Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca

Complete Stories (3 page)

BOOK: Complete Stories

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Smart as a kick in the shins and as on target as a stealth flyer, maybe Parker is more concerned with being considered witty than with being considered nice, especially if “nice” is synonymous with “agreeable” and “orthodox.” It’s tough to be funny when you have to be nice, and Parker made it her business to be funny. Readers clearly adore her humor; critics have often disparaged it as shrill and self-indulgent. This can be put into perspective, however, when we realize that women who argue against their own subjugation are called shrill and those who point out the absurdities in life without offering an accompanying twelve-step program to fix it all up are deemed ethically irresponsible. A recent critic charmingly claimed that Parker remained “morally a child” all of her life. Parker was many things, but naive wasn’t among them, and the idea of her suffering from a case of moral arrested development because she occupied her time in confronting emotional and social issues can hardly be regarded as a rational argument.

If Parker’s work can be dismissed as narrow and easy, then so can the work of Austen, Eliot, and Woolf. Now that it’s mentioned, their writing was also dismissed as small prose-potatoes for quite some time. Maybe Parker is in good company there in the crowded margins, along with all the other literary paragons of her sex. Aphra Behn didn’t get cut much critical slack, either, when she was writing social satire in the 1670s; and like many women writers after her, she was said to have been unencumbered by the necessity of being ladylike.

(Wasn’t it Behn who wrote in an introduction to one of her plays that she appeared as a woman, not as a playwright, to her critics, and that often her work was attacked for one reason alone: it “had no other misfortune but that of coming out for a woman’s: had it been owned by a man, though the most dull, unthinkably rascally scribbler in town, it had been a most admirable” piece of writing? Surely the same can be claimed for Parker. This leads me to think that perhaps Parker should be pictured as seated at a table with these, her literary predecessors, rather than chained by the ankle and fixed in one amber moment at the restaurant of a middling Manhattan hotel surrounded by the boys. Perhaps we should place Parker among her peers, not merely her contemporaries. Surely Behn, Austen, Eliot, and Woolf have more in common with Parker than Benchley ever did, even if we imagine that Parker would have rather played with Robert than with Aphra.)

Parker can be summed up as a writer of depth and substance; to hiss merely that she was a rapid burn-out case is to sneer, when what is called for is prolonged and sincere applause. It’s like saying that Virginia Woolf was melancholic, George Eliot couldn’t handle her relationships, and Jane Austen wasn’t much fun at a dance: you’d imagine that throwing rocks at the glass houses of major writers would get tiring after a while and certain critics would pack up their pebbles, heading home, where at least in their sleep they could do little harm. The trajectory of Parker’s critical acceptance has often been charted far below that of her popular acclaim, a curious reversal of the situation of many other mid-twentieth-century writers, who are so often pushed to the front of the group by their very own personal critics, the authors looking a great deal like reluctant children, aware of their limitations, who are shoved onto the stage by aggressively solicitous parents eager for them to perform so that their own talents can be validated.

With Parker, the job is simplified. There is no need to resurrect her, because she has remained an author whose work has continued to sell strongly year after year, her readership gleefully resistant to the condescension of literary types who damn her with faint praise. But there is now, as there is every so often, a need to re-establish her footing in the “canon.” The stories collected here are evidence of that. The fact that these works have captured the flag of the reading world’s attention and held it since 1944, when the first
Portable Dorothy Parker
was published, is additional evidence, should it be needed, of her strength and originality.

That Parker is brutally funny is no joke: the unforgiving nature of the humor she directed not only towards herself but towards any figures who took themselves too seriously is her trademark. Her wit is not a surprise to those who have read more than two or three of her works, whether stories, poems, plays, or reviews; the patterns of her humor become quickly familiar even to her new readers, since the effects of her style depend not so much on the ambush of the unexpected as on the anticipation of the inevitable.

You know that the woman—cleverly named Dorothy Parker by the author—in the 1928
New Yorker
story “The Garter,” newly collected here, is best friends with the women in Parker’s better-known monologues “A Telephone Call,” “The Little Hours,” and “The Waltz.” When her garter breaks as she sits alone in the middle of a party, “a poor, heartsick orphan . . . in the midst of a crowd,” she muses “To think of a promising young life blocked, halted, shattered by a garter! In happier times, I might have been able to use the word ‘garter’ in a sentence. Nearer, my garter thee, nearer to thee.” At this point, of course, she’s off and running once again, with the applause and hollers of the audience a mere blur:

It doesn’t matter; my life’s over, anyway. I wonder how they’ll be able to tell when I’m dead. It will be a very thin line of distinction between me sitting here holding my stocking, and just a regulation dead body. . . . If I could have just one more chance, I’d wear corsets. Or else I’d go without stockings, and play I was the eternal Summer girl. Once they wouldn’t let me in the Casino at Monte Carlo because I didn’t have any stockings on. So I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt. Dottie’s Travel Diary: or Highways and Byways in Picturesque Monaco, by One of Them. I wish I were in Monte Carlo right this minute. I wish I were in Carcassonne. Hell, it would look like a million dollars to me to be on St. Helena. . . . Suppose somebody asks me to dance. I’ll just have to rock my head and say, “No spik Inglese,” that’s all. Can this be me, praying that nobody will come near me?

If Parker isn’t sure that it’s her, we can reassure her on the matter: the voice is virtuoso Parker, and “The Garter” is one of her best monologues.

You know, too, that the supercilious mother in “Lolita” will be undone by her predatory envy towards the daughter who happily marries the man coveted by the mother herself; when the wry narrator informs the reader at the story’s conclusion that Lolita’s mother was “not a woman who easily abandoned hope,” you know that the mother’s hope is a poisonous one, aimed to strike at her daughter’s success. You know that the wise older woman in “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl” will herself duplicate the unwise habits of the younger woman seeking her advice, that she cannot live out the counsel she passes along. Perhaps, Parker implies, it is impossible for a flesh-and-blood human being to be as coolly manipulative, controlling, and controlled as thirty-nine-ish Miss Marion appears to be when she suggests to her nineteen-year-old friend Sylvie Peyton that she not permit herself to “become insecure,” and that she conquer her fears that her boyfriend will leave her by being “always calm.” Miss Marion coos, “You must wait, Sylvie, and it’s a bad task. You must not telephone him again, no matter what happens. Men cannot admire a girl who—well, it’s a hard word, but I must say it—pursues them. . . . Talk to him gaily and graciously when you see him, and never hint of the sorrow he has caused you. Men hate reminders of sadness.”

Who would like to bet there and then that, after the little Peyton girl has left Miss Marion alone with her own needy demons, the coolly collected older woman will not catastrophically pick up her telephone—more than once in the space of a few minutes—to call a certain Mr. Lawrence? Are we shocked to hear her inner voice send up the familiar lament “Oh, he said he’d call, he said he’d call. He said there was nothing the trouble, he said of course he’d call. Oh, he said so.” All the good advice is invalidated in a shadowy, lonely late afternoon for a single woman approaching forty.

In presenting the pattern for examination, Parker exploits the apparently trivial—telephone calls, social invitations—in order first to extract, and then to reveal, a theory concerning the larger implications of the difference between the sexes. The theory goes something like this, as she put it in a 1957 story titled “The Banquet of Crow”: “Two people can’t go on and on and on, doing the same things year after year, when only one of them likes doing them . . . and still be happy.” It’s a simple statement, but not an easy one to live through, especially for the likes of Miss Marion or, Parker implies, for the rest of us who cannot mummify our emotions.

You need not have read much Parker to know how these stories will turn out, but then her skill does not depend on the breathless rush towards the unknown but instead on the breathless rush towards the known—even, or especially, when that which is known is what should be known and avoided. The voraciously vulnerable woman will be hurt; the casually unfaithful man will call another more-than-willing victim to his side; the shopgirl who longs for jewels in a window will learn just how far from her reach these pearls lie; the son of a selfish mother will turn up on her doorstep hoping for unselfishness; the woman who dances with a lout will have her instep stepped on and will keep on waltzing.

The waltzing woman will inevitably keep her subtext to herself, and let her partner in on only those phrases he will be able to endure, telling him, “I was watching you do it when you were dancing before. It’s awfully effective when you look at it.” She then goes on to tell us what she really thinks, and it isn’t as winsome as what he hears:

It’s awfully effective when you look at it. I bet I’m awfully effective when you look at me. My hair is hanging along my cheeks, my skirt is swaddling about me, I can feel the cold damp of my brow. I must look like something out of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This sort of thing takes a fearful toll of a woman my age. And he worked up his little step himself, he with his degenerate cunning.

Not that the reader is certain, by the story’s end, whose voice is in ascendancy. The man is a figure to be satirized internally, perhaps; but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your arms around him just the same. The twinned-voice belongs to a woman who laughs at her partner but doesn’t quite want to let him go. It’s sad, Parker knows it’s sad, and you know it’s sad when Parker writes it. And yet we laugh.

Parker’s characters are in most danger—and are most dangerous—when they threaten to break the silence. When the young woman in “New York to Detroit” calls to demand some verbal reassurance, she gets only the literalization of the bad connection that has no doubt existed between the lovers for months before his departure from Manhattan. We flinch to hear her say, no doubt against all her better instincts, “Darling, it hurts so terribly when they ask me about you, and I have to say I don’t—” only to have him reply, “This is the damndest, lousiest connection I ever saw in my life. . . . What hurts? What’s the matter?” The repetition of her sentiment more than undermines its effectiveness; it renders her speech so useless that she attempts surrender: “I said, it hurts so terribly when people ask me about you . . . and I have to say—Oh, never mind. Never mind.” But she can’t quite give up, and asks him for some sweetness to get her through the night—only to have him ring off to join a bunch of his friends who have just dropped by for a party. If you have to ask for love, according to Parker, you won’t get it; but who, according to Parker, can manage to go through life without asking for love?

When she writes about a woman waiting for a telephone call, anyone who has ever waited by the phone can understand what Parker’s character is putting herself through, sensing the ferocity of the struggle against speech when words can only lead to further ruin:

I must think about something else. This is what I’ll do. I’ll put the clock in the other room. Then I can’t look at it. If I do have to look at it, then I’ll have to walk into the bedroom, and that will be something to do. Maybe, before I look at it again, he will call me. I’ll be so sweet to him, if he calls me. If he says he can’t see me tonight, I’ll say, “Why, that’s all right, dear. Why, of course it’s all right.” I’ll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he’ll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them. . . . They don’t like you to tell them they’ve made you cry. They don’t like you to tell them you’re unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you’re possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. They hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games. Oh, I thought we didn’t have to; I thought this was so big I could say whatever I meant. I guess you can’t, ever. I guess there isn’t ever anything big enough for that.

Writing with the full force of true passion—writing the way this character speaks—Parker has indeed been chastised for believing that the literary world was big enough to let her say, in all honesty, whatever she meant. Even as her character misgauges her beloved, so did Parker misgauge a gang of critics who sought to punish her for the authenticity and lack of pretense in her writing. And yet even as her character makes us look at ourselves, and makes us the laugh in the mirror image presented, so does Parker hold a glass up to life, lightly. She wins, finally, because her success affords her the last laugh.

—Regina Barreca

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BOOK: Complete Stories

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