The Last Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

wife Elena as a social climber, which, as Dawn promptly notes, “all this wrong, because [the previous wife] Mary McCarthy was the climber. . . . Sudden silence in cab as I raged, then Bunny said ‘I wish you weren’t so jealous of me, Dawn. It makes it very hard for you.’ This was a wonderful switch, which I snatched at and said, ‘It’s because you keep me on that little back street and never let me meet your set and you’re always going back to your wife and I have never seen you except when you’re
in town selling—’ ‘Yes I know it’s been hard on you, dear,’ he said. So we were saved from a real embarrassment.” (For those who don’t recognize the powerful scene they played, it is from the great best-seller of the day
Back Street
by Fannie Hurst.)
    Next day I was ashamed but hardly could call and apologize for murder. So I sent wire to him—“Darling, what happened to us? Was it my money or your music? Was it the Club? Where did we go wrong, dear? Aurore.” Today a postcard from him says ‘Dear Aurore. Perhaps it might be as well for us not to see each other for awhile. The strain of our relationship is becoming difficult. I am leaving for Boston tomorrow.
Mille baisers
—Raoul.”
    They also conducted a correspondence in which she was the lofty Mrs. Humphrey Ward and he a seedy academic called Wigmore.
    “There are so many kinds of fame for a writer that it is astonishing the number of us who never achieve one.” A lifetime of near-misses depressed but did not discourage her. Also, the examination of such monsters as her friend Hemingway made her suspect that the first requisite of earthly glory was a total lack of humor or (the same thing?) self-knowledge. “I tried once again to read
Farewell to Arms
and it seems as clumsily written as ever to me. . . .” Of the protagonist of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
: “a fictional movie hero in Spain with the language neither Spanish nor English. When someone wishes to write of this age—as I do and have done—critics shy off—the public shies off. ‘Where’s our Story Book?’ they cry. . . . This is obviously an age that Can’t Take It.” Dawn’s conclusion is that “Success is a knack—like a knack for weaving something out of a few strings—which for the rest
of us are nothing but a few strings.” Nor was she about to ingratiate herself with book reviewers like the
New York Herald Tribune
’s Lewis Gannett, as serenely outside literature as his confrère in the daily
New York Times
, Orville Prescott, currently divided into two halves of equally bewildered density.
    At Margaret’s Lewis Gannett flung an affectionate arm around me and introduced me: “Dawn’s a good girl except she drinks too much and one of these days she’s going to do a good novel.” “If I did, you wouldn’t know it,” I said. “As for drinking too much you’ve never seen me at these parties in the last five years where you were drinking more than anyone. That’s why you can never be a writer or know good writing when you see it—generalizing about a person’s habits from public performances instead of private understanding.” He was mad. I lectured him that if ever I wrote something he considered “good” I would know I was slipping. “
Pas des mouches sur
Dawn,” as Raoul would say.
    But then, “All my life has been spent killing geese that lay golden eggs and it’s a fine decent sport—superior to killing small birds, horses or lions.”
    It was Dawn Powell’s fate to be a dinosaur shortly after the comet, or whatever it was, struck our culture, killing off the literary culture—a process still at work but no less inexorable—and re-placing it with the Audiovisual, as they say at Film School. The Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Powell American generation was the last to be central to the culture of that part of the world where Gutenberg reigned. By the next generation, it was clear to most of us that the novel had been