Beyond the Wit

by

Paul Clark

The first danger an essayist faces when writing about Dorothy Parker is trying not to outwit her. The second is trying not to underestimate her. As I reread the stories, poems and reviews in the 1973 Penguin paperback edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker, I was struck by two things: (1) Wit is the soda pop of writing—sparkling, effervescent and refreshing in the moment but quickly going flat; (2) I had forgotten how so many of her stories—and not just the often anthologized “Big Blonde”—are marvelously sad tales.

I came to Dorothy Parker through the Marx Brothers. In high school I was one of those tiresome teenagers who had seen the Marx Brothers’ movies so many times I could recite swathes of Groucho’s dialogue, whether anyone wanted me to or not. The Marxes’ cinematic output was meager—even more meager when you eliminate their bad movies from consideration. So to quench my thirst for more Marx, I moved on to books by and about them—Groucho was a prolific author and Harpo wrote a very good autobiography. I read a couple of biographies of George S. Kaufman, who wrote the Marx Brothers first plays and movies and became a prolific Broadway writer and director. Kaufman was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, which is how I found out about Dorothy Parker.

The Algonquin Round Table refers to the gathering of some of the wittiest playwrights and newspaper writers in New York City in the 1920s. They met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, mainly to see who could be wittiest each day and, as a result, get their name mentioned in the local papers most often. Parker was a core member of this gathering.

I bought my copy of the Portable Parker because I thought I would then have at hand a collection of some of her wonderful zingers, which I could then foist on other people. What I didn’t know until I started reading the stories was that the wit on display at the Algonquin was only the most public part of Parker’s persona. The book contains some of her most famous lines, such as the short poem “News Item” (“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.”) The book also includes, under her guise as “Constant Reader” in The New Yorker, her famous reaction to A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (“Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”) Most of the poems and stories, however, reveal a darker, sadder side. My 20-year-old male self was not moved by Parker’s accounts of the travails of single women in New York between the wars, which, in memory, was what ALL the stories were about.

Thirty years later, as I paged through my yellowing copy of this yellow-covered book, I found myself skipping the poetry for the most part, and mainly glancing through the reviews. Above I mentioned the short shelf life of wit—the shelf life of a review of a Broadway play is, I think, even shorter. Parker knew well the audiences for the magazines that ran her reviews, so her insights reflect as much on the circumstances of her seeing a play as they do the play itself. Her “Constant Reader” book reviews from the 1920s reflect a reader who read widely though not very deeply, and sometimes, reluctantly. In one review from 1928 she writes, “I don’t want to review books anymore. It cuts in too much on my reading.”

Re-reading the short stories in 2007, however, was a revelation to me. Most are not much more than two-character pieces, usually set in some Manhattan apartment. The story arcs are slight and similar—several of the stories feature women characters who, when introduced, are already teetering on the edge of despair and, as the story progresses, are pushed over that edge by circumstance.

I don’t mark up my books when I read, but on this re-read I took notes on several pages that featured favorite examples of her writing. The last short story in the book, “The Bolt behind the Blue”, includes this description of two women, a wealthy divorcee and her less-well-off acquaintance.

[Mrs. Hazleton] was rich. She was not wealthy or well-to-do or comfortably off; in the popular phrase, Mrs. Hazelton was loaded. And she had had three husbands and three divorces. To Miss Nicholl, whose experiences had not encompassed so much as a furtive pressure of the hand, there seemed to be always present behind Mrs. Hazleton’s chair an invisible trio of the adoring and discarded.

One of the most chilling characters in Parker’s fiction is the title character of the story “Mr. Durant.” Durant, a married man, works in the credit department of a small company and carries on an affair with one of the secretaries that ends shamefully, for Durant, as much as for the woman, though he is oblivious to shame. Parker establishes the mood for the devastating end of the story when she describes the Durants’ study and living room:

Mr. Durant’s books were lined up behind the glass of the bookcase. They were all tall, thick books, brightly bound, and they justified his pride in their showing. They were mostly accounts of favorites of the French court, with a few volumes on odd personal habits of former Russian minks. Mrs. Durant, who never had time to get around to reading, regarded them with awe, and thought of her husband as one of the country’s leading bibliophiles. There were books, too, in the living-room, but those she had inherited or had been given. She had arranged a few on the living-room table; they looked as if they had been placed there by the Gideons.