Dawn Powell Transcript
[Louis Armstrong track]
Joe Richman [host]: Celebrity graves are some of the most beloved places in the country. Elvis Presley's burial site at Graceland draws more than a half million fans every year. Fans leave red kisses on Marilyn Monroe's headstone in Los Angeles. And jazz lovers trek to Flushing, Queens to drape Mardi Gras beads on the grave of Louis Armstrong
But there aren't many celebrities buried at hart island
This is The Unmarked Graveyard. I'm Joe Richman of Radio Diaries, and each week we're untangling mysteries from America's largest public cemetery.
[montage of voices]
Neil Harris was last seen in Inwood, New York on December 12th.
So many questions, man. So many questions.
You can't help but wonder what her life has been.
I never went back and I never looked for him again.
Joe Richman [host]: On Hart Island, there are no names on headstones, no plaques, just white posts with numbers on them. Each one marks a trench containing about 150 coffins, and buried in one of those graves is a woman that Ernest Hemingway once called his favorite living writer. Today, episode five, the story of how a well-known writer's books and body disappeared.
TV Host [archival]: Mutual presents "Author! Author!" Now we'd like you to meet our guest author for tonight, the playwright, novelist, and author of Happy Island, Ms. Dawn Powell.
[applause in the archival]
Tim Page: Dawn Powell looked on society and she wrote it up. She made fun of millionaires and communists. She was a very smart, tough, sarcastic woman who put all of that into her books.
Dawn Powell [archival]: When they got back there, you see, he had opened up and there was a tearoom, and it was dinnertime, and they had to have the regular blue plate. [laughter]
Fran Lebowitz: She was a truth teller. Women who pointed things out, women who observed things, women who told the truth, those kind of women scare men.
Tim Page: I do think there will come a time when people will realize that she's one of America's greatest writers.
TV Host [archival]: Well, Ms. Powell, thank you for joining us this evening.
Tim Page: But after she died, Dawn Powell was really kind of forgotten.
[applause fades out]
Vicki: My name is Vicki and Dawn Powell is my great aunt.
When I was a teenager, I read My Home Is Far Away, which is about her childhood growing up in Mount Gilead, Ohio. When she was seven years old, her mother died and she had to live with a stepmother who was very unkind.
Dawn had a secret hiding place for her stories that she wrote, and the stepmother burned her stories. So Dawn went to college and then moved to New York and really never came back.
[jazz music]
Archival: Greenwich Village is recognized as being the center of art and letters in America.
[archival fades under]
Tim Page: Dawn Powell arrived in Greenwich Village in 1918. My name is Tim Page, and I wrote Dawn Powell: A Biography.
Fran Lebowitz: My name is Fran Lebowitz. I'm a writer. You know, she came from nowhere. She was no one. All right? But she knew that she was smart enough, good enough to be very good in New York, which is the most competitive place in the world.
Tim Page: She met people like Dorothy Parker and Fitzgerald. She knew all of the famous writers. She was very funny, and people liked that, and she liked to drink, so she was out at taverns a lot of the evening, sleeping around and not caring what other people thought.
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: Had best party, had new dress, and was very drunk. Met Floyd Dell at dinner.
Tim Page: She started keeping a diary. It touches on her friends. It touches on sights she saw in New York, and the whole city comes alive.
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: I contend that a writer's business is minding other people's business.
Tim Page: She wrote for The New Yorker and places like The Saturday Review and Esquire Magazine, and she wrote for any place that would pay her.
[jazz music]
But then she started writing novels about New York, funny books.
Fran Lebowitz: She had contempt for the rich. She had contempt for any kind of falsity.
Tim Page: She's a satirist. She basically thought human beings were silly and frivolous, but she loved them, you know?
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: Nowadays, men want a woman to work, but not to be too good at her job.
Why couldn't the rich mind their own business, invite each other to dinner, and feast on each other's fruity conversation?
Men use the term career woman to indicate a girl who made more than he did, and who was unforgivably good at her job when he was not able to hold one.
Fran Lebowitz: Does that seem to you like it couldn't have been written yesterday?
Dawn Powell was incredibly observant. That is the thing that she succeeded at.
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: By this time next year, I will have a fortune, have cut the throats of my best friends, have kicked my inferiors in the pants, and to be loved and respected by all. Perhaps I will be considered a real artist, a positive dreamer, a genius.
[music fades]
Tim Page: Dawn Powell's personal life was not easy. She had one child. Today, he would be diagnosed as autistic. He got sent to mental hospitals and nursing homes.
Vicki: That was always a sadness, overall sadness, that it was her only son and he needed a lot of care.
Tim Page: She saw life as a tough business, as a very tough business.All the very famous women writers were usually ending their stories with a man and a woman falling in love and living happily thereafter. Dawn had seen enough of life to realize, well, sometimes that's the case, but it's not what usually happens in the world. And so that's the way she wrote.
Fran Lebowitz: But that is not appealing to many people, especially to the critics.
Reviewers were really powerful, but she was not beloved by many people in that world. Like Edmund Wilson, a man, by the way, with the nickname Bunny.
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: If Bunny's review had been offset by a powerful, favorable one, the book would have gotten off. It is very discouraging to have someone who actually has told me I'm equal to Sinclair Lewis at his best, do me so much genuine damage.
I have enough damage done me already merely by the desire to write and my pleasure in people and strange angles of life.
[piano music]
Tim Page: Her last novel, The Golden Spur, was published in 1962, but at this point she was really starting to get sick.
Vicki: We knew that Dawn was not doing well health-wise. My grandmother Phyllis told me that she had trouble eating and she was losing a lot of weight.
[music ends]
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: Letter to Phyllis Powell, March 14, 1964.
Dear Phyllis, I am really fascinated by the aging process, even if the victim is me.
Somebody told me humans age like trees. Almost overnight, teeth and hair and all age, and you are 50, then with a big clank like a rusty chain, you're 60, and so on. Anyway, they tell me trees do this too. The ring of the age cycle on the trunk shows up the same way, suddenly. Love, Dawn
Vicki: We went to New York City and visited her. It was in 1964, and I was in high school then. I had a feeling my grandmother thought she'd never see her again after that visit, which is pretty much what happened.
Tim Page: It was intestinal cancer. She just shrunk down to less than 100 pounds. She died in St. Luke's Hospital November 14th, 1965.
After she died, a lot of her books went out of print, and so she was pretty much forgotten. She was so unknown that you would go into a bookstore and you'd ask, "Do you have any Dawn Powell?" And they said, "I've never even heard of Donald Powell." She was just kind of lost. But then in 1987, Gore Vidal published an article about her in the New York Review of Books.
Gore Vidal (actor reading review: In her lifetime, Powell should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald. The fact is that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit deployed by a woman is a brutal assault upon nature, that is, man.
Tim Page: When Gore wrote this article, a lot of people got interested.
Fran Lebowitz: I never heard of her until Gore wrote that piece, and I bought whatever books there were, and I kept telling people this, "You have to read this. Your life will be better for reading this."
Tim Page: The last years of her life, Dawn wanted her body donated to science, so it was claimed by Cornell Medical Center. Five years after she died, the hospital had a box of some of her remains left, and they talked to her executor, and she wrote back something saying, "We do not wish to claim this. You can do with it what you want."
So in any event, in 1970, whatever was left of Dawn was buried out in Hart Island. The family knew nothing about this.
Vicki: My mom told me it was a potter's field, and it was just a place where people were buried who didn't have any money or no family to take care of them. My grandparents would've certainly found a better resting place for her than where she was buried.
[piano music]
Tim Page: She is, for better or worse, on Hart Island forever.
Fran Lebowitz: There are people who say, "I want this when I die. This is where I want to be buried. This is the kind of gravestone I want." I think Dawn Powell was too smart and realistic to care about this. I don't think she would've cared. I just don't.
Tim Page: I mean, in a weird way, she might've been pleased in a funny way that the city of New York paid for her burial. She loved New York. She told the truth about New York, and I'm not sure she'd want to be anywhere else.
Dawn Powell [actor reading diary entries]: There is really one city for everyone, just as there is one major love. New York is my city because I have an investment I can always draw on, a bottomless investment of building up an idea of New York, so no matter what happens here, I have the rock of my dreams of it, that nothing can destroy.
[piano ends]
Joe Richman [host]: In the 1970s, a fire on Hart Island destroyed many of the cemetery's burial records, likely including Dawn Powell's. So today, no one knows exactly where on the island she's buried. In recent years, Dawn Powell has developed a cult-like following. Nine of her novels are back in print, and a volume of her diaries and letters have been published.
A few celebrities like Julia Roberts have tried turning her books into films, and she's even gotten a shout-out on Gilmore Girls. You can read more about Powell's life in Tim Page's book, Dawn Powell: A Biography.
Thanks to actress Tessa Flannery for being the voice of Dawn Powell in our story. Tom Cole was Gore Vidal. Our story was produced by Mycah Hazel. Our team also includes Nellie Gilles, Alissa Escarce, Lena Engelstein, and myself. Our editors are Deborah George and Ben Shapiro.Sound mixing also by Ben Shapiro. Music in this episode was by Hank Jones and Fletcher Henderson. We couldn't make this series without the help of Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project. Visit hartisland.net to learn more. And thanks to our broadcast partner, NPR's All Things Considered.
Joe Richman: We're proud members of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent creator-owned listener-supported podcasts.
You can hear them all at radiotopia.fm. Radio Diaries has support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, and from listeners like you.
Coming up on the Unmarked Graveyard
Angel Irizarry: There was this tall, dark gentleman standing at the door. He looked like my dad, close to a spitting image. And I have never seen you before. You know, who is this guy? And my dad was like, that's your Uncle Cesar. But after that, I never seen him again.
Joe Richman: I'm Joe Richman of Radio Diaries.
See you next week. Radiotopia. From PRX.
