My Home is Far Away
Contents (43)
First published in 1944 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
This edition of My Home Is Far Away has been published
in cooperation of the Estate of Dawn Powell.
Introduction Copyright © 2004, 1999, 1995 by Tim Page
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to
reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Steerforth Press, L.C., 25 Lebanon Street
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
The cover photograph of [left to right] Mabel, Phyllis, and Dawn
Powell is courtesy of the collection of the Dawn Powell Papers,
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powell, Dawn.
My home is far away / Dawn Powell; foreword by Tim Page.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58195-245-2
I. Title.
PS3531.0936M9
813′.54—dc20 95-3238
v3.1
For my cousin,
Sergeant Jack F. Sherman
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Part One: The Man in the Balloon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two: The Shepherdess in the Snowstorm Ball
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Three: Home is Far Away
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Reader’s Guide
Foreword
LATE IN LIFE, out of luck and fashion, Henry James predicted a day when all of his neglected novels would kick off their headstones, one after another. As the twentieth century came to an end, the works of Dawn Powell managed the same magnificent task.
When Powell died in 1965, virtually all of her books were out of print. Not a single historical survey of American literature mentioned her, even in passing. And so she slept, seemingly destined to be forgotten—or, to put it more exactly, never to be remembered.
How things have changed! In the past dozen years, twelve of Powell’s novels have been reissued, along with editions of her plays, diaries, letters, and short stories. She has joined the Library of America, admitted to the illustrious company of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Edith Wharton. She is both taught in the colleges and read with delight on vacation. For the contemporary poet and novelist Lisa Zeidner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, Powell “is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland, and has a more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh.” For his part, Gore Vidal offered a simple reason for Powell’s sudden popularity: “We are catching up to her.”
My Home Is Far Away, first published in 1944, has a special place in the Powell canon. Most of the author’s work is on some level autobiographical, but it is especially difficult to draw any sure line between fact and fiction in My Home Is Far Away. Like Marcia Willard, the book’s indomitable heroine, Dawn Powell was the second of three sisters, all of whom would seem to have had personalities and sibling relationships much as the ones presented in the novel. (Indeed, the beloved, eternally tearful baby sister, Florrie, was so closely copied from Powell’s own younger sister, Phyllis, that Powell called her character “Fuffy”—Phyllis’s lifelong nickname—throughout early sketches and drafts.) Hattie Sherman Powell, Dawn’s mother, died at roughly the same time as the fictional Daisy Willard, while Harry Willard, the well-meaning but footloose and improvident traveling salesman, was clearly modeled after Roy Powell, the author’s father. Idah Hawkins Willard is a devastating but, according to surviving family members, fundamentally accurate portrait of Sabra Powell, Dawn’s stepmother (indeed, if anything, Powell seems to have played down her savagery). And the character of Aunt Lois was based on Orpha May Sherman Steinbrueck, Hattie Powell’s sister, who raised both Dawn Powell and her favorite cousin, Jack F. Sherman (to whom the book is dedicated), from their teenage years in Shelby, Ohio.