Greenwich Village as a Satirist’s Milieu and Muse

Herbert Muschamp

Thursday, Dec. 3, 1998 | 2:16 a.m.

NEW YORK - Time for holiday shopping. Why not first stop at a bookstore and give yourself a treat? This is a good season to catch up on reading. It's also good for rambling around the neighborhood of a writer many readers are only now beginning to catch up with: the brilliant social satirist Dawn Powell.

Her glittering novels, especially those set in New York, offer a rare opportunity to reflect on the dependence of cities and books for mutual survival. Take home a stack. You'll thank me.

Powell, who died in 1965, would have been 102 years old on Nov. 28. This is a shocking milestone, for Powell's voice is among the freshest in contemporary letters. Her writing flourished in the 1940s and '50s, but only recently has she begun to receive her full due. The campaign to rescue Powell from oblivion was begun by Gore Vidal and led by Tim Page, the chief music critic for The Washington Post, author of a new biography on Powell and a former music critic for The New York Times. It has been a miracle of modern literary life.

Eleven of Powell's 15 novels are in print, more than at any point in her stressed-out lifetime. Published by Steerforth Press, the handsome paperback editions feature atmospheric New York cityscapes bordered with dusky, metallic colors. The voice that emerges from those covers is as sharp as their design. Powell's tone is comic but her themes are profound. Collectively, her books paint a panorama of the energies a great city marshals to corrode as well as nurture people's dreams. They also attest to one woman's triumph over dragons.

"I don't know why anyone in New York worries about good neighborhoods," she said. "They never see their neighbors anyway so it might as well be a bad neighborhood."

- From "A Time to Be Born" by Dawn Powell (1942)

A native of Ohio, Powell spent most of her life in Greenwich Village. In a letter to a friend in the late 1950s, Powell writes about a niece who came to New York but declined her aunt's invitation to visit because it would have conflicted with a scheduled tour of the Village. "I was so startled to think I almost prevented them from seeing mysterious Greenwich Village that I didn't think to say, as an acquaintance suggested, 'But dearie, your Auntie Dawn IS Greenwich Village."'

Powell may exaggerate, but her unspoken retort was not an overstatement. Late in her life, The New York Times Magazine published a picture of Powell in a local antiques store. Life magazine posed her in some Village coffeehouses for an article that never ran. And her books offer the most luminous portrayal of life downtown in the era between Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Stonewall uprising.

The Village has changed dramatically since Powell's death. Rents have skyrocketed. The Loews movie theater on Greenwich Avenue, the Women's House of Detention, the Brevoort Hotel and other landmarks are barely memories. Bohemia dispersed long ago to the East Village, Soho, Tribeca and beyond. Most catastrophically, the bookstores that once lined Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue have dwindled to a small fraction of their former number.

Still, thanks to preservation laws that did not exist in Powell's day, much of the neighborhood's physical character remains intact. Blocks of low-rise buildings let in lots of sky. West of Avenue of the Americas, the Manhattan grid remains happily scrambled. West Fourth Street still crosses West 10th Street. Most of the buildings Powell lived in still stand. And the place retains its image as a refuge from social conventions and constraints. Powell's novels and the city illuminate each other: the desire for refuge is a pivotal idea in her writing.

"There must be some place along the route, a halfway house in time where the runners may pause and ask themselves why they run, what is the prize and is it the prize they really want," Powell reflects in her novel "The Wicked Pavilion." "What became of Beauty? Where went Love? There must be havens where they may at least be remembered."

Greenwich Village offered Powell refuge but not security. Perhaps she didn't want that. She wasn't a stranger to comfort. From the early 1940s through the mid-'50s, she occupied a duplex in a doorman building on a good block of 10th Street, complete with a top-floor maid's room that she used as a writing studio.

But she was not one for putting down roots. Her diary is peppered with periodic descriptions of moves from one apartment to the next, and this nomadism corresponded to something in her temperament.

In 1937, she wrote in her diary: "Homes are bad places. Either they are so comfortable that no other place else could offer as much sheer convenience, yet psychic and family connections are such that you can never enjoy these comforts - this cozy study filled with invisible foes, interruptions, responsibilities, worry, hatred. Or else you have no comfortable place in your home to work and in spite of privacy and other ideal personal relations are unable to enjoy it."

She thought of herself as "a permanent visitor" in New York. "My Home Is Far Away," the title of one of her most autobiographical novels, conveyed a perpetual desire for displacement. To write, she would sometimes hole up at seaside hotels, like the Traymore in Atlantic City, N.J., or the Half Moon in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Summers were often spent in a tumbledown cottage on Long Island's North Shore.

Powell could be romantic about squalor. In "The Wicked Pavilion," she tracks one of her characters as he makes a nocturnal visit to a dilapidated house way out in Queens (she had College Point in mind) that he had shared years before with two pals who were seeking their private Bohemia, a simulation of Left Bank Paris. Here, isolated from worldly distractions, the trio devoted themselves to art.

Powell never lived in College Point, but a few years after the publication of this book she found herself virtually homeless. In 1958, when her building went co-op, Powell and her husband, Joseph Gousha, had to give up their apartment. Powell was in her early 60s. Her husband, an advertising executive, had recently retired. For two years, the couple lived in sublets and cheap hotels. Possessions went into King Arthur Express Storage. Mostly books, plus: "One hall desk, oak. Doll head in carton and dolls. Secretary desk. Three straight chairs. One large dirty rug. Three small dirty rugs."

When her husband became mortally ill, Powell found an airless flat with a deceptively impressive Fifth Avenue address. Later, with financial help from a friend, Powell moved into a penthouse apartment in a prewar high-rise on the corner of Christopher and Bleecker Streets. (I briefly sublet this place in the late 1970s, long before I'd heard of Dawn Powell.) The elegant reprise was short-lived. Two years after she moved in, Powell was interred in a mass grave on Hart Island, New York's potters field.

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