Dawn Powell's Novel "Turn, Magic Wheel" About Abandoned Wives and Other Pathologies of Literary Lives

Dawn Powell (1896-1965) was a novelist and sometimes screenwriter, a sort of prolific Dorothy Parker. Powell fell into oblivion, but praise by Gore Vidal, John Updike, and the labors of Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page. Page edited her diaries and prepared the two Library of America volumes that contain ten of her novels.

The first one to receive some attention and the first of her many novels set in New York City was Turn, Magic Wheel, first published in 1937. In discussing the rejections of Richard Wright's first novel, Lawd Today! Arnold Rampersad comments that many novels were published in the US in the years of 1935-37 that had no more literary merit than Wright's fledgling effort. I find the supporting case of Turn, Magic Wheel as one-dimensional as those in Lawd Today! and neither has very much in the way of a plot. Wright's dialogue seems at least as realistic as Powell's.

Her book is considered satire. (Powell herself proclaimed that what is called "satire" is portrayal of "people as they are." Along with, I think, most people, I think "satire" exaggerates eccentricities of characters. By my lights the fat rich woman supporting an attractive husband and greedy publisher MacTweed are satirical figures, but the main characters are not lampooned. They are fatuous and considerably self-deluded, but don't seem very comic to me.

The protagonist, Dennis Orphen, like Powell (though male) is a writer from the Midwest who has abandoned social realism to write about literary life. He has ruthlessly betrayed the confidence and confidences of Effie Callingham, the former wife of a famous writer and huntsman Andrew Callingham (whose name has the same number of syllables as Ernest Hemingway and shares the middle syllable of the family name).

She has been deluding herself that Callingham is going to return to her. He has broken with his second wife (Marian), the one he left Effie for and with. Technically she left him, but meant that to be a ploy. The hospital where Marian is dying of cancer gets in touch with Effie as a possible relative. Effie cables Andrew that Marian is dying. She prepares herself at the far-more-delusional Marian for Andrew's return, even as she deals with the pain of Dennis's betrayal and of finding out how she appears to others.

Dennis is attempting to manage an affair with a married woman, Corrine and a friendship with Corrine's fatuous husband on whom she relies. Dennis feels some guilt about how he used Effie and ambivalence at meeting the models for characters in his novel who turn out to be quite like their fictional selves (credit the accuracy of Effie observing anyone except her own position).

The legendary Andrew Callingham returns. Nothing of what Effie loved remains and she laughs (silently) at her having wanted and expected him to come back to her. In a bit of wish fulfillment for an author who undoubtedly also treated others as material, Effie is even grateful for Dennis's novel showing the hopelessness of her dream of reconciliation and return to being Mrs. Callingham. (The title is a line from Theocritus: "Turn, magic wheel, Bring homeward him I love." The wish of the two wives is granted and it not quite another example of the need to be careful what one wishes for.)

Andrew Callingham is not a savaging of Hemingway (cf. Black Heart, White Hunter). Callingham's first two wives regret not having had children, whereas Hemingway's first two wives did have children by him. The former Pauline Pfeiffer (the second Mrs. Hemingway) did not die young, like Marian. Hadley Richardson (the first Mrs. Hemingway) gave him up and maintained friendly relations, as Effie does, but insofar as I can tell, Turn, Magic Wheel is not a roman clef. The bars and the viciousness of social climbers and of those keeping them down are probably accurately recounted.

I am less impressed by Powell's sentences than Updike and Vidal are. (They probably read her at a more formative age than I did.) On the basis of this sample (allegedly Powell's own favorite of her New York novels), I don't see what the case for reviving and canonizing Powell's fiction is. I found it quite easy to put Turn, Magic Wheel down. If the book had been much longer, I would not have finished it, though the last parts were satisfying. Effie becomes an interesting and admirable character. Dennis IMO is not very interesting and neither admirable nor a total cad.



(This novel is also included in the first of the two Library of America collections of Powell novels.)