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Dorothy Parker: The Woman with an Acid Pen
In the roaring ’20s, a decade full of clever chaps like Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, and Noel Coward, no writer had a sharper and more acid wit than Dorthy Parker.
Parker made her living as an all-r0und professional writer, but she’s largely remembered today for her acerbic wit and for her role as a charter member of New York’s famous Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and actors that met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until about 1929.
Ah, to have been a fly on the wall of the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel when the “Vicious Circle” met for lunch. Among those eating their soup and salad (perhaps accompanied by a cocktail or two) were Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Benchley, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, Ring Lardner, and of course Dorothy Parker. How’s that for a luncheon group?
Among these brilliant lunch-goers, Dorothy Parker was the queen of the quip (she once called herself a wiseacre), the darling of New York literary society.
She was aware of her reputation. On the subject of her morning rituals, she wrote, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
On hearing of Calvin Coolidge’s death: “How could they tell?”
On a stage performance by Katherine Hepburn: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
On Yale prom night: “If all the girls were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
On female independence from men: “Where’s the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?”
Said after she had been seriously ill: “The doctors were very brave about it.”
She could be a bit racy with her puns: ‘You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.“
She could also laugh at herself.
I like to have a martini.
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.
I’m pretty sure Parker would have appreciated the curious disposition of her ashes, which rested for 15 years in her lawyer’s filing cabinet. But they finally escaped and are now resting under a tombstone in Baltimore, provided by that city’s NAACP, with an epitaph, written by Parker herself, that reads,
Excuse my dust
Postscript: For this post, I went back and read a number of Parker’s 300-some published poems. Many of them are slight things (often published in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, where slight things go to die), though always written with precise diction and imagery. Some deal with the dark side of life, including suicide and alcoholism. In a review of a collected volume of her poems, the critic for the NY Times called them “flapper verse.” That’s too harsh. She was a talented poet, though perhaps too much of her time.
Her stories have more heft to them, though one I read for this post, Arrangement in Black and White, is so dated that it is almost embarrassing to read today. Parker was a civil rights enthusiast (she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Black and White is her attempt to satirize an armchair liberal who gushes over a famous black singer at a party. The story is absolutely cringe-inducing in its dated diction and badly managed satire. Many of her stories, however, do transcend their time. Her story Big Blonde (O. Henry Award in 1929), for instance, is an evocative portrait of a working-class woman’s descent into alcoholism. I read it about 40 years ago, and it has stayed with me all these years.
Parker led a charmed life early on, but she didn’t end well. She was married three times, twice with her second husband (she later said he was “queer as a billy goat”). Both husbands died of drug overdoses. Prone to bouts of depression, Parker attempted suicide twice, once by slitting her wrists. Her poem Resume now serves as a kind of ironic comment on those attempts:
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.
Parker did continue to live, but not well. She ended up an alcoholic, living with her dog in a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She died of a heart attack at the age of 73.
Published in General
She, at one point in my writing of the post, I tried to get that Pooh criticism into it. I too find it funny. I messed around with it for awhile and gave it up. My explanation was taking up too much space.
There is (was?) a Harry’s Bar in Paris where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and some other expats used to hang out.
She, I was in Venice, as a soldier on leave, in 1959. I remember eating minestrone soup for 15 cents. It was so cheap and good and I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the three days I was there. We’re you there in 1959?
A little more about the Maryhill Museum: Railroad tycoon Jim Hill somehow became infatuated with Queen Marie and built the estate overlooking the Columbia River for her. Since she declined to join him there, it eventually became a museum instead.
She was one of the first, if not the very first royal to visit the United States.
Unless you count Napoleon III, who wasn’t royal yet. And he didn’t “visit,” he was exiled here for trying his hand at a coup d’état.
That sounds great. I love minestrone soup. I wouldn’t exactly have to have been carried about in swaddling by my mother in 1959, but almost. I was there in 2003. If I ever go back again, I’m not going to plan anything in advance, but just get up on the morning and go for a ride on the vaporetto, and read the posted signs (I don’t speak or read Italian, but the love of an ancient, dead, language gets me by), and let the locals entertain me. My stepdaughter and I did that, and that’s how we found out about a huge water parade on the Grand Canal to celebrate a naval battle (it wasn’t Lepanto, but it was a big deal), and how we found out about the midnight celebration in St. Mark’s Square to re-start the clock in the tower, after it had been shut down for a about a year for repairs. Thousands of people, and they were handing out free wine and snacks. Hard to imagine, right about now.
My favorite (and relatively inexpensive) meals were the ones we bought from the street vendors and ate sitting on the curb. It was a wonderful holiday. I couldn’t get over the fact that you could walk into a tiny, ancient, church in just about any little square in the city, and find paintings by the Old Masters, just hanging about on the walls.
Regarding troubled artists, I’ve not really figured out why we should find meaning in our lives through the lens of those who can’t manage their own.
The Python’s “Oscar Wilde” sketch comes to mind.
I don’t know that one, Basil. What’s it about?
Here’s a script. The performances appear to have been pulled because of copyright.
http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_3/106.htm
Basil, I see. Indeed, Wilde and Parker have much in common. Some of the skit you posted that made light fun of Wilde might well have been directed at Parker as well. They both liked to shock.
Ring Lardner would have been the most fascinating member to lunch with in 1919-1920…..and likely the most depressing every year after that.
Black Sox Scandal?
Use “horticulture” in a sentence…
@She, I’m really curious about what you think of Parker’s story, Arrangement in Black and White. Would you mind reading it and giving me your opinion?
I’d like to hear from any others as well.
Yep, nothing breaks a cynical man more than betrayal in a realm where had allowed himself some measure of idealism.
Well, I agree with you that it’s a satire. Start with the title: An Arrangement in Black and White. That makes me think of a chessboard, and the hierarchical structure of the pieces on it, from kings to pawns, and the carefully planned series of moves that composes the game. And, of course, Whistler’s Mother. It’s carefully staged and artificial. The black man at the center of the story, and in whose name the gathering is being staged, is just a pawn for his virtue-signalling hosts and other invited guests.
It’s a portrait of hypocrisy, mid 1920’s edition, in which, through her nervous chatter, and incessant and inane prattle, the main character consistently and unknowingly reveals the depths of her contempt for the talented man she’s there to support and honor. (On a completely spurious and invented side note, I suspect that DP might have had more time for this woman’s openly racist husband than she does for the woman herself.) It might be going too far with such a short piece, to say that it was a full indictment of the wealthy classes who often did this kind of thing, lifting up someone who’s in what today we would call an “out-group” in order to signal their tolerance and inclusiveness, while their hearts are still full of intolerance and bile, but I think that’s the direction Parker intended. (On a similar note, the more things change, the more they stay the same.)
Yes, the diction is dated, exaggerated, and cringe-inducing in parts. But I expect DP knew that, and was aiming for that effect, just as I suspect a lot of wealthy white people who were made deeply uncomfortable by the subject of race talked a lot of nervous drivel at the time to try to cover up their disquiet. The stilted, one might say “arranged” dialog doesn’t spoil the story, or the point, for me. I find (in a different context, and pace a hell of a lot of Ricochet members), P.G. Wodehouse much the same in terms of diction, although I acknowledge that Bertie Wooster and his Jeeves are two of the greatest characters in English literature, but I can only take so much “Pip-pip, Cheerio” at a time.
I bet, in 1927, that Parker’s story was groundbreaking, most notably in how it skewered an “open-minded” wealthy patron of the arts, exposing her inner ugly, and in how the only articulate and to-the-point dialog is spoken by the black man. In a very small sense, maybe he’s a more cultured and educated version of Mark Twain’s “Jim.” And, in many ways, at least in the eyes of the gathering, still a slave.
And is it really the source of her quote “the assisted gold of her hair?” I never knew where that came from. But it’s my first clue that everything about this woman in the story is fake.
PS: I’d never read it before, either.
Oh, I agree. And the main reason I banished Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac from my reading list decades ago. Never enjoyed or bought into the idea of the artist as some sort of cult hero.
And if I ever were to become such, I wouldn’t start with either of those two.
Well, I would have married you too if you had turned in that sort of literary analysis to me. I bet you got all kinds of marriage proposals from your literature professors.
It never occurred to me that the title might be an allusion to actual title of Whistler’s Mother, but now that you have pointed it out, it seems obvious. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, though. Perhaps it’s no more than an clever allusion for the intelligentsia. A smart reader might be able to make more of the chessboard allusion .
What I was looking for from you was a confirmation of my feeling about the story. Yes, of course, on the surface, it is a satire on the woman’s fawning attitude toward the black singer. But the story seems so stilted to me, its diction so dated, its attitude and satire so self-congratulatory. I guess I would call it corny. It seems so much a part of its time.
The satire is as pointed today, perhaps more so, as it was then. We call it virtue-signaling today. I think you’re right that DP prefers the husband to the wife.
Mrs. She, thank you for reading and commenting on the story.
It was just the way the story was told that caused me to cringe. Perhaps I’m too sensitive to that sort of thing.
Thanks for my laugh of the day. No, just the one . . .
Yeah, it is, although I can’t help seeing parallels between the woman’s attitude in the story to the attitudes of so many of those on the Left these days who mouth platitudes of inclusion and diversity, and who accuse the rest of us of seeing everything through the lens of race, when, in fact, they’re the ones who continue to do exactly that. If one rewrote the dialog to be more “woke,” I think it could resonate that way.
I think there are worthwhile writers who are a “part of their time” and writers who transcend their time, and every once in a while (rarely), writers who can do both. I have to say that I can enjoy either/or/and. It’s hard to imagine Trollope’s novels existing out of their time, but it doesn’t stop me enjoying them. I just have to put myself in the right frame of mind before I start.
This is a topic that could launch a thousand theses. Although my original comment may have been overly absolutist, I was wondering about its applicability to Parker, given what I know of her personal life.
Hoyacon, I was considering dipping a toe into that same pool. I understand the draw of acid wit, and it’s delightful for a time, but to me it always ends the same: looking for that bottle of Tums. I think shallow and/or troubled when I think of people for whom that is the baseline mode of expression. It seems like Parker was of that mold.
She, I think I like your approach. You can sample when the impulse strikes without having to buy in to a persona as if it has any more meaning or value than your enjoyment in the moment of reading it.
To her credit, Parker was not shy about turning some of that acid inward. On the Roundtable:
@She, I finally understand. “And I am Marie of Romania” is the equivalent of “And I am the Easter Bunny.” That is, those idealistic sentiments the author lists in the first three lines are as likely to be real as it is likely that the author of the poem is Marie of Romania.
I’m slow, Mrs. She. You have to spell these things out for me.
And I am Marie of Romania.
B-R-A-V-O!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uycsfu4574w&list=RDuycsfu4574w&start_radio=1
That’s a good play list, too.
Hi Slow, I’m Dad. Nice to meet you.
What is the opposite of acid wit? Dad jokes!
I love acid wit! But it’s rare to find an author who can continue the skewering beyond the bon-mot or short story, otherwise it does start to wear on one. Stella Gibbons, in Cold Comfort Farm, her wonderful send-up of D.H. Lawrence and those of his ilk (their florid and overwrought prose, their reverence for earthy rusticity for its own sake) is probably one of the exceptions that proves the rule. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend it. (The movies, although quite good, are not an adequate substitute.)
Lots of damaged people have been capable of producing illuminating art and penetrating insights that most of us “normies” just can’t see, from day to day. The history of art and literature is full of their stories. In many cases, I think the person most hurt by their difficult lives is themselves, and that’s sad. I’m less tolerant when the person has shown, through the course of his or her life, that he or she lacks a conscience, or is committed to cruelty and the destruction of others. That’s a point beyond which I’m not inclined to go, and the only way I can express it is that if I think an author or an artist lacks what I might call “humanity,” in his life and work I’m probably going to strike him off my list. I’m the same about movies. I don’t mind the horror, the violence, or the gore, but if the end result, after having read it or watched it, is that I feel empty and/or dirty (in any one of many different ways), or inhuman, I don’t want anything to do with it. Ugh.
I have very few literary heroes. Well, Beatrix Potter. What a girl!