The Brat of American Letters

by

Lauren Roberts

              

Dorothy Parker is probably more often quoted than read these days, which is a shame. Not that she’s not worth quoting for many of her witticisms possess a sparkled brilliance rounded off with enough barbed wire to penetrate the skin of her subject. The same could be said of her short stories, poetry and especially her reviews. Parker could and often did slice open her subjects with a skill as fine as any surgeon, and she did it so well. That she left them bleeding rather than healing was her specialty.

Because she wielded a pen with the same acerbic temperament she displayed with her tongue, Parker’s writings can be off-putting to some. She had little patience and less kindness toward the women of her generation who molded themselves into societal expectations—and experienced the resultant frustrations. Those who came under her professional scrutiny—playwrights, actors, authors—often winced, but readers were well served by her honest, sharp-edged comments. “Wit has truth in it,” she once said. “Wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

Parker was born on August 22, 1893. Her childhood was not a happy one; her mother had died young, and her relationship with her father and stepmother was difficult. But her life turned around in 1916 when Frank Crowninshield gave her an editorial position at Vogue. Within a year, she moved to Vanity Fair, and later became their theatre critic. It was also while she was there that she met those with whom she formed the famous Algonquin Round Table, the famed New York literary luncheon circle, with Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott and others. She was perfect for the group, and they for her.

It was while this group was in existence that Parker began writing for Ross’ new magazine, The New Yorker. It was a relationship that would last on and off until the mid-1950s and her contributions helped shape what the magazine became. But she also continued to publish her poems and short stories as well as book and theatre reviews; she even wrote (with her husband) movie scripts, and later an unsuccessful Broadway play.

Parker is one of my favorite writers, even though her stories invariably push my emotional buttons: humor, anger, love, pity and everything in between. It’s for that reason I cannot read them before going to bed. However, her passion, wit and remarkable insight into the human condition is undeniable. “Big Blonde,” one of her best short stories, details the downward spiral of Hazel Morse. She is, to me, the epitome of Parker’s complex fictional creations that both embodies in the character and elicits in the reader a range of intense emotions. It is easy to dismiss her as an idiot, to sympathize with the limited expectations of her generation’s gender, to scream at her for her choices, to weep with her for her inability to understand, to desire for her the courage of conviction.

Hazel is a former dress establishment model who has developed herself in accordance with her expectations, that is, catering to men. “Her job was not onerous.” Parker writes, “and she met numbers of men and spent numbers of evenings with them, laughing at their jokes and telling them she loved their neckties. Men liked her, and she took it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing. Popularity seemed to her to be worth all the work that had to be put into its achievement. Men liked you because you were fun, and when they liked you they took you out, and there you were . . . She was a good sport. Men liked a good sport.”

The problem with being “a good sport,” of course is that it allows no real emotions. Hazel slowly discovers this as she moves through her days in a fog of  good whiskey and ever-changing men until she “dreamed by day of never again putting on tight shoes, of never having to laugh and listen and admire, of never more being a good sport. Never.” The story may not be a surprising one, running as it does along expected lines, but in Parker’s skilled hands it is an unusually strong one. I think Parker may have hated Hazel, but she probably also felt at one with her in some ways. And it is, in my view, that likely combination that gives this story its powerful, ageless quality.

Parker also wrote a large amount of nonfiction, and it is no less eloquent. Even in her book reviews, she exhibited her usual flair. Under the moniker of “Constant Reader,” she reviewed for The New Yorker. One of the most sensitive reviews I’ve ever read is hers of a book she probably felt should not have been published—Journal of Katherine Mansfield, about which she said, “[It] is a beautiful book and an invaluable one, but it is her own book, and only her dark, sad eyes should have read its words. I closed it with a little murmur to her portrait on the cover, ‘Please forgive me,’ I said.”   

In her review of Nan Britton’s book, The President’s Daughter, she showed her usual flair for outrageous commentary, here designed to poke in the eye those she felt went beyond the bounds of honor. Britton had been the secret young lover of President Warren Harding, and this book was her tell-all about their affair. “Surely this story of so bare and shabby a love,” Parker wrote, “of these meetings held in hotels recommended by taxi drivers, and, some time after the man had been made President of the United States, of that tryst in a clothes closet, should be a pathetic thing . . . For the unfortunate little Elizabeth Ann, the child of Nan Britton and Warren Gamaliel Harding, one can only wish that no one will show her the book so that unbeautifully exploits her. Undoubtedly, it will make money . . . It is lofty on the list of bestsellers . . . This is, you remember, America.”

But she wasn’t frugal with praise when she felt it was warranted. In reviewing a collection of his short stories, she noted. “[He] writes like a human being . . . Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness; he keeps his words to their short path.”

Even her amusing review of the 1927 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette is worth reading if only for her mocking take on the extreme formality the book insisted on. “Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for the finding of topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit . . . ‘You talk of something you have been doing or thinking about—planting a garden, planning a journey . . .  or similar safe topics. Not at all a bad plan is to ask advice: . . . I’m thinking of buying a radio. What make do you think is best?’ . . . If she says that is the way you should talk, then, indubitably, that is the way you should talk. But though it be at the cost of that future social success I am counting on, there is no force great enough ever to make me say, ‘I’m thinking of buying a radio.’”

Sadly, Dorothy Parker has lost her rightful place with many critics and therefore many readers in the list of America’s great 20th century writers. It is an unfortunate fact that the style of cultivated wit she and her cohorts of the Algonquin Round Table so skillfully exercised has been replaced with that of popular vulgarity. We readers are more the losers when this happens. I urge you: don’t let it happen to you.

Note: Collections of her works have been and continue to be published including The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin Classics; $17; 2006) and Complete Stories (Penguin; $15; 2002). A search on AddALL turned up 812 titles of all editions ranging from $2,500 to $1.

 
Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it