Dawn Powell on Happiness

Brilliant societal analysis from Dawn Powell (1896-1965).

What most people wanted was the happiness of having what other people wanted. Then they had brief moments of an inferior happiness when they only got what they themselves but nobody else wanted. This rather spoiled things.  Some people made mistakes in their opinion of what other people wanted, but if they didn’t  find out they managed to be happy , maybe wondering a little once in awhile what everybody wanted this for.  Others wasted so much time trying to have what other people wanted that they never knew they were perfectly happy without it. The biggest jolt in growing up was to discover that that you    didn’t like what others liked and they thought you were crazy to like what you liked.

I’d never heard of Powell till my book club read her book “My Home is Far Away“, from which this quote comes. (Thanks, Stacy, for suggesting it.) This is pretty much par for the course for Powell, who never gained the prominence many think she deserved during her lifetime, for as Gore Vidal wrote  –

For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion.

Powell was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio in 1896, but ran away from home at age 13 and lived most of her adult life in Greenwich Village, where she was part of the Bohemian scene that included EE Cummings and John Dos Passos. She published 16 novels, nine plays and numerous short stories, not a few of which were acerbic Manhattan-based comedies that have been called funnier than Dorothy Parker’s and virtually all of which were out of print when she died in 1965.  Powell was rescued posthumously from obscurity by Vidal and then music critic Tim Rice, who published her bio in 1998 but failed to sell her diaries in 2012 (although Columbia University eventually purchased them in March of this year). According to the Library of America, more of Powell’s books are now in publication than at any time in her life.

I plan on reading more.
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More on Dawn Powell

• Salon.com – How Dawn Powell Can Save Your Life
• Dawn Powell – Library of America Website on the author
• The New Yorker – Dawn Powells Masterful Gossip – Why Won’t it Sell?
• Good Reads – Dawn Powell quotes
• Gore Vidal – Dawn Powell, the American Writer

Pic – Dawn Powell, 1914. From Wikipedia