* * *
A TURNING POINT IN PARKER’S LIFE came in 1927 when she went to Boston to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was her first political action, but it came from deep inside her, and she persisted—infiltrating the prison, getting arrested, marching with other writers like John Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Katherine Anne Porter. They didn’t prevail at this low point in the history of justice in America, but she hadn’t backed down. And as time would show, her actions were not just some outburst of what, decades later, would come to be labeled radical chic.
From then on she was committed to liberal or radical causes. She vigorously supported the Loyalists in Spain, even spending ten days with Alan under the bombs in Madrid and Valencia. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Whether she actually joined the Communist Party for a short time remains an unanswered question. Although Hellman claimed she had been subpoenaed by HUAC and appeared before the committee, this (like so much else in Hellman’s memoirs) is simply untrue. She was, though, visited by two FBI agents in 1951. When they asked her whether she had ever conspired to overthrow the government, she answered, “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?” The FBI gave her a pass.
In the 1930s she had raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, and she never relaxed her efforts in the field of civil rights: When she died, in 1967, her literary estate was left to Martin Luther King, and then to the NAACP, and her ashes are buried in a memorial garden at the organization’s headquarters in Baltimore.
Her emotional life was less consistent. Men had always been in and out of her life, and she inevitably ended up feeling rejected, betrayed, unwanted. She and Campbell loved each other in their way, but their way seems to have been that of a convenient partnership—he could construct stories, she could come up with convincing dialogue; he flattered and cajoled her out of her anxieties and despairs, she legitimized him in the big world. It might have been different if they had had the child she desperately wanted, but in her forties she miscarried more than once, had a hysterectomy, and that was that.
The Campbells tried the rustic life, acquiring an ambitious property near Sid and Laura Perelman in Pennsylvania, but, predictably, that didn’t last. In the early 1940s she went back to Hollywood with modest success—some minor work on The Pride of the Yankees, dialogue for Hitchcock’s Saboteur—but it was a far cry from the high-flying (and high-paying) days of the previous decade. Her stories now appeared only sporadically, and no longer were automatically accepted by The New Yorker—some were simply too stridently political. One magazine editor, she wrote in 1939 in the far-left magazine New Masses, tactfully not naming him, “told me that if I changed my piece to make it in favor of Franco, he would publish it. ‘God damn it,’ he said, ‘why can’t you be funny again?’” That editor was Harold Ross.
Worst of all, as time went by everybody was dying, and far too young, from her idol Ring Lardner at forty-eight and Benchley at fifty-six to Scott Fitzgerald at forty-four. (“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured over his coffin at his sparsely attended Hollywood funeral.) Helen, her sister, was gone. Who was left? Edmund Wilson was still around—they had almost had a fling way back in 1919; now he paid occasional painful visits to her at the Volney. (“She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.”)
She was still devoted to the Golden Couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy. (“There aren’t any people, Mr. Benchley, except you and the Murphys. I know that now,” she had written to him in 1929.) She had lived with the Murphys in their famous spread on the Riviera, and had spent a good part of a year with them in the Swiss sanitarium to which they moved when their son Patrick contracted tuberculosis. Their lives, however, rarely converged now. Difficult friends like Hellman and recent ones like Gloria Vanderbilt and her husband, Wyatt Cooper, couldn’t take up the slack.
She was still revered, a legend, but she had also become a pathetic relic. Yes, “you might as well live,” but for what? And on what? Not only was she running out of old friends, she was running out of money, though uncashed checks, some quite large, were strewn around her apartment (along with the empty bottles), not helping with unpaid bills.
* * *
BY THE MID-1950S she was finished with fiction and verse and screenplays, but now she returned to the field in which she had first made a splash and which she had never entirely abandoned: criticism. We mostly don’t think about this work because it hasn’t been available—until very recently, only her New Yorker book reviews, written between 1927 and 1933, had been collected, and that was in 1970. Her column was called “Constant Reader,” a name immortalized in her review of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. Pooh, she tells us, is reciting a song to Piglet which begins “The more it snows, tiddely-pom—”
“‘Tiddely what?’ said Piglet.” (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.)
“‘Pom,’ said Pooh. ‘I put that in to make it more hummy.’”
And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
The thirty-one reprinted reviews range in subject from the ludicrous to the sublime. Predictably, Parker is deadly when dealing with nonsense or pretension. Her targets include Nan Britton, who wrote a tell-all book about her love affair (and illegitimate baby) with President Warren Harding; the notorious evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson; and Emily Post and her Etiquette. (She did not react positively to Post’s suggestion that to get a conversation going with a stranger, you might try, “I’m thinking of buying a radio. Which make do you think is best?”)
So she’s funny. More impressive is her uncannily astute judgment. She admires Katherine Mansfield, Dashiell Hammett (she loved thrillers almost as much as she loved dogs), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Hemingway’s short stories (more than his novels), of course Ring Lardner, Gide’s The Counterfeiters—“too tremendous a thing for praises. To say of it ‘Here is a magnificent novel’ is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and remarking, ‘Well, well, well; quite a slice.’”
Her most impassioned praise is reserved for Isadora Duncan. Despite calling it “abominably written,” she characterized Duncan’s posthumous autobiography, My Life, as “an enormously interesting and a profoundly moving book. Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths.” Parker would always rise to the challenges of greatness and of garbage; it was what fell in between that drove her crazy.
* * *
LAST YEAR THERE APPEARED a five-hundred-page collection of Parker’s early drama criticism, edited by Kevin Fitzpatrick and titled Complete Broadway, 1918–1923. Except for half a dozen of these pieces that appear in an updated edition of the essential Portable Dorothy Parker, none to my knowledge has ever been reprinted, and yet not only are they wickedly funny and to the point, they unearth for us what Broadway was actually up to in that hyperactive period in the history of the American theater.
Her first piece, from April 1918, sets the tone. It covers the latest musicals and it begins in raptures about the new Wodehouse-Bolton-Kern show, Oh, Lady! Lady!! “Not even the presence in the first-night audience of Mr. William Randolph Hearst, wearing an American flag on his conventional black lapel, could spoil my evening.”
Then things go downhill. Girl O’ Mine was “one of those shows at which you can get a lot of knitting done.” And on to The Love Mill and its “two hundred and fifty pounds of comedienne throwing herself into a man’s arms, felling him to the earth.” And finally there’s Sinbad, the latest Al Jolson extravaganza: “Of course, I take a certain civic pride in the fact that there is probably more nudity in our own Winter Garden than there is in any other place in the world, never
theless, there are times during an evening’s entertainment when I pine for 11:15, so that I can go out in the street and see a lot of women with clothes on.”
Yet even when she yields to her funny bone at the expense of some monstrosity, she finds time to praise. She may poke fun at a vast and gorgeous spectacle called Mecca—“It is comfortable to reflect that it gives congenial and remunerative employment to hundreds, including two exceedingly shabby camels, who, I am willing to wager, although my memory for faces is not infallible, made their debut in the world premiere of Ben Hur…”—but she goes on to say “the most important announcement is that Michel Fokine directed the dances, for they are startlingly beautiful.” Who knew that the renowned choreographer of The Firebird, Scheherazade, Petrushka, and Les Sylphides had once worked side by side with camels?
It’s all here right at the start of her career—the wit, the fun, the creation of “Dorothy Parker” as a character: She was determined to make a name for herself, and she did. But not at the expense of the worthy. She might deride the endless longueurs of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, but she’s enthusiastic about his Candida. She’s in awe at The Hairy Ape: “One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception of O’Neill’s.” About Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: “Here is a play stamped all over with the poisonous marks of the lofty-browed … yet it will give you just the same sort of good, homemade thrills that The Bat did.”
After apologizing at length for her inability to enjoy Shakespeare on the stage, she notes,
I am willing to go down to my plot in Woodlawn secure in the conviction that never has there been so fine a Hamlet as John Barrymore’s. He makes the Prince of Elsinore a young and engaging man, gives him flashes of quiet, skillful humor, grips you suddenly with a glimpse of his desperate loneliness.… As to his sanity, you are never in a moment’s doubt. You leave the theatre ready to take the thing to court, if necessary.
And in that same column of February 1923, she gives an equally ardent and convincing account of Jeanne Eagels’s famous performance in the dramatization of Somerset Maugham’s Rain: “Her voice, her intonations, her bursts of hard laughter and flaming fury—great is the least that you can call them.”
Parker loves Ethel Barrymore, she loves Laurette Taylor, she loves, sometimes, Sir J. M. (“Never-Grow-Up”) Barrie, she loves George M. Cohan, she’s nuts about scary melodramas. For theater-history buffs, all this is catnip. For Parker-lovers, it’s revelation. Yes, she gets repetitious, repeats some gags, stumbles, but in the face of Broadway 1918 to 1923, wouldn’t you?
* * *
THEATER CRITICS ARE TRAPPED by opening-night schedules. Book critics can be more elastic—if they’re lucky, they can pick and choose. In December 1957 Parker began writing a monthly book column for Esquire—monthly in name only, since getting copy out of her was anguish for the editors. (According to her biographer Marion Meade, the magazine’s formidable publisher, Arnold Gingrich, viewed his job with her as “obstetrics, and often referred to the monthly operation as a ‘high-forceps delivery.’”)
For almost five years her column was an ornament to Esquire. She announced her standards in her first article, a roundup of the year’s best fiction: William Faulkner is “the greatest writer we have,” and she characterizes 1957 as “the year in which The Town appeared.” She then obliterates James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed—“cold, distant, and exasperatingly patronizing”—anticipating by several weeks Dwight Macdonald’s famously savage assault in Commentary. She highly recommends Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, Sybille Bedford’s “almost terrifyingly brilliant” A Legacy, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Brian Moore’s The Feast of Lupercal. (Among the books she nixes is Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which “must have been written while he was waiting for the lift to reach his floor.”) And she doles out Yeses and Nos and Maybes to a host of others. She had done her work, and then some.
Some of the columns are workaday, but many are stellar—not only for the acuity of her judgments (“Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book”) but for the pleasure of her writing. Because these Esquire pieces have never been reprinted, I will indulge myself with some extensive quotation.
About Sheilah Graham’s tell-all Beloved Infidel, Graham lets it be known
that of course she felt something awful after [her lover Scott Fitzgerald] died, but of course she had to go on living, and so she married and had two children—quite big children it seems, for they were old enough to hear about Scott Fitzgerald, and they asked Mommie if they weren’t related to Mr. Fitzgerald, and Mommie said yes, darlings, in a way you are.
I present this as the possible all-time low in American letters.
About the divine Zsa Zsa:
It will be a black day in these grubby diggings when some stony-eyed precisionist shall enter, uninvited, and explain to me that there really is a Zsa Zsa Gabor. To me, the lady is a figment of mythology. In my mind, she is one with the unicorn, all shining white and gold, forever swift and lovely, immortal because fabulous. It is a simple belief, and harms no one.
So it is a pleasure to me to set down here that even after a careful reading of Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story Written for Me by Gerold Frank my faith is still unshattered, and Miss Gabor keeps her place in the land of faerie.
And in a review of James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, she draws a heartfelt portrait of her old colleague and friend Harold Ross, their political differences long behind her:
His improbabilities started with his looks. His long body seemed to be only basted together, his hair was quills upon the fretful porcupine, his teeth were Stonehenge, his clothes looked as if they had been brought up by somebody else. Poker-faced he was not. Expressions, sometimes several at a time, would race across his countenance, and always, especially when he thought no one was looking, not the brow alone but the whole expanse would be corrugated by his worries over his bitch-mistress, his magazine.
This is Parker prose at its absolute finest—and another example of how her take on things is almost inevitably personal rather than analytical.
The saddest and most telling moment in her five-year run at Esquire comes at the very end of a discussion of a book about James McNeill Whistler and his circle. She is writing this in 1960, and she is sixty-six. She talks of Whistler, Rossetti, Swinburne, Wilde. “There were giants in those days,” she remarks. “And fools talk about the round table at the Algonquin!”
Dorothy Parker was too smart to buy the legend and too clearheaded to slide into nostalgia. That left her having to acknowledge some bitter realities. If only she hadn’t won celebrity so early and so easily. If only she had been blessed with Hemingway’s talent, had written her novel (and it had been any good), hadn’t succumbed to the easy life and money of Hollywood. If only she had married Mr. Right instead of lumbering herself with all those Mr. Wrongs. If she had had that baby …
She was too sensible to live in regret, but she certainly understood how much of her life she had spent carousing and just fooling around. The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself.
The New York Review of Books
APRIL 7, 2016
The Genius
THOMAS WOLFE
THE MOVIE Genius, which recently came and went with predictable celerity, is an earnest attempt to track the relationship between Thomas Wolfe and his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, by turning it into a high-flown literary bromance: boy meets man, soul meets soul, deeply needy young writer bonds with melancholic son-less editor (he has five daughters), boy rejects man as the Oedipal dynamic inexorably has its way, boy dies, yet love and trust prevail even unto—and beyond—death. “It’s a true story,” the movie announces right at the start, and most of the “facts” are close enough to accurate, give or take a little exaggeration. Nor do we expect biopics to cling neurotically
to mere data—the crucial thing for a commercial movie is “story,” not “true.”
But true or false, this story could never have stood much chance at the box office. Who could have believed that the relationship between Wolfe and Perkins would find an audience today? I saw Genius twice, at two different Manhattan theaters, and if there were any people in the house under sixty-five, I didn’t spot them. And there weren’t many over sixty-five, either.
The reality is that Thomas Wolfe has gone over the cultural cliff. From the 1930s through the 1950s—maybe a little longer—his Look Homeward, Angel was a rite of passage for sensitive literary adolescents (mostly boys, though some girls, too). In 1957, a play based on it and starring Anthony Perkins as young Eugene Gant played on Broadway for well over a year and won the Pulitzer Prize. But by the 1960s, the sardonic Catcher in the Rye had become the go-to novel for sensitive adolescents: a very different kettle of angst from the overwrought prose of Wolfe’s famous book, and a lot shorter. Yet the myth of Wolfe’s short, dramatic life, and of his relationship with the exemplary Perkins, hung on, reinvigorated when in 1978 the young A. Scott Berg published his highly regarded biography of Perkins. Berg, as it happens, is one of the six “Executive Producers” of Genius, and the script is officially based on his book. Don’t you ever wonder what executive producers execute?
Colin Firth as Max Perkins and Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe in Genius
I myself came upon Look Homeward, Angel at the appropriate moment in my life—I was fourteen or fifteen—and it stunned me. No matter that Wolfe’s Eugene Gant grew up as part of a cluttered family in North Carolina, his father (like Wolfe’s) a stonecutter, and I grew up an only child in New York, my father a lawyer: We both had suffered! What’s more—and this is the embarrassing part—I was deeply affected by Wolfe’s rhapsodizing style. Can I really have thrilled to such writing as “life unscales its rusty weathered pelt, and earth wells out in tender exhaustless strength, and the cup of a man’s heart runs over with dateless expectancy, tongueless promise, indefinable desire”? What could I have made of “the earth was spermy for him like a big woman”? I take comfort in reminding myself that the nonpareil Perkins had thrilled to it as well, and Perkins was not only a great editor but an adult. Fortunately for me, within a year I had encountered and absorbed the antidote to Wolfe: Jane Austen’s Emma.
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