The Last Empire Read Online Free PDF Page B

each other far too seldom, the condition of an active life in the golden age, she—like Touche—made the weather for us all or, as she put it, “The way Latouche and I always knocked ourselves out to entertain morons. The more useless and blah they were, the harder we worked for their amusement—as if they were such a waste that only by converting these ciphers into something (in fact nothing more than audience) could they be endured.”
    Then the memorable August 7, 1956: “Latouche died!—in Calais, Vermont. Luckily his opera ‘Baby Doe’ had been a great peak last month in Central City, a peak he might not pass. Incredible that this dynamo should unwind and I think I can guess how. Talentless but shrewd users pursued him always . . . trying to get him in a corner room, lock him up and get out the gold when he wanted only to talk all day and all night. . . . I’m sure this was a desperate, hysterical escape from Lillian Hellman and others waiting for his output to finish up
Candide
.” He was thirty-nine.
    In later years Dawn reviewed books, shrewdly if somewhat wearily, in
Mademoiselle
. Although like every regular reviewer she was pretty much stuck with the daily output (Capote? “The Southern white trash and
crème de menthe
school as against the old mint julep school”) but her own views on literature, particularly the superiority of Petronian satire to everything else in the prose line, are interesting. “ ‘Realism’ is the only completely vague word. ‘Satire’ is the technical word for writing of people as they are: ‘romantic’ the other extreme of people as they are to themselves—but both of these are the truth. The ability to put in motive is called satire; the ability to put in vision is romanticism.” She duly noted that the rich and the poor could be satirized with impunity (because they were—then—so few and never read books?) but “The middle class is wit-proofed. . . . If there is to be satire it must not
bite at the breadwinner.” And “the human comedy is always tragic but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.”
    Powell seems to have got the point to Edith Wharton long before others did. In 1951, “Read Edith Wharton’s
The Reef
and struggling with
Wings of the Dove
by James simultaneously. Curiously alike, but she is so superior in this. Odd, her reputation for ‘moralizing novels’ when it was her
age
which read its own moralizing into her. Not one word could be called moralizing—no villains, no heroes in the noble sense. Villainy is done by a group of characters behaving in the only way they, in all honesty, feel they can decently behave. . . . I must write to Sophy Viner, I woke up thinking. I must tell her—tell her what? She never existed. What a precise miracle of illusion Edith Wharton created—never showing Sophy’s room, giving her only one dress, one cloak, describing her only as fresh-faced—but she is
real
.”
    Dawn is very much on to Mary McCarthy: “Read Mary McCarthy’s piece—another beginning of novel. . . . These last two starts are invigorating—like a brisk whiff of the stable on a clear wintry day. She has her two manners—her lace-curtain Irish, almost unbelievably genteel lady scholar torn between desire to be Blue Stocking without losing her Ladyship; and then her shanty Irish where she relaxes, whamming away at her characters like a Queen of the Roller Derby, groin-kicking, shin-knifing, belly-butting, flailing away with skates and all arms at her characters and jumping on them with a hoarse whoop of glee when they are felled.”
    Finally, she comes to James through that curiously enchanting nouvelle
The Reverberator
, so prescient in its grasp of the general horror of publicity at the dawn of the age of the tabloid newspapers. “James’s work nearly always stirs the writing imagination. Some object to ‘involuted writing,’