 31, 1958 about King Arthur Express Storage expenses) "*Powell and her husband were evicted -- literally put out on the sidewalk - from 35 East 9th Street in late October for non-payment of rent." (p. 389)
Again, Powell and her husband were in their sixties, after a lifetime as a fairly successful writer and steadily-employed advertising guy, they had nothing. Soon after this, one of Powell's many friends set them up with a kind of trust fund that kept her and her husband from destitution. From this point it was mostly poor health that dogged Powell and her husband, until their deaths a few years later.
As if these calamities were not enough, Powell had terrible health. A tumor in her chest that pressed against her heart and lungs was successfully operated on in the thirties - it was not cancer, but rather a benign mass with fingernails and hair in it - one of those "failed twin" things that generally aren't lethal. She also suffered high blood pressure, massive nosebleeds, and, finally, cancer. She was a heavy drinker - some sources say alcoholic, but she was pretty high-functioning if so.
***
Much of her diaries are taken up with accounts of her struggles with her novels; these are my least-favorite part of the Diaries and not once did any of these accounts make me read one of her novels (at this time, I have read none of her novels). And yet the novels (and stories and plays) are what makes Dawn Powell interesting to us today, presumably.
"February 16 (1944): I am in a curious position about this book, for I haven't the faintest notion of whether it's good or bad but at least now it is going very vast. It pours out spontaneously now that it s more fictionalized. The purity and loyalty of Florrie must be brought out more, the mixture of arrogant selfishness, pride and bravery of Lena; the complete retreat into dream world of Marcia with surprised shock of contact with reality." (p. 226)
Is there such a thing as being too workmanlike? I suppose novelists have to deal this prosaically with their characters - mixing in "purity" and "loyalty" and "bravery" in order to get the right mix. And yet I can't really see, say, Flaubert or Edith Wharton going about their work so formulaically.
Powell is frequently hard on herself, usually for not producing enough, but she often exhibits a fairly healthy self-regard in regards to her work:
"April 9 (1948) I read my book with apprehension and was astonished to find an admirable, superior work - no holes of plot as in other works - and a sustained intelligence dominating the farcical and exaggerated so that it had more unity and structural solidity than anything I ever did. In fact, a unique work, showing indubitable development. Advance sale is 3,000 before New York." (p. 270)
In a way, this is an admirable passage - a master craftswoman regards her latest work. There is none of the modern/postmodern reflexive artistic "despair" that even back in 1948 was ala mode. Powell was not, and didn't apparently try to be, cool, play the poet maudit, the postwar Existentialist. But I always had this sort of vague disappointment when she discussed her own work, I wanted a little more maudit, a little less plot points and character "development."
And yet even as I winced at such passages (and the diary is full of them), I came to understand that Powell was trying to do a difficult thing that is, nowadays, an impossible thing - to be a commercially viable Important Novelist. She wrote during a flourishing period for American fiction - 1920s-early-1960s was a time when a short story in a mass-circulation magazine paid a livable wage. And there were several such magazines in the day - Saturday Evening Post, Collier's were two very desirable goals. F. Scott Fitzgerald made a very good living with his short stories by publishing in these rags. It was tough, and the competition was ferocious, but it could be done.
Sometimes this is looked upon as a Golden Era of American Fiction - Fitzgerald was doing it, so it must be great, right? My guess is most of the fiction was pretty forgettable, or at least no important in a literary sense. Instructive examples of this milieu is Kurt Vonnegut and J. D. Salinger, who both broke into the "slicks" early in their career, only to find it disappear in the early 1960s. Salinger had already broken away from this kind of fiction back in the 1940s, and the incredible success of The Catcher in the Rye as well as family money, made it easy for him to abandon the slicks - he simply didn't need the money. Vonnegut on the other hand gave up a PR job at General Electric to make it as a writer, just as this market was withering away (and while he had a large family to provide for). Then came Slaughterhouse Five and Vonnegut's embrace of the college-creative writing scene, saving him from what looked like, around the time of Dawn Powell's death in 1965, a failed writing career.
Powell watched the market, and the culture, carefully. She didn't like what she saw:
"January 11 (1958): The so-called avant-garde are the would-be academics, long-to-be-stuffed-shirts. They blow and blow -- not enough generations of wind behind them, just enough to blow own tiny candle but not enough to stuff a shirt." (p. 380)
"January 12 (1963): Indiana University asks me to conduct creative writing workshop, which is no interest to me but more and more I feel the pressure put on a doer like myself to do things that enhance the watcher's status. Academic friends or relatives can boast in their own circle of close contact with superior academic shot and get preferment themselves. The dower has to keep doing -- seldom enjoys or appreciates the rewards..." (p. 448)
***
Throughout the diaries, Powell blames luck for her misfortunes - I don't mean her personal misfortunes, which did have a lot to do with bad luck - but for her literary misfortunes. Although this perhaps demonstrates her robust self-confidence, her complaints about bad luck often come off as the typical failed writer's lament: "Our Stupid Culture Can't Recognize (MY) Talent," a tune I've whistled a few times strolling past the graveyard.
And yet at other times, Powell could be refreshingly clear-sighted about her situation:
"July 9 (1945) I think my great handicap and strongest slavery is my insistence on freedom. I require it. So I cannot make the suave adjustments to a successful writer's life - right people, right hospitality, right gestures - because I want to be free. So I am tied down and now in middle years almost buried (so far as my career goes) by my freedom." (p. 242)
It are the passages like this one that made this book so thrilling ("(almost) buried by my freedom" would make a really good epitaph). As far back as the 1930s she could've sold out - to Hollywood, to the slicks (by writing more palatably) to various NYC cultural entities - pioneer "culture" radio and television. But she didn't. Of course a lot of artists can claim they never sold out - but how many of them were ever asked to sell out? That this selling-out process has become institutionalized (creative writing programs in the university) makes it less commercial, which, I would argue, makes it worse.
Powell's diaries embody something about writers (and poets) that has largely gone extinct: writers should not be colleagues. They can be friends. They can be enemies. They can be a little bit of both. And whatever their personal attachments, writers are always, always, always rivals. They are never colleagues. Colleagues say "yes" when they want to say "no." Colleagues trade favors, bestow jobs and are careful what they say (especially professorial colleagues - which pretty much describes all "serious" writers and poets these days). Colleagues are primarily evaluated by their careers, not their works. Colleagues are never free; writers have to be free. Writers are evaluated by one thing only: what they write.
***
Historically, some of the most interesting aspects of this diary are Powell's observations on the Greenwich Village / NYC literary-cultural scene. She knew everybody, from the oldsters such as Edmund Wilson (about her age, actually) to the up-and-comers such as Gore Vidal (who revived her moribund posthumous reputation with an influential essay in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987). Her love of NYC is expressed many times, and yet it has an abstract quality because it is difficult to find instances where she liked the people very much. She had a killer eye for pretence, fake talent, cultural insider trading and general bullshit - which left her with few illusions and few real friends.
But let Vidal have the last word, from the essay referenced above:
"One evening back there in once upon a time (February 7, 1957, to be exact) my first play opened at the Booth Theatre. Traditionally, the playwright was invisible to the audience: One hid out in a nearby bar, listening to the sweet nasalities of Pat Boone's rendering of "Love Letters in the Sand" from a glowing jukebox. But when the curtain fell on this particular night, I went into the crowded lobby to collect someone. Overcoat collar high about my face, I moved invisibly through the crowd, or so I thought. Suddenly a voice boomed-tolled across the lobby. "Gore!" I stopped; everyone stopped. From the cloakroom a small round figure, rather like a Civil War cannon ball, hurtled toward me and collided. As I looked down into that familiar round face with its snub nose and shining bloodshot eyes, I heard, the entire crowded lobby heard: "How could you do this? How could you sell out like this? To Broadway! To Commercialism! How could you give up The Novel? Give up the security? The security of knowing that every two years there will be—like clockwork—that five-hundred-dollar advance!" Thirty years later, the voice still echoes in my mind, and I think fondly of its owner, our best comic novelist. "The field," I can hear Dawn Powell snarl, "is not exactly overcrowded."
https://www.dawnpowell.com/dawnpowell...
December 9, 2019
Powell was a wonderful, unflattering observer of character and though unflattering so interested and fond, her observations constitute a rare sort of love. One quotable comment after another rises from her acutely psychological observations -- so many, I will have to take another time to write them in the quotes section about her. Powell's life was a struggle, but though she frequently recounts money and family conflicts I would not say that she ever indulges in self-pity. She was one of those wise women who accepted the people she loved whole, as complex mysterious beings even if she lived intimately with them. The exchanges with her disabled son and rare comments about her husband are full of appreciation as well as despair (for both were quite difficult). She holds herself responsible for them as family, but for the most part, her attention and passion are focused on work and work is the constant, even though she suffers self-doubt through a tortuous process and is grudgingly rewarded. Pain and disappointment and poor health, she liberally assuaged with drinking -- which sounded wildly fun and sometimes ghastly -- another part of her life she paid for with horrible hangovers both physical and emotional. This is a big fat book, but I was fascinated all the way through.
July 10, 2021
I found it fascinating. Hanging out with Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and so many names we know--but did we ever hear of Dawn Powell? I didn't. Interesting and challenging family from birth until death, while finding the time and energy to just keep writing through it all, somehow.
She lived a tough life. Nothing but respect and affection for her. However, if you're feeling a little down in the dumps, this isn't the book to read. I tend to take on the mood of the books I read and couldn't help but notice that I was slipping a little over the two weeks I was reading this. Coincidence? Maybe. Just an FYI, fellow readers! Now that I'm done and can just reflect on what I read instead of jumping into it every night before sleep my spirits are lifting.
She lived a tough life. Nothing but respect and affection for her. However, if you're feeling a little down in the dumps, this isn't the book to read. I tend to take on the mood of the books I read and couldn't help but notice that I was slipping a little over the two weeks I was reading this. Coincidence? Maybe. Just an FYI, fellow readers! Now that I'm done and can just reflect on what I read instead of jumping into it every night before sleep my spirits are lifting.
August 5, 2025
I just love reading diaries but perhaps my most favourite kind of all are by writers. I really enjoyed Powell's company and appreciated her constant battle to make a good living from her pen. Still, Hemingway told her that she was one of his favourite writers!
to-buy
November 22, 20205books.com
December 19, 2015
These are interesting but not as interesting as the novels. In her diaries, Powell collected vignets of New York life, recorded her anxieties and inspirations, chronicled significant events in her life, set down aphorisms for use in her fictions, and cataloged the roster of the people who passed through her life from Edmund Wilson ("Bunny") to Filipe Alfau. The novels are finished works of art, full of satire and life, and yield a more rounded and literary experience. The diary is a peak behind the curtain, but the novels contain the magic.
March 31, 2008
When I am a fan of someone's novels, I generally don't want to know anything about their lives. Dawn Powell is the exception. A good read for anyone who enjoys memoirs.
April 21, 2010
Started to read but it was not enjoyable reading, her diaries were confusing to me.
February 15, 2013
Poignantand revealing. The writer's life under strong light.
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