 |
Why is it that the novels of Miss Dawn Powell are so much less well known than they deserve to be? This is, I believe, partly due to her complete indifference to publicity. She rarely goes to publishers' lunches or has publishers' parties given her; she declines to play the great lady of letters, and she does not encourage interviews or the appearance of her photograph on book jackets. No effort has been made to glamorize her, and it would be hopeless to try to glamorize her novels. For in these novels—another reason that they have not been more popular—she does nothing to stimulate feminine daydreams. The woman reader can find no comfort in identifying herself with Miss Powell's heroines. The women who appear in her stories are likely to be as sordid and absurd as the men. There are no love scenes that will rouse you or melt you. It is true that in her more recent books she has been relenting a little. In The Locusts Have No King, she did close on a note of enduring affection, though an affection sorely tried and battered—"In a world of destruction," the author concludes, "one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern"—and in her last book but one, A Cage for Lovers, there are actually a young man and a young woman who, though kept apart by an ogress, are benevolently united at the end.
But love is not Miss Powell's theme. Her real theme is the provincial in New York who has come on from the Middle West and acclimated himself (or herself) to the city and made himself a permanent place there, without ever, however, losing his fascinated sense of an alien and anarchic society. Like Miss Powell, who was born in Ohio, these immigrants find themselves vividly aware of elements of Manhattan life that the native of New York takes for granted, since he has usually no very intimate experience of anything else to contrast with them. To such recent arrivals in town, the New Yorkers seem giddy and unreliable, their activities confused and often pointless; yet once the transplantation has taken root, they may enjoy in the very amorality of this life a certain relaxation, and freedom, a certain convivial comfort in the assurance that, whatever you do, no one—though lovers and spouses may occasionally make themselves disagreeable—is really going to call you to account. Such a world has great comic possibilities if one has enjoyed it on its own terms and yet observed it from a point of view that does not quite accept these terms as normal, and Miss Powell has exploited these possibilities with a wit, a gift of comic invention and an individual accent that make her books unlike any others. The mind, the personality behind them, with all its sophistication, is very stout and self-sustaining, strong in Middle Western common sense, capable of toughness and brusqueness; yet a fairyland strain of Welsh fantasy instills into everything she writes a kind of kaleidoscopic liveliness that renders even her hardheadedness elusive.
|
|
