Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
Complete Stories (2 page)
Certainly the portraits of deleriously pretentious intelligentsia Parker poured onto her pages tweaked at certain readers, and it’s probable that Parker herself was aware of the wince-inducing effect of some of her sharper prose as she left it out of the earlier collections of her work. What is certain is that a number of the stories printed here for the first time since their initial publication in various periodicals contain moments of satire so spectacular that those certain readers mentioned earlier might shrivel up in the manner of a vampire shown a silver cross.
Her silver crosses are fashioned along the lines of this miniature, presented in Parker’s previously uncollected early sketch “An Apartment House Anthology”:
The minute you step into her apartment you realize that Mrs. Prowse is a woman of fine sensibilities. They stick out, as you might say, all over the place. You can see traces of them in the handmade candles dripping artistically over the polychrome candlesticks; in the single perfect blossom standing upright in a roomy bowl; in the polychrome bust of Dante on the mantel—taken, by many visitors, to be a likeness of William Gibbs McAdoo; most of all in the books left all about, so that Mrs. Prowse, no matter where she is sitting, always can have one at hand, to lose herself in. They are, mainly, collections of verse, both free and under control, for Mrs. Prowse is a regular glutton for poetry.
In passage after passage, Parker not only grasps the petit points made by self-proclaimed cognoscenti in order to mock them, but she grasps them hard ’round the throat, and hard enough to put them out of their misery.
Parker went about the business of writing in a very practical way: she did it and got paid for it. But it seems as if there is a fraternity of disgruntled critics who would like to make her pay for her achievement with her reputation. They speak of her “exile” to Hollywood, where she had the audacity to be successful as a screenwriter and the nerve to be nominated for an Academy Award for writing the cinematic masterpiece
A Star Is Born
. They argue that she “sold out” and “wasted” herself by writing about narrow topics.
A Star Is Born
. They argue that she “sold out” and “wasted” herself by writing about narrow topics.
Let’s clear up this business about narrow topics: Parker concerns herself primarily with the emotional and intellectual landscape of women, the places where a thin overlay of social soil covers the minefields of very personal disaffection, rejection, betrayal, and loss. She manages throughout it all to make her work funny (and that she is funny is one of the most important things about her) while tilling away at this dangerous garden; and for that generations of women and men have thanked her by reading her, memorizing her, making movies about her, performing plays based on her, and writing books analyzing her—but also castigating her most ruthlessly, passing on untruths behind her back and since 1967 speaking most ill of the dead.
Narrow topics? It is true that Parker often viewed her large subjects through small lenses, and that sometimes—sometimes—her fanatic attention to detail can be mistaken for a passion for minutiae instead of a passion for sharply focused observation. But those disparaging Parker’s accomplishments usually make only passing (if not parenthetical) reference to the fact that she has remained a popular writer for more than sixty years, a woman who constructed a literary reputation for herself by writing satirical and witty prose and poetry when women were not supposed to have a sense of humor, and writing about the battle between the classes with as much appetite and bite as she brought to the struggle between the sexes.
You might say that Dorothy Parker should be placed at the head of her generation’s class, given her ability to willfully and wickedly push, prod, and pinch her readers into thought, emotion, laughter, and the wish to change the world as we’ve always known it. You might say that she has surely earned recognition by articulating that which is ubiquitous but unspoken, or you might say that she deserves kudos because she managed to say with wit and courage what most of us are too cowardly or silly to admit. Usually when authors manage to do this— write powerfully and passionately about an important and universal topic—they are rewarded.
Not so with Parker. Parker has been slammed for at least thirty years. One recent critic complains that Parker had “no disinterestedness, no imagination,” and another bows low to introduce Parker with the gallant phrase “The span of her work is narrow and what it embraces is often slight.” It’s clear, however, that such critics write not out of their own convictions but out of their own prejudices. How else could they have read Parker with such blinkered vision?
Parker’s work is anything—anything—but slight, concerning as it does life, death, marriage, divorce, love, loss, dogs, and whisky. Given the comprehensive nature of her catalog, it is clear that the only important matters untouched by Parker boil down to the impact of microchip technology, sports, and cars. And if you look carefully at her prose, Parker does deal with cars—if only in passing, and only those passing in the fast lane.
Not that Parker had a great wish to be counted among Those Who Appeal to the Well-Read. Her portrait of literary types, in both her fiction and her nonfiction, is about as flattering as a broken tooth. In another previously uncollected sketch, “Professional Youth,” we are introduced to “one of the leading boy authors, hailed alike by friends and relatives as the thirty-one-year-old child wonder”—uncannily resembling his modern counterparts, who continue to make up the vast population of large parties in large cities celebrating small achievements. Parker informs us about the way in which the junior author declares his greatness and originality:
Perhaps you have read his collected works, that celebrated five-inch shelf. As is no more than fair, his books
—Annabelle Takes to Heroin, Gloria’s Neckings
, and
Suzanne Sobers Up
—deal with the glamorous adventures of our young folks. Even if you haven’t read them, though, there is no need for you to go all hot and red with nervous embarrassment when you are presented to their author. . . . He has the nicest, most reassuring way of taking it all cozily for granted that not a man or a woman and but few children in these loosely United States could have missed a word that he has written. . . .
And what exactly is the original contribution to thought made by this radical young band of renegade writers?
They come clean with the news that war is a horrible thing, that injustice still exists in many parts of the globe even to this day, that the very rich are apt to sit appreciably prettier than the very poor. Even the tenderer matters are not smeared over with romance for them. They have taken a calm look at this marriage thing and they are there to report that it is not always a lifelong trip to Niagara Falls. You will be barely able to stagger when the evening is over. In fact, once you have heard the boys settling things it will be no surprise to you if any day now one of them works it all out that there is nothing to this Santa Claus idea.
Not that reading fares all that much better than writing. Parker implies that language should be considered a controlled substance, par celed out according to need and only in small amounts. Listen to what, in her classic late-night-alone monologue “The Little Hours,” she has to say about what she might call the “gorgeous” effects of books taken at a high dosage:
Reading—there’s an institution for you. Why, I’d turn on the light and read, right this minute, if reading weren’t what contributed toward driving me here. I’ll show it. God, the bitter misery that reading works in this world! Everybody knows that—everybody who
is
everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rochefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. There was a man for you, and that’s what
he
thought of it. Good for you, La Rochefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read. I wish I’d never learned to take off my clothes. Then I wouldn’t have been caught in this jam at half-past four in the morning. If nobody had ever learned to undress, very few people would be in love. No, his is better. Oh, well, it’s a man’s world.
“If nobody had ever learned to undress, very few people would be in love” is one of Parker’s witty lines. It is not her autobiography. When an author’s words are confused with her deeds, they too often act as substitutions for a truly conscientious consideration of her work and life. Yes, Parker married a few times, divorced a few times, drank, and wrote her heart out. Except for the astonishing ability with which she completed this last task, she lived a life much like those of the other writers of her day. It seems odd, then, for an article written on the centenary of her birth (in
The New Yorker
, ironically enough) despairingly to announce the shocking discovery that for Parker “success did not bring happiness.”
The New Yorker
, ironically enough) despairingly to announce the shocking discovery that for Parker “success did not bring happiness.”
Why this prevailing wish to preserve Parker as a twentieth-century version of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, a phantom swaying over the ghostly remains of the Algonquin Round Table, murmuring rhyming verse to herself, alone and abandoned? Why the wish to see her long life as a failure of the will to die rather than the triumph of a will to survive? Perhaps because the idea of a successful woman writer, one who deflated daily the pretensions of the world around her with a stiletto irreverence aimed at the hypocrisies of the cultural avant-garde, is unnerving even in this day and age. Why else preserve not the image of a wickedly laughing woman who enjoyed her heart’s rush into the territories where angels feared to tread, but the vision of a sad, unfunny used up little old lady? (Who
was
that little old lady, anyway? Certainly not Parker. At seventy Parker wanted to start writing a column for
Esquire
and to publish a new collection of stories.)
was
that little old lady, anyway? Certainly not Parker. At seventy Parker wanted to start writing a column for
Esquire
and to publish a new collection of stories.)
On a bad day it’s not hard to dream up a conspiracy plot which demands that all women writers who speak successfully with a satirical tongue get lacerated critically or, worse, that such women are presented as sad, shriveled shells of frivolous femininity, or—worse still, worst ever—that women who don’t act nicely
get left alone
. But then such bad days are usually provoked by the realization that the woman writer is still regarded by certain critics as an intellectual and moral idiot because she doesn’t write about fly fishing or pontificate on the bounty of the world so lovingly created (by men, need we add?) as her playground.
get left alone
. But then such bad days are usually provoked by the realization that the woman writer is still regarded by certain critics as an intellectual and moral idiot because she doesn’t write about fly fishing or pontificate on the bounty of the world so lovingly created (by men, need we add?) as her playground.
But Dorothy Parker was not meant to be Betty Crocker; the joys of womanhood were not on her agenda.
The complications, delights, humor, and frustrations of womanhood were, however, unflinchingly examined by Parker. Her business was to make fun of the ideal, whatever it was, and trace the split between the vision of a woman’s life as put forth by the social script and the way real women lived real lives. The ordinary is the very heart of her material. It is the essence of much of her humor. In “Dusk Before Fireworks,” for example, we are privy to the following timeless exchange between a “very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed,” and a “temperately pretty” woman who “half a year before . . . had been sweeter to see,” which takes place after the beleaguered girlfriend has just protested a little too much: “You know I haven’t got a stitch of jealousy in me. Jealous! Good heavens, if I were going to be jealous, I’d be it about someone worth while, and not about any silly, stupid, idle, worthless, selfish, hysterical, vulgar, promiscuous, sex-ridden—”
Delicately annoyed, the young man stops her tirade with the word “Darling!” Using the term as a means of punctuation rather than a declaration of affection, he interrupts her only to ask the age-old question:
“Why do you want to work up all this? I watched you just sit there and deliberately talk yourself into it, starting right out of nothing. Now what’s the idea of that? Oh, good Lord, what’s the matter with women, anyway?”“Please don’t call me ‘women,’ ” she said.“I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I didn’t mean to use bad words.” He smiled at her. She felt her heart go liquid, but she did her best to be harder won.
The gap between how life is dressed up to appear and what it looks like underneath its fancy trimmings is the gap where interesting writing begins, especially when that writing is satiric. The female satirist makes some people nervous. They don’t feel all that easy around a woman who puts her “femininity” aside in order to make a point or a joke—and heaven help her if she wants to take a humorous perspective on a serious point.
But heaven help Parker, then, because she was nothing if not irreverent; nothing to her was sacred save human dignity. For the woman in “The Little Hours” who finds herself awake as a kind of penance for having retired early, in bed with only La Rochefoucauld for company, Parker can offer a virtual litany of irreverence. Listen to how well she mimics the authoritative voice, only to slash it to pieces with the edge of reality; listen to the way she demonstrates her perfect knowledge of the lines (making reference to, among others, Shakespeare, Browning, Milton, Marvell, Keats, Shelley, and Walter Savage Landor). Only after establishing proficiency in that most acceptable of lofty literary languages does Parker go on to savage its meaning by tossing it all into the blender:
This above all, to thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. Now they’re off. And once they get started, they ought to come like hot cakes. Let’s see. Ah, what avail the sceptered race and what the form divine, when every virtue, every grace, Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Let’s see. They also serve who only stand and wait. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Silent upon a peak in Darien. Mrs. Porter and her daughter wash their feet in soda-water. And Agatha’s Arth is a hug-the-hearth, but my true love is false. Why did you die when lambs were cropping, you should have died when apples were dropping. Shall be together, breathe and ride, so one day more am I deified, who knows but the world will end tonight. And he shall hear the stroke of eight and not the stroke of nine. They are not long, the weeping and the laughter; love and desire and hate I think will have no portion in us after we pass the gate. But none, I think, do there embrace. I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. I think I will not hang myself today. Ay tank Ay go home now.
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