I have always liked Dawn Powell's books, since the first one I read. I have also read all of Dorothy Parker. I had noticed that Dorothy Parker didn't have the same amount of writing that Dawn Powell had. But it wasn't until I read this book that I learned more about Dawn powell, and how she has been largely ignored both while alive and somewhat, after she passed.
The author has performed a work of love; the feelings she has for Powell shine clearly through her writing. It was her thesis; thoroughly researched and containing detailed events of Powell's life, i was delighted to learn more about Dawn Powell through Palermo's lens.
2016, Paperback, Swallow Press
P.4:
"...'a Dos Passos biographer even calls Powell 'the poor man's Dorothy Parker' -- though many commentators agree that the Roundtabler 'had a comparatively modest talent'. Parker's witty lines have come down to us largely because she voiced them in earshot of her newspaper chums, who took note of them and reported them post haste. Powell, however, as friend, writer, and critic Matthew Josephson remembers, uttered many of her best lines 'before a bibulus company whose powers of recall became clogged'."

Besides the fact that she was not a Roundtabler, sitting around drinking with newspaper writers eager to lap up her words, Powell did not kiss ass, a fact that, while itincreased my respect for her, did not do the sale of her books any favors.
P.32-3:
"as we have noted, she was uncomfortable playing up to reviewers and preferred the role of observer; she was similarly uncomfortable with the adulation of fans, when she did come upon them. Charles Norman recounted one memorable encounter Powell had with an admirer: 'at a party I gave on Perry street,' he wrote, 'there was a woman who sat on the floor. Dawn was in a chair yards away from her, but little by little the woman came closer, crawling with a glass in her hand, and looking up admiringly at dawn. Soon she was beside dawn, who jumped up. "I didn't want a lap full of ears," she told me.' As always, Powell remained uneasy in the spotlight."

reading this book, I understand more the appeal that Dawn Powell's work had for me. I am a bit of a misanthropist, I'm disgusted with pretentious humans, I have a dry, sardonic humor. I feel as if, had i met Dawn Powell, she and I would have had much in common.
I agree with Dawn Powell's feelings that satire is the best way to out lies and falsehood in humans. It's something I use and one reason I I'm not the favorite of people who are living a lie.
P.73:
"all of her New York novels feature outsiders like Powell herself -- those who have come to the city from small-town Midwestern locations, full of impossible dreams. Her most interesting characters are those who strive but never do make it: the losers, the graspers, the drinkers, the misfits, the homeless, the heartbroken, the nameless souls who wander the city carrying crumbling suitcases and broken dreams. Powell's 'heartaches of the street,' wretched as they often are, nevertheless remain hopeful, clinging to their dreams despite long odds. understanding and sympathizing with her characters as she does, they always ring true.
Satire was her mode, and satire, Powell wrote again and again, was a recounting of the truth. SHe realized that her favorite literary technique was also her most effective weapon for exposing folly and vice; she maintained in her diaries that 'the lashing of... Evil can only be done by satire'."

One more thing that I have in common with Dawn Powell is her disgust of humans that are greedy and stingy. My childhood was spent in poverty, and much of my life has been that way as well, but the money that I have, I share with animal sanctuaries and Friends in need. If you have money and you don't help your fellow creatures, what the heck good are you?
P.128-9:
"Belle [a character in "Turn, Magic Wheel"], 'the meanest, stingiest old woman of all the mean stingy old women in New york,' is quite literally 'eating herself into the grave':...
the character's over indulgence in sugary treats, coupled with her refusal to donate to charity, exposes the ugliness of greed, excess, and selfishness that Powell would always find intolerable, especially after having as a child lived with a woman so miserly that when Dawn and her sisters asked if they could make 'hot - water soup' of 'hot water, salt and butter,' she would coldly refuse them."

For an unfathomable reason, critics did not like the honesty with which Powell portrayed humans. As any dedicated reader knows, the majority of humans would rather read fiction than literature, for the same reason that people like celebrities: it's all on the surface. This is the reason critics gave for not giving her books good reviews, and why her books did not sell that well.
Curious, that; I have read plenty of books that feature nauseating characters: men who are misogynists, etc, that did not suffer from bad sales. I think the truth is just that Dawn Powell was her own woman, and as I wrote above, she did not brown nose. They resented her for that, I'm sure.
P.166-7:
"Robert Van gelder, One reviewer who sometimes faulted Powell for her 'worthless' characters, had asked Powell the reason behind the 'pointless' types she was so well known for. In reply, she first 'wondered how many people out of an odd lot of 100 wouldn't be rather pointless,' then added, 'I'll bet if you walked through an office at 5:00 in the afternoon and asked people working there, "what is your aim in life? Most of them would be up against it to give you an answer'. more often, she said, they would be thinking only of immediate concerns, such as remembering to buy toothpaste or to meet up with friends. for the same reason, Powell felt it disingenuous to write books full of characters who strive to accomplish heroic goals."

when people talk about helping those in need, they often think of organizations to give their money to. An example would be Feed the Children, The Humane Society, to name a couple. But those organizations have large workforces that have to be paid first before any of that money reaches their so-called target. and in many of the regions where the help is needed, the people are oppressed, and those in charge take the money, never giving any of it to those who need it. This is why it's ridiculous to give to charity organizations. if people need money, just give it directly to them. Dawn Powell felt the same way.
P.178:
"similarly, in a letter of the same time Powell wrote to Bruce Bliven, writer and later editor for The New Republic, she disparaged the role of 'the church supper' in encouraging The View that 'the starving chinese, the ragged prisoner of war, the orphan can only be helped by as many people as possible putting on their minks and sables and eating more than they want', just as any child growing up in the post-war United States often heard at the dinner table, 'clean your plate; people are starving in china!' Powell's dead-on satire, her cutting, wicked humor bites into every line of the novel. As she points out, not only does our excess not assist the needy, but our vanity in pretending that it does serves no purpose other than to assuage our guilt. American consumerism, following the Great depression of the previous decade, was alive and well in the wartime years of the 1940s, the tony citizens of New York as well-fed then as always. If the message of the city was to 'eat Sunshine biscuits,' then spreading them with caviar -- for the war effort, of course - might have been an even better idea."

Powell loved her cat, who was probably one of the few creatures that gave her true love.
P.194:
"On her cat's death Powell wrote what Tim Page says must be 'one of the most loving farewell tributes to a pet ever recorded'. Her very first pet had given her the kind of unconditional love that she received neither from her father, her alcoholic husband, nor her troubled son. She wrote, 'my dear cat Perkins died today - very sweetly, very quietly, daintily, a lady wanting to give as little trouble as possible... Finally she lay on the balcony, exhausted, in the sun. I heard her choke, and she was in a convulsion... I held her paw and moistened her lips with water. It was unbearable'."

Powell was depressed about the changes brought to Manhattan, after the war. Historic buildings were destructed to make way for apartment buildings to house more inutil humans. I can only wonder what she would think if she lived in this time, 2021. ((Horrors))
P.199:
" 'in an age of destruction,' Powell wrote, 'one must cling to whatever remnants of love, friendship, or hope... One has... I refer to the enemy not as fascism, communism, Mammon or anything but the plague of destructivism - inherent in human nature but released in magnified potencies since the war closed'. The novelist's general outlook, in late 1947, appears to have grown even darker than it had been at the period of A Time to be Born."

This reader was horrified to learn of what happened to a true friend of Dawn Powell and her family, Margaret de Silva. Can you imagine if that were to happen nowadays? It would be scandalous.
P.247:
"despite the cheering security that the money [from friend Margaret's trust fund set up for Powell and her family] brought after years of crushing poverty, it was too late for Joe who lay dying, more often than not in unbearable pain, in the hospital for a year and then back home again. soon Margaret de Silver would fall seriously ill as well, the result of having been forgotten while being x-rayed, then contracting a severe internal infection from the burns. Powell would lose both Joe and Margaret in 1962, the same year that her final novel was published.

I salute the author for her work on this book. I learned much more about an already cherished author. It feels like it fills a Gap in history that was much needed.



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