Customer Reviews

The Golden Spur

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One of the joys of reading is the opportunity of finding for oneself authors that have long been obscure or overlooked. I came to Dawn Powell's work with expectations of such a reward. I knew that the Library of America had saw fit to publish two volumes of her work and that Tim Page, Washington Post classical music critic, had edited the volumes and written a biography. I was eager to learn more.

Dawn Powell grew up in rural Ohio and moved to Greenwich Village as a young woman and lived a bohemian life. She wrote 15 novels between the 1930s and the early 1960s mostly set in rurual Ohio and Greenwich Village, which were little noted during her life. She has been "rediscovered" and praised highly by some.

Dawn Powell's "The Golden Spur" was her last novel and the first book of hers I read. The book tells the story of Jonathan Jamison who, at the age of 26 leaves his Ohio home in search of his father in Greenwich Village. Jonathan's mother had worked as a typist briefly in the Village before she returned home and married what she found a rather conventional man. She delivered prematurely and told Jonathan that his true father was in New York. And Jonathan goes to search for his father --- and himself.

The book centers around The Golden Spur, a bar in Greenwich Village frequented by artists and literary types. (It had been frequented by Jonathan's mother in her New York days). We meet a cast of characters who become involved with Jonathan, including Hugow, the bohemian modern painter of questionable talent, a succession of Hugow's former lovers, some of whom are bedded by Johnathan, failed literary critics, academics, has-beens and never wases. We also meet an elderly woman named Claire Van Orphen, the writer for whom Johnathan's mother worked briefly. She befriends Johnathan and is instrumental in his search.

I couldn't recommend reading this book for the story-line. It is muddled and hard to follow at times. Nevertheless, I came away from the book thinking that my search to discover a new author had been rewarded.

This book is written in a beautiful clear prose. Each line tells and each word is in place. It is a joy to read. The satire in the book is uncompromising and biting. Because the book is a satire, the characters are somewhat one-sided. In addition, I get the impression that Dawn Powell put some part of herself (but not her whole character) in each of the people in her book-- the young person (Jonathan Jamison) leaving rural Ohio for a new life in New York City, the young sexually active women in the Village, the struggling artists, the aging unsucessful writer to take some examples. Thus I found the characterization effective.

The book works better as a series of minature episodes than as a connected novel. Each scene is tightly written and convincing written, as I indicated, in a lively and supple style. I got absorbed in the book page by page and incident by incident. Possibly as a result of this, there were times when I lost the thread of the story and the interrelationship of the characters.

The best part of the book, besides the writing style, is the picture drawn of Greenwich Village. The picture of life in the bars and of artists, some good some not-so-good, struggling in flats with their women, their friends and their agents is precious. Dawn Powell knew the life she described. Again, most of the characters, from the young man, Jonathan Jamison, through the women, through the ageing Ms. Van Orphen, were aspects of Dawn Powell herself, transmitted into one character or the other.

This is a frothy, light book not without its flaws. But I came away with the sense of discovery for which I had hoped. Dawn Powell deserves to be read.

Dawn Powell writes prose evocative of a vanished or vanishing New York. She peppers her New York novels with snappy one-liners and clever analysis of personality types. But she pays only the smallest attention to pace or narrative. There are entertaining set pieces and frequently glittering cynical prose but only the barest outline of a plot, here rapidly wrapped up in a throw away ending. Read her for her wit, her ability to conjure up a city that is no longer but not for her ability to flesh out characters or for her story lines.

Read this after reading Gore Vidal's essay about her & finished a little disappointed. She writes first-rate prose (a perfect sentence-writing clinic, I found myself re-reading passages & marveling at her craft) & is very funny, but every character seems mades of cardboard. The constant cynical wit can be tiring & stubborn & (as the reviewer below notes) everything is thrown together at the end, seemingly because she just felt like stopping the story. I guess I wanted to know more... I'll probably try another one of her books though.

I've edited a number of Powell's books -- and this is one of her best (although not quite on a level with "Turn, Magic Wheel," "A Time To Be Born," or "Come Back To Sorrento.")

I did find it a little amusing to read the review of my supposed "introduction" to this edition, and to find it called "vague" and "anemic." It's actually much worse than that -- as I wrote no introduction to "The Golden Spur" whatsoever!

Note to budding critics -- it's always a good idea to read a book before printing a review.

Powell's last novel takes a delightfully satiric look at the artistic life in Greenwich Village during the mid-twentieth century. Jonathan Jamison makes a lot of new friends when he comes to New York hoping to determine the identity of his biological father. Will he make as big a splash as his mother did during her brief sojourn? It certainly looks like it, seeing how quick everyone is to help him out. But do they really care about this handsome, but rather clueless young mid-Westerner, or are they only using him for their own purposes? Either way, you can be sure that everything will work out all right in the end.

The plot has a wispy, meandering quality to it, perhaps to reflect how Jamison doesn't seem to have any clear-cut plan of what he's doing when he comes to the big city, and so few of the other characters are ever sober enough to do more than react as situations arise. But the marvelous portraits of the various personalities found in that time and place make this book more than worthwhile all by themselves. Not surprisingly, the women are particularly well-drawn. And while there's not a lot character development, we do get to meet wonderfully comic examples of the various types who frequent the artsy/dive bar that gives this volume its name. Between the has-beens, the woulda-beens, the success stories, and the hangers-on (and how thin the lines between these categories really are) Powell makes this little subculture come alive with artistic verve. Tame enough for young people (but not children) this is a must for those who are considering making a career of the artistic life.

Fine, funny literary satire of "bohemian" New York centered around Greenwich Village. This is Dawn Powell's last novel, published in 1962. Like The Fool in "King Lear," Dawn Powell punctures the absurd self-deceptions of numerous tinpot Lears (to the reader's vast delight). I found the writing wonderful, the wit fantastic and relentless; there are great lines on every page.

Here is a vast canvas of eagre "real" New Yorkers, fresh from the provinces (small town, or boring suburb), people who want to to shed their past, to hide their ignorance and laugh at the squares (not them! of course): people who "want to be what everyone else wanted them to be" in Manhattan.

Powell is excellent at looking behind peoples' pipe dreams. You'll recognize people and types you've encountered in real life as you read this book. You'll see their dreams, and you'll see the reality they hide from. Here's the person, "with her refined Carolina accent, which she kept up like her grandfather's shotgun;" here's the young lady dimpled with pride at "the generous picnic of her decolletage." And here are the "old has-beens, needling me for making it when they never could with their genius." The tone is perfect throughout; I was not surprised to read that Powell's favourite writers included Aristophanes and Petronius, two of the greatest satirists in history. She fits write into that tradition. The only negative thing to say about this book is that the types it describes will not appreciate it. But the detached reader, of even mild self-confidence, and a love of the Roman greats, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Bellow and Vidal - a love of Truth over Cant - will enjoy Dawn Powell enormously.

In the end the book is a vast panorama of the New York of the 60's (and today), wonderfully evocative of the pull that city can have on all types of people, and beautifully descriptive of the reality of a decision to move there, for so many.

This Steerforth edition of *The Golden Spur* was brought out by Tim Page, who has seen many Powell books back into print. Good of him; but his introductions to her work (*The Happy Isle*, her *Diaries*, and in his biography of her) I found anemic and vague; he seems to have difficulty coming to grips with Powell's great powers as a satirist , is shy of its implications and tries to turn Powell into a much more sentimental writer than, as a clear-eyed realist, she is. I recommend Gore Vidal's 1987 essay (its in his collection "United States") which has a lot of information about Powell and gets (I think) the experience of reading Powell exactly right.

Try Powell's "Happy Island," The Wicked Pavillion," and, indeed, all her New York novels if you like this one.

Powell continues an examination of her Manhattan circle that reached its zenith in 1948's astutely charactered, insightful satire *The Locusts Have No King,* was broadened to farce in 1954's *Wicked Pavilion,* and in 1962 broadened further to lampoon in *The Golden Spur.* Her novels became progressively faster-paced, less nuanced, shorter, and less keenly psychological as she moved through substantial chronic illnesses that finally claimed her life a couple of years after *Spur* was published. Her compromised health shows in the comedic breakneck pace of this last book and her comedy was less lancet than affectionate mockery by this point. Although not in the glow of health while writing this, Powell was able to josh with characters inspired by the antics of her Hemingway-Guggenheim-Kline peers, her objective in this novel to portray the self-delusions that were now not so maddening but rather so very comical.