But anyway, I had better quit crabbing about these present straits, because by the time you get this novelette, they will be over and something new – or more probably nothing whatever – will be going on. So you see.
And you also see, I haven’t a damn thing to say. Let’s not talk about that dandy little book of mine, except to thank you for your sweetness about it. The reviews simply sunk me, full fathom five. (All except Don Marquis, God love him. How is he fixed for beautiful white bodies, slightly shattered?) You think you are not going to care, but you do, somehow. Jeez, I want it to be a long, long time before I give the Little Dusty Folk another crack at me. . . . . And at that, I haven’t seen the Journals of Opinion – if they took any notice of it at all. I’m afraid Tzortzie was too soft-hearted to send them.
Last night, a clipping was delivered to me at nine o’clock, by which time I had been in bed fifteen minutes, after an evening spent in playing Consequences with little Patrick. (It had come in the morning mail, but had got mixed up with Murphy mail.) It was one of those dears about sordidness, soddenness, bitterness and brutality; and the writer soared on into the realm of speculation as to what manner of steel-shelled, scale-covered monster I was, and in what coarse and reeking pursuits did I spend my life. When it was given to me, my little dog was asleep on my left arm, and my right hand was holding the book I was reading – “Little Women” by Louisa M. Alcott. It was some time before I could really see the review, as my eyes were so full of the tears caused by the account of little Beth’s passing away.
Ah, the hell with them. I know that’s what you should say. But you get reading them, and you are left with the pretty thought, “Jesus, baby, you can’t even WRITE!” to take to bed with you.
And anyway, I had a lovely, lovely letter from Ernest Hemingway about the book, and that did help so much. (I am saving it to bequeath to my beloved god-son, Dangerous Karl Saalburg, because it is the most beautiful letter I ever saw, and the only valuable thing I own.) I’d rather have Ernest like what I write than have Isabel Paterson like it. Yah, yah, ya-ah! Before I’d be a book-worm! Before I’d wear green stockings! Yah, yah, ya-ah!
Oh, look. Do you remember me? I was the one that said, not ten minutes ago, let’s not talk about that dandy book.
Dear kids, I wish I had news and things to tell you, but there is none, and I don’t dare go into how I feel, because this is too blue a time. I would give anything to throw a nightgown and a toothbrush into Robinson and get the hell out of this, and back to see you. But I haven’t got __ck [sic] enough to get down to the valley, let alone across the sea, so I can’t even think about that.
There’s no use trying to say how much I love you, and what an enormous comfort your letters and Karl’s pictures are – I’ve got them all worn out. Once I tried to cable some of my feelings about the Saalburgs to them, but the lady in the Poste said that Noroton Heights exists not, so there you are. Please, are the Saalburgs still in the country, or what the hell are they doing and where are they going to live?
I’ll never let this go so long again, and I’ll write you a decent letter, truly, as soon as things get a little better. And please, please, please let me know how you are and what gossip there may be. Any news is big news here.
Oh, hell. I can see both Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn from my window on a clear day, but I’d rather see youse guys in the driving rain.
Please, my deepest respects to the novel Miss Guinzburg.
And now I’ll remember all the things I didn’t say, and go crazy. But this letter was just to get you caught up on the Summer.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888): Famous for the beloved novel Little Women.
Barnekow, Brita von (1858–?): Danish baroness.
Barry, Philip (1896–1949): Dramatist whose play The Philadelphia Story was made into a popular Katharine Hepburn film.
Benchley, Robert (1899–1945): Humorist and film actor, New Yorker critic, member of the Algonquin Round Table.
Blütenburg, Eiko von (aka “Robinson”): Parker’s pedigreed dachshund purchased in Munich in 1930, died in 1932, after being attacked by another dog in New York.
Broun, Heywood: Highly regarded New York World columnist and member of the Algonquin Round Table.
Buchanan, Bucky: (?)
Connelly, Marc (1890–1980): Playwright respected for Pulitzer Prize–winning drama The Green Pastures, member of the Algonquin Round Table.
Crevel, René (1900–1935): French surrealist writer diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1926, committed suicide.
Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, Frances Scott (“Scottie”) (1921–1986): Journalist, daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940): Novelist, screenwriter, best known for The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre (1900–1948): Writer, dancer, famed “flapper,” muse of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832): German poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, best known for The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust.
Griswold, John A. (“Jack”) (1882–1940): Comanager Guaranty Trust Co., Paris branch.
Guinzburg Lauro, Carola (“the novel Miss Guinzburg”) (1930–2007): Newly born daughter of Alice and Harold Guinzburg.
Hale, Ruth (1887–1934): Journalist, feminist cofounder of the Lucy Stone League, wife of newspaper columnist Heywood Broun, mother of TV sportscaster Heywood Hale (“Woodie”) Broun.
Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961): Nobel Prize–winning novelist best known for A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises.
King, Muriel (1900–1977): Fashion designer and Hollywood costumer for such stars as Katharine Hepburn.
Long, Lois (1901–1974): New Yorker columnist (“Lipstick”) who covered speakeasies, wife of New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno (1904–1968).
MacLeish, Archibald (1892–1982): Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and playwright, Librarian of Congress.
Mann, Thomas (1875–1955): German Nobel laureate novelist, known for The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and other works.
Marquis, Don (1878–1937): Humorous poet, newspaper columnist, remembered for creating a fictional cockroach “Archy” and his alley cat friend “Mehitabel.”
Martin, Townsend (1895–1951): Playwright, screenwriter, wealthy Princetonian friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s.
McEvoy, J. P. (1897–1958): Short-story writer, novelist, creator of the popular comic strip “Dixie Dugan.”
Murphy, children of Gerald and Sara: Honoria (1917–1998), Baoth (1919–1935), Patrick (1920–1937).
Murphy, Gerald (1888–1964), and Sara Wiborg Murphy (1883–1975): Renowned American expatriate couple living in France during the 1920s, who befriended artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gerald Murphy, whose family owned Mark Cross luxury leather goods, now is recognized as an accomplished still-life painter of pop culture images (Razor, 1924, Watch, 1925). Portraits of the couple appear in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
Paterson, Isabel (1886–1961): Novelist, book review columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, one of the founders of American libertarianism.
Ruskin, John (1819–1900): English art critic (The Stones of Venice).
Saalburg, Allen (1899–1987): Painter, silk-screen artist, muralist (1930s WPA), married to Muriel King.
Saalburg, Karl: Young son of Muriel King and Allen Saalburg.
Stewart, Donald Ogden (1894–1980): Parodist, screenwriter (The Philadelphia Story), political activist who moved to England after being blacklisted.
Tzortzie (?): Staff member, Viking Press.
Weaver, John V. A. (1893–1938): Poet, playwright, screenwriter, peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table, husband of actress Peggy Wood.
Wiborg, Frank B. (1855–1930): Ohio-born ink manufacturer, father of Sara Murphy and Hoytie Wiborg.
Wiborg, Mary Hoyt (“Hoytie”) (1887–1964): New York socialite, sister of Sara Murphy.
Wohlforth, Mildred Gilman (1896–1994): “Sob sister” newspaper reporter in the 1920s, at one time Heywood Broun’s secretary.
NOTES
1.Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, September 1929.
2.Guinzburg and Oppenheimer originally called their company the Half-Moon Press, in honor of explorer Henry Hudson’s Dutch sailing ship (Halve Maen). Learning that another business had prior rights to the name, they substituted the Viking Press.
3.Alpine Giggle Week.
4.Various George Oppenheimer correspondence to Dorothy Parker.
5.George Oppenheimer, The View from the Sixties: Memories of a Spent Life (New York: David McKay, 1966), 3.
6.Dorothy Parker, “A Book of Great Short Stories,” New Yorker, October 29, 1927.
7.Ibid.
8.F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, June 1929, in Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 156.
9.The amount of Parker’s advance against royalties is unknown. As a comparison, Scribner’s in 1923 paid F. Scott Fitzgerald $3,939 (equal to around $53,000 today) for his third novel, The Great Gatsby. Viking’s payment would have been very different for a first-time novelist.
10.Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, September 1929.
11.Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
12.Ibid., September 1929.
13.Dorothy Parker, “The Artist’s Reward,” New Yorker, September 30, 1929.
14.Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
15.Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, November 7, 1929.
16.Ibid.
17.Dorothy Parker to Helen Droste, November 28, 1929.
18.New York Telegram, February 1, 1930.
19.Asked by the Paris Review, in a 1956 interview, if she’d ever tried a novel, she apparently decided to forget the painful episode with the shoe polish. “I wish to God I could do one, but I haven’t got the nerve.”
20.New York Times, June 15, 1930.
21.Dorothy Parker to George Oppenheimer, July 2, 1930.
22.Alpine Giggle Week.
23.George Oppenheimer to Dorothy Parker, July 3, 1930.
24.Alpine Giggle Week.
25.Ibid.
26.Ibid.
27.Ibid.
28.Dorothy Parker to Robert Benchley, November 8, 1930.
29.Dorothy Parker, “Home Is the Sailor,” New Yorker, January 24, 1931.
30.Ernest Hemingway, Sean Hemingway, and Patrick Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (restored edition) (New York: Scribner, 2010), 239.
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