20 June (1945): Dawn Powell to Maxwell Perkins

Below, Dawn Powell writes to her editor, Maxwell Perkins, of her travels through her home state of Ohio. She describes it as “walking into My Home is Far Away,” her most recently published novel in which she tried to “show the basic illusions and innocence that become fruit for future satire.” She also details her complicated family history and the “curiously prim cruelties” of a stepmother who had, years before, burned Powell’s written stories, causing Powell to take the thirty cents she had earned in berry picking and run away.

35 East Ninth Street

June 20, 1945

Dear Max:

I had a strange time in Ohio, strange because so much of it turned out to be walking into My Home Is Far Away. First, both my sisters met me with a car and that unlimited gas that the middlewesterners always seem to wangle, and we rode around all week. In Shelby, (the London Junction) we found that the house we had lived in and where our mother had died in 1903 was now an antique store, so we wandered around there, looking out the same little windows, peeking through the register in the room where she had died, and buying odd items. I had the creeps, the more so for having so recently reconstructed the whole place. Then we went to Mt. Gilead, our birthplace, where the very hotel our father once worked in is now run by our cousins. This was all like a dream for nothing had changed in the town, and it was queer sitting in the office he had once sat in and sitting in the spacious old living quarters we had visited as very small children, finding them exactly as we remembered them, even though I was barely four at the time and expected to find everything much smaller in reality.

I asked very cautiously about my stepmother, now still living in Oberlin, and for the first time heard from my sisters a most amazing story that of course I could never use. When I ran away (at the age of 12) I left my younger sister Phyllis there who was thrashed regularly every day, she told me, but was ashamed to ever tell anyone. When she was only 11 she had to stay up all night with a premature baby our stepmother had given birth to. The stepmother (named Sabra, incidentally) had lost it when it was six months developed and it weighed only two pounds and never opened its eyes, was kept in a tiny sewing basket in the kitchen and died after a week. Sabra was sick and never allowed downstairs to see it, so the baby died and was buried without her seeing it.

Then, Phyllis said, a few weeks later she heard a scream and found Papa wresting a gun away from Sabra who was trying to kill herself, with boxes of mementos laid out for all of her own relatives. Later Phyllis was told to stay out of school and drive with Papa and Sabra to the graveyard. (The baby had been dead a month.) Sabra unlocked the cabinet where the doll we were never allowed to play with was kept, and took the pink silk dress off of the doll. Then the grisly three drove to the cemetery, waited till no one was looking, and Sabra made Papa dig up the baby’s grave and put the doll dress on it for a shroud. Then Phyllis was driven back to school and dropped at the schoolhouse to go back in the geography class of the fifth grade with the other children. Stepmother was satisfied, for at least the baby she had never seen had a shroud.

Oddly enough, as my sisters and I pieced together a number of theories about her, the baby’s death was not really responsible for her curious prim cruelties, for she had been that way from the first. And she continued the secret thrashings of Phyllis daily, knowing Phyllis was afraid to tell the neighbors or Papa, until the neighbors did find out and gave Phyllis carfare to run away when she too was 12. Phyllis is soft and forgiving and still sees her but always comes away with some fresh evidence of her psychopathic cruelty. Phyllis is an artist, won three first prizes in the north Ohio art show in Canton this year, makes her own bread, and has raised three handsome daughters.

Everybody worked in war plants, everybody knew everything about the war as translated by letters from whatever husband or son they had there, everybody had storerooms filled with flour, sugar, canned goods, etc., and lived in desperate fear of being obliged to do without whatever they were were used to—the necessities there being largely hot biscuits, fudge pie, coconut cake, mashed potatoes. In Cleveland, of course, menus were more modern and elastic. There my brother-in-law, who has two Packards and a Chevrolet for his family, and gas for fifty, talked gloomily of being ruined by the government, though twenty years ago he made twenty dollars a week. To mention Roosevelt is to admit colored blood so no one does. I had forgotten how rich Cleveland people are, the miles and miles of private homes as big as our public libraries, the beautiful country clubs, the glorification of material conveniences, the vast invincible Magazine Public that in New York we can thank God we forget. I had the impression that at last I had made good by having a story (good or bad didn’t matter) printed free of charge in Collier’s. No wonder they are firm in the belief that Louis Bromfield is America’s leading writer, recognized from coast to coast as such, and Dos Passos and Hemingway are some cranks that had pieces in Esquire once, and Culture meant traveling first class, cases of Scotch instead of bottles of rye, children (dumb or bright) in private schools, and a Friend who’s been Abroad to settle all fine points.

I was glad to get my background into a fluid state again, as the new book had come out in such rigid form that I didn’t see how to recast it. I caught the language again quickly and the familiar combination of open hearts and closed minds that represents so much of the country except New York, where we have closed hearts first, and minds so open that carrier pigeons can fly straight through without leaving a message. Having been reminded again that New York is not part of America, I still feel safer here—at least we can write or paint here without the Woman’s Home Companion breathing on our necks.

Best,

Dawn

From Selected Letters of Dawn Powell 1913-1965. Edited by Tim Page. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999. pp.131-2.

FURTHER READING