 |
The period flavor of her work is unmistakable.The nearly journalistic attention to detail in the New York books is always attuned to her contemporary moment: "I know of no one else," Gore Vidal remarks of A Time to Be Born (1942), "who has got the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one's life." But precisely because these books are so keen to the singularity of the time in which they were written, they address us now from a considerable distance. As lamented most poignantly through the destruction of the Café Julien in The Wicked Pavilion (1954) and the Wanamaker department store in The Golden Spur (1962), the Greenwich Village she knew and loved has long ceased to exist. Her gin-besotted advertising men, middling artists, and mercenary social climbers have their counterparts in today's Manhattan, but the peculiar etiquette that governs their relations—even in the breach—has long since been obsolete. She stands plainly on the other side of the cultural divide that gaped open at about the time of her death in the mid-sixties, for even though she wrote repeatedly about sex and dissipation among urban sophisticates, subjects treated endlessly in contemporary literature and musical theater, she possessed a reticence marked by what one friend, the English art historian Bryan Robertson, called "a near-Edwardian sense of propriety." Is there a single writer contemporary with Powell who would opt for the abstemious spelling "f—k" even in her personal correspondence?
Powell is not, that is, one of those prescient authors who seems to be "our contemporary," thus explaining perhaps the neglect of her own contemporaries. Even so, the Powell revival is in full swing, particularly as previously unseen material such as her letters and her plays have become available. This ensures some measure of attention from reviewers, which seems especially important given the still muted academic interest in Powell. But the revival will end eventually, whatever Powell's immediate fortunes, and it will be interesting to see how and to what extent her work is read in, say, fifteen years. The bleakest scenario is that Powell will be regarded as a writer of metropolitan satire of merely historical interest, her idiom trapped in a past even now nearly alien to us. (By the same token, her Ohio novels risk being read as a footnote to the midwestern fiction of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.)
An unfortunate possibility. Because beyond her social portraiture lies something else—a hungry embrace of experience combined with a temperamental, ultimately unshakable pessimism. It is, I think, this friction of curiosity and pessimism that distinguishes her work. Despite difficulties that easily could have soured her, Powell never lost her habitual inquisitiveness, as her diaries make plain. A 1931 remark—that "with me the basic urge to write is neither knowledge nor the desire to expound but pure curiosity"—is echoed in her 1959 sketch of the "industrious, go-getting little writer" Elizabeth Janeway, who
does not intend to enlarge her field by noting people, places or ideas alien to her experience or present knowledge; she does not expect to be interested in anything she is not already interested in. When I hear someone talking about bridge building in Chinotka or politics in St. Thomas, I like to jot down their speech, rhythm and exact beat, as a musician jots down native chords and airs, pure compositional scholarship research.
A sixty-three-year-old Powell wrote this entry in her diary during a period of acute financial distress, living temporarily in one of a string of rundown residence hotels after her eviction from her 12th Street apartment the previous year. But there is no reason to interpret the entry, for all its offhand whimsy, as anything less than a sincere, impassioned profession of interest in the "speech, rhythm, and exact beat" of the remotest of strangers.
|
|
