The Last Empire Read Online Free PDF

superseded by the film while popular writing of the sort Dawn was reduced to turning out—stories and serials for slick mass magazines—has, in the last four decades, been replaced by television sitcoms and miniseries. Today few magazines publish fiction of any kind. Few people read fiction of any kind other than what those chains of bookshops in the bright malls of America feel that the mallsters are capable of grasping, which is not very much beyond thinly disguised stories about showbiz celebrities,
competing with tell-all biographies or autobiographies of the few people that television has acquainted our unread public with. For Dawn Powell’s generation, there was still the romantic, if somewhat sappy, notion of The Great American Novel that someone was bound to write—and altogether too many people did write. You were, if serious, a writer for life, with an ever-growing public if you were any good.
    All that changed in the Fifties. Writers can still be minor celebrities, good to flesh out a talk show if they can be counted on not to say anything of interest. But the writer as definer of the prospect has no role at all in the “first world.” Our serious writers teach other serious writers who in turn teach
them
in classrooms. But for the bright inventive woman who kept these diaries the scene was no different from what it was for George Sand—a novel one year, a play the next year, and a life in the stream of her time. When she noted that the reader wants his simple-minded Story Book, she had not realized that the story had already started its leap from dull page to bright moving picture, and when she mourned that this is the age that Can’t Take It, she is quite right except that she thought the “it” was realistic observation—satire—that they couldn’t take when the “it” they can’t, and won’t, take is literature itself.
    The New York of the Golden Age (1945–1950—the only period when we were not kept at war) glitters in her diary, as she reflects on all sorts of wonders and novelties and even genius. Among the wonders was John Latouche, a short chunky Irish wit (with the obligatory Jewish mother). Although himself an outlander from Virginia he was, like Dawn herself, the personification of Manhattan, particularly its nightside, when ten thousand musicians in dives played songs for which he had written the lyrics—“Taking a Chance on Love,” “Cabin in the Sky,” “Lazy Afternoon” (written at my house on the Hudson one hot summer day). Latouche talked and talked and kept everyone excited and laughing. It was he who first told me of a writer with the unlikely name Dawn Powell; she had just written a novel called
The Locusts Have No King
. I met Dawn with him. They looked alike except that he had bright blue eyes in his disproportionately large head, while hers were, I think, brown.
    Latouche came out Saturday and Sunday and left me exhausted. He is so multi-gifted that he seems to leave people as worn as if they’d been to a circus, and while he shoots sparks in all directions, in the end it is the others who are depleted and he is renourished. . . . It is unconsciously deliberate on his part. He wants people not-to-do, just as he doesn’t-do. He likes their doing well—no envy there—but it’s actual
doing
he minds.
    When, to survive, I wrote a dozen plays for live television in one year, Latouche was deeply saddened. “Whoever suspected that you would end up as the Lope de Vega of television?”
    March 11, 1954: Latouche’s
Golden Apple
opened at Phoenix—thoroughly fresh and delightful. At end, saw him by stairs in middle of cheers. He was weeping. “They’ve ruined my second act—they’ve ruined it—spoiled everything! Come downstairs and have champagne!” Down was a vast Sardi’s. Gore Vidal—Luciferian-looking young man who called a couple of times. Very gifted, brilliant, and fixed in facility as I am.
    Thus, I first appear in her diaries: and though we saw