Here, Dawn Powell writes to her sister Phyllis about her hysterectomy (thirteen years before this letter) and her attempts to find employment. After time spent in and out of hospitals—due in part to disease and in part to the violent impulses of her mentally disabled son, Jojo—Powell made unenthusiastic efforts to find a job, eventually deciding that all she really wanted to do was write. Later, Powell would develop colon cancer, ultimately dying of the disease in 1965. Despite these trials, Powell always retained her dark humor—once naming a teratoma tumor that had developed in her chest “Terry Toma”. That humor is exemplified below.
Dearest Phyllis—
First, regarding Dry Hospital Skin, let me share my Egyptian beauty secrets of eternal youth. After years of Endocreme I was squeezed out when it zoomed to $5 a jar and took up a rare product called Pond’s Dry Skin Cream (75 cents). I was taken with an ad telling you to heat a spoonful and stuff on your puss after cleaning. Well sir, I think it’s great. Even on the hands. Also, it doesn’t smell. However, if your antennae are still sensitive you may be nauseated at a faint sniff of lanolin. If I had saved the 20 years’ worth of Endocreme expenditures I would not be the beauty I am today, perhaps, but I would have had more to put on the horses or gigolos or fine jewels or else enough for a rainy day if I’d saved enough water too.
It is 8 a.m. and I sit here in my bay window looking over at the New York Life skyscraper (midget skyscrapers) waiting for the toilers to get to their desks and start staring back at me. I couldn’t sleep because I have an appointment in two hours to see a man about a job—a role I haven’t played for some time. Do I come in with a curtsy or with a roar? Does he pay me or do I pay him? I have only a vague idea of what the job is as the publication doesn’t yet exist—and I’m sure the man who phoned me about it hasn’t any idea of what I do. So I don’t know whether to go in with a list of girls’ phone numbers for an Elks banquet or some samples of my upside-down cake. I did remember to get a haircut and shave and I shined my shoes and wiped the cat hairs off my suit. I am fairly sure I will be baffled right back here by noon.
My operation—hysterectomy due to cancer cells—was in 1946 and was not a complete one as I faded out in the middle and had to be transfused and oxygenated and then went into shock so the doctor stayed in my hospital room all night. (Isn’t that flattering?) So, to get the rest out, I had two or three months of daily radium treatments that wore me down and sickened me. I had felt marvelous after the operation so I was mad when I had to go to Mt. Sinai Hospital for a week and have a radium kind of operation. All this was particularly mean because Joe and everybody were bored by my being sick by that time. However, I will say it fixed me. The radiological doctor is dead now (of cancer) but here I am, Pond’s Creamed up the hilt (where the ovaries used to stand) and ready for employment—so cheers! Be of high heart! Or High Beust or something. Get high.
Love,
Dawn
From Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913-1965. Powell, Dawn, and Tim Page. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.