The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal

Author:Gore Vidal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385526821
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

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After the war, Powell returned to the New York cycle for good. She published a book of short stories, Sunday, Monday and Always (1952). There are occasional ill-omened visits back home but no longer does she describe the escape; she has escaped for good. There are some nice comic moments. Edna, a successful actress, comes home to find her rustic family absorbed in radio soap operas. Although she is quite willing to describe her exciting life, the family outmaneuvers her. “‘Well, Edna,’ cackled Aunt Meg, hugging her. ‘I declare I wouldn’t have known you. Well, you can’t live that life and not have it show, they tell me.’” The “they tell me” is masterful. Powell’s ear for the cadences of real-life talk only improved with time.

The final New York novels, The Locusts Have No King (1948), The Wicked Pavilion (1954), and The Golden Spur (1962), demonstrate Powell’s ultimate mastery of subject, art, self. Where the last two are near-perfect in execution, The Locusts Have No King (“yet they, all of them go forth by bands”: Proverbs) shares some of the helter-skelterness of the early books. It is as if before Powell enters her almost-benign Prospero phase, she wants to cut loose once more at The Party.

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