Conversation with Ilana Masad

Belt talks to Ilana Masad, author of the introduction to our new edition of She Walks in Beauty

What does Dawn Powell's work mean to your writing life or personal life? 

I first discovered Dawn Powell's work through her New York novels while I was, fittingly, living just outside the city and visiting often and falling in love with the city. I thought she was terrific and so funny and I was still in college so still very young, and I was shocked (as, I think, maybe only the very young can be) about how incredibly relevant and contemporary-feeling her novels about NYC were. She was lambasting everyone in the very industries my college peers and I all wanted to be working in (publishing! theater! magazines! etc.) yet she felt just a tad more loving to me than her contemporary, Dorothy Parker. I love Parker too, don't get me wrong, but Parker's writing always had, in my mind, a sharper razor's edge, while Powell, as much as she lampooned her characters, also recognized a certain pathetic and deeply human need for us all to be liked. So I discovered her at just the right time, and she helped me realize just how much things stay the same when it comes to things like human desire and ambition.

Since this book is so richly place-based, tell me about Powell's Ohio.

I really wish I could, but I don't think I can! Everything I know about Powell's Ohio is filtered through Powell's work itself, and in She Walks in Beauty is very particular to a time and place I know little about. But my understanding was that Powell, who had a difficult upbringing, felt very stifled in the parts of Ohio where she lived. She presents the town in She Walks in Beauty as being very much a small pond full of fish believing they're very large, and a few curious fish wondering what lies outside the pond they seem to be stuck in. At the same time, she doesn't seem to hate the place, and her characters certainly don't—but they seem to have a misunderstanding about their own size and importance. Which, to be fair, could be said also about her New York novels!

I love the portion of your introduction in which you talk about the mixed reviews Powell received for She Walks in Beauty when it first came out. My favorite is from the Saturday Review: "books with as much merit as 'She Walks in Beauty' come in for harsher criticism than their inferior contemporaries, because they say so briskly and explicitly what they want to say that one cannot help wishing they wanted to say something more important." What does She Walks say? And why does that matter to you?

Ha, yes, I rather enjoyed that one too--such a weirdly backhanded compliment! I think She Walks is, in many ways, a character study but of a community rather than a single person, and I think it wants to say what Powell also said in other novels: human beings are rather silly, and we do such silly things to ourselves and one another, we care about such silly things, and yet there's something very beautiful and sometimes achingly tender about all this silliness. I think that in She Walks in particular, she's also looking at the process of growing up and learning that even if you think so many things are silly--like class and gender expectations, for instance--you so often have to learn to understand them and respect them in order to get along with others—but isn't it nice, occasionally, to remember how ridiculous so much of it is? I know that for me, anyway—as a person who takes myself and the world very, very seriously—it is vital. 

What, do you find, is the value in reading outstanding writers' early, less polished work?

Oh gosh, what a great question. I think there are so many valuable things about it! Obviously as a writer, it's reassuring. I mean, I'm not saying that the 200k-word high fantasy novel I wrote when I was 18 should get published, but it's nice to know that even the most celebrated writers had to learn by doing. Then, too, I think there's something fascinating about watching a writer's voice change and mature--getting glimpses of that earlier work allows us to do that. And, finally, I think that there's often a softness, a flash of idealism, and some vulnerability present in writers' earlier and less polished work—they haven't learned yet that they might sometimes need to listen to an audience's or an industry's or even an editor's desires; they're still more attuned to their internal desires, and they're still playing around. 

If you were to recommend this book to a friend who hadn't heard of it or Powell—in just a couple sentences—what would you say?

I'd say: here is a short, funny, and tender novel that's deeply relatable to anyone who ever grew up dreaming of going somewhere else, as well as to anyone who realized, once they'd left, how very much life existed right where they were.