Volume 43, Number 5 · March 21, 1996
Queen of the Golden Age
By Gore Vidal
The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965
edited by Tim Page
Steerforth Press, 513 pp., $32.00
On November 5, 1987, after a year of reading the published works of Dawn Powell (1897–1965), I published my findings in these pages.[1] There is now a somewhat blurred perception that she was always very much on the minds of such exciting critics and taste-makers as James Wolcott and John Updike, and that I had simply leapt onto a merrily moving bandwagon. Actually, all her books were out of print and her name was known only to those of us whose careers had overlapped hers. In the twenty-two years that had passed since her death, she had been thoroughly erased, as original writers so often are, in the United States of Amnesia. But then she had never had much success in her lifetime either. She was a wit, a satirist and a woman, a combination that did not enchant the bookchatterers of that era. Worst of all, she did not affirm warm mature family values. She herself was the principal third of an interesting ménage à trois in Greenwich Village; the other two thirds were her lifelong (his lifelong) husband, Joseph Gousha, and Coburn Gilman, a man about town and sometime magazine editor. All three were serious drinkers but then so was everyone else in those days when she could (with no irony) write a book about Manhattan and call it The Happy Island.
Review, 4705 words
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