by John Updike
However, I liked and admired the biography’s overall organization, in rather sweeping topical chapters that lift us above the plod of years, and the biographer’s lack of timidity in dealing with her subject. She expresses her own literary opinions firmly (“Katharine … was blind to the strongest virtues in her own writing”), speculates boldly upon the thorny and delicate issues of Katharine’s mothering, wiving, and formidability, and draws as close to the dead woman as she can, detailing her diseases and sleeping habits and cuticle-picking and even sharing with us what the Whites thought was the right amount of married sex (once or twice a week). Katharine White no doubt would have deplored some of these revelations. She scorned publicity, not out of shame but in aesthetic distaste. When, in 1937, she was invited to be included in a book called Women of Achievement, she declined, saying, “I can’t see any reason for such a book, other than to satisfy the vanity of the ladies described in it.” She and Ross agreed in regarding their magazine’s workings as a purely private matter; gossipy books by New Yorker insiders like Thurber and Gill, as they began to be published, gave her pain, benign though they generally were. Yet the truth-seeking spirit of Onward and Upward, even where the tone turns combative and carping, is surely the right and worthy one, and one suited to its honest, industrious, selflessly engaged subject.
Katharine White’s achievements—“the best woman editor in the world,” Janet Flanner called her—were by the nature of editorial work largely invisible; an editor is like an actor or actress in that the performance leaves its traces mostly in hearsay and memory. The satisfaction Mrs. White took in her work focused on the product and did not ask that she herself be made widely visible. Still, it is nice to see her here, from little beribboned bookworm to infirm great-grandmother; her life offers a model, in its stresses as well as its surmountings, for the many women now who bravely try to combine a full career with a full womanliness.
Witty Dotty
DOROTHY PARKER: What Fresh Hell Is This?, by Marion Meade. 459 pp. Villard, 1988.
It is hard to know what made reading this biography as enjoyable as it was, since the writing is shoddy, the mood sour, and the subject rather resolutely unsympathetic. Perhaps in my case it was a teen-age infatuation with the Algonquin Round Table, or what I imagined of it with the help of the late Bennett Cerf, who used to compile books of jokes (e.g., Try and Stop Me and Shake Well Before Using) that drew heavily upon the alleged ripostes and verbal barbs of Mrs. Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, and other “celebrated wits” of the Twenties, who, legend assured me, liked nothing better than to have lunch together at their own special table at the Algonquin Hotel and endlessly bask in one another’s banter. That such an angelic assembly, glorying in its own pure being, objectively existed seemed proved by a fallout of books that reached us provincial mortals—Mrs. Parker’s slim volumes of poems and short stories, F.P.A.’s copious verse and anthologies, and, above all, the humorous essays of Robert Benchley, packaged under such saucy labels as My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or David Copperfield. The very titles bring back the sickly-yellow, pencil-gouged look of the old oaken high-school library tables where, trying to stifle my laughter lest I become known as a discipline problem, I used to read Benchley’s collections, with their tidy illustrations by Gluyas Williams. It is fascinating, if a bit drearily so, to learn now, from Ms. Meade’s book, that Benchley, the epitome in print of hilarious innocence, who never penned a word that stirred a licentious shadow in an adolescent’s mind, was in his personal, New York life a priapic demon. Having settled his wife with a “Victorian divorce” in Scarsdale, he kept his own kimono at Polly Adler’s brothel and “played backgammon with the madame for the services of her women.” Outside the whorehouse walls, “the wife of a well-known banker was so eager to continue sleeping with him that she once crawled through the transom of his room at the Royalton Hotel,” and he was praised for his phallic grandeur by no less a connoisseuse than Tallulah Bankhead. Nor were the other Round Table regulars models of monogamy:
While most of Dorothy’s wedded friends were less noisy about their troubles than the [F. Scott] Fitzgeralds, their marriages seemed no better. Benchley … was in a dreadful mess. George Kaufman had stopped sleeping with Beatrice. Frank Adams bedded a succession of young women, whose names he flaunted in his column for his wife and a million New Yorkers to read over their morning coffee.
Coffee, however, was not this crowd’s beverage of choice; the Algonquin circle brimmed with alcohol. Heywood Broun “had a habit of fueling himself all day long from his hip flask.” Charles MacArthur, soon after he arrived from Chicago in 1922, “was putting away a quart of Scotch every night.” Benchley and Mrs. Parker came late to the joys of the bottle but became unshakable devotees. Benchley’s father in Worcester, Massachusetts, had been an alcoholic, and his son was an “ardent prohibitionist,” who hailed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment as “too good to be true.” But on the night of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, in July of 1921, a group of Round Tablers were celebrating Dempsey’s victory at Tony Soma’s speakeasy, on Forty-ninth Street, and Benchley, who usually drank coffee at the speakeasy, was persuaded to have an Orange Blossom. Within weeks, he had moved on to whisky sours and become a bibulous mainstay at Tony’s, where liquor was served in thick white china cups. He favored rye, but was not above adding vodka to chocolate ice-cream sodas; the story goes—try and stop me—that when Scott Fitzgerald said to him, “Bob, don’t you know that drinking is slow death?,” Benchley responded, “So who’s in a hurry?” Benchley died (like Broun and Woollcott) in his fifties—of a cerebral hemorrhage complicated by cirrhosis of the liver.
Dorothy Parker, up to her marriage, in 1917, to Edwin Pond Parker II, was alcohol-innocent: “She hated the taste of liquor herself and refused to touch it.” Her husband, however, was a tremendous drinker, whose nickname in the ambulance corps was Spook, “because hangovers made him look pale as a ghost,” and who returned from the war addicted to morphine as well. To make herself companionable to Eddie and to such sportive Vanity Fair colleagues as Robert Sherwood, she began to allow herself a cocktail or two, despite being warned by the then-abstemious Benchley, “Alcohol will coarsen you.” Gin made her sick, but, “after a good deal of experimentation, she found that Scotch whisky, without water, was generally quick, safe, and reliable.” Although both her marriages—to Eddie and to Alan Campbell, a fellow writer and rumored homosexual—dissolved in alcoholic brawls, and long stretches of her career were soddenly unproductive, she remained faithful to Scotch into her seventies: “Several times she went too far with Scotch and found herself in Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Whenever visitors appeared, she politely offered them a drink, then guessed she would pour one for herself.” A friend of her old age, Parker Ladd, thought to reduce her dependence by emptying a bottle with her:
One night shortly before Christmas 1965, he prepared highball after highball for them, swallowing a little of his own and dumping the rest down the sink. Finally he heaved a sigh of relief to find the bottle empty. To his amazement, Dorothy hauled herself up and began rummaging around on the closet floor among some old shoes. In triumph, she produced another bottle of Scotch.
For a time in Hollywood in 1951, she found a housemate with a thirst to match hers—James Agee, who, she told S. J. Perelman, had on one Friday evening “consumed three bottles of Scotch unaided.” Perelman wrote of their ménage, which included Agee’s twenty-two-year-old companion, Pat Scallon (whom Dorothy named Pink Worm), that they lived “in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds.”
This is sad stuff, and Ms. Meade leaves little doubt, for those who might not have already heard, that the Algonquin wits and, for that matter, most of the literary lights of the Twenties carried forward their work under a fearful burden of booziness, at a
cost of truncated lives and deflected ambitions. But since she is not, presumably, writing a temperance tract, one might ask what she is writing, in these four hundred nicely annotated and beautifully indexed pages. The biographer seems far from in love with her subject. Ms. Meade’s previous heroines have been Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and the medieval nun Héloïse (in a novel), and her prose keeps crinkling as if with distaste at having to touch on the twentieth century, and on this unhappy and conflicted modern woman. Her subtitle seems excessive and awkward. Her sentences snarl with unprovoked aggression:
Despite her piety, there must have been times when Eleanor [Dorothy’s stepmother, the second Mrs. Henry Rothschild] felt like strangling the miserable brat. Instead, she admonished lucky little Dorothy to count her blessings.
[Alexander Woollcott’s] literary style leaned heavily on the side of lavender and old lace, but he successfully resisted all impulses to improve it. If not one of the worst writers in America, he surely ranked among the top ten. Even his friends made fun of his style and were genuinely surprised to realize just how atrocious it actually was.
Dorothy … viewed a ski slope with the same enthusiasm as she did an electric chair.
She fell flat on her face in the hall and had to be scraped up and carried out feet first.
He [David Susskind, after Dorothy appeared on his talk show] ushered her away with all the tact and delicacy of a funeral director exhibiting a decomposed corpse, and she rode back alone to Manhattan with her ego reduced to the size of a pea.
The curious seething undercurrent of scorn and a taste for vivid metaphors at times bizarrely stress Ms. Meade’s syntax:
Courageous Becky [Sharp], thumb glued to her nose, was able to confront and defy adversity head-on.
For eight dollars a week, she received a room the size of a pantry and two meals—and the idea that perhaps she could become a famous writer.
… the women deprived of maternal warmth and comfort who are condemned to seek love forever in the barren soil of husbands and children and even animals …
Nor does the biographer, while deploring the sins—alcoholism, promiscuity, bitchiness, indolence, inchoate neediness, fellow-travelling—admire the sinner for her talent and oeuvre. She gives Dorothy Parker’s writings rather short shrift, ranging from the patronizing (“She was careful about rhyming the first and third lines of quatrains and fussed over masculine and feminine endings”) to the forthrightly dismissive: her fashion-photo captions for Vogue were “drivel,” and her work in the early Twenties consisted of “dozens of hokey verses and prose pieces.” It is observed of her theatre reviews, “She was beginning to run out of nasty cracks and to repeat herself,” and, disapprovingly, of her poetry, “Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on the quality of her work.” Ms. Meade quotes from the fiction as if it were autobiography and displays antipathy to the, as she sees it, parasitic process of literary creation:
While striking fancy poses and whipping herself into an emotional frenzy got her adrenaline moving, that white-hot heat also served a serious purpose; it generated salable verse and enabled her to deposit checks into her bank account. In this respect, she was no more calculating than Scott Fitzgerald who, in April, published his novel The Great Gatsby, which he had extracted from his and Zelda’s eighteen-month residence in Great Neck. His characters were modeled on people he had met at the Swopes’, who were some of the very same men winding up in Dorothy’s bed at the Algonquin and, eventually, in her verse. Both Dorothy and Fitzgerald were adept at sucking the juices out of people.
Though in the course of this thorough survey of Dorothy Parker’s seventy-three years there must be some words in her favor, they do not linger in the mind or prevail over the main impression of domestic misery and professional inconsequence. Even the quips she was famous for do not rise very high above the ambient sleaziness and fug, though some made me laugh. Of John McClain, an athletic and faithless lover, Dorothy said that “his body had gone to his head.” After being told that Clare Boothe Luce was always kind to her inferiors, she asked, “And where does she find them?” She called her Southern mother-in-law “the only woman alive who pronounced the word egg as if it had three syllables.” And after meeting Somerset Maugham she claimed that “whenever I meet one of these Britishers I feel as if I have a papoose on my back.”
She was very American, beginning with her Jewish father’s determination to put his Jewishness behind him. He married two gentile women, of whom the first, Eliza Marston, became Dorothy’s mother in 1893, in stormy weather, at the New Jersey beach resort of West End. Eliza and Eleanor Lewis were both “Christian schoolteacher[s] … liberated from spinsterhood,” and both died young—her mother when Dorothy was five, her stepmother before she turned ten. Dorothy, though she referred to herself, often deprecatingly, as Jewish, was given no Jewish religious instruction and attended a Catholic school near her home, on Manhattan’s West Side; its influence may be detected in her work as the great frequency of the word “hell.” J. Henry Rothschild, though not of the international-banking Rothschilds, was a wealthy clothier, an amateur versifier, and, his letters indicate, an affectionate father; but Dorothy, who under his protection had grown into a pert, piano-playing, dog-loving, largely self-educated minx less than five feet tall, was not grateful. Indeed, though she was to enjoy indulgent benefactions from New York publishers, Hollywood studios, and the Long Island rich, she does not seem to have been grateful for anything, except perhaps the friendship of Robert Benchley, with whom she never slept—which cannot be said of Elmer Rice, George Kaufman, Charles MacArthur, Ring Lardner, and Deems Taylor. She and Benchley, though, did spend hours and days together and for a time co-inhabited a midtown office so small that she claimed, “An inch smaller, and it would have been adultery.” She thought of herself as an orphan. Her jokes, her poems, and her prose personae defy a cold world, a world of deaths and departures. Her hard-boiled gallantry, like Hemingway’s, belongs to the generation from which World War I had stripped amiable illusions. She helped set a style, and perhaps a legitimate complaint about her as an artist is that she stayed set in that style; unlike her contemporary Rebecca West, or Mary McCarthy in the following generation, she did not let her edgy young brightness and irreverent sass deepen into an intellectual boldness and an expressive range. Her stories wear better than her poems, though some of her light verse will last as long as the genre is anthologized:
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.
Her meticulous, Housmanesque neatness, especially fine in the second quatrain, redeems the sentiment from bathos. Within her conscientious quatrains, she sometimes, though rarely, compresses language to a lyric intensity:
God’s acre was her garden-spot, she said;
She sat there often, of the Summer days,
Little and slim and sweet, among the dead,
Her hair a fable in the leveled rays.
In her stories, she captures the voice, above all, of neediness; the newly-weds in “Here We Are” and the disintegrating heroine of “Big Blonde” and the tipsy, haughty mother of “I Live on Your Visits” all demonstrate how need in its very urgency clogs and blocks its own satisfaction. Dorothy Parker was an expert on the lovers’ quarrel, and her wasteful life afforded her a thorough education in the self-wounding perversity of the human heart.
A fonder biographer than Marion Meade might have discovered something to admire in how her subject, after her precocious infatuation with death, a number of suicide attempts, and the apparent suicide of her second husband, settled herself grudgingly to live. She outlived all the original Round Tablers except for Marc Connelly, and in her last burst of creativity—a handful of short stories and a play, The Ladies of the Corridor, written with Arnaud d’Us
seau, which ran six weeks on Broadway and was called by her “the only thing I have ever done in which I had great pride”—she took lonely, aging women as her topic. Interestingly, in the late stories “I Live on Your Visits,” “Lolita,” and “The Bolt Behind the Blue,” children vividly figure, though she herself had borne none. In “I Live on Your Visits,” an adolescent boy observes with chagrin and precision the drunken mannerisms of a woman who, from her high-toned and arch way of talking, exactly matches what we know of Dorothy Parker. The consolations and detachment of art remained available to her, and it might also be said in admiration that neither alcoholic haze nor romantic distress cut her off from the pleasures of reading. She was, as her column for The New Yorker proclaimed long ago (1927–33), a Constant Reader, and the book reviews she procrastinatingly executed for Esquire toward the end of her life show the same enthusiasm for the written word that lighted up her girlhood as a mock-orphan. She treated books with a rectitude and a respect she could not muster for people. And her passion for left-wing causes argues a warmth for people in general if not in particular, though Ms. Meade sniffs, “She had a tendency to assume personal responsibility for world catastrophe,” and reports that some observers considered Dorothy to be “playing amateur revolutionary, just as she once had played amateur suicide.” Raised amid a wealth based upon the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, Mrs. Parker became an avid proponent of unionizing screenwriters in Hollywood. Having publicly marched for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, she travelled the extra mile with the Communist Party in the Thirties: in April of 1938 she signed a statement declaring that Stalin’s infamous Moscow trials established “a clear presumption of the guilt of the defendants,” and, unlike many radical intellectuals, she did not drop out of pro-Communist groups when the Soviets and the Nazis signed their nonaggression pact. Though no conclusive evidence or remembrance has emerged that would identify her and Alan Campbell as card-carrying members of the Communist Party, she took the Fifth Amendment when asked about her membership before a New York State legislative committee. However, viewed in the gentle twilight of the Cold War, her left-wing commitment and her active fundraising for Spanish Civil War refugees show a generous and selfless spirit that otherwise had few opportunities to express itself as she fiddled away at unproduced scripts for a weekly salary bigger than most Americans’ annual one. Scott Fitzgerald, writing from Hollywood to Gerald Murphy in 1940, considered her a “spoiled writer” and “supremely indifferent”: “That Dotty has embraced the church [i.e., Communism] and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference.” Perhaps we, a half-century later, can judge her more kindly.
