Satire, as playwright George S. Kaufman once famously declared, is what closes on Saturday night. He might have said much the same thing about satiric novels. Portraiture confined to too small a social space and containing too much acerbic wit generally rings up disappointing sales, excites scant academic interest, and then slides down the memory hole a decade later. This is particularly true in America, where the tradition that makes possible British writers such as Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark never quite caught on.

Dawn Powell (1887–1965) is an instructive case in point. Although she churned out short stories, plays, magazine articles, and book reviews to keep a difficult domestic situation afloat (she was doubly saddled with an alcoholic husband and a mentally retarded son), Powell thought of herself principally as a novelist and, moreover, as a novelist of a very particular sort: “In my satire … I merely add a dimension to a character, a dimension which gives the person substance and life but which readers often mistake for malice.” Readers, in short, got her wrong—not only failing to see the uncompromising realism that went into her depictions of Manhattan café life, but also resisting Powell’s efforts to capture people as they actually are. If she had been content to poke good-natured fun at the antics of the very rich or the very poor, her work might have fared better, but she could not resist the impulse to point out that “the pleasures of the middle class are a little ridiculous, too.” Life had turned Powell into a tough cookie, one who saw others with an unblinkered eye.

The same thing, alas, cannot be said when her rich sense of curiosity turned itself inward. One diary entry after another tries desperately to explain why it is that success singles out others (Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter) and continues to give her the cold shoulder. If, as Gore Vidal rightly points out, Petronius’s Satyricon was Powell’s favorite book and a lively emblem for her fictive imagination, it is the image of Sisyphus, continually pushing his rock up an unyielding slope, that functions as the Rosetta stone of the diary:  

December 31 [1940]: Depressing year but not as depressing as the thought of a new one, and the weariness of perpetually beginning at the bottom. From the appalling lack of momentum in my progress I gather I must have originally started several ladders below bottom and have not yet struck bottom rung. There is an effort, certainly, for those who must keep their ball rolling uphill, but that is nothing compared to the ever-increasing work for us whose efforts keep nothing going up, merely keep the ball from crushing us in its downward roll. Every book, every play, every story, seems to have less chance than ever, and the factor of luck seems to have nothing to do with me—merely work to no avail.

Granted, Powell is hardly the first diarist to unload a cri de coeur, but likening her condition to that of Sisyphus strikes me as far more self-pitying than existentially heroic. Friends, including the likes of Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, chalked up her dubious status as an important but much neglected writer to her lack of self-promotion. As they would have it, with the right sort of connections (say, at The New Yorker, where she occasionally published but never became part of the in-crowd) and a bit of judicious horn-tooting, she might well have unseated Dorothy Parker as the wickedest wit in town. Others urged her to pay more attention to the market place, either by way of adding consummated sex to her novels (odd advice, indeed, for a writer who refused to spell out the word fuck, even in diary entries) or by aligning herself more directly with the fashionable movements of the day. To her credit (and enduring neglect), however, neither the crassly commercial nor the avant-garde seemed to be in her writerly cards. During the 1930s, when one’s leftist credentials mattered greatly, Powell remained, of all things, a lifelong Republican; and when the literati might have done her some good, she held their feet to the fire rather than sucking up.

Three decades after her death, the beat goes on. On the face of it, Dawn Powell ought to be exactly the sort of writer that feminist critics love to rescue from an undeserved obscurity. After all, she pushed her novels up the slopes of Parnassus at a time when serious women writers were either dismissed out of hand or at best lightly regarded; and then there is the whole ugly business of an abused Ohio childhood, her marriage to a drunken ne’er-do-well, the heart-cracking story of a son in and out of mental institutions—in short, the whole predictable scenario of everything that militates against a woman writer having a brilliant career.

The difficulty is that while some parts fit, many others decidedly do not. Consider, for example, these remarks from a diary entry of 1952—well before Betty Friedan brought us the Good News of contemporary feminism:

The way world insists woman is primarily woman—housekeeper, mama, cookie-maker. Male doctors, lawyers, writers, artists continue to wear their robes even in swimming and are not asked to do a full day as father, husband, host, handyman… . Women have never been more enslaved—by their own fictions about how they handle their sick-life, how politely they are about their work. A novel could be written like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Far more representative, however, are her ruminations about why women turn out to be such a bother: “Female friends are the greatest hazard in a working woman’s life for they cannot be casual. Talk about men being little boys growed up—women are little girls not growed up or little girls are old ladies shrunk up.” In brief, this is not the sort of writer who can be depended on to get all the words to “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” right.

Powell had a very different explanation, blaming her sputtering career on the fact that her first novel, Wither (1925), was a flop. Crawling out of that deep hole wound up being something of a mug’s game (this when her career seemed as futile as that of Sisyphus). Small wonder, then, that she kept a sharp eye on luckier writers who made their debuts to rave reviews and ongoing, often unmerited attention; or that she was savage in her witty denunciations (one can only imagine what she would make of a contemporary novelist such as Jay McInerney), and nearly inconsolable in her envy.

Yet, despite all the handwringing, Powell’s motto remained “Allez-oop.” An entry dripping with despair is usually followed by the upbeat, especially if an idea for a novel has struck her and she looks forward to pushing it along in thirty to forty page increments. Still, what Powell observed about Virginia Woolf’s diaries largely holds true for her own: “Entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy.” The result is a thick tome that includes much that is tedious (we learn more than we probably ever wanted to know about Powell’s tangled finances, her fluctuating weight, and a history of illnesses both real and imagined), but also much that gives us a taste and feel of the demimonde she chronicled in her novels. Powell firmly believed that “a writer’s business is minding other people’s business.” For her, this was the “oxygen” (a term she variously applied to laughter, privacy, and most important of all, to writing itself) that made life possible.

Powell was an equal-opportunity drinking companion—as comfortable with Communists as she was with fat cats—and so it is hardly surprising that many of the best vignettes take place in the Greenwich Village watering holes that figure so prominently in her fiction. The most memorable of these anecdotes usually revolve around Coburn Gilman, her drinking buddy, confidant, and intimate friend. But those hoping that Powell’s diaries will come clean about the long suspected ménage à trois with her elusive husband, Joseph Gousha, and “Coby” will be disappointed, for the diary keeps its silence on this point. What Powell gives us, instead, are witty moments like the following: “Coby spent the evening at the Player’s Club. I asked him if the members did much drinking and he said, well, yes, but real drunkenness is frowned on, so everybody sits there frowning at each other.”

True enough, Dawn Powell could toss off bons mots with the best of them (“Would be at end of rope,” she once noted, “if could afford rope. Let’s say am at end of thread”), and she was particularly good at puncturing inflated egos (Frieda Lawrence, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway—to say nothing of the mere mortals who counted themselves as “friends”—find themselves on the receiving end of well-aimed barbs); but what finally matters, and what makes Powell’s diaries valuable, are her entries about writing itself. When she insists that the “most important thing for a novelist is curiosity and how curious that so many of them lack it,” one shudders to think what she would make of the self-absorbed practitioners in the school of moi.

The question, of course, is whether Dawn Powell’s readership will move from a small cult to a mainstream phenomenon. Gore Vidal’s 1987 reappraisal in the pages of The New York Review of Books boosted her stock enormously, not only causing eight of her novels to be reissued, but also setting the stage for this handsome edition of her diaries. The editor of the diaries, Tim Page, we are told, is now hard at work on a biography. What might Powell herself think of all this? My hunch is that she is probably laughing sardonically in whatever corner of heaven (or circle of hell) writers are consigned to … and also that she will be eternally grateful.