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Powell's earlier novels generally are set in small-town Ohio in the early 20th Century. They have as themes what Powell saw as the conformity and frustration, sexual and otherwise, of small-town life. The main characters in these books, typically young people, long to escape to make a new life for themselves in the city. The latter novels are, for the most part, set in New York City where Powell lived most of her adult life. The novels are comic and satirical, sometimes sharply so. They reflect loss of innocence and love and, on occasion, fall into cynicism.
The first volume of the Library of America compilation included two early Ohio novels, "Dance Night' and "Come Back to Sorrento" and three novels reflecting Powell's change in style and theme and set in New York City, "Turn, Magic Wheel', "Angels on Toast", and "A Time to be Born."
The second volume opens with a novel in which Dawn Powell returned to the setting of small-town Ohio. The book, "My Home is Far Away" (1944), is a fictionalized account of Powell's early unhappy childhood. The book offers a poignant picture of the death of Powell's mother and of her father's remarriage to a cruel and jealous stepmother. There are excellent scenes of the family wandering through cramped Ohio towns and small dusty hotels and back neighborhoods. The father himself is portrayed as a travelling salesman who generally behaves carelessly and irresponsibly to his three daughters. Powell initially planned this book as the first of a trilogy. This project did not materialze.
In the next book in the collection, "The Locusts have no King"(1948), Powell returned to sharp satire and to New York City. The book is set after the conclusion of WW II and includes a memorable passage of reflection at the end on the United States atomic testing program at Bikini Atoll. The book contrasts the life of serious, scholarly writing and its difficulty with the life of superficial magazine publishing devoted to economic success and to popular culture. There is also a love story, serious to the participants, in which the main character of the book, a serious if unsuccessful scholar, becomes infatuated with a shallow, sexy blonde. This book reminded me of George Gissing's Victorian novel of the literary life, "New Grub Street" as well as of West's "Day of the Locust", which has some of the same themes and the same dark humor as does Powell's book.
Powell wrote "The Wicked Pavilion" in 1954. Unlike most of Powell's works, the book appeared on the best-seller lists for a very brief time. The book is set in New York City in the late 1940s and celebrates, if that is the word, a bar called "The Cafe Julien", located in Grenwich Village, and its patrons. The book is full of would-be artists without talent, unhappy lovers, and people on the lookout for the main chance. It is sharp, astringent satire very close to disillusion. The book is well and convincingly written.
Powell's final novel, and the last in this collection, "The Golden Spur" (1962) was nominated for the National Book Award. As does its predecessor, this novel centers around a drinking establishment which gives the book its title and its patrons. This book also is set in Grenwich Village in the 1950's and records novelistically the passing of an era. This novel, as are some of Powell's earlier works, is a coming-of-age story which tells the story of a young man who comes to New York City from Ohio to learn the identity of his father. In the process, the young man learns about himself as well. This book is impressive less for its story line than for the beautiful writing style Powell achieved in this, her last novel. The book is deliberately light in tone, and I think it ranks with Powell's best.
Dawn Powell produced a substantial body of excellent work describing the places and lives (primarily her own) with which she was familiar. The qualities of growing up, coming-of age, searching and frustration, and the loss of innocence are all well portrayed. The descriptions of New York City, in particular, are themselves irreplaceable. Those readers who enjoy the pleasure of discovering a previously little-known writer will enjoy the novels of Dawn Powell.
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The "Wicked Pavilion" in the novel is the Cafe Julien, on Washington Square in Grenwich Village. It is a haunt for failed artists, lovers, bohemians, mid-towners, and those on the make. The novel centers around three groups of characters: a) a group of three failed artist friends, Dazell, Ben and Maurius and their agents and hangers-on. Much of the story centers upon the apparent death of Marius and the instant celebrity and inflation of his reputation that follows in its wake; b) Rick and Elleanora, on-again off-again lovers who meet and carry on their relationship over the years in the Cafe Julien; c)Elsie and Jerry. Elsie is an elderly woman from a wealthy Boston family who befriends Jerry a struggling model and would -be kept woman who spends a night in a mental institution with prostitutes. The three stories are interrelated, but the plot does not fit together althogether well and is the weakest part of this still excellent novel.
The book is biting precise, well-observed satire. The characters in the book, both male and female, are predominantly people who have come to New York from the Midwest in search of adventure, art, success, a new life -- much as Dawn Powell herself did. The dream of New York as a "happy city" remains but it becomes covered in Powell's work with disillusion, failure, and cynicism. The artists lack talent, the lovers lack passion, and everyone is on the make. Still, at the end of the book, the Cafe Julien is torn down and Powell makes us feel how an era is at an end.
The book begins with a short chapter, an essay in fact, called "entrance" which sets the stage for the disillusion we see in the course of the book. It also sets out, as satire will do, an ideal which the world the book shows us only parodies. Powell writes"
"But there were many who were bewildered by the moral mechanics of the age just as there are those who can never learn a game no matter how long they've been obliged to play it or how many times they've read the rules and paid the forfeits. It this is the way the world is turning around, they say, then by all means let it stop turning, lit us get off the cosmic Ferris wheel into space. Allow us the boon of standing still till the vertigo passes, give us a respite to gather together the scraps of what was once us -- the old longings for what? for whom" that give us our wings and the chart for our tomorrows."
This book gives a picture of a New York City that physically is no longer and perhaps always lived as a vision and ideal. The book is sharp, cutting and funny in its picture of what Powell portrays as a fallen reality.
She is my newly crowned queen of American characters, a pretender to the throne of female greats held for years by her predecessor, the equally, overbearing British country Dame, Lady Circumference, the infamous peeress in Waugh's,"Decline and Fall." I so love these heavy, plodding females with aristocratic license to bore and command. Boston-bashing Brahmin, Elsie Hookler, is the terror of any hostess, intrusive grand dame, consummately worthy of position in American characters. Readers of Waugh, Wharton, Mitford, Parker, etc.- you know who you are- this is required!
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Powell wrote "Dance Night" in 1930, and it is an early novel in the "Ohio" group. It describes the fictitous small-town of Lamptown, Ohio in the early 20th century. There are gritty pictures of the local bars and saloons and of the railroad men who frequented them. There a pictures of the factories which were the chief employers of both men and the young women. The book focuses on the life of the working class in Lamptown, with their cramped, limited ambitions and opportunities, their rickety homes, and their sexual repressions and liasions. (Books such as this remind me of George Gissing, a Victorian novelist who remains too little known, and who depicted somewhat similar scenes and people in London.)
The two primary characters in the novel are Morry Abott a young man on the verge of adulthood and Jen St. Clair, a young girl just beginning adolescence who has been adopted from an orphanage. The book is how they come of age, sexually and emotionally, and how they attempt in their own ways (including their frustrated relationship with each other) to leave Lamptown. Morry, in particular, seems based upon Powell herself (she generally uses male protagonists in her books that I have read) and the frustrations she experienced in the rural midwest and her dream of a life of glamor, freedom, and adventure (sexual and otherwise) in New York.
In the novel, Morry lives with his mother who runs a small woman's hat shop, the Bon Ton. The father is a travelling salesman and mostly absent. When he is present, things are very ugly.
The title "Dance Night" derives from the chief social activity in Lamptown, the Thursday evening dances. Morry, his mother, and the young factory girls of Lamptown frequent the dances to flirt, dance, and arrange dates and sexual encounters.
There is a great deal of emphasis in the book on furtive, repressed sexual encounters between the young men and women of Lamptown. There is always a hope of escape -- then and now -- based primarily on the dream of sexual liberation. The book is also a story of economic change and ambition at the time of the beginning of the Depressions. The book shows the passing of chance and the attempt to make a quick dollar without thought or training.
The story is really within the American tradition of the coming of age novel -- of the young man finding himself. The book gives a memorable picture of Lamptown. But it leaves its main character Morry as he departs Lamptown in search of broader horizons and an uncertain future. This is an excellent, little-known American novel.
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The protagonist of the book is Dennis Orphen, a young man who, modelled on Dawn Powell herself, has left midwest Ohio to come to New York City in search of a literary career and of excitement.
Orphen begins as a "proletarian" leftist type of writer but soon achieves some popular acclaim. He then publishes a novel, "The Hunter's Wife" which satrizes sharply a famous American writer who has long lived abroad, Andrew Callingham (a Hemingway-like figure.) Orphen has learned about the details of Calligham's life through his three-year affair with Effie, Callingham's first wife whom Callingham had left 18 years earlier. (Effie is much older than Orphen.) Effie is despondent over the revelations in Orphen's book. Orphen also has affairs with other women, particularly a young married woman named Corrine, who loves Orphen but also loves her good if boring home with her husband.
The book is full of pictures of New York City streets, bars, homes and characters. It satirizes the literary establishment and literary tastes of the day unmercifully. The plot in the story turns on Orphen's attempt to reconcile what he has done as a writer -- written a fine novel -- with the betrayal of Effie. He needs to sort out his feeling for her and for Corrine.
Effie too needs to sort out her feelings towards Orphen and towards Callingham, her long-gone husband. She has the opportunity to do so when Callingham returns briefly to New York City. The title of the book, "Turn, Magic Wheel", is taken from an epigraph of Theocritus: "Turn, magic wheel, Bring homeward him I love" and is suggestive of the plot.
Some readers see this book is sharp, unremitting satire. I find it much more. It tells an unconventional love story lived by people with unconventional sexual mores. Dawn Powell brings real sympathy and understanding to the characters and their situation. The book is a beautiful portrait of New York City of the mid-1930's. It captures the allure of leaving one's youth in the midwest and seeking life in the excitement of Manhattan. Powell is a writer who deserves the acclaim she has recently received.
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Dawn Powell grew up in rural Ohio and moved to Greenwich Village as a young woman and lived a bohemian life. She wrote 15 novels between the 1930s and the early 1960s mostly set in rurual Ohio and Greenwich Village, which were little noted during her life. She has been "rediscovered" and praised highly by some.
Dawn Powell's "The Golden Spur" was her last novel and the first book of hers I read. The book tells the story of Jonathan Jamison who, at the age of 26 leaves his Ohio home in search of his father in Greenwich Village. Jonathan's mother had worked as a typist briefly in the Village before she returned home and married what she found a rather conventional man. She delivered prematurely and told Jonathan that his true father was in New York. And Jonathan goes to search for his father --- and himself.
The book centers around The Golden Spur, a bar in Greenwich Village frequented by artists and literary types. (It had been frequented by Jonathan's mother in her New York days). We meet a cast of characters who become involved with Jonathan, including Hugow, the bohemian modern painter of questionable talent, a succession of Hugow's former lovers, some of whom are bedded by Johnathan, failed literary critics, academics, has-beens and never wases. We also meet an elderly woman named Claire Van Orphen, the writer for whom Johnathan's mother worked briefly. She befriends Johnathan and is instrumental in his search.
I couldn't recommend reading this book for the story-line. It is muddled and hard to follow at times. Nevertheless, I came away from the book thinking that my search to discover a new author had been rewarded.
This book is written in a beautiful clear prose. Each line tells and each word is in place. It is a joy to read. The satire in the book is uncompromising and biting. Because the book is a satire, the characters are somewhat one-sided. In addition, I get the impression that Dawn Powell put some part of herself (but not her whole character) in each of the people in her book-- the young person (Jonathan Jamison) leaving rural Ohio for a new life in New York City, the young sexually active women in the Village, the struggling artists, the aging unsucessful writer to take some examples. Thus I found the characterization effective.
The book works better as a series of minature episodes than as a connected novel. Each scene is tightly written and convincing written, as I indicated, in a lively and supple style. I got absorbed in the book page by page and incident by incident. Possibly as a result of this, there were times when I lost the thread of the story and the interrelationship of the characters.
The best part of the book, besides the writing style, is the picture drawn of Greenwich Village. The picture of life in the bars and of artists, some good some not-so-good, struggling in flats with their women, their friends and their agents is precious. Dawn Powell knew the life she described. Again, most of the characters, from the young man, Jonathan Jamison, through the women, through the ageing Ms. Van Orphen, were aspects of Dawn Powell herself, transmitted into one character or the other.
This is a frothy, light book not without its flaws. But I came away with the sense of discovery for which I had hoped. Dawn Powell deserves to be read.
I did find it a little amusing to read the review of my supposed "introduction" to this edition, and to find it called "vague" and "anemic." It's actually much worse than that -- as I wrote no introduction to "The Golden Spur" whatsoever!
Note to budding critics -- it's always a good idea to read a book before printing a review.
Here is a vast canvas of eagre "real" New Yorkers, fresh from the provinces (small town, or boring suburb), people who want to to shed their past, to hide their ignorance and laugh at the squares (not them! of course): people who "want to be what everyone else wanted them to be" in Manhattan.
Powell is excellent at looking behind peoples' pipe dreams. You'll recognize people and types you've encountered in real life as you read this book. You'll see their dreams, and you'll see the reality they hide from. Here's the person, "with her refined Carolina accent, which she kept up like her grandfather's shotgun;" here's the young lady dimpled with pride at "the generous picnic of her decolletage." And here are the "old has-beens, needling me for making it when they never could with their genius." The tone is perfect throughout; I was not surprised to read that Powell's favourite writers included Aristophanes and Petronius, two of the greatest satirists in history. She fits write into that tradition. The only negative thing to say about this book is that the types it describes will not appreciate it. But the detached reader, of even mild self-confidence, and a love of the Roman greats, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Bellow and Vidal - a love of Truth over Cant - will enjoy Dawn Powell enormously.
In the end the book is a vast panorama of the New York of the 60's (and today), wonderfully evocative of the pull that city can have on all types of people, and beautifully descriptive of the reality of a decision to move there, for so many.
This Steerforth edition of *The Golden Spur* was brought out by Tim Page, who has seen many Powell books back into print. Good of him; but his introductions to her work (*The Happy Isle*, her *Diaries*, and in his biography of her) I found anemic and vague; he seems to have difficulty coming to grips with Powell's great powers as a satirist , is shy of its implications and tries to turn Powell into a much more sentimental writer than, as a clear-eyed realist, she is. I recommend Gore Vidal's 1987 essay (its in his collection "United States") which has a lot of information about Powell and gets (I think) the experience of reading Powell exactly right.
Try Powell's "Happy Island," The Wicked Pavillion," and, indeed, all her New York novels if you like this one.
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When the book first appeared, the critic Diana Trilling wrote a negative review. She observed that Powell was a writer of great gifts and style who, in "Angels on Toast", had wasted her talents on utterly frivolous, valueless people and scenes. On reading the book, I can understand Trilling's reaction. The book isn't one of Powell's best, but its scenes are sharply-etched and entertaining. As I have frequently found in Powell's novels, the book works better in parts than as a whole, even though the story line of "Angels on Toast" is generally clear and coherent.
The story is basically a satire of American business in the later 1930s with the scene shifting back and forth from Chicago to New York City. The two main protagonists are businessmen, Lou Donovan and his best friend, a less successful businessman named Jay Oliver. The two characters are pretty well differentiated from each other although both remain one-dimensional. The activities of Lou and Jay can be summarized in three terms: moneymaking, drinking and wenching. As are virtually all the characters in the book, Lou and Jay are out for the main chance in their endless trips to New York. They engage in unending bouts of hard drinking. Their sexual affairs, and the deceits they paractice on their wives and mistresses take up at least as much time as the business and the booze. Jay's mistreess is a woman named Elsie while Lou is involved with a mysterious woman named Trina Kameray. Both give just as good as they get. It is difficult to think of a book where the entire cast of characters are crass, materialistic, on the make, without sense of value. Powell portrays them sharply.
I found the book less successful than Powell's other New York novels. I think this is because the book satirizes American business and Powell clearly has less sympathy with business than she does with the subjects of her satire in her other novels. Her other books generally deal with dissilusioned wannabe artists in Grenwich Village, with writers, nightclub entertainers, frustrated musicians, and writers resisting the tide of commercialism. Powell has knowledge of the lives of such people and sympathy with at least some of their ideals. This gives a touch of ambivalence and poignancy to the satire. But in "Angels on Toast", she shows no real knowledge and no sympathy to the world of business. This, I think, makes the satire shrill and too one-sided. Also, the business world is satirized in essentially the same terms as the various components of New York society Powell satirizes in her other books -- i.e. the characters are egotistical in the extreme, heavy drinkers (always), and sexually promiscuous and unfaithful.
Some of the individual scenes in the book are well-done. In particular, I enjoyed Powell's descriptions of a fading old New York Hotel, called the Ellery and its guests and the patrons at its bar. There are a few good scenes of train travel in the 1930's, and much sharp, punchy dialogue. The book held my interest.
The characters are crass and one-dimensional. Powell refers to some of her minor characters repeatedly by offensive nicknames such as "the snit", "the floozie" and "the punk", which certainly don't show much attempt at a sympathetic understanding of people. The book is sharp, cutting, and more so that Powell's other books, overwhelmingly negative towards its protagonists.
This book has its moments. The writing style and the details are enjoyable, but the satire is too one-dimensional and heavy-handed. Although the book is worth knowing, it is one of Dawn Powell's lesser efforts.
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The stories are all truly "short stories"--most no more than 5 or 10 pages. They are almost like one-act plays, enough to introduce you to the main players and what their environment is like, walk you through a crucial and significant moment (an audition, a forbidden shopping spree, a dinner party, a funeral), and it's over--perfect if you are not in the mood to make a longer reading commitment to one of Ms. Powell's novels (although you should!). A witty--and sometimes ascerbic--look at American society in an age gone by.