 |
In the diaries, Powell subjected many of her contemporaries to the corrosive acid of her wit. And yet, the sting of Powell's portraiture rarely seems mean-spirited or petty. Take, for example, a biting entry on Genevieve Taggard, the poet and anthologist. The two fell out after developing a close friendship during the late 1920s. The entry dated 3 January 1936 reads:
Genevieve Taggard is changed. Happiness as a rule brings out the worst in people's characters. No longer afraid, they radiantly flaunt their smugness, small vices and worst sentimentalities. For years, G. was troubled by lack of humor and ponderous foot. A light conversation made her wretched, a twinkle in the eye made her aware of something going on that she was missing and, loud as she could laugh, she secretly feared her lack was conspicuous; strain as she could, she still missed everything and it depressed her.
But now, happy in marriage, secure in love, and conventional above all, she can say what's so funny? and who cares?; recklessly she can be pompous and patronizingly pedagogic. She doesn't need to see whimsy any more for she's safe above it. Fearlessly, she can leap into an old-style genteel lady's discussion of Art in Life, The Poet in a Crass Age. Her eyes flash ecstasy as she cries "But Art is Life! And Life is Art!" No wedge for the arty cliché is left ignored, her voice is raised in unctuous defense of Culture, a missionary hope ticks behind her words of bringing—even forcing—Culture, Art, Poetry, on the Man in the Street. Her clichés, her little pets that a sophisticated group of friends once shamed her into hiding, can all be brought out again, and she can stand bravely, self-righteously, up to a twinkle or a light word, and bludgeon it down with Integrity, Sincerity of Purpose, Honor. Happiness has given her a sword; respectability has given her the right to be stupid.
The techniques of disparagement displayed here are quite remarkable in their artfulness, given the fact that the writing is essentially private. It is true that Powell incorporated entire passages from her diaries verbatim into the novels and hoped, as most diarists do, that they would eventually be read. But the diaries do not draw their considerable potency from the imagined response of some future reader or from the usefulness of detailed notebooks to the novelist. Their energy is too immediate, responding to the ephemera of her experience with an intensity that reveals a need to master that experience, first and foremost, through craft. In the diaries and the novels, Powell remains faithful to a sharp and unsentimental brand of scrutiny that exposes the illusion behind the act, the affectation behind the gesture. She maintains a nearly impersonal standard of judgment based on her voracious appetite for observation and an exacting, never conspicuously "literary," sense of style. Her judgments, harsh as they often are, never seem gratuitously cruel.
Powell's novels were composed in the wake of the varied mannerisms of modernist experiment while being apparently indifferent to them. She was skeptical of the premises of a great deal of modernist writing, with its ambitions to rebuild a shattered world through conspicuous formal innovation. She never assumed, in fact, that the world was really and newly fragmented in the modern age or in special need of revolutionary literary gestures. Though her taste was never parochial, her hostility to modernism was often palpable. She comments in her diary on the "sickening funereal smell" of Proust and "the constipation of English letters" in Woolf's The Years. She was drawn to earlier models of fiction, particularly Dickens and the nineteenth-century French novelists, from Benjamin Constant through Balzac and the Flaubert of L'Education Sentimentale. "As late as 19th century a writer didn't decide to write, he was one," she wrote in her diary in 1958, adding, "The most facile story by de Maupassant, Sarah Orne Jewett, throws off a glow of wisdom, human observation. Pressure cooking and electric logs"—a lovely deflation of modernist heroics—"make the same color but glow does not come through." Surely this contributed, and may do still, to the critical neglect of her work. Characteristic works of modern fiction also opposed to modernism—the proletarian novel, the protest novel, regional writing—are all more tendentious than Powell's are ever inclined to be. They often rest on sentimental assumptions inimical to her. (As if to prove the rule, her attempt at a political novel, The Story of a Country Boy, is possibly her least satisfying book.)
Powell's characters are needy, often disarmingly so. Lopsided erotic pairings are at the core of nearly all of her novels, exploring as they do the psychology of what might be called voluptuous helplessness, notably in the Ohio books. The startling vacuity of Elsinore Abbott in Dance Night (1930) is a case in point. Proprietress of a millinery shop in dismal Lamptown, a grimy industrial hamlet where everything takes place in the shadow of the local factory, Elsinore becomes adulterously obsessed with Harry Fischer, the itinerant dance instructor who presides over the town's weekly dances. Her unrequited desire for Fischer seizes her absolutely—though what such desire displaces isn't entirely clear, since apart from her erotic obsession she seems insubstantial. Even her shop is run, for all intents and purposes, by her young assistant, the spirited if annoyingly smug Nettie Farrell. As a mother, Elsinore is indifferent to the fate of her only child, Morry. The unbidden thought comes to her in a state of drowsy inattention that "she had moved over for Morry as you would move over for someone on a street car, certain that the intimacy is only for a few minutes, but now it was eighteen years and she thought why, Morry was hers, hers more than anything in the world was." But her alienation from her role as mother isn't, as with the familiar "mother-women" passage in Chopin's The Awakening, made a counterpart to a search for greater autonomy or self-fulfillment than her era allowed: she accepts her husband's "domination without demanding any of its practical benefits....In Elsinore's scheme a husband was always a husband."
|
|
