Christopher Purdy on Dawn Powell

On January 29, 2005, WOSU’s Ohio Arts Alive paid tribute to Ohio-born writer, Dawn Powell. Christopher Purdy was host; guests included Powell’s biographer Tim Page and her cousins, Jack and Rita Sherman. Selections from Powell’s work were read by Kassie Rose, and Act One of her 1931 Broadway comedy Big Night, was read by Bruce Herman, Mandy Fox, and Christina Ritter.

Below is Christopher Purdy’s take on Dawn Powell.

“If I have ugly babies I’m going to kill them. Unless they have a rich father. Then I might let them live a few years just to see what sort of numbskulls they develop into….”

Dawn Powell was 23 years old when she wrote this letter to girlfriend Charlotte Johnson in 1919. “Tongue very firmly in cheek,” her biographer Tim Page assures us!

Born in Shelby, Ohio, Dawn Powell moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1918. For the next forty-seven years, she moved between luxury apartments in good times and flea bags in bad, and she had plenty of both. At her death in 1965, Powell left fifteen novels, ten plays and a host of short stories. The novels divide pretty evenly between those set in Ohio and those in New York.

The Ohio novels, among them The Bride’s House, My Home is Far Away, and the superb Dance Night, are marked by nostalgia without sentimentality. (Powell is the least sentimental writer I’ve ever encountered.) You get the sense of stifling small town life and a yearning to escape, yet not all is grim! There are marvelous, funny characters, reminiscent of her beloved Dickens, but set in Ohio in the years surrounding the First World War.

The New York novels, among them The Golden Spur, Angels on Toast, and A Time to be Born feature Powell’s biting wit and unflinching look at her surroundings.

From A Time to be Born, 1942:

On Fifth Avenue and Fifty Seventh, hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump. Hundreds waited with craning necks and thirsty faces as if this single person’s final gesture would solve the riddle of the world. Civilization stood on a ledge, and in the tension of waiting it was a relief to have one little man jump.

“Dawn saw everything,” Tim Page tells us. “She was never without her notebook, jotting down observations in restaurants, in bars, in the subway, and in the Ohio countryside.” In addition to writing Powell’s biography, Tim Page, a Pulitzer-prize-winning critic for The Washington Post, has edited Powell’s letters and diaries and has supervised the reissue of nearly all of her novels. Tim Page was my guest on Ohio Arts Alive, A Tribute to Dawn Powell:

Diary, June 22, 1934

I am lost without a novel. Those plays confuse me with their hysterical bursts into my life. A novel is like a gland pill—it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong, instead of rioting all over my person.

Diary, July 9, 1945

I think my great handicap is my insistence on freedom. I require it. So I cannot make the suave adjustments to a successful writer’s life—right people, right hospitality, right gestures, because I want to be free. So I am tied down and now in my middle years almost buried (as far as my career goes) by my freedom.”

Powell married ad man Joseph Gousha in 1920. Their only child, Joseph Jr. (always called Jojo) was born the next year. It soon became evident that Jojo was developmentally disabled, and he spent most of his life as a ward of New York State, in institutions. The Goushas kept him at home as long as they could, but the boy’s rages and lack of control made his care very difficult. Jojo died in 1998, thirty three years after his mother. His care in later years was entrusted to Powell’s cousin Jack Sherman. Today a vigorous ninety five year old, Jack was a fabulous participant in this on air tribute to his cousin.

“I was with Dawnie when she died. One hour before I told her, I would always take care of Jojo. She said to me, ‘I know you will, Jack.”

Letter to Her Cousin, Jack Sherman, June, 1931

As for New York City, it’s the only place where young people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything. A young man, particularly with a tuxedo and decent manners, can go anyplace, be welcomed in the ritziest circles and even fought over by debutantes. All he needs to do is act wise…men are too scarce for girls to care whether they were brought up anywhere. The chief difference between New York and every place else in the world is that you brag of your early struggles, how you worked on the section or delivered ice and your folks were mountain whites or blacks—and everybody brought up at Harvard or Vassar or in convents abroad is very envious and hates their folks always coddling them.

Powell struggled with an impaired child, alcoholism, an up-and-down marriage and periods of insolvency. Through it all, “Dawn was a great wit. She was always very funny, but never cruel,” says Jack Sherman. “She loved Jojo very much, but realized there was nothing much she could do for him. And with all of her problems, she never, never stopped writing.”

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Ohio Arts Alive is a journey with the arts throughout the state of Ohio.
Saturdays at 4pm on WOSU-AM, NPR 820
Sundays at 7pm on WOSU-FM, Classical 89.7

Hosted by Christopher Purdy and the Ohio Arts Council’s Wayne Lawson
Emily Lawrence, producer

An Ohio Writer - Dawn Powell with Tim Page, Kassie Rose, Jack Sherman, and Act One of Big Night, with Bruce Herman, Mandy Fox, and Christina Ritter

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