504
PARTISAN REVIEW
Anyway, a lot of miscellaneous things have been bobbing up
(including a low state ofmind) and it seems a change would be very
salutary. New hands, new eyes, new faces, new pocketbooks, new
photographers. So, with quivering lip but chin up,
I
would like to
pack up my pretties from all departments, including the best pieces
of furniture from your offices (you must admit they were Mother's)
and leave your bed and board.
It was dispiriting for Powell to see her fifteen novels appear to mixed,
although often favorable, reviews, sell poorly, and quietly go out of
print. From the
Diaries:
September
I8, I940.
In spite of pleasure over Max Perkins' edito–
rial work on me, now that the book
is
to come out the usual deadly
hopelessness and weariness comes in. The lack of any ad or
announcement, the silence from publishing end, the all-too-famil–
iar signals of another blank shot, and once again the weary pack–
ing up and readying another book-never understanding why
{
am
unable to follow the arrogance of my writing with an arrogance of
personality or why the luck should
so
unfailingly fall elsewhere.
Powell was born in
T
896 in Mount Gilead, Ohio, the second of three
daughters. Her mother died when she was seven, and the girls were raised
by various relatives until her father remarried in
1907.
After her disturbed
and abusive stepmother burned some of her first stories, Powell ran away
at fourteen and lived with an aunt until she matriculated at Lake Erie Col–
lege (class of 1918) in Painesville, Ohio. As outstanding a student in col–
lege as she had been in high school, she moved to New York City, where
she married Joseph Goushay, a poet and advertising executive, in 1920.
She gave birth to a severely mentally impaired son, Jojo, in
T92 T
and
began writing novels. Lack of money and Jojo's violence and permanent
hospitalization plagued the marriage, which nevertheless, and despite
Goushay's advancing alcoholism, lasted until his death in 1962.
Powell hit bottom in 1958 when Goushay's summary retirement with
no pension left her the sole support of the family. She increasingly
sought freelance magazine work and hack reviewing while struggling in
real poverty with her fiction and unsuccessful forays into television and
pia y ada ptations.
On the publication of what would be her last novel,
The Golden Spur,
Edmund Wilson, an early admirer and close friend, wrote a strongly
appreciative critical appraisal of her work for
The New Yorker
(Novem-
