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Powell modulated her epistolary voice for her various pen pals, a group that included John Dos Passos, Maxwell Perkins, and Edmund Wilson (whom she calls "Wig," perhaps a reference to his shiny-pated middle age). But throughout, she tends to put a comical gloss on her tribulations, with the tears of things peeking out through the cracks. As the very first letter in the collection reveals, the author already had a handle on her comedic resources at age 17, describing a dog's righteous indignation: "Saturday I decided to make a miniature peach meringue pie. When Benjamin caught a glimpse of me, suspiciously decorated with flour, he gave a low cry of pain and staggered away. He didn't return until late that night when I heard him weeping and gnashing his teeth out in the chicken yard." But Powell just got better from there--much better. This volume contains thousands of incidental barbs and felicities, which makes it a true browser's heaven. And nobody should overlook the marvelous, on-the-fly credo she addressed to a publisher who was about to turn down her whip-smart masterwork The Locusts Have No King:
Edmund Wilson, the critic, insists I have been writing "existential" novels for years, before Sartre. I object, for my novels are based on the fantastic designs made by real human beings earnestly laboring to maladjust themselves to fate. There is no principle for them to prove--they may disobey the law of gravity as they please. My characters are not slaves to an author's propaganda. I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses.Powell labored as hard as humanly possible to accommodate her own fate--with, perhaps, mixed results. But her Selected Letters are a glorious and supremely funny record of her long struggles and (truly) lasting triumphs. --James Marcus
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