I was having drinks with an old friend last night (an architect, historian and filmmaker who has been kicking around NYC since the 80s) and told him that my literary love of life right now is Dawn Powell. His response: “Ah, it was only a matter of time. It takes a particular type of New Yorker to find her, but when you do, it feels vital.”
I then stumbled upon this old article from Salon about how reading Powell’s diaries can save a young person, and although no book can rip through its own pages to help the reader, Dawn’s words from the 1930s feel to me like a kindred spirit lived here long ago. It’s incredibly comforting. She often called her diary “Woggs.” One of my favorite excerpts follows. Find DP for yourself here.
[I was dreamily prophesying my future the other day for the girls.”In ten years from now,”Katherine said,”you’ll be left. You get all the men you can on the string and make them unhappy and pretty soon when you want a man you’ll be left. You are too flip altogether.”“Yes, I’ll be left,”I said slowly and with overwhelming conviction.”Ten years from now I will still be Dawn Sherman Powell—but girls, that name will be famous then. Ten years from now, I will have arrived.”And Woggs, I know it will be true. I never entertain the slightest fear of an obscure future. I’ll be before the public eye in some way—and you know it, too. I must make myself strong for the knocks that are to come, for no matter what you tell me—“you’ve had enough knocks, you’ll have happiness the rest of your life”—something in me says that life for me holds more knock than boys, and the blows will leave me crushed, stunned, wild-eyed and ready to die, while the joys will make me deliriously, wildly, gloriously happy. It’s the way I’m made, Woggs—that Irish strain in me, perhaps. Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.]
