Today’s chat transcript is up. No chat next week between the holidays.
—
“Would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”
Dawn Powell has, in the last twelve months, become my favorite female American novelist, a writer whose books consistently deliver unusual and interesting characters, featuring Manhattan in its literary golden age, written with a sardonic wit male writers would be hard-pressed to match. She is the Queen of Snark, more than happy to turn her acerbic eye on her own social scene, and in Turn, Magic Wheel
Drawing its title from “The Sorceress,” a bucolic poem by Theocritus that includes the repeated line “Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love,” Turn, Magic Wheel covers a group of writers, wannabe writers, publishers, and hangers-on in New York around the time that Dennis Orphen, a fictional writer who made a cameo appearance in The Wicked Pavilion, has written a fictionalized biography of his friend, Effie Callingham, long separated from her famous, Hemingway-like husband Andy Callingham, now presumed in Europe with the woman for whom he left Effie. The book is days from publication and Effie is just learning that it’s about her, too thinly disguised to fool anyone, which will put her at the center of a storm of publicity.
In addition to the phonies and schemers are the lovers, including Dennis’ married lover Corinne, whose husband, Phil, is the most oblivious cuckold imaginable, while Corinne herself is unaware she’s just a physical thing for Dennis, who comes closest to actual affection for Effie. Meanwhile, Effie is pulled to the hospital when Andy’s second wife – not that he ever divorced the first – turns up in New York with terminal cancer, having left Andy (before she knew she was ill) because he took up with a Swedish chorus girl.
Powell inserts herself more into this book than the four other novels I’ve read, through the Orphen character and through her sendup of New York publishers, including the fatuous publisher Mactweed and his ambitious associate Johnson, always fearing for his position while he tries to gauge the direction of the literary wind. Orphen is the anti-romantic chronicler of his New York life, but had to fill in some missing gaps in Effie’s history for his novel, only to find himself confronted with the real-life analogues to his fictional characters and settings:
He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book.
Step he does, of course, often leaving him dissembling about his identity and connection to Effie to avoid detection as the parodist of his hosts, but also to chase Effie when she abandons him (never for long) over some slight … like turning her life into a satirical novel without asking her first.
Turn, Magic Wheel rivals her best work, A Time to Be Born, for its cynical view of love. But it’s inarguable that love can be born and die as a living organism, beyond the control of its owners, and for Powell the writer, the end of love means an honest exploration of emotional pain. When Effie hears Andy’s second wife, slightly delirious from the cancer, echo as her own Effie’s wish that she had borne Andy a son so she would still have something of him, Powell writes:
There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.
I’d still suggest that anyone who has yet to read any Dawn Powell novels begin with A Time to Be Born, which is a lock for the next Klaw 100, a wicked satire that functions more completely as a novel with real narrative greed and a protagonist you can actually support (even if she’s not completely innocent herself). Turn, Magic Wheel might be too biting for some readers – although I suppose if you’re here you’re not opposed to heavy use of snark – and doesn’t have as strong of a central character, with the city perhaps the real star of the book. It is, however, more evidence of the greatness of Dawn Powell, one of the most under-read authors I’ve ever encountered.
Next up: I finished Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers
