'Curiosity'

Someone is forever rediscovering the novels of Dawn Powell. Just this week I reread My Home Is Far Away (1944), one of her “Ohio novels.” Here she describes children out after dark in the winter in a small town. I choose it because it is typical of Powell’s prose, not a self-conscious display, and typical of the way she projects herself imaginatively into the minds of children and notices the details they would notice: 

“Down the street they could see their house with all the lights on, downstairs and up, as if it was Christmas Eve. Night was the best time of all to be outdoors, they thought, especially in winter and in London Junction where the smell of train smoke mingled with the snowflecked air and tickled the nose. Darkness, snow, smoke and stars made a special London Junction smell, just as mittens and their wool mufflers drawn tightly up to their noses and moist from chewing had a fuzzy snowball taste.”

 

All of this seems like a memory to me, though I grew up not in Mount Gilead, Ohio, like Powell but a hundred miles to the northeast in a suburb of Cleveland, then the sixth-largest city in the country. Still, being outside in the dark and cold was a thrill, even a little dangerous, somehow a foretaste of being a grownup. In her diary for June 22, 1965, five months before her death at age sixty-eight, Powell writes:

 

“Most important thing for novelists is curiosity and how curious that so many of them lack it. They seem self-absorbed, family-absorbed, success-absorbed . . .

 

“The new writers disdain human curiosity; they wish only to explore and describe their own psyches; they are too egotistical and snobbish to interest themselves in neighbors. The urge to write now is no longer the love of story-telling or even the love of applause for a neat turn or dramatic twist. It is the urge to show off, the author as hero is a big sex success and leaves them gasping. The book’s drive is only the desire to strip the writer’s remembered woes and wrongs and show his superiority to the reader – not to communicate with him or to entertain.”

 

How often do we learn something from a contemporary novel or poem? When does fiction or poetry extend our knowledge of the world? When is a work of literature more than just another act of solipsism? The late Terry Teachout wrote in 1995:

 

“Dawn Powell was one of America’s best novelists, and if there is any justice—a proposition at which she would doubtless have laughed wildly—she will soon receive her due.”

 

[Terry’s “Far from Ohio: Dawn Powell” is collected in A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale University Press, 2004).]