A Time to Be Born

********** Dawn Powell, Ohioan by birth, sophisticated Manhattanite by choice, is one of America's biggest cultural hang-fires. This unfortunately still-too-little known writer who died in 1962 deserves a far wider audience; pity that the publishing of most of her novels in a two-volume set by the Library of America in 2001 didn't put her in the cultural Panetheon where she belongs. "A Time to be Born" is a good starter piece. Powell's novels tend to break into two camps--sentimental and sharp--and this 1941 novel, set among Manhattan's cultural elite just before World War II broke out in 1939--is a great introduction to the latter, more satirical work. The core of the plot deals with the curious relationship between two women who grew up in the same fictional Ohio small town. Amanda Keeler Evans is a thinly disguised version of Clare Booth Luce (she who married TIME magazine's publisher and quickly became a nationally known journalist, not to be confused with Claire Luce, author of the bee-witchy movie classic THE WOMEN). Amanda is more than happy to let her provincial Midwestern past lie in the past but, though a mutual hometown acquaintance, plays Lady Bountiful to her naive high-school acquaintance Vicky Haven, who is about to move to the Big Apple. Amanda secures Vicky an entry-level job at a publishing house with her big-time bullying and clout. Although she and Vicky are definitely not of the same social set, she wants to keep Vicky close--we suspect that in her cynicism Amanda is so nice to Vicky as a matter of spin control; she doesn't want Vicky blabbing too intimately about their hick background. Well, it couldn't happen to a nicer bully: Amanda's every good deed never goes unpunished. Amanda, on the sly, rents a studio apartment for a trysting place with her twentysomething lover, but tries to justify this pied-a-terre to her vapid husband by saying she rented it for Vicky so that her pseudo-protegee could have a ready-made place to hang her hat upon arrival in the Big City--while Amanda cunningly retains daytime-hours occupancy privilege for her "work." During a routine dinner party, to which Vicky has been invited as a matter of protocol, Vicky meets Amanda's lover (not knowing he is anything other than a professional contact); and eventually, to save her hide, Amanda is forced to offer Vicky the flat for real while keeping her right to its daytime use. When boyfriend drops by the flat Amanda rented for Vicky, Vicky wonders why he's so familiar with the place and assumes all Manhattan studio apartments follow a common scheme . . . Dawn Powell is truly an American original but a few comparative metaphors won't hurt. Think of her as a midcentury Jane Austen with a sharp, Dorothy Parkerish writing style and an appalling, almost Evelyn Waugh-type perspective on human greed and folly. All this makes A TIME TO BE BORN first-rate social comedy (not just routine satire), a great view into the protocol of tha

This magical novel was published in 1942. Unlike most of Dawn Powell's earlier novels, it sold well and went through several printings. Although Powell denied it, one of the major characters of the book, Amanda Keeler Evans, is based in part on and satirizes Claie Boothe Luce.These external details say little about the appeal of this novel.As with most of Dawn Powell's books, "A Time to be Born" talks about New York City and its effect on young men and women who meet their chances there from small towns in the Midwest. The book's two main characters, Amanda Keeler Evans and Vickie Haven, come to New York City under different circumstances and with different results after being girlhood friends in the town of Lakeville, Ohio. On the verge of WW II, Amanda has become a success by publishing a schmaltzy romantic novel and hobnobbing with the powerful under the guidance of her husband, Julian, a newspaper magnate. Amanda has married her way to success with Julian but with success will not touch much less sleep with him.Vicky Haven comes to New York at the peak of Amanda's success to escape the memory of a failed affair in which she has lost her love to her business partner. She is put up, begrudgingly, by Amanda who uses her pad to entertain the lover, Ken Sanders, that she jilted to marry Julian. Amanda takes the fancy pad for Vicky to have an excuse to have an affair with Ken on the side.The climax of the book occurs when Vicky decides to leave Amanda's fancy pad and lease an apartment of her own. No luxury this. It is a cold-water flat on the fourth floor of a dilapated building surrounded by warehouses and with a pet shop on the lower floor. But it is Vicky's and it is where her life begins. Powell writes: "She only wanted to be alone with her new house so definitely hers, because nobody, Amanda, Ethel, brother Ted, Eudora Brown, Ethel Carey, nobody would ever have selected it for her, and so it was the beginning of her own life." There is magic here, in life beginning anew, with self-affirmation and choice, even if, and especially if in Powell, the outcome is uncertain and the scene itself is partially ironic.In addition to the theme of having one's own start at life, the book paints a memorable picture of New York on the eve of WW II. The book juxtaposes the lives of the rich, famous and powerful -- their self-importance, their officiousness, their concern for the weighty matters of peace and war -- with the lives of the "little people" who, as Powell describes them, "can only think that they are hungry, they haven't eaten, they have no money, the have lost their babies, their loves, their homes, and their sons mock them from prisons and insane asylums, so that rain or sun or snow or battles cannot stir their selfish personal absorption.". The little people have little to do with the fate of nations. Specifically in the book, Vicky is concerned not with affairs of state or with the rich and famous. She is concerned with love --

Despite its awkward title, Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born is, after Washington Irving's A Knickerbocker's History of New York, the funniest book in American literature. The story of the rise and fall of ruthless self-promoter, arch manipulator, and glamour girl Amanda Evans Keeler, the novel seamlessly propels the reader through its deliciously involving plot, dropping brisk, barbed, and piercing bombs of cutting humor all the way. Every other line in this New York City-based minefield is cause for bursts of healthy, uproarious laughter, as one character after another finds their egos and intentions rebuked and thwarted by fate in sardonically appropriate fashion. While mildly cynical about human nature, the novel's humor thankfully never collapses into cattiness or camp; though sometimes approaching the brittle artifice of Saki or Firbank, Powell continually steers herself back in humanity's direction whenever she veers too far towards improbability or outright farce. And humanity, in Powell's vision as expressed here, exists only among those in the lower ranks--the novel's 'Little Men'--who are naive, gullible, and ignorant, but hopeful. Powell's understanding of what happens to human beings and human relationships as people rise or force their way through the hierarchies of the power elite is wonderfully astute. Though the story takes place just before World War II, the book is timelessly relevant in its illustration of power structures, protocol, and propriety among the powerful and power-mad. Powell also excels here in illustrating how shrewd, calculating and talented individuals go about creating shining, influential, publically-adored and much-venerated if entirely artificial media personalities for themselves. Though Powell's work is often compared to that of Muriel Spark, there's literally a world of difference between their novels, though each filled their books with large casts of odd-ball characters and believable eccentrics. Spark's novels always take place in a world where God and the possibility of grace are always present, though sometimes only remotely so. Powell's comic novels take place in a universe in which the question of God has never even been raised; certainly none of Powell's characters ever give the idea of god or grace a first or second thought. In Powell's work, there is little more to the world than what meets the eye, and it is around these glittering prizes that her often phlegmatic characters circle relentlessly. However, both Powell and Spark write brilliantly about servants and masters, and Powell does a hilarious job here of portraying Hurricane Amanda's servant, frustrated power monger Miss Bemel, who tries to seize control over events even as Amanda insist she buy herself a girdle. Insightful, perceptive, and almost perfectly structured, A Time To Be Born is also entertainment of the highest form.

This novel, set in early World War II, could have been written yesterday. The author masterfully portrays complex characters with ranges of selfishness, naivete, cynicism, humor, everything. It's a great story of twenty-something's making their way in New York City. Enjoy!

This is the first of Dawn Powell's books I have read, and I look forward to reading the rest. It's a hilarious send-up of very recognizable types, as caustic and cynical (and as funny) as H. L. Mencken or Ambrose Bierce has written.