The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (28 page)

Again, one gets the boom and bust of the Twenties and early Thirties. Chris Bennett is the all-American boy who makes good. He is entirely self-confident and sublimely unaware of any limitations. Yet, in due course he fails, largely because he lacks imagination. There is a good deal of Warren Harding, Ohio's favorite son, in his makeup. He is more striking in appearance than reality. Also, Powell was becoming more and more fascinated by the element of chance in life, as demonstrated by Harding's incredible election (those were simple times) to the presidency. “Chris could not remember ever being unsure of himself except in little details of social life where his defects were a source of pride rather than chagrin.” He also wonders “if pure luck had brought him his success.” He is right to wonder: It has. When he finally looks down from the heights he falls. No fatal flaw—just vertigo.

A splendid new character has joined the stock company, a former U.S. senator who sees in Chris the sort of handsome mediocrity that, properly exploited, could be presidential. John J. Habbiman's drunken soliloquies are glorious:

“Tell them I died for Graustark,” said the Senator in a faraway voice. He sombrely cracked peanuts and ate them, casting the shells lightly aside with infinite grace. “What wondrous life is this I lead. Ripe apples drop about my head.”

Powell also developed an essayistic technique to frame her scenes. A chapter will begin with a diversion:

In the utter stillness before dawn a rat carpentered the rafters, a nest of field mice seduced by unknown applause into coloratura ambitions, squeaked and squealed with amateur intensity…. Here, at daybreak, a host of blackbirds were now meeting to decide upon a sun, and also to blackball from membership in the committee a red-winged blackbird.

Unfortunately, her main character is too schematic to interest her or the reader. In any case, except for one final experiment, she has got Ohio out of her system; she has also begun to write more carefully, and the essays make nice point counterpoint to the theatricality of her scene writing.

The theater is indeed the place for her first New York invention,
Jig Saw
(1934), a comedy. The gags are generally very good but the plotting is a bit frantic. Claire is a charming lady, whose eighteen-year-old daughter, Julie, comes to stay with her in a Manhattan flat. Claire has a lover; and a best woman friend to make the sharper jokes. Julie “is a very well brought up young lady—easy to see she has not been exposed to home life.” Again it takes two to make a mate: “It takes two women to make your marriage a success.” To which Claire's lover, Del, responds, “Have it your way—then Claire and I have made a success of my marriage to Margaret.”

A young man, Nathan, enters the story. Both mother and daughter want him. Julie proves to be more ruthless than Claire. Julie moves in on Nathan and announces their coming marriage to the press. He is appalled; he prefers her mother. But Julie is steel: “I can make something of you, Nate. Something marvelous.” When he tries to talk her out of marriage, she declares, “I expect to go through life making sacrifices for you, dear, giving up my career for you.” When he points out that she has never had a career, she rises to even greater heights: “I know. That's what makes it all the more of a sacrifice. I've never had a career. I never will have. Because I love you so much.” Nate is trapped. Claire wonders if she should now marry Del, but he advises against it: “You're the triangular type….” With a bit of the sort of luck that so fascinated Powell by its absence in most lives, she might have had a successful commercial career in the theater. But that luck never came her way in life, as opposed to imagination. Finally, Powell's bad luck on Broadway was to be our literature's gain.

3

The New York cycle begins with
Turn, Magic Wheel
(1936), dedicated to Dwight Fiske, a sub-Coward nightclub performer for whom Powell wrote special material. Powell now writes about a writer, always an edgy business. Dennis Orphen is a male surrogate for Powell herself. He is involved with two women, of course. He is also on the scene for good: He reappears in almost all her books, and it is he who writes finis to
The Golden Spur
, some twenty years later, as the Lafayette Hotel is being torn down and he realizes that his world has gone for good. But in 1936 Dennis is eager, on the make, fascinated by others: “his urgent need to know what they were knowing, see, hear, feel what they were sensing, for a brief moment to
be
them.” He is consumed by a curiosity about others which time has a pleasant way of entirely sating.

Corinne is the profane love, a married woman; Effie is the sacred love, the abandoned wife of a famous writer called Andrew Callingham, Hemingway's first appearance in Powell's work. Effie is a keeper of the flame; she pretends that Andrew will come back: “Why must she be noble, frail shoulders squared to defeat, gaily confessing that life was difficult but that was the way things were?” Dennis publishes a
roman à clef
, whose key unlocks the Callingham/Hemingway story, and he worries that Effie may feel herself betrayed because Dennis completely dispels her illusion that the great man will return to her. As Dennis makes his New York rounds, the Brevoort Café, Longchamps, Luchow's, he encounters Okie, the ubiquitous man about town who will reappear in the New York novels, a part of their Balzacian detail. Okie edits an entertainment guide magazine, writes a column, knows everyone, and brings everyone together. A party is going on at all hours in different parts of the town, and Powell's characters are always on the move, and the lines of their extramarital affairs cross and recross. The essays now grow thoughtful and there are inner soliloquies:

Walter missed Bee now but sometimes he thought it was more fun talking to Corinne about how he loved Bee than really being with Bee, for Bee never seemed to want to be alone with him, she was always asking everyone else to join them. In fact the affair from her point of view was just loads of fun and that was all. She never cried or talked about divorce or any of the normal things, she just had a fine time as if it wasn't serious at all.

Powell is much concerned with how people probably ought to behave but somehow never do. The drinking is copious: “Corinne went into the ladies room and made up again. It was always fun making up after a few Pernods because they made your face freeze so it was like painting a statue.” Of course, “Walter was as mad as could be, watching the cunning little figure in the leopard coat and green beret patter out of the room.” Whenever “cunning” or “gaily” or “tinkling” is used, Powell is stalking dinner, with the precision of a saber-toothed tiger. She also notes those “long patient talks, the patient civilized talks that, if one knew it, are the end of love.”

There are amusing incidents rather than a plot of the sort that popular novels required in those days: Effie is hurt by Orphen's portrayal of her marriage in his book; Corinne vacillates between husband and lover; the current Mrs. Callingham goes into the hospital to die of cancer. There are publishers who live in awe of book reviewers with names like Gannett, Hansen, Paterson. One young publisher “was so brilliant that he could tell in advance that in the years 1934–35 and–36 a book would be called exquisitely well-written if it began: ‘The boxcar swung out of the yards. Pip rolled over in the straw. He scratched himself where the straw itched him.'” Finally, the book's real protagonist is the city:

In the quiet of three o'clock the Forties looked dingy, deserted, incredibly nineteenth century with the dim lamps in dreary doorways; in these midnight hours the streets were possessed by their ancient parasites, low tumble-down frame rooming houses with cheap little shops, though by day such remnants of another decade retreated obscurely between flamboyant hotels.

That
city is now well and truly gone.

“Fleetingly, Effie thought of a new system of obituaries in which the lives recorded were criticized, mistaken steps pointed out, structure condemned, better paths suggested.” This is the essence of Dawn Powell: The fantastic flight from the mundane that can then lead to a thousand conversational variations, and the best of her prose is like the best conversation where no
escalier
is ever wit's receptacle. As a result, she is at her best with The Party; but then most novels of this epoch were assembled around The Party, where the characters proceed to interact and the unsayable gets said. Powell has a continuing hostess who is a variation on Peggy Guggenheim, collecting artists for gallery and bed. There is also a minor hostess, interested only in celebrities and meaningful conversation. She quizzes Dennis: “‘Now let's talk,' she commanded playfully [Powell's adverbs are often anesthetic preparatory for surgery]. ‘We've never really had a nice talk, have we, Dennis? Tell me how you came to write? I suppose you had to make money so you just started writing, didn't you?'” Callingham himself comes to The Party. Powell's affection for the real Hemingway did not entirely obscure his defects, particularly as viewed by an ex-wife, Effie, who discovers to her relief “there was no Andy left, he had been wiped out by Callingham the Success as so many men before him had been wiped out by the thing they represented.” Effie frees herself from him and settles back into contented triangularity with Dennis and Corinne. Cake had; ingested, too.

         

In 1938, with
The Happy Island
, the Powell novel grows more crowded and The Party is bigger and wilder. This time the rustic who arrives in the city is not a young woman but a young man. Powell is often more at home with crude masculine protagonists, suspecting, perhaps, that her kind of tough realism might cause resentment among those who think of women as the fair sex.

A would-be playwright, Jeff Abbott (related to Morry?), arrives on the bus from Silver City; a manager has accepted his play with the ominous telegram,
CASTING COMPLETE THIRD ACT NEEDS REWRITING
[like that of
Jig Saw
]
COME IMMEDIATELY
. Jeff has two friends in the city. One is Prudence Bly, a successful nightclub singer; the other is Dol, a gentleman party giver and fancier of young men. At the book's end, Dol gives great offense by dying, seated in a chair, at his own party. How like him! the guests mutter.

Prudence is the most carefully examined of Powell's women. She is successful; she drinks too much; she is seldom involved with fewer than two men. But it is the relationships between women that make Powell's novels so funny and original. Jean Nelson, a beautiful dummy, is Prudence's best friend; each needs the other to dislike. At the novel's beginning, Jean has acquired Prudence's lover Steve. The two girls meet for a serious drunken chat over lunch. “You aren't jealous of me, are you, Prudence?” “
Jealous?
Jealous? Good God, Jean, you must think this is the Middle Ages!” Prudence then broods to herself:

Why do I lunch with women anyway?…We always end up sniveling over men and life and we always tell something that makes us afraid of each other for weeks to come…. Women take too much out of you, they drink too much and too earnestly. They drink the way they used to do china painting, and crewel work and wood burning.

In the restaurant things grow blurred: “‘You're so good to everyone,' sighed Jean. ‘You really are.' Nothing could have enraged Prudence more or been more untrue.” Finally, Jean goes: “Prudence looked meditatively after Jean as she wove her way earnestly through tables and knees. The girl did look like a goddess but the trouble was she walked like one, too, as if her legs had been too long wound in a flag.”

Prudence's forebears include, yet again, the eccentric grandmother. This one is rich, and “Prudence was always glad her grandmother had been neither kind nor affectionate.” The escape from Silver City had been easy. The grandmother was indifferent to everyone, including “her surly young Swedish chauffeur.” A great traveler, Mrs. Bly “always wanted to buy one dinner with two plates, as if he were a Pekinese, and, more alarming still, to take one room in the hotels where they stayed…. After all, she explained, she always slept with her clothes on so there was nothing indecent in it.” In addition, Mrs. Bly is a sincere liar, who believes that she was on the
Titanic
when it was sunk; and was courted by the czar.

Jeff Abbott and Prudence meet. They have an affair. Jeff is sublimely humorless, which intrigues Prudence. He is also a man of destiny, doomed to greatness in the theater. “‘I never yet found anything to laugh at in this world,' said Jeff. ‘You never heard of a great man with a sense of humor, did you? Humor's an anesthetic, that's all, laughing gas while your guts are jerked out.'” Since they are not made for each other, marriage is a real possibility. Prudence is growing unsure of herself:

She could not find the place where the little girl from Ohio, the ambitious, industrious little village girl, merged into the
Evening Journal
Prudence Bly,
The Town and Country
Bly. There were queer moments between personalities, moments such as the hermit crab must have scuttling from one stolen shell to the next one…. Prudence Bly was not so much a person as a conspiracy.

Then Powell, in a quick scuttle, briefly inhabits her own shell:

Prudence slew with a neat epithet, crippled with a true word, then, seeing the devastation about her and her enemies growing, grew frightened of revenge, backed desperately, and eventually found the white flag of Sentimentality as her salvation. For every ruinous
mot
she had a tear for motherhood.

The failure of Jeff's powerful play does not disturb him, and Prudence is somewhat awed since worldly success is the only thing that makes the island happy. But “he belongs to the baffling group of confident writers who need no applause. For them a success is not a surprise but cause for wonder that it is less than international…. A failure proves that a man is too good for his times.” When he says he wants to buy a farm in the Midwest and settle down and write, Prudence is astonished. When he does exactly that, she goes with him. Integrity at last. No more glamour. No more happy island. Only fields, a man, a woman. In no time at all, she is climbing the walls and heading back to New York where she belongs. Since Jean has let go of Steve, he receives her amiably (but then hardly anyone has noticed her departure). The book ends with: “Prudence's looks, [Steve] reflected with some surprise, were quite gone. She really looked as hard as nails, but then so did most women eventually.” That excellent worldly novelist Thackeray never made it to so high a ground.