Odd Jobs (143 page)

The curious seething undercurrent of scorn and a taste for vivid metaphors at times bizarrely stress Ms. Meade’s syntax:

Nor does the biographer, while deploring the sins—alcoholism, promiscuity, bitchiness, indolence, inchoate neediness, fellow-travelling—admire the sinner for her talent and oeuvre. She gives Dorothy Parker’s writings rather short shrift, ranging from the patronizing (“She was careful about rhyming the first and third lines of quatrains and fussed over masculine and feminine endings”) to the forthrightly dismissive: her fashion-photo captions for
Vogue
were “drivel,” and her work in the early Twenties consisted of “dozens of hokey verses and prose pieces.” It is observed of her theatre reviews, “She was beginning to run out of nasty cracks and to repeat herself,” and, disapprovingly, of her poetry, “Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on the quality of her work.” Ms. Meade quotes from the fiction as if it were autobiography and displays antipathy to the, as she sees it, parasitic process of literary creation:

Though in the course of this thorough survey of Dorothy Parker’s seventy-three years there must be some words in her favor, they do not linger in the mind or prevail over the main impression of domestic misery and professional inconsequence. Even the quips she was famous for do not rise very high above the ambient sleaziness and fug, though some made me laugh. Of John McClain, an athletic and faithless lover, Dorothy said that “his body had gone to his head.” After being told that Clare Boothe Luce was always kind to her inferiors, she asked, “And where does she find them?” She called her Southern mother-in-law “the only woman alive who pronounced the word egg as if it had three syllables.” And after meeting Somerset Maugham she claimed that “whenever I meet one of these Britishers I feel as if I have a papoose on my back.”

She was very American, beginning with her Jewish father’s determination to put his Jewishness behind him. He married two gentile women, of whom the first, Eliza Marston, became Dorothy’s mother in 1893, in stormy weather, at the New Jersey beach resort of West End. Eliza and Eleanor Lewis were both “Christian schoolteacher[s] … liberated from spinsterhood,” and both died young—her mother when Dorothy was five, her stepmother before she turned ten. Dorothy, though she referred to herself, often deprecatingly, as Jewish, was given no Jewish religious instruction and attended a Catholic school near her home, on Manhattan’s West Side; its influence may be detected in her work as the great frequency of the word “hell.” J. Henry Rothschild, though not of the international-banking Rothschilds, was a wealthy clothier, an amateur versifier, and, his letters indicate, an affectionate father; but Dorothy, who under his protection had grown into a pert, piano-playing, dog-loving, largely self-educated minx less than five feet tall, was not grateful. Indeed, though she was to enjoy indulgent benefactions from New York publishers, Hollywood studios, and the Long Island rich, she does not seem to have been grateful for anything, except perhaps the friendship of Robert Benchley, with whom she never slept—which cannot be said of Elmer Rice, George Kaufman, Charles MacArthur, Ring Lardner, and Deems Taylor. She and Benchley, though, did spend hours and days together and for a time co-inhabited a midtown office so small that she claimed, “An inch smaller, and it would have been adultery.” She thought of herself as an orphan. Her jokes, her poems, and her prose personae defy a cold world, a world of deaths and departures. Her hard-boiled gallantry, like Hemingway’s, belongs to the generation from
which World War I had stripped amiable illusions. She helped set a style, and perhaps a legitimate complaint about her as an artist is that she stayed set in that style; unlike her contemporary Rebecca West, or Mary McCarthy in the following generation, she did not let her edgy young brightness and irreverent sass deepen into an intellectual boldness and an expressive range. Her stories wear better than her poems, though some of her light verse will last as long as the genre is anthologized:

Her meticulous, Housmanesque neatness, especially fine in the second quatrain, redeems the sentiment from bathos. Within her conscientious quatrains, she sometimes, though rarely, compresses language to a lyric intensity:

In her stories, she captures the voice, above all, of neediness; the newly-weds in “Here We Are” and the disintegrating heroine of “Big Blonde” and the tipsy, haughty mother of “I Live on Your Visits” all demonstrate how need in its very urgency clogs and blocks its own satisfaction. Dorothy Parker was an expert on the lovers’ quarrel, and her wasteful life afforded her a thorough education in the self-wounding perversity of the human heart.

A fonder biographer than Marion Meade might have discovered something to admire in how her subject, after her precocious infatuation with death, a number of suicide attempts, and the apparent suicide of her second husband, settled herself grudgingly to live. She outlived all the original Round Tablers except for Marc Connelly, and in her last burst of
creativity—a handful of short stories and a play,
The Ladies of the Corridor
, written with Arnaud d’Usseau, which ran six weeks on Broadway and was called by her “the only thing I have ever done in which I had great pride”—she took lonely, aging women as her topic. Interestingly, in the late stories “I Live on Your Visits,” “Lolita,” and “The Bolt Behind the Blue,” children vividly figure, though she herself had borne none. In “I Live on Your Visits,” an adolescent boy observes with chagrin and precision the drunken mannerisms of a woman who, from her high-toned and arch way of talking, exactly matches what we know of Dorothy Parker. The consolations and detachment of art remained available to her, and it might also be said in admiration that neither alcoholic haze nor romantic distress cut her off from the pleasures of reading. She was, as her column for
The New Yorker
proclaimed long ago (1927–33), a Constant Reader, and the book reviews she procrastinatingly executed for
Esquire
toward the end of her life show the same enthusiasm for the written word that lighted up her girlhood as a mock-orphan. She treated books with a rectitude and a respect she could not muster for people. And her passion for left-wing causes argues a warmth for people in general if not in particular, though Ms. Meade sniffs, “She had a tendency to assume personal responsibility for world catastrophe,” and reports that some observers considered Dorothy to be “playing amateur revolutionary, just as she once had played amateur suicide.” Raised amid a wealth based upon the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, Mrs. Parker became an avid proponent of unionizing screenwriters in Hollywood. Having publicly marched for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, she travelled the extra mile with the Communist Party in the Thirties: in April of 1938 she signed a statement declaring that Stalin’s infamous Moscow trials established “a clear presumption of the guilt of the defendants,” and, unlike many radical intellectuals, she did not drop out of pro-Communist groups when the Soviets and the Nazis signed their nonaggression pact. Though no conclusive evidence or remembrance has emerged that would identify her and Alan Campbell as card-carrying members of the Communist Party, she took the Fifth Amendment when asked about her membership before a New York State legislative committee. However, viewed in the gentle twilight of the Cold War, her left-wing commitment and her active fundraising for Spanish Civil War refugees show a generous and selfless spirit that otherwise had few opportunities to express itself as she fiddled away at unproduced scripts for a weekly salary bigger than most Americans’ annual one. Scott Fitzgerald, writing from Hollywood to Gerald Murphy in 1940, considered her a “spoiled writer”
and “supremely indifferent”: “That Dotty has embraced the church [i.e., Communism] and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference.” Perhaps we, a half-century later, can judge her more kindly.

To answer my own question: what makes
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
enjoyable is its deglamorized depiction of the literary and cultural world that hatched and to an extent smothered Dorothy Parker. The Algonquin wits, most of them, were under thirty when the Round Table first assembled, in 1919, and their blithe misuse of their time and bodily health, and their quick-fix approach to literary production, have the charm of youthful innocence. As in the Sixties, being young then was in itself an empowerment; writing under Harding and Coolidge was impudent fun. Dorothy Parker’s life brushed against most of the strands of American literary life from 1920 to 1950, and the strands crackled with an energy not felt since. Yet in those pre-television days, when New York had a dozen newspapers and short stories were as hot as rock videos are now, making a living out of words still wasn’t easy, even for those who became, like Mrs. Parker, celebrities. F.P.A.’s famous “Conning Tower” paid nothing to contributors, Harold Ross’s fledgling
New Yorker
paid little, and Condé Nast—who was a man before he was a corporation—called the tune to his pipers. Few New York writers could spurn the summons to Hollywood when it came, though it condemned them to a virtually anonymous and utterly frustrating part in the manufacture of mass entertainment. Benchley, the irresistibly publishable, jumped at the chance to become a stage actor, and then a screen actor. Dorothy Parker was more strugglingly loyal to her ancient craft. Her life, even unsympathetically told, evokes the pulse of a spendthrift generation, whose promise sparkled in speakeasies and glimmered through a long hangover.

A
RTFUL
P
ARTNERS:
Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen
, by Colin Simpson. 320 pp. Macmillan, 1987.

B
ERNARD
B
ERENSON:
The Making of a Legend
, by Ernest Samuels. 659 pp. Harvard University Press, 1987.

It is always a pleasure to see a reverenced reputation besmirched, and Colin Simpson works hard, in his flat-footed but roundly detailed account of a secret partnership between “the most successful art broker of the twentieth century” and the high-art-minded sage of I Tatti, to do some besmirching. His revelations, though, are somewhat less sensational than he and his jacket copy seem to think, and they hit at rather faded targets—Bernard Berenson’s reputation, in the public mind, at its acme borrowed much of its gloss from an amiable confusion with that of Bernard Baruch, and Joseph Duveen has already been unabashedly portrayed as a rascal in S. N. Behrman’s rollicking series in
The New Yorker
in 1958.
Artful Partners
on one hand takes a judgmental tone and on the other limns an international art world that had all the moral nicety of an underwater feeding frenzy. Between 1869, when Joel Duveen began to deal on the London antiques market, and 1939, when his son Joseph, titled Lord Duveen of Millbank, died, colossal American fortunes arose and uprooted hundreds of European artworks from their damp nooks in monasteries and palaces and the moldering great homes of the aristocracy; such a transatlantic surge required adroit fishers of men like Joseph Duveen and his uncle Henry and, to give some semblance of order and decency to the upheaval, experts like Berenson. That art experts received fees for their accreditations and recommendations, and that these were not always entirely disinterested shocks me rather less than it does Mr. Simpson, an English “popular historian.” Indeed, for one of my nationality, severe moral repugnance might seem downright ungrateful, since the result of these genteel predations lies all about us, in the form of the great American collections, which have passed from flattering the vanity of plutocrats to withstanding the conscientious scrutiny of humble museum tourists. Thanks to the Duveens and their ilk, we have a National Gallery and masterpieces for the masses.