The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965

"Dawn Powell was completely unknown to me until the late 1980s, when Gore Vidal – who knew her when she was old and he was young – wrote an essay about her for The New York Review of Books . Then a tiny, tiny press started republishing her. There is no other writer I could recommend more heartily than her. If you had asked me to choose New York novels, I would have had a very rough time choosing among hers. They are spectacularly good. She wrote two sets of books. One whole group of her novels is set in Ohio, where she’s from – they are also excellent. But the New York ones are funnier, they’re basically satires. You should read Dawn Powell’s novels and then read her diaries, or vice versa, it doesn’t really matter. But when you read her diaries you see what it really means to be a writer. She struggled her whole life for money. She’s constantly worrying about money, because she doesn’t have any. This is the condition of most writers. You could read the letters of James Joyce and you’d see this. And I can’t stress enough how good she was. It teaches a little lesson: You can be sensational and not succeed financially. In fact, you’re more likely not to succeed financially if you’re really good. The diaries are immensely rich – they give you a great picture of a certain sensibility and a certain part of New York. Powell overlaps in era with Dorothy Parker, but there is a difference in their sensibilities. Powell was more bohemian than Parker. She lived in the Village her entire New York life. Dorothy Parker was very connected to The New Yorker , which was in Midtown. Those writers were generally more successful financially. Dorothy Parker was depressed by nature. Dawn Powell tended towards optimism, even though she had a much worse life – a child who was severely autistic and plenty of problems with her husband. A way in which they were similar was there was an endless, unbelievable, shocking amount of drinking. As I said, they’re basically of the same era. If you read both of these books you’ll see that New York was at one time a million cities at once because there are so many different sensibilities at work. I certainly second that opinion. Density creates that dynamic. You don’t get that in Los Angeles, I don’t care who claims it. I don’t care how many rich people build museums in LA. To me, it’s not a city if people spend half their day in a car. I said directly to Michael Bloomberg, “You know what sitting around in bars and restaurants, talking and smoking and drinking, is called, Mike?” He said, “What?” I said, “It’s called the history of art.”"