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Powell later had this to say on the subject of running away, a practice she approved of: "Whereever you land is sure to be better than the place you left." But she could never run away from her childhood: If her aunt gave her ambition and optimism, her stepmother scarred her with fear and distrust. In 1933 Powell wrote, "I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness—since I am always so bowled over by it—and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack."
Although Page does not speculate on the deeper psychological springs of Powell's art, he has uncovered a good deal about Powell's early years that illumines her adult life. It appears that she developed a protective carapace that armored her against disappointment and kept her going despite the obstacles tripping up her career. And humor became a weapon against disappointment—and cruel stepmothers everywhere. Edmund Wilson praised her "Middle Western common sense, capable of toughness and brusqueness," which gave ballast to a "fairyland strain of Welsh fantasy" that imbued her books with "a kind of kaleidoscopic liveliness that renders even her hardheadedness elusive."
After escaping Ohio she dove into New York life with glad cries. In 1920 she married Gousha, then a young newspaperman who had literary aspirations but gave them up to go into advertising. As he explained to a friend, "I married a girl with more talent than I have and I think she should have the chance to develop it." Gousha made top dollar in the ad game but blew a lot of it in speakeasies and fancy restaurants, Page reports. He drank his way through the twenties and thirties, and Dawn was not far behind him in the consumption derby. Their drinking led to quarrels; and adding to the pain of both parents, their autistic child, Joseph, Jr.—known as Jojo—was given to violent rages, once beating up his mother on her birthday. Yet the three of them stuck out their lives together.
Powell's novels divide rather neatly between those set in New York among the bohemian-culturati and those set in the eternal Ohio of her childhood. Two of her Ohio novels, My Home ls Far Away (which closely follows her real-life childhood and the wicked stepmother) and Dance Night (a hard-bitten portrait of a small industrial town in Ohio), stand among her best work, serious and poignant but buoyed by stoical Midwestern humor that rises out of self deprecation and distrust of "airs."
In all her novels, to varying degrees, there is an underlying sadness, the sadness of that hurt child. Yet for all her tribulations she maintained a gallant gaiety that filled her books with laughter. ("No laughter equals no life," she once wrote.) If her bones lie among the undifferentiated dead, her comic spirit still soars in her novels. All praise to Tim Page for this sensitive and readable biography, and to Steerforth Press for helping save Dawn Powell's witty novels from America's literary mass grave.
Reprinted with permission from the November 16, 1998 issue of The Nation.
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