A nice, if not a
pretty, wit
David Wright
DOROTHY PARKER by Marion Meade
Heinemann, £12.95, pp. 480
All Dorothy Parker's papers vanished after her death — perhaps destroyed by a jealous executor — thus removing all temptation, or obligation, on the part of her biographer to construct one of those dutifully wearisome mosaic chronologies made up of quotations from manuscript sources, which are now de rigueur for American biographies. Instead, Mrs Meade has had to depend for material mainly on the viva voce recollections and reminiscences of Dorothy's surviving friends. The result is a lively book, an entertaining read and a memorable por- trait.
What emerges, rather surprisingly, from this account of the acid-tongued needle- sharp-witted Dorothy Parker is her essen- tial niceness and innocence. These attri- butes she camouflaged, or shielded, with an obsidian carapace of glitzy sophistica- tion. She was a successful writer, not a great one, and she knew it — unlike Hemingway, she never laid that flattering unction to her soul. Though she published three best-selling books of verse (her verse was mordant, economical, and — give or take an Atlantic ocean between them reminiscent of A. E. Housman), she never took herself seriously as a poet. 'There is poetry and poetry', she said. Again unlike Hemingway (who hated her, as he did most of his fellow scribes), she was, according to Ruth Goetz, 'never jealous or mean- spirited about somebody else's good for- tune or talent'. Both William Faulkner and John O'Hara owed much to her help and generosity. Yet she was perhaps the most devastating put-downer of all time and much feared, even by her closest friends, for her caustic summations of their charac- ters.
Despite that she had a large fund of compassion, which she expended on anim- als, on the deprived, on the persecuted. She had the courage of her compassion, and led a demonstration march in protest at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, unabashed by the mob shouting 'Hang her!' Arrested by the police, she found the experience disappointing — 'They didn't take my fingerprints but they left me a few of theirs.' Her hatred of the Nazi persecu- tion of the Jews led her into campaigning against Fascism and thus into the toils, if not into the parlour, of the Communist Party, and to her subsequent grilling by the Un-American Activities Committee and Hollywood blacklisting during the McCar- thy era. And when she died she left her estate to Martin Luther King.
Like most of the great clowns she was an unhappy person. 'She was at war with herself all her life. . . All the digs she took at people, friend and foe alike, were really digs at herself', a friend wrote after her death. Her family were second-generation Jewish emigrants from Prussia. Her mother died when she was a child and she hated her stepmother; her father, Henry Rothschild — no relation — made a fortune out of mass-produced garments, using the cheap labour of New York sweatshops. But when he died he left next to nothing. Dorothy was largely self- educated — she never finished high school (`But, by God, I read') and on that count probably better equipped than she might have been for the career she followed. A talent for writing jingles led to the publica- tion of one of them in Vanity Fair. Having gained this toehold, in a surprisingly short time Dorothy found herself being appointed drama critic to the magazine in succession to no less a person than P.G. Wodehouse.
Meanwhile she embarked on the first of her many disastrous mesalliances. She fell deeply in love with, and married, a young hard-drinking stockbroker called Parker. When America declared war on Germany in 1917 he joined up and served bravely on the Western Front. But when he returned after the Armistice he had become not only an alcoholic but dependent on drugs. This was effectively the end of the marriage, especially as Parker had no place in the circle that Dorothy had found for herself, the legendary Algonquin Round Table presided over by Alexander Woollcott (`famous mostly for being famous') and including wits and comedians like Robert Benchley and Harpo Marx, to name the more distinguished. These people, most of them contributors to the newly-born New Yorker, would meet daily to drink lun- cheon at the Algonquin Hotel. ('We drank our heads off but we worked like holy hell' — the quantity of alcohol that Dorothy Parker and her friends consumed is stag- gering.) Here they would often be joined by visiting celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Paul Robeson. Noel Coward was one seeing Edna Ferber wearing a double- breasted suit like his own, he exclaimed `You almost look like a man.' She riposted, `So do you' — a fair specimen of the wit served up at the Round Table, whose members — apart from Dorothy Parker mostly deserved Anita Loos's opinion of them as 'wilfully sophisticated suburba- nites unable to admit their mediocrity'. Drink and badinage were the links that fettered them. Their best witticisms Dorothy's in particular — seem to have been lost because unprintable. Among those that survive is a famous one: Bench- ley brought her the news that President Coolidge was dead. 'How can they tell?' asked Dorothy. Less well-known, for ob- vious reasons, is Benchley's reply: 'He had an erection.' Mostly her wit was mordant. A bartender asked her 'What are you having?' — 'Not much fun'.
After the failure of her first marriage Dorothy 'fell in love with some of the goddamnest terrible people' — most of them playboys and alcoholics — till she found Alan Campbell, with whom she collaborated for years as a Hollywood scriptwriter. Campbell was a handsome but kindly failed actor who became her willing dogsbody and with whom she had many years of comparative happiness and stabil- ity until the miscarriage of a longed-for baby turned the marriage sour. They di- vorced, married again, separated, and finally reunited, till one day Dorothy came home to find Campbell dead and full of seconal. Her last lonely years in a New York boarding-house make for sad read- ing; but she herself was free of self-pity all she wanted was to be left alone to drink in peace.
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