Of the many rapid-burnout cases in American letters, one of the saddest is that of Dorothy Parker. Born a hundred years ago next Sunday, she was the last child of Henry Rothschild, a prosperous German-Jewish cloak manufacturer, and Eliza Marston, an ex-schoolteacher of English ancestry. Eliza died when Dorothy was four. Dorothy soon acquired a hated stepmother, but within a few years she, too, died, and thereafter Dorothy and her siblings lived a peaceful, if motherless, life, cared for by Irish servants, in the family’s four-story town house at 214 West Seventy-second Street. In later years, Parker rarely spoke of her father without scorn, but according to her most recent biographer, Marion Meade, Henry Rothschild was an affectionate and responsible parent. He sent his daughter to good schools, and when she was gone for the summer he wrote her funny little poems about how much he and the dogs missed her.
When she was twenty, her father died. She was left without money, but she did have a few salable talents. She was good at writing, and she had a quick, acerbic wit. At that time, the so-called smart magazines were being born, and Parker soon found her way to their doors. She was a staff writer for Vanity Fair from 1917 to 1920. From 1927 to 1931, under the nom de plume Constant Reader, she was The New Yorker’s lead book critic. Her light verse, which was what first made her famous, was published in these magazines, among others. Most of her short stories appeared first in The New Yorker. When Parker took over Vanity Fair’s theatre column, at the age of twenty-four, she had never reviewed a play or anything else, but in her first column, which covered five musical comedies, she wittily disparaged most of what she saw. She was a “tired business woman,” merely seeking an evening’s innocent diversion. And what had she got? Bad seats, noisy audiences, ridiculous shows. One play she dismissed with the line “If you don’t knit, bring a book.” This particular voice, with its world-weariness, its wicked merriment, its emphatically personal note, was exactly the sort of thing the new magazines were seeking.
At the same time that Parker found the work she needed, she found congenial friends. At Vanity Fair, in 1919, she met Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, who, like her, were gifted, witty, unknown writers. The three became inseparable, and they attended, together, the first luncheon of what became the celebrated Algonquin Round Table. This group has been so much written about that I will dispense with the particulars here—but it must be said that Parker was the wittiest of the bunch. In a small, sweet, highly cultivated voice (“She talked like a woman who as a little girl had attended a very good singing school,” one of her friends said), she would come out with utterly withering remarks. Many of them were too obscene to be printed, but others were printed and reprinted in her friends’ columns and passed around town. Meanwhile, she was doing her own writing. Between 1926 and 1933 she published three collections of verse and two collections of stories, all of them big sellers. Her books column is said to have been the first thing people turned to when they opened this magazine. In 1929, she won the O. Henry Prize for her story “Big Blonde.” By the early thirties, she was a celebrity. Playwrights wrote plays about her; people followed her around at cocktail parties, waiting for her to say something funny.
Success did not bring happiness. In 1917, at the age of twenty-three, she had married a young stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II. (She later said she had married Eddie because he had such a “nice, clean name.” She did not enjoy being half-Jewish.) Eddie enlisted in the Army, and by the time he got back from the war, in 1919, Parker was part of the Round Table, a world he did not know how to enter. They separated in 1922—not, however, before Eddie, an alcoholic, helped teach Parker to drink. After Eddie, there were numerous affairs, and they took on a pattern. The man would pursue her, and then his interest would flag. She would wait by the phone, eventually falling into despair, which she treated with alcohol. She found that if she took small sips of Scotch all day long the hours passed more easily. At night, she would go out with her Algonquin friends and get thoroughly drunk. She often thought of death, and made this obsession part of her public persona. Those of her poems that are not about lovelessness (“Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses”) are usually about death (“Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp . . .”). When she wasn’t joking about suicide, she was attempting it. Between 1923 and 1932, she tried four times to kill herself: once by slashing her wrists, once with Veronal, once with barbiturates, once by drinking a bottle of shoe polish.
This was the period of her best work, but her editors had a hard time getting it out of her. She was shameless about deadlines. And even her best pieces showed a certain lack of ambition. “All of her things are asides” is how her editor at The Saturday Evening Post put it. Parker knew this, and she responded by despising her own work. When her editor at the Viking Press sent her the page proofs of her first collection of stories, she refused to correct them. She wanted to burn them, she said. He ended up locking her in a room with himself, the proofs, and a bottle of whiskey until the job was done.
She eventually solved her writing problems by ceasing to write. In 1933, at the age of thirty-nine, she met an actor, Alan Campbell, eleven years younger than she. Unlike her other men, Alan seemed genuinely interested in her well-being. He moved in with her; he cooked, he cleaned, he helped her shop for clothes. Alan’s acting was going nowhere, and he decided that he and Parker should try screenwriting. In 1934, they bought a car, got married, and drove to Hollywood.
That, effectively, was the end of Parker’s career. She lived thirty-three years longer, but in those years she produced only eleven more stories. (Sadly, some of them are among her best.) She also coauthored two plays and wrote occasional magazine pieces. She contributed to about two dozen films, almost always in collaboration with Alan, but she hated the work. Probably their best film was the 1937 “A Star Is Born,” which won them an Academy Award nomination. Parker claimed that she never saw the movie—that she went but walked out. Much as she scorned Hollywood, however, it was making her rich. In 1937, she and Alan signed a contract with Sam Goldwyn at a combined salary of fifty-two hundred dollars a week, an astonishing sum that they somehow managed to spend—on houses, clothes, and parties. Parker drank as much as ever. Alan drank more.
What high-mindedness Parker had left she invested in politics. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; according to Ring Lardner, Jr., she briefly joined the Communist Party. And she remained faithful to the Stalinist line long after other American leftists were repelled by events in the Soviet Union. She stopped speaking to many of her friends, accusing them of political cowardice. Eventually, she turned on Alan as well, claiming that he was homosexual. (“What am I doing in Hollywood, at my age and married to a fairy?”) She divorced Alan in 1947, remarried him in 1950, split up with him again a year later, then moved back in with him in 1961. When Alan died, in 1963, from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates, Parker returned to New York, where she passed her last years in an alcoholic twilight. “Don’t feel badly when I die,” she told a friend. “I’ve been dead for a long time.” In terms of public perception, this was true. When she finally died, of a heart attack, in 1967, the obituaries surprised people. They thought she had died ages ago.
So Parker used her gifts for little more than ten years. But even during that period she tended to waste herself. Her mind was dominated by one idea: the interlocking of vulnerability and cruelty. All her friends, whatever else they remembered about her, remembered her two-facedness: how, as Lillian Hellman described it, Parker “embraced and flattered a man or woman, only to turn, when they had left the room, to say in [her] soft, pleasant, clear voice, ‘Did you ever meet such a shit?’ ” Hellman tried to be understanding: “The game . . . probably came from a desire to charm, to be loved, to be admired, and such desires brought self-contempt that could only be consoled by behind-the-back denunciations of almost comic violence.” Most of Parker’s friends were afraid of her, but at the same time, they were protective of her.
That pattern—appeal followed by denial, effusion followed by constriction, the female principle, as she came to view it, followed by the male principle—became the rule of her imagination. You can see it in all her work, most obviously in the poems. Line by line they go, telling us about pretty things, about flowers and keepsakes and love, until they come to the last stanza or the last line. Then Parker delivers the sucker punch. Here’s a celebrated example:
It’s witty, and so are some of the other poems, but in all of them the message is the same: hope will always be disappointed. And the technique is the same: she inflates the balloon, then pops it.
Parker’s book columns for The New Yorker also follow the pattern. Almost invariably, she opens with a long comic complaint about her life. “And this was the week I meant to get all that reading done,” begins a typical piece. But she couldn’t read, she says, because she had the grippe or she was hungover or spring had arrived, and there’s nothing she hates more than spring. She’s a poor, beleaguered woman, and what do people do? They write books, and then expect her to review them. Well, all right. (You can almost hear the gears shifting from vulnerability to aggression.) And she begins her perusal of the week’s books, most of them ridiculously easy marks—Emily Post’s “Etiquette,” Margot Asquith’s essays, a collection of poems on Lindbergh’s flight, a volume entitled “Favorite Jokes of Famous People,” another called “The Technique of the Love Affair,” foreign-phrase books, pornography. She takes aim and, needless to say, she scores.
A few of these pieces are still funny. There are times when, reading them, you wish Parker were here to take on Danielle Steel or Shirley MacLaine. And her reviews would no doubt seem more valuable now if the menaces they describe—Lindbergh mania, country-weekend etiquette—were still around to plague us. But many of Parker’s victims are not menaces. Joke books, foreign-phrase books: who cares? Many good books were being published at the time, books that Parker didn’t review. During the period of Parker’s Constant Reader column, Edmund Wilson, in his book reviews for The New Republic, was writing about John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, Lytton Strachey, André Malraux, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Eliot, among others. Parker, meanwhile, was shooting Margot Asquith in a barrel. On the rare occasion when she devoted a column to a writer she admired, she nevertheless found something to ridicule—how people misunderstood this writer (Lardner), how they praised that one’s novel but ignored his short stories (Hemingway)—and spent most of her words on that. Finally, when she was cornered, when the column was about to end, and she had not said why the writer was good, she would unload some hysterical hyperbole (Hemingway she compared to the Grand Canyon; Gide she compared to the Grand Canyon and the Atlantic Ocean) and then beat a hasty retreat.
The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews; they are standup-comedy routines. You don’t have to listen to her opinion, she says. If she didn’t like the book, maybe that’s just her hangover speaking. And anyway she didn’t really read the book. She skimmed it, or she threw it out the window. She doesn’t care much for reading. (“I think the last thing I read was ‘Sketches by Boz.’ ”) Even less does she care for writing. When she composes so much as a telegram, she has to go lie down for the rest of the day.
Of all the kinds of writing Parker practiced, the one she did seem to care for—the one she worked hardest on and wanted to be remembered for—was the short story, and her fiction is indeed her best work. Like many of her poems, her stories are about the relations between men and women, but in the stories she is forced to supply details. She can’t just say there’s a sucker born every minute; she has to say which sucker, and how, and in the process the situation deepens and intensifies. Basically, she is held back from wit. Possibly for that reason, something curious happens to her vulnerability-cruelty formula. Instead of deploying the two forces sequentially—buildup, then letdown—she works them simultaneously. Her heroines are all vulnerability, but from the very start they are observed with a cold precision.
Most famous and best of the stories is “Big Blonde,” which tells of the good-time girl Hazel Morse. “Men liked you because you were fun,” Hazel learns, “and when they liked you they took you out.” Hazel lands a husband, Herbie, but, once married, she no longer feels like being fun. A huge sadness descends on her. “She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs.” To cheer her up, Herbie teaches her to drink, but it doesn’t work. Herbie leaves, and the drinking remains. The years pass; Hazel drifts from man to man. One night she changes into her nightgown, swallows twenty Veronal tablets, and, without regret, goes to bed. Nettie, the maid, finds her the next day:
What makes this scene so hair-raising is that it is an inverted sex scene, taking Hazel’s situation down to its root, the female body. We see the breasts, the thighs, the nightgown flung back, only now the body is fat and tired, and the occasion is no longer one of fun but one of cold scrutiny, with the three strangers staring at Hazel’s nakedness, the doctor pinching her back into life. Never has female vulnerability been more terribly portrayed.
“Big Blonde” is not just Parker’s best story; none of the others comes near it. Still, there are about a dozen stories that are hard to forget. Most of them, like “Big Blonde,” are about the hopelessness of male-female relations, but their heroines are different from Hazel; they are more intelligent, more nervous, more captious, more like Parker herself. We see them at the speakeasy, drunkenly complaining to their friends about neglect, betrayal. We see them having cocktails with the cad in question while he takes calls from other women. Or we see them at the other end of the phone, calling and wondering who he’s in the room with. The telephone turns up again and again. To Parker it seems to have been the quintessential image of male elusiveness. The men in the stories are barely described. They are not really human; they are merely a scarce resource, like money or food—something needed. Only the women are real, and what is most real about them is their desperation: the dresses they choose to catch the man’s eye, the pearls they have shortened to hide wrinkles at the neck, the fights they pick, the tears they shed. It is a pitiless vision, and it was Parker’s only true subject.
In the late thirties, she tried writing stories about the socialist struggle, and she produced one nearly beautiful one—“Soldiers of the Republic,” about the Spanish Civil War. (She and Alan went to Spain in 1937.) The story is set in a café in Valencia, and it is full of fine observation: the soldiers briefly reunited with their wives, the babies in patched dresses on their laps. But Parker keeps wrecking the story by interjecting her own guilty-liberal thoughts. At one point, she observes a baby at the next table, with a new blue ribbon in its hair. The bow is wonderfully described—its loops, its determined gaiety. Then:
This happens again and again. Parker is trying to write a story about something other than herself—about the Spanish people and their courage—but every time she climbs up out of herself she falls back in. And, of course, the thrust of these asides is not altruism but egotism, the selfishness of those who hate themselves. This she could write about, but she couldn’t write about anything else.
And that is the tragedy of Parker’s career. She has no disinterestedness; she has, basically, no imagination. She seems to feel she has no right to one. People are always telling us how there is no connection between moral strength and artistic strength: how Picasso preyed on women, how Wagner hated Jews, how you can be a terrible person and still be a great artist. But the case of Parker reminds us that, while the relation between morality and imagination may be a complicated one, it does exist. Hope, forgiveness—these are not just moral actions. They are enlargements of the mind. Without them, you remain in the tunnel of the self. Parker was morally a child all her life. She had a clear vision of the bad, but it never taught her anything about the good. In the mid-fifties, when she was the subject of one of The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interviews, she was asked whether she thought Hollywood had a way of destroying artistic talent. “No, no, no,” she replied. “I think nobody on earth writes down. Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. That is their best. If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.” Very brave, right? Take responsibility for what you’ve done. But, in fact, the criticism is excessive, unrealistic—thereby letting her off the hook, releasing her from judgment into a little ecstasy of self-loathing. For Parker, working in Hollywood was a conscious tradeoff—money for art—as it was for many other writers. And as she had just told the interviewer a moment before, she was quite willing to make the trade: “I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”
Parker’s politics, too, however idealistic-seeming, have an irresponsible quality. Obviously, she acquired her hatred of political oppression by way of her hatred of sexual oppression, and, though this is not a bad way to acquire a social conscience, in Parker’s case the resulting political feelings were as confused as her feelings about the sexual situation. She sided with all victims, her friend Wyatt Cooper recalled in a 1968 Esquire article. “This sympathy extended to anyone accused of a crime; so long as they were found guilty, she was convinced of their innocence.” If, on the other hand, they were found not guilty, she was convinced of their guilt. “Lizzie Borden, having been acquitted, would be forever guilty in Dottie’s eyes,” Cooper writes. “ ‘I can sympathize with almost any wrongdoing,’ she once told me. ‘People are horrified by child molesting, but it seems perfectly understandable to me. The only criminal activity with which I don’t completely identify is arson.’ ”
Parker has been praised for the extreme economy of her stories, many of them less than ten pages long, most of them faithful to the unities of time and place (a taxi ride, a conversation on a patio), all of them sketching in their characters with a stroke or two and leaving much for us to guess. They deserve praise, as the aptest container for what she had to say. But surely she herself must have noticed that her finest story, “Big Blonde,” was her least economical story, more than twice as long as her average; that it did not observe the unities but covered ten years; and that, despite the autobiographical touches (the alcoholism, the suicide attempt), it was almost the only one of her major stories whose heroine was not like her but duller and nicer—a sympathetic character. Parker’s best story, in other words, is her least typical story. It is a voyage out, and that is what she needed. Instead, she pulled in and pulled in, until at last she just disappeared.
Why did she limit herself so? You can blame the frivolity of the twenties, or you can point to those institutions of the twenties with which she was most closely associated—the Round Table, with its ban on seriousness, or The New Yorker, founded and edited by a Round Tabler, Harold Ross. According to James Thurber, Ross was determined to give the magazine “an offhand, chatty, informal quality. Nothing was to be labored or studied, arty, literary, or intellectual.” For a while he succeeded. In its first year (1925), The New Yorker was full of tiresome, subcollegiate joshing. But Ross’s brains and good taste—and also, I think, his curiosity, his interest in the world, a trait in short supply at the Round Table—got the better of him, and he began producing a magazine that, if light-spirited, was nevertheless serious and well written. By the time his friends from the Algonquin began writing for him regularly (Parker and Benchley in 1927, Woollcott in 1929) Ross had in some measure outgrown them. Eventually he got rid of them. He broke with Woollcott in 1939. He fired Benchley in 1940. Parker he didn’t have to eliminate—she stopped filing her book reviews—but in the late thirties he started turning down her stories.
Lack of ambition was not Parker’s only problem. There was also her vision of the world as a yin-yang of need and hate. Where did that come from? Two of her biographers, Meade and John Keats, point to the early death of her mother. A third biographer, Leslie Frewin, diagnoses her malady as manic-depressive psychosis. Actually, Parker had a psychiatrist—she started going to him in 1926, right before her second suicide attempt—and his diagnosis was more modest: “pathological drinker.” This leaves unanswered the question of what caused the drinking, but does one have to look that far? Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, O’Neill, Thurber, Ring Lardner, John O’Hara, Hart Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett: did all of their mothers die young? A number of these writers had their careers—indeed, their lives—prematurely ended by alcohol. Parker, miraculously, lived to the age of seventy-three, but from about age thirty on she was intoxicated during most of her waking hours. It is no surprise that she achieved so little. The wonder is that she achieved so much.
Everything Parker wrote that is memorable, and much that is unmemorable, fits neatly into the Viking “Portable Dorothy Parker,” the only comprehensive Parker collection still in print. According to a Viking editor, that book is one of the ten best-selling Portables—one slot below Emerson, one slot above Poe. Interest in Parker has not died. The director Alan Rudolph is making a film about her right now, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. The script is one of those “Ridi pagliaccio” affairs: how bright the Round Tablers were on the surface, how neurotic and miserable underneath. Needless to say, the scriptwriters were not at a loss for snappy dialogue. All of Parker’s famous quips are there. Conversation, actually, may have been her best genre. In any case, it is for her wisecracks, and for the poems that read like wisecracks, that she seems to be remembered by the public.
But her unique contribution was her portrait, in the stories, of female dependency. This was a central concern of nineteenth-century women writers—Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës—and also of some of the men, notably Thackeray. (Parker said that she read “Vanity Fair” “about a dozen times a year.” Meade believes that Parker modelled herself on Becky Sharp.) But in the twentieth century the rules changed. With the move to the city and the loosening of ties to family and class, women were thrown into a new situation—one in which they should have been freer, and in which some were (witness Sister Carrie) but in which others found themselves wholly abandoned, both by the system that had formerly hemmed them in and by the new one, which still had no place for them (witness Lily Bart). Even after women began to make their way economically in twentieth-century culture, they were still left with an ages-old inheritance of emotional dependency, the thing that marriage and the family, having created, once ministered to and now did not. If in the old days women were enslaved by men, they nevertheless had legal claims on them. Now they had no legal claims, so all the force of their dependency was shifted to an emotional claim—love, a matter that men viewed, and still view, differently from women. Hence Parker’s heroines, waiting by the phone, weeping, begging, hating themselves for begging. This is a story that is not over yet. Parker was one of the first writers to deal with it, and she addressed it in a new way. Because, it seems, she identified with the man as well as the woman, she saw these women from the outside as well as from within, heard the tiresome repetitiousness of their complaints, saw how their eyelids got pink and sticky when they cried. She did not feel sorry for them. They made her wince, and we wince as we read the stories—for, burning with resentment though they are, they are even more emphatically a record of shame. Female shame is a big subject, and for its sake Parker should have been bigger, but she is what we have, and it’s not nothing. ♦
