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I call her Dottie because there is not one bit of doubt in my mind that she and I would have been fast friends. She may be the only woman who ever lived with whom I can comfortably and sympathetically identify, though I'm not sure exactly why. I've never contemplated suicide; she did frequently, and tried at least twice. I've never been much of a boozer; she may have been an alcoholic. My life has been spent married to one woman; Dorothy Parker moved through romantic relationships like so many bad apples in a torn basket.
It is her wit that attracts me, her sense of humor dry to the point of withering. Everywhere in her writing -- her stories, her verse, her reviews -- she injects herself with often caustic but resigned bemusement. She could not even write a play review without some not quite parenthetical reference to her failed love life or her current hangover.
THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER is a compilation of her short stories, verse, play reviews, and book reviews.
The short stories are my least favorite. Not that they aren't well written, well-formatted, and with unerringly telling dialog. It's just that, well, I can only read about the empty, boring lives of well-to-do ladies for so long, is all. I guess Dottie took to heart that old standby advice to a young writer: write about what you know. She was often herself bored to tears, perceived her life as empty (bemoaning in one aside that her love life was successive rather than successful), and earned enough money to rise above lesser women lacking silver spoons.
While panning a book by Ford Maddox Ford, she complains about the name of a female character, one Valentine Wannop. "That is quibbling, I know, and of the silliest sort. But that's the way I am. Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both." It is her book reviews, in fact, (and the play reviews to a lesser extent) that really gave me a loud thwack on the back. Although I normally am irritated by writing where the author feels the need to inject himself into the work, when Dottie does it, she makes me laugh.
In her first review after returning from a trip to Switzerland, she praises NYC, its skyline, its attractive women, but says that "there is a certain amount of exaggeration in the report that your men think of nothing but business, business, business, all the time. If it is true, then wherever did I get these bruises on my neck?" She then proceeds to review, and pan, the book that is the subject of the article.
Her book reviews were published under the byline "Constant Reader." Putting down A.A. Milne's writing in "The House at Pooh Corner," she writes sarcastically, after citing an example, that this was the first point at which "Tonstant Weader fwowed up."
If I enjoyed her book reviews, her verse is the main thing that has drawn me to her. If you imagined Ogden Nash as a romantically beleaguered woman with a suicidal bent and a knack for insulting incompetence, that would be Dottie.
"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."
Or,
"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."
Despite her self-loathing and suicide attempts, Dottie Parker lived from 1893 to 1967...dying of a common heart attack at age 73. Perhaps it was her common sense and her sense of humor that carried her that far, her ability to see the comic in even life's most awful disappointments. Damn, I would like to have been her friend, in my prime when I could stay up late and hold my liquor...
posted on June 27, 2008 3:22 PM ()
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