Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music; adaptations notably include the operatic song cycle Hate Songs by composer Marcus Paus.
Dorothy Parker -
By Hephzibah Anderson for BBC.COM CULTURE, 7th June 2017
On the 50th anniversary of her death, Hephzibah Anderson looks beyond Dorothy Parker’s wisecracks to find another side of the legendary wit.
“Excuse my dust”: these are the words that Dorothy Parker suggested for her own epitaph. They made it onto the plaque that marks the spot where her ashes rest – somewhat incongruously – in Baltimore. But though they encapsulate the pitchy humour that made her the feared darling of literary New York in her prime, on the 50th anniversary of her death, it’s another of her suggested epitaphs that is most revealing: “If you can read this, you're standing too close”.
Like so many funny folk, the critic, poet and short story writer ‘Dottie’ Parker was a woman of gloomy depths, and she used her sharp tongue to keep people at a distance, even as she spun comedy from her misadventures. She was also fond of self-dramatisation. As her friend Wyatt Cooper put it in a 1968 Esquire profile tellingly titled Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t, she had an “affinity for distress”. Still, it seems fair to say that her childhood was far from happy.
Dorothy Parker had to support herself from a young age – first as a dancing school pianist and then in New York publishing (Credit: Alamy)
By her own admission “a plain disagreeable child with stringy hair and a yen to write poetry”, Dorothy Rothschild was born in 1893 at her family’s New Jersey summer home. She was two months premature and would lose her Scots-American mother before her fifth birthday, soon after acquiring a loathed stepmother. Her Jewish father had been a successful garment manufacturer, but by his death in 1913 the business was failing, leaving Parker to support herself, first as a dancing school pianist and then in the brittle, sophisticated world of New York magazine publishing.
Once the Depression stilled the champagne corks and the clouds of war began gathering over Europe, Parker seemed dated, and was later presumed dead
A petite, almost fragile figure, her lethal wit marked her out from the start. Her break came when she sent a poem, Any Porch, to the charismatic editor of Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield. She soon progressed from caption writer at Vogue to staff writer at Vanity Fair, eventually becoming the magazine’s drama critic. In 1920, that same legendary wit got her fired when she couldn’t resist a wisecrack at the expense of actress Billie Burke, wife of one of the magazine’s biggest advertisers.
Parker worked at Vogue and Vanity Fair, before writing stories for The New Yorker, helping to shape it from its launch in 1925.
The 1920s were to be Parker’s decade, however. She published some 300 poems and free verses in various magazines, and in 1926, her first volume of poetry became a bestseller and garnered positive reviews, despite being dismissed as ‘flapper verse’ by The New York Times. At the same time, she was contributing short stories to The New Yorker, whose tone she helped shape from its launch in 1925. And, of course, it was during those years that she became part of that ultimate in-crowd, the informal literary luncheon club that sprang up at the Algonquin hotel and became known as the Round Table.
Unfulfilled longing
Unfortunately, her work so embodied the era’s giddy mix of cynicism and sentimentality that once the Depression stilled the champagne corks and the clouds of war began gathering over Europe, Parker seemed dated, and was later presumed dead. In her final years, living alone with her dog in a hotel room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the most common response to anything she managed to write was surprise that she was still alive. (It hardly helped that much of her verse flirted so drolly with the idea of doing away with herself.)
During the 1920s, Parker became an established figure of the literary luncheon club known as the Round Table situated at the Algonquin hotel
Few critics were as dismissive of Parker’s talents as the author herself. In middle age, she would disparage fellow Round Table writers, dimming her own achievement as their leading light by pointing out that none of their generation’s greats attended – no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway. As she grew older, she disowned quotes attributed to her, and turned her famous wit onto herself: “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers”.
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think – Dorothy Parker
The writing was a struggle – good writing always is. “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”. “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to”. “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think”. Lines like these that trip off the tongue and lodge in the mind with such alacrity may seem breezy and uncontrived, but as Parker once said, for every five words she wrote, she’d change seven.
Her personal life, meanwhile, was a mess. Beneath its tough satire, a current of intimate, unfulfilled longing courses through her verse, whose rueful lessons were learned the hard way, through entanglements with a series of men who these days might be called emotionally unavailable – or sometimes simply married. “Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both”, she wrote.
Parker’s work was dismissed as ‘flapper verse’ by The New York Times – and by the end of the ‘20s she was considered dated
Her first husband, Edwin Pond Parker II, a Wall Street stockbroker whose name she kept, was an alcoholic and morphine addict. They wed in 1917 and divorced in 1928 but the marriage was over long before that. Her second husband, Alan Campbell, was a bisexual actor and writer 11 years her junior, and, if not faithless, then a terrible flirt. Their marriage ended in divorce but they later remarried, bound together in a dance of push and pull that would continue until his death. (Like her first husband, Campbell died from a drug overdose.) She self-medicated (she wasn’t a writer with a drinking problem, she’d joke, but a drinker with a writing problem) and chronically mismanaged her financial affairs. Twice she attempted suicide (once following an abortion), and she became pregnant at 42 only to miscarry a few months later.
An independent spirit
Perhaps suspicious of her interest in fashion and men, feminists have been wary of claiming Mrs Parker. Even if she’d wanted in, lines like “If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you” would have had her evicted from the sisterhood faster than you can say Simone de Beauvoir (never mind that de Beauvoir herself spent a lot of time weeping in cafes over Sartre’s infidelities). Parker was accused of disloyal attacks on women, of writing for a male audience, of projecting a female rather than a feminist view of the world. So-called second wave feminists were more interested, and began to portray Parker’s humour as a kind of social protest against patriarchal convention.
Parker married, divorced and remarried husband Alan Campbell in a game of push and pull that would last to his death.
Ironically, while the hectic turmoil of her private life is a tale well-thumbed, her public life has been forgotten
Certainly, most of the quotes she’s remembered for come from her verse or her Round Circle quips, but her stories feature female characters trying to square exhilarating new choices with the enduring constraints of societal expectation. Some of her heroines are lovelorn, suicidal alcoholics but others are undeniably strong characters. Temporarily untethered by the hedonistic ‘20s, their lives embrace contradictions and challenges only too familiar to 21st Century women.
Parker self-medicated: she wasn’t a writer with a drinking problem but a drinker with a writing problem, she joked.
Parker’s stories also deal with questions of family, race, war and economic inequality, and it wasn’t just on the page that these themes interested her. Ironically, while the hectic turmoil of her private life is a tale well-thumbed, her public life has been forgotten. Throughout, she was actively involved in campaigning for social justice. In 1927, she was fined $5 for ‘sauntering’ in a Boston demonstration protesting the execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; during the Spanish Civil War she travelled to Europe to further the anti-Franco cause; she became national chairman of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. And in her will, she left the bulk of her estate to Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, which brings us back to Baltimore.
Some second wave feminists have read Parker’s humour as a form of social protest against patriarchal convention.
It’s a city Parker is not known to have had any connection with, and an unlikely resting place for a writer who sojourned on the West Coast, wooed like so many other writers by Hollywood fees, but who remained first and foremost a New Yorker. Less than a year after her death, Dr King was assassinated. Her estate then passed to his organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which is headquartered in Baltimore.
Parker will be remembered as the tipsy distiller of sentiments that defined the Roaring ‘20s but her independent spirit defines her as an icon.
Until they claimed them, her ashes spent some 15 years sitting in a lawyer’s filing cabinet – a melancholy but apt fate. We may think of her as a Round Table star, as a distiller of the tipsy, frostbitten sentiments that defined the Roaring ‘20s, as a New Yorker writer. She was all of these things and none of them. As her friend Lillian Hellman put it in her eulogy: “She was part of nothing and nobody except herself; it was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction”. It’s this that makes her such an enduring icon.
Selected Poems by DOROTHY PARKER
The Passionate Freudian To His Love
Only name the day, and we'll fly away
In the face of old traditions,
To a sheltered spot, by the world forgot,
Where we'll park our inhibitions.
Come and gaze in eyes where the lovelight lies
As it psychoanalyzes,
And when once you glean what your fantasies mean
Life will hold no more surprises.
When you've told your love what you're thinking of
Things will be much more informal;
Through a sunlit land we'll go hand-in-hand,
Drifting gently back to normal.
While the pale moon gleams, we will dream sweet dreams,
And I'll win your admiration,
For it's only fair to admit I'm there
With a mean interpretation.
In the sunrise glow we will whisper low
Of the scenes our dreams have painted,
And when you're advised what they symbolized
We'll begin to feel acquainted.
So we'll gaily float in a slumber boat
Where subconscious waves dash wildly;
In the stars' soft light, we will say good-night—
And "good-night!" will put it mildly.
Our desires shall be from repressions free—
As it's only right to treat them.
To your ego's whims I will sing sweet hymns,
And ad libido repeat them.
With your hand in mine, idly we'll recline
Amid bowers of neuroses,
While the sun seeks rest in the great red west
We will sit and match psychoses.
So come dwell a while on that distant isle
In the brilliant tropic weather;
Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed,
We'll always be Jung together.General Review Of The Sex Situation
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?Wisdom
This I say, and this I know:
Love has seen the last of me.
Love's a trodden lane to woe,
Love's a path to misery.
This I know, and knew before,
This I tell you, of my years:
Hide your heart, and lock your door.
Hell's afloat in lovers' tears.
Give your heart, and toss and moan;
What a pretty fool you look!
I am sage, who sit alone;
Here's my wool, and here's my book.
Look! A lad's a-waiting there,
Tall he is and bold, and gay.
What the devil do I care
What I know, and what I say?Unfortunate Coincidence
By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.Ultimatum
I'm wearied of wearying love, my friend,
Of worry and strain and doubt;
Before we begin, let us view the end,
And maybe I'll do without.
There's never the pang that was worth the tear,
And toss in the night I won't-
So either you do or you don't, my dear,
Either you do or you don't!
The table is ready, so lay your cards
And if they should augur pain,
I'll tender you ever my kind regards
And run for the fastest train.
I haven't the will to be spent and sad;
My heart's to be gay and true-
Then either you don't or you do, my lad,
Either you don't or you do!The Sea
Who lay against the sea, and fled,
Who lightly loved the wave,
Shall never know, when he is dead,
A cool and murmurous grave.
But in a shallow pit shall rest
For all eternity,
And bear the earth upon the breas
That once had worn the sea.There Was One
There was one a-riding grand
On a tall brown mare,
And a fine gold band
He brought me there.
A little, gold band
He held to me
That would shine on a hand
For the world to see.
There was one a-walking swift
To a little, new song,
And a rose was the gift
He carried along,
First of all the posies,
Dewy and red.
They that have roses
Never need bread.
There was one with a swagger
And a soft, slow tongue,
And a bright, cold dagger
Where his left hand swung-
Craven and gilt,
Old and bad-
And his stroking of the hilt
Set a girl mad.
There was one a-riding grand
As he rode from me.
And he raised his golden band
And he threw it in the sea.
There was one a-walking slow
To a sad, long sigh,
And his rose drooped low,
And he flung it down to die.
There was one with a swagger
And a little, sharp pride,
And a bright, cold dagger
Ever at his side.
At his side it stayed
When he ran to part.
What is this blade
Struck through my heart?Interview
The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They’d rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints ...
So far, I’ve had no complaints.For a Favorite Granddaughter
Never love a simple lad,
Guard against a wise,
Shun a timid youth and sad,
Hide from haunted eyes.
Never hold your heart in pain
For an evil-doer;
Never flip it down the lane
To a gifted wooer.
Never love a loving son,
Nor a sheep astray;
Gather up your skirts and run
From a tender way.
Never give away a tear,
Never toss a pine;
Should you heed my words, my dear,
You're no blood of mine!A Dream Lies Dead
A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:
Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!Resumé
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.One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.Frustration
If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;
Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.
But I have no lethal weapon-
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.Parties: A Hymn Of Hate
I hate Parties;
They bring out the worst in me.
There is the Novelty Affair,
Given by the woman
Who is awfully clever at that sort of thing.
Everybody must come in fancy dress;
They are always eleven Old-Fashioned Girls,
And fourteen Hawaiian gentlemen
Wearing the native costume
Of last season's tennis clothes, with a wreath around the
neck.
The hostess introduces a series of clean, home games:
Each participant is given a fair chance
To guess the number of seeds in a cucumber,
Or thread a needle against time,
Or see how many names of wild flowers he knows.
Ice cream in trick formations,
And punch like Volstead used to make
Buoy up the players after the mental strain.
You have to tell the hostess that it's a riot,
And she says she'll just die if you don't come to her next
party-
If only a guarantee went with that!
Then there is the Bridge Festival.
The winner is awarded an arts-and-crafts hearth-brush,
And all the rest get garlands of hothouse raspberries.
You cut for partners
And draw the man who wrote the game.
He won't let bygones be bygones;
After each hand
He starts getting personal about your motives in leading
clubs,
And one word frequently leads to another.
At the next table
You have one of those partners
Who says it is nothing but a game, after all.
He trumps your ace
And tries to laugh it off.
And yet they shoot men like Elwell.
There is the Day in the Country;
It seems more like a week.
All the contestants are wedged into automobiles,
And you are allotted the space between two ladies
Who close in on you.
The party gets a nice early start,
Because everybody wants to make a long day of it-
The get their wish.
Everyone contributes a basket of lunch;
Each person has it all figured out
That no one else will think of bringing hard-boiled eggs.
There is intensive picking of dogwood,
And no one is quite sure what poison ivy is like;
They find out the next day.
Things start off with a rush.
Everybody joins in the old songs,
And points out cloud effects,
And puts in a good word for the colour of the grass.
But after the first fifty miles,
Nature doesn't go over so big,
And singing belongs to the lost arts.
There is a slight spurt on the homestretch,
And everyone exclaims over how beautiful the lights of the
city look-
I'll say they do.
And there is the informal little Dinner Party;
The lowest form of taking nourishment.
The man on your left draws diagrams with a fork,
Illustrating the way he is going to have a new sun-parlour
built on;
And the one on your right
Explains how soon business conditions will better, and why.
When the more material part of the evening is over,
You have your choice of listening to the Harry Lauder records,
Or having the hostess hem you in
And show you the snapshots of the baby they took last summer.
Just before you break away,
You mutter something to the host and hostess
About sometime soon you must have them over-
Over your dead body.
I hate Parties;
They bring out the worst in me.