Gore Vidal was softly shocked by Dawn Powell

GV's essays are brilliant mini intellectual breakdowns, particularly fine when focusing on a fellow writer and their collected work. Vidal efficiently digests it whole, like a snake, and regurgitates it back in finer form, far more elegant in its reincarnation. In this, he's very much alone.  

One of my favorite essays is the one devoted to Dawn Powell, arguably America's premier writer of satire; forever. No wonder she'll never cease being a cult and become a religion. We're not fond of the truth, we're not much for mirrors, it's a rather cruel culture, solidarity is not necessarily our strength.  

Dawn was all about strength. Of mind, of spirit, a genius. Hemingway knew it, Diane Trilling knew it, everyone who was anyone in the literary world knew it, but refused to give her fame because she refused to live by their rules. She could not write about women in a romantic way, nor the war. And the rare moment she did write of war, it was without romance. 

These facts and others all feed deliciously into Gore Vidal's eternal gratitude.  Her personal life and humor are but two other qualities which softly shocked Gore Vidal. The former because it appeared as if she always had two men rather than just one and the latter because it was so powerful, so overt and ever present, far and beyond anyone else's ability to sing for their supper on every single page.   

GV reviews their light friendship from the beginning, when he was much younger than she, circa early 50's, when "New York City was as delightful a place to live in as to visit."  

Back when writers read deeply and completely, when they set aside large swaths of time to understand what had been published by their peers...and far more importantly, all that had been written and published up til then.    

When she writes of death, "When Dr. Arnold's face flashed on the mirror she thought, "This must be the way one dies. People collect on a mirror like dust and something rushes through your mind emptying all the drawers and shelves to see if you're leaving anything behind."  What a pity, she thought, no one will ever know these are my last thoughts-that Dr. Arnold's mouth was so small."

On War. 

"This was a time when the true signs of war were the lavish plumage of the women; Fifth Avenue dress shops and the finer restaurants were filled with these vanguards of war. Look at the jewels, the rare pelts, the gaudy birds on elaborate hair-dress and know that war was here; already the women had inherited the earth. The ominous smell of gunpowder was matched by a rising cloud of Schiaparelli's Shocking. The women were once more armed, and their happy voices sang of destruction to come...This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in cafes and in country homes and accused each other over their brandies or their California vintages of traitorous tendencies. This was a time for them to band together in mutual antagonism, a time to bury the professional hatchet, if possible in each other....On fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth street hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump; hundreds waited with craning necks and thirsty faces as if this single  persons final gesture would solve the riddle of the world. Civilization stood on a ledge, and in the tension of waiting it was relief to have one little man jump."

She will take your breath away and your eyes might sting just, but then she'll write something so practical you're physically forced back into the present. Dawn is always in the present, in fact Gore Vidal says, "I know of no one else who has got so well the essence of that first war-year before we all went away to the best years of no one's life."  She knew her America, specifically her address in Greenwich, but we didn't much like to listen.

It's almost as if she and Virginia Woolf could be literary bookends of time; one perfectly present, the other perfectly capable of focusing on past, through memory, allowing it to expand with time. For both writers, they lend more essence by time, by their intensity. They are both very, very intense. 

Dawn rarely touched on war but often touched on women in an awfully funny fashion. Basically, we aren't to be trusted. "Why do I lunch with women anyway?...We always end up sniveling over men