dawn powell.

"satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."

excerpt from My Home is Far Away

This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying...

excerpt from Turn, Magic Wheel

Some fine day I'll have to pay, Dennis thought, you can't sacrifice everything in life to curiosity. For that was the demon behind his every deed, the reason for his kindness to beggars, organ-grinders, old ladies, and little children, his urgent need to know what they were knowing, see, hear, feel what they were sensing, for a brief moment to be them. It was the motivating vice of his career, the whole horrid reason for his writing, and some day he warned himself he must pay for this barter in souls.

Always as he emerged late in the afternoon from a long siege of writing, depressed by fatigue, he was accustomed to flagellate himself with reproaches and self-inquiry. Why had he come to New York, why had he chosen this career? though to tell the truth he could not remember having made any choice, he just seemed to have written. But if a Muse he must have, he reflected, why not the Muse of Military Life, or better the Muse of Advertising? . . . Actually I should have gone out to South Bend, he decided, into my uncle's shoe factory and made a big name for myself in the local lodges; but there again was the drawback. Did my uncle invite me? No. He said, "You'd be no good in my business, Denny. Here's a hundred dollars to go some place way off." "Thank you, uncle," I should have said briskly, "I prefer to take over the factory and with the little invention I have been working on all these years for combination shoe-stocking-and-garter I propose to make the Orphen shoe known the world over. Allow me, uncle," I should have said, "to put your business on its feet or at least on its back." Then I would have married Alice or was it Emma who lived next door? We would have had a cottage at a respectable Wisconsin lake in summer and winter fixed up the basement with chintz and old furnaces to be a boys' den. I would have satisfied both my intellect and my ego by sitting up nights reading thick books Alice couldn't possibly understand, and for my cosmopolitan urge I could have winked at stock company actresses. Even if it was Emma and not Alice I should have done that. But no, I am a born busybody. Curiosity is my Muse, lashing me thousands of miles across land and sea to study a tragic face at a bus window, not for humanity's sake but for the answer's sake. Have I no finer feelings, he begged his stern inquisitor, look what a loyal friend I have been to Effie Callingham, for instance; was there ever a truer friend? . . .

The answer to this query was not gratifying for his speculations on Effie, her emotions, her past, her future, had resulted in his latest book, so that if this was loyalty it worked hand in glove with his major vice. Face it, then, curiosity was the basis for the compulsion to write, this burning obsession to know and tell the things other people are knowing. Unbearable not to know the answers. Behind those blank faces on the subway, what? In the spiritualist parlor on Seventy-third and Amsterdam what casual guess sums up this one, what blind prophecy outlines another's future; in the reading rooms of the Forty-second Street Library countless persons absorbed in books (Why absorbed? What do they read? Why do they read it?) look up and away; what sentence stirred what memories so that interlacing thoughts float through glass and steel to faraway, to places you will never know, dwell familiarly on faces you will never see. At the Dolly Raoul Studio of Stage Dancing, Inc., Acrobatic, Ballet, Toe, Ballroom, Tap, Radio, Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, what does the little peroxide Jewess leaning out the window feel or know, what perhaps beautiful plan is shaping in her little head for a break from Avenue A to Carnegie Hall? On paper you can fill in the answers, be these persons, transfer your own pain into theirs, remember what they remember, long for what they desire. Spread out in type, detail added to detail, invention added to fact, the figure whole emerges; invisibly you creep inside, you are at last the Stranger.

excerpt from The Wicked Pavilion

There were people, and Dalzell was one of them, who were born café people, claustrophobes unable to endure a definite place or plan. The café was a sort of union station where they might loiter, missing trains and boats as they liked, postponing the final decision to go anyplace or do anything until there was no longer need for decision. One came here because one couldn't decide where to dine, whom to telephone, what to do. At least one had not yet committed oneself to one parlor or one group for the evening; the door of freedom was still open. One might be lonely, frustrated or heartbroken, but at least one wasn't sewed up. Someone barely known might come into the café bringing marvelous strangers from Rome, London, Hollywood, anyplace at all, and one joined forces, went places after the café closed that one had never heard of before and never would again, talked strange talk, perhaps kissed strange lips to be forgotten next day. Here was haven for those who craved privacy in the midst of sociability, for those whose hearts sank with fear as the door of a charming home (their own or anyone's) closed them in with a known intimate little group; here might be the chance companion for the lonely one who shuddered at the fixed engagement, ever dodging the little red book as a trap for the unwary. Here, in this café, were blessed doors strategically placed so that flight was always possible at first glimpse of an undesired friend or foe's approach. Here was procrastinator's paradise, the spot for homehaters to hang their hats, here was the stationary cruise ship into which the hunted family man might leap without passport or visa. Here in the Julien it was possible to maintain heavenly anonymity if one chose, here was the spot where nothing beyond good behavior was expected of one, here was safety from the final decision, but since the doors closed at midnight sharply, a bare two hours from now, Dalzell began wondering from where his solution would come. At this very moment in the dining room there might be someone he had known and forgotten years ago, now risen to great consequence in the world, and this person would pause at the café entrance to cry out, "Dalzell Sloane, as I live and breathe, the very person I'm looking for!" Or a theatre party, dropping in at the last minute for a nightcap, would carry him off to someone's apartment for midnight music, and one o'clock would pass, two o'clock, three o'clock—he would have missed the train, not the first time his future had been determined by negatives. But then what about tomorrow? Ah well, even if nothing else would be accomplished, at least he would have closed a door.