Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Still, it was a relief when autumn came. One day, when she went to the Guaranty Trust Company to collect her mail, she realized that the American tourists had gone home. Now some of her friends began drifting back to the city. Road-weary Don and Bea Stewart arrived from Munich and moved into a nearby hotel with their new schnauzer, continuing their honeymoon while Don wrote articles for the Chicago Tribune. Dorothy got on well with Bea, who had a nice sense of humor and was fond of having a good time.

  While it was pleasant to have company, she continued to invest most of her energies in her writing. She overhauled the autobiographical story about a mother and her adopted child that she had begun the previous summer as part of her novel. Having plundered a partial manuscript again, the novel no longer amounted to much. The adopted child, quite likely a little girl in her original drafts, became a boy named Curtis. The story reverberates with Eleanor Rothschild’s admonitions to Dorothy about counting her blessings. Dorothy titled this story “Lucky Little Curtis” and mailed it to Pictorial Review, the same magazine that had published “The Wonderful Old Gentleman.” She did not submit either of these stories to The New Yorker because she did not regard the magazine as an appropriate market for serious fiction. She further dismissed it because Harold Ross paid writers so little.

  Early in October, Dorothy went to a birthday party that Don gave for Bea at Prunier’s restaurant. Hemingway showed up alone. He effectively wrecked the party mood by announcing that his marriage had broken up and he was now living by himself in a studio lent by Gerald Murphy. He supposed that he would be getting a divorce to marry Pauline Pfeiffer. This news considerably upset Don Stewart, who admired Hadley Hemingway as one of the finest women he knew, nor could he hide his disapproval that the breakup had occurred over another woman.

  Shortly after this, the poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada, hosted an evening party at a sumptuous flat on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne that some wealthy friends had loaned them. Among the guests was Hemingway, so depressed over his temporary separation from Pauline that he was seriously considering suicide. The Stewarts were also present but not Dorothy, who did not know the MacLeishes at that time. Hemingway had brought a poem with him he’d written about Dorothy and insisted upon reading it, although nobody encouraged him once he had read the title: “To a Tragic Poetess—Nothing in her life became her like her almost leaving of it.” The poem opened with an extremely harsh attack that accused Dorothy of cowardice. Apparently its author had no sympathy for those who want to kill themselves but lack the nerve to carry through. There were further ridiculing references to her affair with MacArthur and the subsequent abortion, and her scorn for Spain and bullfighting were not passed over either:Spaniards pinched

  the Jewish cheeks of your plump ass

  in holy week in Seville

  forgetful of our Lord and His passion.

  Returned, your ass intact, to Paris

  to write more poems for the New Yorker....

  Then, offering a contrast to Dorothy, he went on reverentially to present several supposedly genuine tragedies that had been suffered by various Spaniards whose courage he deeply appreciated. The poem was in exceptionally bad taste, racist as well as sexist in that it contained anti-Semitic slurs against both Dorothy and Gilbert Seldes.

  At the MacLeishes’, Hemingway’s audience was not amused. Don Stewart, who thought it was “viciously unfair and unfunny,” immediately jumped up and protested. “I told him what I thought of his poem”; that turned out to be the end of their friendship. As might be expected, Stewart and his wife took pains to shield Dorothy from all knowledge of what had taken place at the MacLeish party, and apparently none of the others present spoke of the incident either. The poem was eventually published, but not until after her death. If Dorothy found the sudden estrangement between the two men peculiar, she asked no questions. Unaware of Hemingway’s cruelty toward her, she continued to regard him as an innovative writer and a person with many estimable qualities.

  She was beginning to change her mind about living abroad. She had spent nearly half a year on her own and proved to herself that she could still labor with discipline. She had a good deal to show for those nunnish months, but accomplishments were not enough. In early November, when the Stewarts booked their sailing, she knew that she could not face the prospect of being alone. Taking her Scottie with her, she went home with Don and Bea.

  Her first week in New York she was merry as could be. The transatlantic crossing, she joked, was “so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.” Frank Adams wanted to hear all about Ernest Hemingway. How old was this fellow anyway?

  “Well, I don’t know,” she told him. “You know, all writers are either twenty-nine or Thomas Hardy.”

  Back in her old suite at the Algonquin, at her favorite table at Tony’s with Benchley, she trundled her new Scottie all over town and told stories about life in Paris. When the New York Telegram offered her a job as drama critic, she pretended to debate whether or not to accept. “What would Lincoln have done?” she wondered. It was obvious Lincoln would have refused and so did she. One night Thornton Wilder took her to hear a concert of old English ballads. The singers sang without accompaniment and then thoroughly mystified her by sitting down at a table as if they were going to play cards. She kept “expecting them to deal.” It was an intensely boring evening. She went to a Saturday night party at Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun’s house where she reminisced at length with Elinor Wylie and congratulated an elated Frank Adams, whose first child had been born that evening.

  Next morning she woke unusually early for her. West Forty-fourth Street was Sunday silent. She dressed and went down to the lobby. By eleven o’clock, she was ringing the bell at Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét’s house on East Eighteenth Street. When a surprised Elinor opened the door, Dorothy said that something really bad was happening to her, if Elinor knew what she meant, which she did. “She spent the day with us from eleven AM till five PM, saying she was going to kill herself that night & as she’d already made two attempts—wrists and veronal—it was not very soothing to [the] nerves.” For several hours Elinor talked to her, then she was joined by her husband and both of them “begged, reasoned, kidded, scolded & did all we could.”

  Wylie and Benét somehow got through to her. Relenting, she promised Elinor not to do anything “for the present.” The next day Elinor wrote to her mother that “we were queer ones for her to come to, in a way. I supposed she thinks we are experts on the subject!”

  The bad time passed away fairly quickly, but it shook her confidence. She had imagined herself strong again, since she had been able to write so much that year. She worried that her periods of creativity were going to be nothing more than intervals between suicide attempts. It was a chastening thought.

  After her brief treatment with Dr. Barach, she did not continue psychotherapy. Many years later, she mentioned to Oscar Levant that once she had told Barach about hating her father, she could think of nothing further to say and wondered how other patients managed to fill up the time, a problem the garrulous Levant found impossible to comprehend. Citing the eleven-year analysis of Lillian Hellman and the case of Heywood Broun, who went in and out of treatment “like a revolving door,” she expressed doubt about therapy because, she said, “I’ve never seen a cure.”

  Instead, she continued to place her faith in Scotch. Any substance that made her feel good was as velvet to her—and Scotch had the further advantage of being portable.

  About this time, Edmund Wilson ran into her on the street. He was surprised to see her looking fat, bloated, puffy-eyed, and he thought her hairstyle, cut into a ragged bob, was unbecoming.

  “Why dontcha ever come to see me, yuh damn fool?” she said to him.

  One evening they went out together. Dorothy insisted on going to Tony’s because “Mr. Benchley is sunk tonight, and I promised I’d go up there and see him.” Wilson felt annoyed but not surprised because the Round Tablers, in
his opinion, did not know how to get along with anybody but one another and only felt safe in their regular hangouts. His account of this boozy evening is a sad update on Benchley’s life: “... He was getting worse and worse in debt (his syndicate stuff began to show it—overdrafts on Scarsdale bank), he would rush out to Chicago, where the mistress was playing, to lecture....” Benchley had taken great pains to help the young woman. Robert Sherwood later told Nathaniel Benchley that the elder Benchley had taught her how to behave, to enter a room, and even tutored her in French. As it happened, Benchley’s youthful protégée was able to profit quite nicely from his coaching in speech and deportment. She went on to become a dramatic actress whose distinguished career spanned forty-five years on American and British stages.

  Arriving at Tony’s, Dorothy and Wilson found Benchley leaning against a wall in the hall. They ordered the first of many rounds of Tom Collinses and settled down for an evening of serious drinking. Wilson did not find the reunion enjoyable. Dorothy flattered him excessively, “which always inspired me with misgivings,” and Benchley nervously drummed his fingers on the table until the people opposite requested him to stop. Wilson found their clowning to be embarrassing and their jokes about children “cruel and disgusting.” Suddenly he remembered that Dorothy always referred to his infant daughter Rosalind as an “it.” Wilson was further upset by Benchley’s heavy drinking and “his red grossening face,” perhaps because he himself was in the process of developing a serious problem with alcohol. Writing in his diary about the evening at Tony’s, Wilson noted disapprovingly that Benchley “had got to a point where he no longer went at all to plays he reviewed for Life, ” as opposed to previous years when he at least showed up at some of them. Although Wilson allowed that Benchley had “some admirable qualities,” he would never agree with E. B. White or James Thurber, who idolized him as one of America’s finest humorists, surpassing even Mark Twain, and he also failed to understand why Dorothy regarded him as “a kind of saint.”

  It took only a short time for her to slump back into the old nocturnal rituals: smoky cocktail parties in her suite with Ivy passing drinks, a few hours at some revolting play, then on to Tony’s to drink and argue about “life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman, and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan’s club when the place closes.”

  In December, Boni and Liveright published her book of poems under the title Enough Rope, which she had adapted from Rabelais’s “you shall never want rope enough.” The handsome volume bore a gray-and-yellow dust jacket and a price tag of two dollars. It was dedicated to Elinor Wylie, whose personal copy Dorothy inscribed with the words With love, gratitude, and everything. After the publication of Enough Rope, everything would be different.

  Chapter 10

  BIG BLONDE

  1927-1928

  Well before the spring of 1927, it was clear that something out of the ordinary was happening. Enough Rope, already in its third edition with the end not yet in sight, was making publishing history by becoming a best seller, an almost unprecedented achievement for a volume of poetry.

  Suddenly, Dorothy found herself inundated with invitations to literary luncheons that were held in hotel ballrooms “filled with people who looked as if they had been scraped out of drains”—women in draped plush dresses and pince-nez and men who were “small and somewhat in need of dusting.” She quickly learned to avoid these gatherings of “literary Rotarians” by pleading “a return of that old black cholera of mine.” She had to be extremely vigilant even with friends. She was horrified to learn that Horace Liveright planned to merchandise her as “another A. A. Milne,” an author whom she found repulsive. She managed to veto the idea, but not in time to prevent Robert Benchley from going about the city saucily calling her “Dotty-the-Pooh.”

  Enough Rope received impressive reviews. The Nation said that in the book’s best lyrics “the rope is caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity.” The New York Herald Tribune praised her work as “whisky straight,” an unfortunate metaphor considering her drinking problem. Poetry observed that she had in fact carved out her own niche in American literary humor with poetry that was fashionably chic, “ ‘smart’ in the fashion designer’s sense of the word.” A few disapproving reviewers couldn’t wait to slap her down on the very same grounds, calling Enough Rope flapper verse that seemed to them slangy, vulgar, and frivolous. All in all, Enough Rope could not have suited more perfectly the tastes of readers in the year 1927.

  By far the most thoughtful assessment came from Edmund Wilson, who believed that even though “few poems in this book are completely successful,” the best of them were extraordinarily vivid and possessed a frankness that justified her departure from literary convention. It was incontestable that her verse gave off the essence of the Hotel Algonquin. He wrote in The New Republic that “her wit is the wit of her particular time and place.” Her writing had its roots in contemporary reality, which was precisely what he had been pleading for in poetry. Dorothy had emerged as “a distinguished and interesting poet,” he wrote, an opinion later seconded by John Farrar in The Bookman, when he called her a “giantess of American letters secure at the top of her beanstalk,” who wrote “poetry like an angel and criticism like a fiend.”

  Any kind of praise made Dorothy uncomfortable. Even though she was extremely gratified by the book’s reception, she dismissed compliments and tended to downplay her new popularity. When McCall’s magazine invited her to join Edna Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Elinor Wylie in contributing to a Christmas feature that would be titled “Christmas Poems by America’s Greatest Poets,” she was perfectly happy to oblige and threw together “The Gentlest Lady.” Not for an instant did she fancy herself among America’s greatest poets, if indeed the editors of McCall’s were competent to make that judgment, which she must have questioned. As she later wrote in The New Yorker, “There is poetry and there is not.” Her writing, she believed, fell into the latter group. Once Hendrik Van Loon said to her that if a reader has any doubt about a poem, then it isn’t one. Dorothy had nothing but doubts about her work. Regardless of McCall’s, she felt that her true aptitude might lie in fiction. Her intention was to give up verse and concentrate entirely on short stories, but this raised other problems. How could she quit writing poetry now? She was too famous.

  Anarchism was a theory she understood naturally. During the summer of 1927, she published a poem in The New Yorker that she appropriately titled “Frustratior”: If I had a shiny gun,

  I could have a world of fun

  Speeding bullets through the brains

  Of the folks 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.

  Among those she hated were the powerful who had no qualms taking advantage of the weak. It was a revulsion against mistreatment of all creatures, human and animal, that dated back to her earliest days. That summer, her own past (heretofore fairly well concealed) suddenly began to interlock with disturbing current events, and she became absorbed in a political cause. Like Katherine Anne Porter and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she was drawn to this particular issue because of her conviction that a shocking miscarriage of justice was taking place. She entered the fight with the intention of stopping the execution of men she believed innocent, but by its conclusion, her experiences had thoroughly radicalized her. She would remain unalterably committed to radical principles for the rest of her life, even when it meant sacrificing her livelihood.

  To a large degree, her reputation had been built on tough talk and a whiplash tongue, a style that was synonymous with taking little seriously. Not only the public but some of her closes
t friends wrongly concluded that her feelings could not be altogether sincere. Certainly she had indicated absolutely no interest in organized politics before 1927. Women won the vote in 1920, but not once had she taken the trouble to cast a ballot. Politicians of both parties bored or appalled her, and not until after the election of Franklin Roosevelt was she heard to speak kindly of any candidate. Little wonder that those who saw newspaper photographs of policemen bundling her off to jail were astonished.

  The explanation for all this was simple: It was not the American political system that succeeded in firing her imagination, but foreign-grown philosophies that most Americans found extreme and distasteful.

  Her first memories of course were of a family whose every comfort depended upon a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people. Whether or not she ever saw the inside of a sweatshop is immaterial, because she surely absorbed the essence of the conflict between bosses like J. Henry Rothschild and the cloakmakers he employed. In 1927, she began to recover pieces of her past and apply them to the present.