Why she remains obscure, despite having written several terrific novels:
Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life’s feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.
In the few interviews that Powell gave, she often mentions as her favorite novel, surprisingly for an American, much less for a woman of her time and place, the Satyricon. This sort of thing was not acceptable then any more than it is now. Descriptions of warm, mature, heterosexual love were — and are — woman’s writerly task, and the truly serious writers really, heartbreakingly, flunk the course while the pop ones pass with bright honors.
Vidal notes a reviewer complaining about Powell: “[S]he views the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm.”
Like Vidal himself, who said “Love is not my bag,” love was, wrote Edmund Wilson, “not Miss Powell’s theme.”
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It’s a curious thing. John Montague once said, “The urge to comprehend is so deep. It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done.” Yet this can’t be true, since we so often tend to loathe our best writers and intellectuals, the ones who – we grudgingly admit – tell us the truth so that we can see ourselves and comprehend. Look at the post-mortem contempt heaped on Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin… I mean, sure, plenty of tributes, too. But on and on about their heartlessness, their surgical calm as they dissect humanity…
Imagine how much harder this tendency toward clinical appraisal – absolutely typical of the great writer – is for people to take when a woman has it.
August 1st, 2012 at 8:21PM
Thanks for this, UD. I will have to give Powell a read. I have thought from time to time about why I don’t read many women authors, and why none of my favorite writers are women. I really can’t pin down whether it is a matter of style (are there women writers with the muscular narrative drive of John Barth?), or genre (Patrick O’Brian and Neal Stephenson are favorites, although there I have gone through Ursula LeGuin and Mary Renault phases). it would be more interesting if it was really a matter of perspective (I’m thinking of Martin Amis, Milan Kundera, and Walker Percy) but I don’t know why I wouldn’t be particularly interested in a women’s take.
August 1st, 2012 at 9:17PM
It’s a fascinating and somewhat treacherous question, Shane – why do you, and I, read few women fiction writers? The two strongest of the 20th century in English are, I think, Flannery O’Connor and Doris Lessing. Both are brilliant stylists, with the narrative drive you mention, along with a strong, subversive, unsentimental, rather eccentric point of view. And they have ideas. Both also have a rather disillusioned attitude toward humanity – a position which sometimes borders on the nihilistic. Both have a harsh – I guess I’d say nasty – sense of humor.
Which also characterizes someone like Kundera or Percy or Amis, among those you mention. Their characters are always grappling with a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of just barely holding on to reasons to live, a sense of the demoralizingly random nature of existence.
If I say I find few women writers with these qualities, Elaine Showalter will accuse me of having internalized “male standards of greatness,” to which all I can say is oy vey.
August 1st, 2012 at 10:19PM
It may be a flaw in my reading choices, but what I know of O’Connor and Lessing comes fom their short stories, not novels. And maybe I’ve given short stories….uh, short shrift. God knows I’d rather read any selection from “Everything That Rises Must Converge” than Faulkner’s “The Bear” again.
I think something similar may be found in television (I know you don’t watch much of the tube). There are very few women show-runners or head writers. But there are two outstanding recent examples: Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” and Lena Dunham’s “Girls” on HBO.
So maybe it is a matter of genre? Are the better modern poets female? I really have no idea.
August 2nd, 2012 at 12:11AM
“The two strongest of the 20th century in English are, I think, Flannery O’Connor and Doris Lessing. ”
Nadine Gordimer says “hi.”
Dcat
August 2nd, 2012 at 2:35AM
Derek: Gordimer for me is a good but not great fiction writer, lacking a subversive, original point of view, and a bit moralistic.
August 2nd, 2012 at 10:18AM
I suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree, and I know you explicitly stated fiction, but she is also a remarkable essayist. And I think we need to forgive a white writer who opposed apartheid in South Africa for being a bit moralistic. I’m a historian of race and politics in the US and South Africa, and so my take on Gordimer comes from that angle as well. Burgher’s Daughter, July’s People, and A Sport of Nature, in addition to her collected (and we might even say underrated) short stories, as well as the political context in and about which she wrote earned her that Nobel Prize in my mind.
dcat
August 2nd, 2012 at 11:25AM
Derek: I take your points – all of them good. I have read many of her essays and find them, as do you, remarkable. I think writers who are better essayists than novelists – Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Gordimer – may be this way because in an essay the sheer power of your descriptive capacities can in some sense carry your moral point, whereas a writer may feel that the formal imperative of art is to round out things with a message — even a nuanced message. I think Iris Murdoch is a pretty wretched novelist precisely because to me her narrative voice feels too impelled toward a moral point.
August 3rd, 2012 at 9:13AM
Ah! Iris Murdoch jogs my memory: I have read and do very much like A.S. Byatt as a novelist. I really admired Babel Tower. But The Chidren’s Book still thuds on my bedside table, having resisted two attempts at being read. Her early cycle (The Virgin in the Garden and that) was melodrama, in my opinion, but I liked it. It seemed the female flip side of Percy. And Babel Tower reverberated with the Eco I was also reading.
So, I’m a sexist for liking her work because of its relation to male writers I admire, right?