I've never read Dawn Powell before. I had two volumes of her novels, in gorgeous green-cloth Library of America editions, sitting on a shelf for a decade or two - long enough ago that I've never mentioned her on this blog at all. She was a novelist of the interwar and post-war era, one of the many who came from somewhere else (Ohio, in her case) to New York and wrote largely about New York. She had a cutting tongue and an unflinching eye, two things I've always admired in writers; I thought I wanted to read her works for a long time, and I finally did.
The Locusts Have No King is her 1948 novel, considered one of her best and most characteristic. (I did a little research, weighing this one against A Time to Be Born and finally choosing Locust because I found its kaleidoscopic first paragraph meatier.)
In the cliché of literary fiction, it's the story of one affair: married playwright Lyle Gaynor, female despite the confusing name, has taken up quietly with literary essayist Frederick Olliver. Most of the main plot of the novel, such as it is - it's more a swirling social satire than a straightforwardly plotted novel - is about how they separate for a while but eventually come back together.
(In a way, it feels like the relationship version of that old plot, where a bad character reforms and a good character goes to hell, and they pass each other along the way - except that Lyle and Frederick somewhat switch social circles and outlooks on life for a while. They're both bad or both good, I suppose - Powell doesn't really do absolutes like that.)
We are not meant to sympathize with Lyle's husband and collaborator Alan, who is cruel and obnoxious to her in the few scenes where we see him. He's an invalid - some kind of leg injury put him in a wheelchair, years before, and turned him from an actor/director into the weak link in the playwriting Gaynor marriage - though that does make him an echo of Lady Chatterly's Sir Clifford, which I have to assume is on purpose. (Alan is assumed to be incapable of seduction, by Lyle as by everyone else, though that turns out, very late in the novel, not to be true.)
We are meant to like Lyle and Frederick equally: she's smart and hard-working, social but not snobbish. He's a bit of a stuffed shirt, but in an endearing way - devoted to doing his work well and, as the novel begins, just coming up for air after finishing a major work that is described very vaguely and never even given a title. (It seems to be non-fiction of some kind, maybe some kind of wide-range literary criticism shading into social history.)
So they have been having an affair, which is mostly secret. In what I think may be a typical piece of Powell irony, rumors only start to circulate about the two of them after they're not longer seeing each other. They have some tension, mostly involving their social sets - Lyle is plugged into a fairly commercial literary/high society/Broadway world, which Frederick claims to detest. Frederick in turn is central in a more downtown, "authentic" literary world anchored by Edwin Stalk and the small Swan magazine.
Lyle seems to be happy in the affair; Frederick, though, suffers pains in Lyle's world, where he has to spend a lot of time slightly distanced from her:
But being too reasonable to wish for complete fulfilment did not keep the denial from corroding inside you, until the constant analysis bared a torturing sense of injustice. Even in this resentful mood he could not stay away from her, must follow her to any party, be introduced again and again to people interested only in flamboyant success, be conscious of his inadequate tailoring, lack of small talk and find himself shamed by a fretful desire for millions merely to avoid adolescent humiliation. (p. 253 in Novels 1944-1962)
But Frederick has two big upheavals in his life: second, his work at the publishing house run by Benedick Strafford - formerly mostly ceremonial, as an editorial advisor to the list - is increased when he's given the crude but popular magazine Haw, just bought by Strafford's, to edit. And, first, he meets Dodo Brennan, a much younger woman just arrived in New York and on the hunt for men. She is demanding and coquettish and frankly horrible in a lot of ways, but Frederick is weirdly fascinated - perhaps because they met in a bar and no one in this novel thinks straight when drunk, and they're drinking all the time - so Frederick ends up taking up with Dodo.
(This is not exclusive. I don't think there's a single relationship in the novel that is within spitting distance of exclusive. Everyone is obsessed with someone else, except for the few who are obsessed with Art or Money. And probably them, too, come to think of it.)
Frederick starts avoiding Lyle, and things spin from there. At the same time, the various complications surrounding Frederick's roommate Murray Cahill also pile up, circling the same parties and dinners and bars and people as Lyle and Frederick's sets. Murray's ex-wife Gerda hits town, looking to rekindle things just as he has a young painter, Judy Dahl, more-or-less living in their apartment and has mostly disentangled himself from two other women, Caroline and Lorna, one of whom is Gerda's old best friend and the other one lives next door. (And Caroline and Lorna are also close friends, for most of the novel.)
There are a lot of characters and a lot of scenes and a lot of great sentences - I dog-eared five quotes, when I usually try to limit myself to two - but not a clear obvious plot. This is a book about people who keep getting involved - professionally, romantically, randomly - with each other, with positive and negative changes to their lives along the way. It all rolls out over what seems to be more than a year, though the timeline is deliberately vague.
I should also mention that these people don't necessarily like each other - even the ones having affairs seem, often, to have more hate than love. And, as a group, they have deep wells of scorn and dislike. For one example:
Both were astonished to discover themselves linked in the warmest friendship by mutual dislike of their host. To Strafford, his first visit to the Beckley home was a needling reminder of his own inadequacies in business. … Frederick's feelings were similar; in Strafford he saw the only person here besides Lyle who remembered his name and respected (without quite understanding) his talents. (p.261 in Novels 1944-1962)
It's a book of thoughts and gossip and people's conceptions of themselves and each other, a book set in and around the literary world in its various incarnations - small magazine, commercial publishing house, Broadway, the improving lecture series - that is quite happy to satirize and disparage every single one of those worlds. (But quietly, in an undertone, so that you could miss the blade if you're not paying attention.)
I enjoyed it, and found the characters true and well-drawn, even if I felt they were left at a distance. The writing is wonderful, full of amusing thoughts and deep insights and quirky takes. It's not a novel for everyone - I think Powell is a novelist you have to want to read; you need to be interested in that kind of satire and literary polish - but it's deep and capacious for a relatively short book.
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