BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Her Life as a Novelist and Playwright, in Her Own Words : THE DIARIES OF DAWN POWELL 1931-1965 <i> by Tim Page</i> ; <i> Edited with an introduction</i> ; Steerforth Press $32, 512 pages

My grandmother always said that the best thing about New York was the anonymity. After her childhood sentence in Dover, N.H., eating uptown one night, downtown the next and moving in circles that never collided was fiercely liberating. One’s identity was set free of its mooring, from the stern gazes of neighbors and aunties, and set sailing, three martinis to the wind, in the social eddies of New York and Long Island.

Novelist, playwright and New Yorker contributor Dawn Powell was born in Mt. Gilead, Ohio, in 1897. She ran away from home when she was 12, after her stepmother burned her precious notebooks. In 1918 she burst into New York City, convinced of her own talent and certain fame, and stayed, besotted, until her death from cancer in 1965. And while she achieved some fame and recognition for her novels satirizing New York society, she has remained one of those authors whose reputation as a writer is almost swallowed by their participation in a dazzling social set. Until now.

In 1920, Powell married Joe Gousha, poet, advertising executive and heavy drinker, and had a son, Jojo, in 1921. Jojo suffered from a combination of cerebral palsy and schizophrenia, was in and out of hospitals early in his life and, in 1954, became a ward of the state. He is a beacon of tenderness in the life of this suffering family, and while he appears with startling seldomness and brevity in Powell’s diaries, his noticings, proudly recorded by his mother, possess all the wisdom, all the strong center that her life seems to lack.

In his foreword to the journals, Tim Page, chief music critic for the Washington Post, explains that “three-quarters of the diaries are here preserved,” that he kept even the most caustic of Powell’s “passing irritations” with her friends (including Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley and Ernest Hemingway) and cut only the most illegible, drunken, scrawling entries.

“Diaries tell nothing,” Powell wrote in 1954, after reading those of Virginia Woolf. “The entries stop when anything interesting happens or whenever the writer is happy.” The frustrations and fears in Powell’s diaries, from social dramas to financial worries, did not change much in the 34 years recorded here. And while they tell almost nothing about Powell’s intimate relationships, they reveal much about her life as a writer.

After her escape from Ohio at age 12, she does not break free again from what poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles,” but triumphs with good old Midwestern perseverance and flat-mouthed, prairie humor.

She was outrageously productive (15 novels and numerous plays, short stories, reviews and articles) and was clearly the one who kept house and home together. She refused to go to Hollywood, even when studios offered her a desperately needed $1,000 per week, more than she earned in some years .

The diaries also reveal that Powell was admired for her strong characters and beautifully drawn contexts and criticized by editors, reviewers and readers for her weak plots. And if diaries reveal a writer’s inspiration and sources of material, then here is the stuff of Powell’s works. She recorded scenes and conversations in buses and interactions with passers-by in far finer detail than her own impressions and dramas. Her literary criticism is sharp and original. As a satirist, Powell could out-Parker Queen Dorothy, and was frequently pushed by her editors and agents to do so.

One of the thrills of a writer’s diary can be what Powell refers to as “accidental prophesy”--a part, she claims, “of the writer’s job.” Writers think, so often, that they get their material from the past and the present, and often it comes from their future as well. There are many examples of this in Powell’s diaries. In 1933, in a strange, out-of-place entry about a nightmare in which the final lesson is the importance of denying feeling, Powell writes, “. . . The cause and effect must go and, by God, will .”

Will is also the last word in the last entry of Powell’s diary, before her death Nov. 14, 1965. And she was, this career writer, astonishingly prolific in spite of everything, electric with will.