The Happy Island - Dawn Powell

[bookgazing]

The delightfully spiteful battles of Dawn Powell’s The Happy Island’ were just what I needed to throw me out of my funk. Sometimes there’s nothing nicer than seeing characters quarrel, cry and backbite so much that you feel positively saintly in comparison. Bless Dawn Powell for calmly skewering the 1930s set of New York’s professional party goers and curses that she isn’t here to do the same for the WAG set.

‘The Happy Island’ begins with a young playwright, Jefferson Abbot, arriving in New York, summoned from his small farm on Silver City to fix the third act of his play. Jefferson meets a rather oily musician called Van Deusen on the bus ride to New York. To say Jefferson is less than receptive to Van Deusen’s attempts at friendship is putting it in much politer terms than Jeff would ever use. Later in the book Van Deusen is established as a chancer who has returned to New York to sponge off friends and use his contacts to re-establish himself as a successful pianist, but in this first exchange Van Deusen reveals himself as a name dropper, ‘a dangerous man-about-town’ who is a little too eager to make an acquaintance. The kind of man who offers his help, but ends up being helped by someone else’s twenty pound note, or spare room:

‘ “You could do me a favour by mentioning that you saw me. Put him in the mood so I can look him up. You might say I’m planning to give a concert here. Mention my name – Van Deusen. Perhaps I can do you a favour sometime. Do you know anyone else?” '

From Jeff’s first brusque refusal to engage with such a charming, yet false character it seems that Dawn Powell is establishing him as the stalwart hero who champions authenticity, accidentally living in a city that values deception, for its prettiness. He is shown hiding from parties, trying to work on his play. He rejects the help of his host Dol, a sponsor of talent and a well know party giver, who thinks Jeff should learn the ropes of how to work New York’s fashionable, creative scene. In a letter he writes after fleeing Dol’s house he says ‘Looking around, I seem to think those ropes are for hanging the people that know them. They’d hang me...’, showing that Jeff is a man who rejects social conventions in favour of an unencumbered method of creation. When his play is savaged by the critics and public, Jeff sees the panning as proof that the people watching his play aren’t interested in authenticity and that this validates his play, as he hates the falseness of the people around him. As proud and deluded as that attitude might sound, I would guess that few readers will question it, as by that time the hilariously shallow lives of the New York set have been fully exposed.

For Dawn Powell doesn’t skimp on the satire, cheerfully revealing the ridiculously conventional lives of the New York ‘batchelor’ set who live to be unconventional. ‘The Happy Island’ is extremely episodic, at least I hope I’m using that word right – each chapter is like a sketch of an event and could be separated out as a brief short story because each chapter has a miniature conclusion. This allows Dawn Powell to include lots of different characters from the social circle that Jeff despises and by including so many layers of vacuous, sharp tongued people she gives the reader the overwhelming impression that Jeff is right and all the New York set are people who should be laughed at. And I did grin, even as I was JUDGING them, because there are lots of funny episodes in ‘The Happy Island’. Take this one where a woman called Jeanne has left her husband for her lover, who is mortified she’s come to stay, but can’t refuse her because she is his bosses wife and that would be terribly insulting. What does a wife do once she reaches her lovers flat, why call her husband of course:

‘ “Harvey, dear,” Jean choked into the phone. “I just wanted to tell you this is one of the biggest, finest things you’ve ever done. Steve wants to thank you, too. Here, Steve.”

Steve reluctantly faced the mouthpiece thrust at him.

“Thanks,” he said briefly.

“We’re terribly happy, Harvey,” said Jean. “We went to the Voodoo dancers after Prudence and to Hamburger Mary’s and now we’re here all alone. Steve wants to tell you how happy he is.”

“Awfully happy, old man,” Steve barked into the phone.

“You sound so tired and miserable, Harvey dear. Take couple of luminal, why don’t you if you can’t sleep…You did?...I hope they work. I’ll call back in a little while to see if they did.” '

The group’s calculated artifice is epitomised by Prudence Bly, the closest thing to a heroine in ‘The Happy Island’. Prudence is a nightclub singer of great popularity, who grew up in Silver City at the same time as Jeff. Prudence ran away to New York’s and joined the society of performers at a young age. Now well established in New York she has cast off her background and any chance at a real personality. She almost fears expressing anything real and operates in an artificial way, cutting her associates down with easy wit, disguised as flattery. While readers will find Prudence funny as she throws out her slyly harsh chatter, this new Prudence is not the girl Jeff wants. Even though at the beginning of the novel he wants to reconnect with her, in the first few pages of the book, he refuses to engage with her after finding her changed.

At first Jeff’s reaction to Prudence seems like Dawn Powell doling out the moral message of her satire. She clearly finds the way most of her New York characters lead their lives rather silly, although she often treats them with as much affection as scorn. Jeff’s negative reaction to Prudence and her New York life seems intended to point out the right path for a life to take, but it’s not as simple as that. Jeff can also be cruel, in fact he requires himself to be truthfully unkind to preserve his genuine personality, which he thinks is integral to making art. At one point he tells Prudence ‘If there was a choice between you and my work you’d be the one to go.’ which may be truthful, may be a necessary sentiment for an artist to preserve their core and work well, but it seems unnecessarily hard to tell someone that. He also never considers that his version of meaningful truth (outside of his playwriting) is just one version of truth that really only applies to him. He never thinks about the way that other people must manage the world to keep his dream of authenticity alive.

There is a poignant, monologue of thoughts near the end of the book that shows how Jeff’s demands for authenticity from Prudence inhibit her and force her into a domestic role that is no more truthful than her role in New York. Jeff and Prudence have eventually worked it all out (the back cover will tell you that so I’m not spoiling) and Prudence moves back to Silver City with him, but Prudence must make compromises to follow the love she feels. Among other things Prudence thinks:

‘I’ll tell about the kind of simplicity he loved: a big house with no maids to interfere with his flow of thought, so all the simplicity had to be worked out by the little woman or else there was complicity instead. How he stayed in his study all day while she swept and tried her damnedest to fasten up curtains and to cook and count things for the laundry and have a vegetable garden like the simple peasants did and mend stoves and socks and pick berries and fry chicken because all those things show how honest you are, whereas trying to fix up your cracked fingernails or brush your hair is a sure sign of something phony.’

This monologue reveals that Jeff and the men he associates with, create a gendered version of integrity. To prove herself honest, a woman must embrace the confines of their systems just as she previously embraced the conventions of the society they find phony.

These thoughts of Prudence’s may be full of terrified authenticity, but they’re still constructed as tales she will tell when she returns to New York and they are in part an angry, rather bored show. The complicated reality of Prudence’s feeling, the part she won’t reveal to anyone comes later when she talks about ‘the frantic desperate love I knew at nights’ and ‘waking up to a village with my grave in it and feeling that this real person he was after was already in that grave, had been there for twelve years and the other half was now being killed because New York was in its lungs.’ Prudence’s New York identity may be false, but her Silver City identity is also constructed and her original escape from Silver City was an admirable attempt to be herself, not as Jeff sees it an attempt to put on airs. And in these last moments with Prudence it’s suddenly clear just how much of a heroine she might be, or might have been if only the world wasn’t so keen on lies and boxes.

The introduction to ‘The Happy Island’ mentions that this is not one of Dawn Powell’s acclaimed novels and was the last to be reissued when Gore Viddal started his campaign to bring Powell’s books back into circulation. It perhaps lacks the clarity of ‘Dance Night’, maybe because the cast of characters is a little too large. What I love about this novel is that there are so many different storylines to explore. I could have written this review focusing on any number of things: Jeanne and Prudence’s harsh friendship and their sudden cohabitation, presumably as lovers, James and Dol’s passing about of a pretty young man named Bert, the young Brent couple drawn into a mess of affairs. And each route of exploration is just as interesting as the last. Plus the book is funny in that light, stabbing way that characterises my favourite kind of classics. I pass it on as a remedy for a dark mood.