… the level of craft and breadth of emotions available to Dowell as a writer is dizzying. … The syntax, spun from Brontë as much as Faulkner, forges in the power of its obsession something beyond the recognized parameters of Southern fiction.
Coleman Dowell (1925-1985) was born and raised in Kentucky. After serving in the US Army Medical Corps during World War II, Dowell found his way to New York, where he worked as a typist, model and songwriter for Broadway musicals and television. After becoming disillusioned with the theater, Dowell turned to fiction and received the admiration and praise of writers like John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino and Tennessee Williams.
Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell’s fourth book, is a boldly erotic novel about an overly endowed young Kentucky farmer, his painfully inhibited wife, and an outrageously provocative teen-age boy. Set amid the rigorous years of the Second World War, with the pressures of maximum production needs countered by a minimum of available farmhands, it is an authentic depiction of the way of life of millions of Americans on the home front. But more than a bare chronicle of the rural South, the novel reveals the surprising relationship of a spinster schoolteacher and the farmer (her former pupil), putting to rest the fiction that total sexual inexperience implies a deficient capacity for sensual and perverse imagination.
Readers of the New Directions anthologies will have some familiarity with the work of Coleman Dowell, three of whose remarkable short stories were published in ND26, 27, and 28. But with the publication of his second novel, Mrs. October Was Here, the vast range of his talents and imagination is strikingly underscored. The action of Dowell’s satirical American fantasy––like some of our dreams, both comic and frightening––takes place “out beyond the limits of the twentieth century,” in “an outpost called Tasmania, Ohio.” Lying “like an English pudding, rather heavily in its basin,” Tasmania is a seat of insularity, bigotry, and boredom harboring its portion of madness and peacefulness, fostered by familiarity. On this, the quintessential American town (“Oh, beautiful for specious skies / For ambient waves of pain. . ."), Mrs. Septimus October, a lady of vast wealth whose hobby is revolution, descends with her mysterious entourage to stage her great experiment-one aimed at ridding the world of hatred by focusing it on one single individual and destroying him. Her strange cadre of agents grows amid surprising, even sinister circumstances. Mrs. October’s bright and terrible revolution, however, takes a turn she had not anticipated, and the novel reveals itself as a ferocious, many-leveled fable.
… the level of craft and breadth of emotions available to Dowell as a writer is dizzying. … The syntax, spun from Brontë as much as Faulkner, forges in the power of its obsession something beyond the recognized parameters of Southern fiction.
[In Dowell’s work] the reader encounters teeming, charged emotions, dark and active with pain.
