The Portable Dorothy Parker
By The Criticess
I have a very learned friend with a passion for 20’s literature and a PhD in Psychoanalysis and Modernism’s Departure From Femininity. She got married a little while ago and, appropriately, had a fabulously 20’s themed wedding with flapper dresses and tables named after the era’s most famous writers. I was put on the Algonquin table so thought I could settle in for an evening of banter, bath tub gin, and some bitter bitching. However, no one had heard of the Algonquin Hotel. Even the mention of its madam, Dorothy Parker, only met with doe-eyed stares from the women and vague shrugs from their accompaniments. When someone proffered, “I’ve heard of Dorothy Perkins”, I contemplated crying.
Faced with such a disconcerting display, I thought I should take action. It’s a fairly widely acknowledged fact that weddings tend to provoke one of two emotions: either delightful romance or violence. Lacking the remotest possibility of the former – nothing, it seems, makes women more proprietorial than a single flapper – I tried to start a fight with the American girl on my left by telling her I’d slept with the outrageously dull boy she’d had an enormous crush on. She didn’t take the bait; not even when I told her his imagination barely and reluctantly stretched to a minor variation on the proverbial thinking of England.
Thinking I could try the other option by some sort of osmosis, I turned to the couple on my right only to see the most nauseating – not to mention, logistically complex – public display of affection. Somehow, throughout the entire, delicious meal they had managed to hold hands and were now at the point of cutting up each other’s dessert. With his visions of conjoined humans cartwheeling into eternity, Aristophanes would have been proud. I didn’t think it was quite so pretty.
So for the sake of poor Dorothy who would no doubt outwardly resent me doing so while inwardly smiling smugly, I feel duty-bound to give her a little revival.
The popular perception of Parker – a sort of Dorothy-Lite – is of a woman of crackling wit, gaily and drunkenly garrulous, bitter to the point of vitriol yet with an ever disarming delivery. The reality is a little darker.
For all her captivating presence, Parker’s first love was despair. The wit, the charm, the ribaldry, and the bite were there, but so were suicide attempts, abortions, and decrepit, dog shit smeared apartments. The woman who chewed up and spat out the great, the good, and the mediocre – the belle dame sans merci of every circle in which she moved – reserved her most abject thoughts for herself. It is with begrudging consent she agreed to live; the other options apparently marginally less attractive. I might have done her no favours over dinner by quoting the poem, Résumé, in which she most directly expressed such sentiments:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
It isn’t really in keeping with joyous celebration of a life spent together (or perhaps it is, depending on your disposition).
It’s possible, of course, that Parker’s habitual displays of despair – both in her writing and everyday life – were part of an affected persona. There is a certain intrigue about a figure whose every work, every drink, and every day may be her last. I can’t help but wonder if, as a woman familiar with celebrity, she knew the value of offering glimpses into her private life through work assumed to be autobiographical. The overdosing Hazel Morse of Big Blonde; overwrought Mimi’s desperate, fraught attempts to please her soldier husband in The Lovely Leave; and the tormented woman, beseeching god to make a man phone in A Telephone Call can all be traced to episodes in Parker’s life. By creating characters so close to her own, she became her own anti-heroine.
But in the face of – or perhaps because of – her despair, her poems and stories, even at their most sour, are funny. She is, after all, a woman who put international relations into a bra (“Mrs Martindale’s breasts were admirable, delicate yet firm, pointing one to the right and one to the left: angry at each other, as the Russians have it.”); created an entire life philosophy in just a few lines (“Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”); declared her contempt for any even vaguely proprietorial presumptions (“But now I know the things I know, And do the things I do; And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you!”); and voiced the oft-heard woman’s lament over non-committal men (“He’s so sure of me, so sure. I wonder why they hate you as soon as they are sure of you. I should think it would be sweet to be sure.”).
Yet no matter how wittily dressed up it may be, such determined despair gets a little wearing. For all the scope of her engagement with the world of writing – from Broadway and frolicking with the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, to working as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, and being blacklisted as a member of the Anti-Nazi League – she is somehow self-limiting in her perceptions. Entertaining though it undeniably is, sardonicism only goes so far. But if misery was her muse then I suppose she had no choice but to indulge it: to think as she passed every blossoming cherry tree, “How gay ‘twould be to hang me from a flowering tree”. Far more helpful, it seems to me, would be to have given said muse a good slap, and chided it for draining her far more harshly than any other presence in her life. That, however, is the fantasy of a slightly Dorothy-fatigued Criticess in need of a little speakeasy wit – perhaps without the rancour.
About the author:
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The Criticess was born out of a desire to steal female writers, labelled classics and consigned to the doldrums of academia, and to explore them in all their unhinged, electrifying, mischievous, eloquent, mistressful glory. For a time, she wrote for the Edinburgh literary publication, The One O'Clock Gun, and now she is here, bringing to The Fine Line those women and works too vital to grow old on dusty bookshelves. |
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