Wicked Pavilion

This follow-up novel to Powell's superb *The Locusts Have No King* is a full-on comedy. Instead of Locusts' character study brushed with satiric views, Pavilion comes closer to farce. Because it was written during Powell's maturity as an author, Pavilion contains the impressive insights into human motivations and characters' struggles to keep some of their instincts private from the others in the cast. The novel uses a common meeting ground in the title cafe to have various patrons meet or avoid one another, seek or exploit, stumble upon or alienate each other. There are some interesting farcical types weaving in and out of the cafe-- a pair of art forgers, a socialite wannabe and her unsolicited patron, bickering young lovers. If Pavilion is not as incisive as Locusts, it is nevertheless appealing and a high-paced read, nearly a "slamming doors" type roundelay. If Locusts was "All About Eve" then Pavilion would be "The Lady Eve"-- both worthwhile, one more penetrating and realistic in approach. Pavilion is more astute than Powell's next, and last, novel, *The Golden Spur*, which has her straining to convincingly portray a Midwestern innocent amidst jaded Villagers of the late 50s.

Dawn Powell (1897-1965) grew up in rural Ohio, but spent most of her adult life in New York City. Although little known during her lifetime, her reputation has blossomed in recent years. "The Wicked Pavilion" is her next-to-last novel. It was written in 1954 and is set in New York City in the late 1940's.The "Wicked Pavilion" in the novel is the Cafe Julien, on Washington Square in Grenwich Village. It is a haunt for failed artists, lovers, bohemians, mid-towners, and those on the make. The novel centers around three groups of characters: a) a group of three failed artist friends, Dazell, Ben and Maurius and their agents and hangers-on. Much of the story centers upon the apparent death of Marius and the instant celebrity and inflation of his reputation that follows in its wake; b) Rick and Elleanora, on-again off-again lovers who meet and carry on their relationship over the years in the Cafe Julien; c)Elsie and Jerry. Elsie is an elderly woman from a wealthy Boston family who befriends Jerry a struggling model and would -be kept woman who spends a night in a mental institution with prostitutes. The three stories are interrelated, but the plot does not fit together althogether well and is the weakest part of this still excellent novel.The book is biting precise, well-observed satire. The characters in the book, both male and female, are predominantly people who have come to New York from the Midwest in search of adventure, art, success, a new life -- much as Dawn Powell herself did. The dream of New York as a "happy city" remains but it becomes covered in Powell's work with disillusion, failure, and cynicism. The artists lack talent, the lovers lack passion, and everyone is on the make. Still, at the end of the book, the Cafe Julien is torn down and Powell makes us feel how an era is at an end.The book begins with a short chapter, an essay in fact, called "entrance" which sets the stage for the disillusion we see in the course of the book. It also sets out, as satire will do, an ideal which the world the book shows us only parodies. Powell writes""But there were many who were bewildered by the moral mechanics of the age just as there are those who can never learn a game no matter how long they've been obliged to play it or how many times they've read the rules and paid the forfeits. It this is the way the world is turning around, they say, then by all means let it stop turning, lit us get off the cosmic Ferris wheel into space. Allow us the boon of standing still till the vertigo passes, give us a respite to gather together the scraps of what was once us -- the old longings for what? for whom" that give us our wings and the chart for our tomorrows."This book gives a picture of a New York City that physically is no longer and perhaps always lived as a vision and ideal. The book is sharp, cutting and funny in its picture of what Powell portrays as a fallen reality.

I had never heard of Dawn Powell before- this was the first of her novels that I've read. The New York art scene of the that compelling between war period, is drawn and quartered in this timeless tale of obsession and illusion that is a comic classic of the highest form. I read the book in one and a half sittings and regretted its end. I strongly disagree with those who accuse it of nothing more than a bitchy and bitter novel. I was overcome, at the gentility by which Powell drew the most vulgar and opportunisitic social pariahs with ultimate sympathy and grace. Even the most pretentious social parasite, is awarded a show of dignity, and not a reptilian exit that would have been his due in less compassionate hands. The Cafe Julien, described in the title is modeled on a real artists' haunt in Powell's Greenwich Village. However it is equally every time and every place where humans come apart and remake themselves in that painful custom peculiar to man. It is no less the synagogue of the moneychangers, Balzac's Paris, the Occupied Left Bank, The Storming of Versailles. It could be peculiar to Caesar's or Mussolini's Rome with decadence the perfect counterpart of Brechtian Berlin. For this is how we act, this is what we do; often in the name of art and always, in pursuit of glory. We create and devour, crown and then dethrone, and like the lions, we will honor the new ruler by gobbling our young. In the Wicked Pavillion, some artists die physically and the rest undergo a spirtual death all in pursuit of what cannot be named. Even the timeless Julian is ultimately leveled and as easily forgotten as the woman who once had beauty and now posesses nothing else. Barstools at the Julian were like places at a royal court and equally vain and vicious were the proud patrons who owned them. We witness once committed artists become forgers of their dead comrade's work, postuhumously valuable. Everyone is making out, the would-be intellectual critics and the jackals who own the galleries. Even an ex comes uninvited to a mock remembrance service covered in widow's weeds. The service is taped and reveals nothing more than the vicious remarks made about all in attendance. Everyone is stripped and denuded but none so starkly as the naked, crazy prostitutes locked away on a psych. ward- the fate to which their chic counterparts eventually succumb. But, forget this cautionary blather- read the book for the character Elsie! She is my newly crowned queen of American characters, a pretender to the throne of female greats held for years by her predecessor, the equally, overbearing British country Dame, Lady Circumference, the infamous peeress in Waugh's,"Decline and Fall." I so love these heavy, plodding females with aristocratic license to bore and command. Boston-bashing Brahmin, Elsie Hookler, is the terror of any hostess, intrusive grand dame, consummately worthy of position in American characters. Readers of Waugh, Wharton, Mitford, Parker, etc.- you know who you a

"Born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad," remarks an anonymous character in "The Wicked Pavilion." That seems like a shard of a micro-self-portrait buried in the book. And can one ever doubt how clear-sighted Powell was about her unique strength? Recently Lorrie Moore took Powell to task in The New York Times Book Review (Nov 7, 1999) for her "point-of-view problems." "'[Her novels] are dart-throwing fiestas,' to borrow one critic's words," said Moore, "'The Wicked Pavilion,' for instance, is on the brittle brink of being mere mood -- mean and elegant, but whose?" Such Jamesian prudence is off-base when confronted with Powell's raucous, near-drunken laughter bellowing from almost every page. (Her razor-sharp wit seems able to better Woody Allan any day! But how many artist-fools can we find in our Entertainment Century who could turn down writing assignments from Hollywood on "Funny Girl" and "The Wizard of Oz"?) Powell's comic vision is unabashedly omniscient and aggressively earthy. "The Wicked Pavilion" is no doubt elegant. If it appears to be acidic, it's also unmistakably warm. Her lyricism at the end of the novel brings to mind her elegant but no less tough-minded predecessor Edith Wharton, for what else is Cafe Julien but Society -- in this context the Glamor-rotten Big Apple of New York -- where all is cloaks and masks and the dreams of love and fame a deadly dart-throwing masquerade? If one finds Powell's caricature of the art world too one-dimensional, her insights about a struggling artist's plights are painfully immediate and ultimately, with the ruins of her life haunting these pages, authoritative. "Being dead has spoilt me," said Marius, the artist who is complicit in the news of his death and witnesses the incredible ascendence of his reputation. At such moments you seem to hear Dawn Powell speaking from beyond the grave. Her voice has survived magnificently, not because she has, like Marius, won "the Grand Immortal Prize of death which opened the gates closed in life" to her, but because it has spoken the unspeakable about human foibles and the necessary lies and illusion of happiness through the mirage of her art.