My Home is Far Away
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.
Published ten years after The Story of a Country Boy (1934), this was the last of Powell’s six Ohio novels, and it must have come as something of a shock to her admirers for, in the interim, she had attained a modest but enthusiastic following as a comic novelist with Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), The Happy Island (1938), Angels on Toast (1940), and A Time To Be Born (1942). Such rural books as The Bride’s House (1929) and Dance Night (1930) were long out of print, not to reappear for more than half a century. By 1941, when Powell set to work on My Home Is Far Away, she was better known for the smart, boozy, bawdy, hilarious send-ups of Manhattan high and low life she had discovered since becoming what she called a “permanent visitor” to the city. She had begun to attain a reputation for high sophistication (“Miss Powell is one of the wittiest women around and our best answer to the familiar question, ‘Who really says the funny things for which Dorothy Parker gets credit?’ ” Diana Trilling wrote in 1942) and nothing could be less “sophisticated”—in the glittering, all-knowing, furiously present-tense, big-city manner Powell had perfected—than My Home Is Far Away.
This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!”
Powell started My Home Is Far Away in the early morning of January 27, 1941, while suffering from a fever that brought back so many childhood memories that such a novel seemed “imperative.” “At the beginning, it is written as for a child—words, images, etc., are on the table level of their eyes,” Powell noted in her diary. “Everyone is good to the three sisters, their pleasures are simple, their parents good. As they grow, the manner of writing changes—the knowledge of cruelty, divorce, disillusionment, betrayal …” In fact, My Home Is Far Away is one of the very few examples of a book written for adults, with an adult command of the language, that maintains the vantage point of a hungry, serious child throughout. It might be likened to a memoir that has been penned not with the usual tranquility of distance but rather with the sense that everything happening to the characters is happening right now, without any promise of eventual escape, without any assurance that childhood, too, shall pass away.
I have found that reactions to My Home Is Far Away—and, indeed, to most of Powell’s Ohio novels—vary enormously. Well aware that I am generalizing, I should say that the strongest responses to this book usually come from women readers; from readers—male and female—who know (and feel) the landscapes of the American Midwest; and—especially—from readers who have survived frustrating childhoods, in part by creating for themselves imaginary lives just over the horizon. (Is there another book that so vividly conveys that sense, common among gifted children, that they are human arrows, pulled back for years and years, then finally let fly to find their targets?) This is not to limit or disparage “My Home Is Far Away” but merely to point out that it is not a “typical” Powell novel by any means and that readers who have picked this up looking for riotous wit may be disappointed.
There are many compensations, however—the lush, lyrical writing about a remembered countryside; the reacquaintance Powell provides us with our own youthful secrets and yearnings; the rare sense of a creative artist working in dangerous proximity to her raw material, to those very crises that helped determine the course of her life and artistry. The understated but excruciating way in which Powell described the death of Daisy Willard was admired by no less a critic than Van Wyck Brooks, while the portrayal of Sabra Powell/Idah Hawkins can only be called a magnificent act of vengeance. (Sabra was still alive when My Home Is Far Away was published; her reaction to the book, if any, is not recorded.)
Powell apparently found this mixture of fiction and autobiography difficult to sustain and she was never entirely sure exactly what she had wrought. “Although I set out to do a complete job on my family, I colored it and, even worse, diluted it through a fear of embarrassing my fonder relatives,” she wrote in her diary during a moment of frustration. Immediately after publication, she reread the book: “My first feeling was one of queasiness over the initial establishment of a distinctly autobiographical flavor, but after a while the characters become wholly fictional, increasingly round and with the full reality that only created characters have. Certainly few facts are here.” And yet only four days later she was horrified when an unfriendly reviewer objected to her “pathetic, good-for-nothing people”: “I hate to bring myself out so openly for censure, also to expose the family. It made me cringe.”
Matters were not helped by the inane publicity campaign Scribner’s mounted for My Home Is Far Away, which stressed a wholesome, homespun quality in the book which, while undoubtedly present, is far from the whole truth. The text for one ad is almost farcical in its misperception:
The scene is Ohio in the early 1900s; the main characters are the members of the happy-go-lucky Willard family—always on the move, always seeking the home that is always far away. You’ll laugh with the Willards and sympathize with them in their moments of tragedy. They’re a family you’ll like—especially Marcia, the “middle one.” Meet them today. You’ll be glad you did.[[end extract]]
Happy-go-lucky? A dying mother, a delinquent father, neglected children, a stepmother with a silver whip—can this publicist have read the book? Cornball hype aside, My Home Is Far Away initially sold about four thousand copies—fairly well, by Powell’s sorry standards—and it was respectfully, if sparsely reviewed; in 1953, it was published in Great Britain by W.H. Allen. Powell planned a sequel—to be entitled simply, “Marcia”—and worked on it intermittently for the rest of her life, finishing at least eighty double-spaced typewritten pages. What remains of “Marcia” carried the central figure on to a new life in Cleveland, and brought back the lecturer Thorburne Putney and Aunt Lois for further complications.
It is probably best that Powell let My Home Is Far Away stand on its own. And so Marcia Willard is forever young, alert, battered but unbowed, ready to begin her real life, at long last riding that train that will take her far away from home and to a home that is far away:
She was still scared, but she felt light-headed and gay, the way Papa did when he was going away from home. She thought she must be like Papa, the kind of person who was always glad going away instead of coming home. She looked out the window, feeling the other self inside her, the self that had no feelings and could never be hurt, coming out stronger and stronger, looking at the fringe of London Junction and the beginnings of Milltown with calm, almost without remembrance.
Without remembrance? On the contrary—Powell remembered everything. Eugene O’Neill called his Long Day’s Journey Into Night a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood”: a similar claim might be made for My Home Is Far Away.
The critic Matthew Josephson, who was responsible for the first posthumous study of Powell’s work (published in the Spring 1973 issue of Southern Review) wrote to Jack Sherman in August 1972 for information about Powell’s early life. “I thought her novels wonderfully witty but unfinished,” he confessed by way of introduction. “Now I like them about as they are. My Home Is Far Away is not for fun, and it is a masterpiece.”
Tim Page
1995/2004
PART ONE
The Man in the Balloon
1
THIS WAS THE MONTH of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!”
Down the cinder driveway between the Willard house and Dr. Bird’s box hedge rumbled the hay wagon, laden with the Willard furniture. The sudden picture of their home, everything that was theirs, yanked out of its familiar roots like baby teeth and stacked up on wheels, made the children stand still, staring, uncertain. There was their little pine bed standing on end, the baby’s high chair hanging by a rope from the corner pole, the big walnut dresser with its front bulging out like a funny-paper policeman’s; there were the two big parlor chairs, wide rockers curved in perpetual grins, wonderful for scooting games; there was the couch bought with coupons—bright yellow fuzzy stuff with red and green caterpillars wiggling circles over it so that it always seemed alive and dangerous; there was the pine kitchen cupboard tied on its back to the dining table as if it had left its little corner only when overpowered by force. Yes, there went their little yellow house itself, for without these things warming its insides, the little yellow house was nothing but empty doors and windows. They watched the wagon wheels roll relentlessly over the pansy border and leave deep ruts in the soft new grass, but it didn’t matter because they didn’t live here any more. Like their furniture, now being brushed by the overhanging branches of Peach Street, they were suspended in space between the little yellow cottage, Number Twenty-Three, and the unknown towers of London Junction. This must be the reason that time, too, was suspended, for no matter how often they ran to ask their mother the time, it was always nine o’clock, a little before, a little after, but not quite starting time. So round and round they swung each other over the grass, as if this example of speed would whip up the minutes.
“We’re moving, we’re moving, we’re moving to London Junction!” they chanted shrilly. This time they whirled through the gap in the hedge into Dr. Bird’s front yard. This was a hushed space, shaded with sleek-leafed bushes, wide-spreading locust trees that dripped feathery green over fern beds below. The sun never came here or into the shuttered, vine-covered house; it was an old people’s yard with a cool cemetery smell, suitable for an old man and old lady who never came out further than the plaster old man and lady in the tiny weather-house. Old Dr. Bird sat behind the porch vines, shelling peas into a tin saucepan.
“Hold on there! What’s all this?” he called out in a high trembling voice.
“We’re moving!” Lena answered. “We’re moving to London Junction.”
“Here,” said the old man. “Here you are, girls. Here’s a penny apiece.”
They flew to his side.
“Dr. Bird,” asked Marcia earnestly, “who will hold the string for you to tie up bundles when I go to London Junction?”
“Nobody,” said Dr. Bird. “I’ll have to do it myself.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marcia. “I liked putting a finger on the string. I don’t see how you’ll get along.”
“Never mind, here’s your penny,” said the old man. “Run along or your folks’ll drive off without you.”
“Say goodbye to Dr. Bird,” their mother called from the surrey now pausing in the driveway. “Well, here we go, Dr. Bird.”
“Glad, eh?”
“Indeed I am,” their mother answered happily. “You see, I’ll be there with Ma and Lois, and besides it’s a better place for Harry.”
“London Junction, London Junction, London Junction!” sang the two girls and whirled each other round and round across the lawn, down the dusty path till they fell in the geranium bed laughing. Their father, a slight, jaunty figure with a little sandy moustache, in a neat brown-checked suit, came out of the little yellow house carrying the baby in one arm and the red telescope in the other. The red telescope was the very thing in which Dr. Bird had first brought the baby. The two girls had looked in it carefully every morning for over a year to see if any other babies had arrived, but so far none had followed Florrie.
“Get in, get in!” shouted their father. “Do you want to go to London Junction or do you want to stay here?”
They scrambled over the wheels into the back seat of the surrey. The horse and surrey were borrowed from the Busby Hotel where their father had clerked until today. It was a handsome outfit, the shining black surrey with tan fringe twinkling along its top, and the gleaming black horse that Papa himself had “broke” in the field behind the hotel. There were leather storm curtains rolled up to be let down in case of rain, and a silver-trimmed whip in a silver-trimmed socket. This elegance so impressed Marcia and Lena that they sat still, proudly stretching their feet in the new Mary Jane black patent-leather slippers. Dr. Bird limped along the box hedge to the gate and watched them.