ON MARRIAGE: “Pretty near any complaint you make about wives, why it is true they will probably resent it. But I often ask myself the question could 1 get along without them? And the answer to that is that ! got along without none for twenty-five yrs. and never felt better in my life.”7
ON HISTORY: “It was during the early days of the subway that Emile Zola visited New York and remarked in broken French: ‘Why you New Yorkers are like ze little animals, what you call them, ze moles. You are always burrowing in ze ground.’ Horace Greeley was much taken with this comment and made a suggestion that was afterwards put into effect—that the city be divided into burrows, the Burrow of Brooklyn, the Burrow of the Bronx, etc.”
ON HISTORY: “In 1900, Robert Fulton invented and tried to introduce the automatic or dial telephone. His invention was turned down, unwillingly, by the phone trust in compliance with a petition from people in the then infantile motion picture industry, who argued that the strain of attempting to learn the alphabet would reek havoc with their Art.”
ON PROHIBITION: “I don’t believe I am betraying a confidence when I say that there are, in this country, several organizations whose aim is to effect the modification or repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.”
Asked once to comment on how his wife had helped him and his career, Lardner reminisced: “In 1914 or 1915, 1 think it was July, she cleaned my white shoes. She dusted my typewriter in 1922. Late one night in 1924 we got home from somewhere and I said I was hungry and she gave me a verbal picture of the location of the pantry.
“Another time I quit cigarettes and she felt sorry for me.”
Author Clarence Budington Kelland, who lived near the Lardners on Long Island, was awakened by Ring at three o’clock one morning. After inviting him in, Kel-land discovered that Ring was in one of his silent moods and desired company itself but not conversation. Kel-land fell asleep and was awakened at dawn by Ring tapping him on the shoulder. “I don’t want to seem rude,” Ring whispered, “but aren’t you ever going home?”
On Prohibition (from The Big Drought, 1925) : “Well they was a lot of people in the U.S. that was in flavor of [Prohibition] and finely congress passed a law making the country dry and the law went into effect about the 20 of Jan. 1920 and the night before it went into effect everybody had a big party on acct. of it being the last chance to get boiled. As these wds. is written the party is just beginning to get good.”
1 From Say It With Oil, George H. Doran Co., 1923.
2 From The Lardner Reader, ed. Maxwell Geismar, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963, p. 465.
3 From Preface to The Big Town.
4 The Lardner Reader, p. 557.
5 Ibid., p. 655.
6 The Lardner Reader, p. 463.
7 Ibid., p. 463.
Dorothy Porker
DOROTHY (ROTHSCHILD) PARKER [1893-1967], literary critic, short story and verse writer, started her career as drama critic for Vanity Fair (with fellow Round Tablers Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood). A gifted writer of short, humorous prose—her story “Big Blonde” won the O. Henry Prize. She is best remembered for her verse, usually light, witty, and gently mocking in tone. Political-minded and sharing Broun’s liberalism, she astonished certain friends when she took a job, for a time, writing for the Marxist magazine New Masses. In these writings, she often chided “the gilt and brass of a certain type of American personality, the self-absorbed female snob,” and satirized the nineteenth-century ideal of vacuous, idle womanhood. She was called by Alexander Woollcott “a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth” Mrs. Purker’s demure appearance belied an acid wit and ready tongue that knew few equals. Among the Round Tablers, she was perhaps the most devastating master of repartee and the verbal put-down.
Dorothy Parker gave the following advice to a friend whose ailing cat had to be put away; “Try curiosity.”
Early in her career Mrs. Parker wrote captions for Vogue magazine, later confessing to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield that “fashion would never become a religion” with her. One of the lines that guaranteed her a short-lived apprenticeship as a caption writer read: “Brevity is the soul of Lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise.”
One noon hour at the Round Table, a lady author was congratulating herself on her marital success and extolling the virtues of her mate. “I’ve kept him for seven years,” she concluded with pride. The Round Table group did not share the wife’s opinion of her spouse, however, considering him an extremely dull fellow. Mrs. Parker answered the lady’s remark: “Don’t worry, if you keep him long enough he’ll come back in style.”
“Excuse me, everybody,” Mrs. Parker said one day, rising from her chair at the Round Table, “I have to go to the bathroom.” Then, after a brief pause: “I really have to telephone, but I’m too embarrassed to say so.”
Mrs. Parker once collided with Clare Boothe Lece in a doorway. “Age before beauty,” cracked Mrs. Luce.
“Pearls before swine,” said Mrs. Parker, gliding through the door.
“Men don’t like nobility in women. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility—if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.”
“It’s a terrible thing to say, but I can’t think of good women writers. Of course, calling them women writers is their ruin; they begin to think of themselves that way.”
“Woman’s life must be wrapped up in a man, and the cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool with a man.”
Reporting on a Yale prom, Mrs. Parker said, “If all those sweet young things present were laid end to end, 1 wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
“His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.”
Reviewing a book on science, Mrs. Parker wrote, “It was written without fear and without research.”
Commenting on Lucius Beebe’s Shoot If You Must, Mrs. Parker declared, “This must be a gift book. That is to say, a book which you wouldn’t take on any other terms.”
Describing a guest at one of her parties: “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.”
When Mary Sherwood—wife of the playwright—gave birth to a child (an event that most of the Round Tablers felt she had made too much of), Mrs. Parker cabled her: “DEAR MARY, WE ALL KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU”
Mrs. Parker once said of a Londoner who spoke in clipped accents: “Whenever I meet one of those Britishers I feel as if I have a papoose on my back.”
Sitting next to a table of visiting Midwestern governors in a New York nightclub, Mrs. Parker summed up their conversation: “Sounds like over-written Sinclair Lewis.”
“How can you tell?” asked Mrs. Parker on hearing that Calvin Coolidge was dead.
Somerset Maugham, seated next to Mrs. Parker at a party, asked her to write a poem for him. Mrs. Parker wrote:
Higgledy piggledy, my white hen;
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
Mr. Maugham commented that he liked those lines. With a cool smile Mrs. Parker quickly added two more:
You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat To come across for the proletariat.
Asked if she had enjoyed a cocktail party at which she had been seen, Mrs. Parker said, “Enjoyed it! One more drink and Pd have been under the host.”
Mrs. Parker co-authored with Elmer Rice a play titled Close Harmony, which lopped after a very brief run. The night it closed Mrs. Parker wired Robert Benchley: “Close Harmony did a cool ninety dollars at the matinee stop ask the boys in the back room what they will have.”
“A girl’s best frend is her mutter.”
Book review: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Mrs. Parker remarked, at the reception following her remarriage to Alan Campbell: “People who haven’t talked to each other in years are on speaking terms again today—including the bride and groom.”
As a writer of book reviews, Mrs. Parker experienced many
tedious moments, but her most difficult times came when forced to review novels of “sensational” appeal. On this occupational hazard she once commented: “It’s not just ‘Lady Chatterley’s Husbands.’ It’s that, after this week’s course of reading, I’m good and through with the whole matter of sex. I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it!”
Dorothy Parker was once informed that a female acquaintance had broken her leg while vacationing in London. “Probably sliding down a barrister,” Mrs. Parker suggested.
Of Ford Madox Ford’s The Last Post, Mrs. Parker wrote: “I have been faithful to my duty, in my fashion. I have read the book.”
A friend who had attended a party with Mrs. Parker described their hostess, a loquacious, domineering woman, as “outspoken.” “Outspoken by whom?” Mrs. Parker asked.
At a dinner party Mrs. Parker joined a group of guests who were delighting in the routine of a slightly clownish wit. Her date, a snobbish young man, derided the performer. “I’m afraid I can’t join in the merriment,” he said, “I can’t bear fools.”
‘That’s queer,” said Mrs. Parker. “Your mother could.”
Mrs. Parker once complained to friends that her dog had caught a “social disease” from using “a public lamppost.”
“I met a strange fellow up in Canada, the tallest man I ever saw, with a scar on his forehead. I asked him how he got the scar, and he said he must have hit himself. I asked him how he could reach so high. He said he guessed he must have stood on a chair.”
Margot Asquith, an English countess, published an autobiography which filled four large volumes, a literary endeavor that Dorothy Parker found tedious and over-personalized. Mrs. Parker predicted: “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”
On Margot Asquith’s book Lay Sermons, Mrs. Parker commented: “Lay Sermons is a naive and an annoying and an unimportant book. The author says ‘I am not sure that my ultimate choice for the name of this modest work is altogether happy.’ Happier I think it would have been if, instead of the word ‘Sermons,’ she had selected the word ‘off.’”
“ ‘Daddy, what’s an optimist?’ said Pat to Mike while they were walking down the street together one day. ‘One who thought Margot Asquith wasn’t going to write any more,’ replied the absentminded professor, as he wound up the cat and put the clock out.”
After addressing an antiwar poem called “Hate Song” to all men, Mrs. Parker wrote of herself:
But I, despite expert advice
Keep doing things I think are nice,
And though to good I never come—
Inseparable my nose and thumb.
At the 92nd birthday celebration of Negro leader W. E. B. Du Bois, guest Dorothy Parker was seated next to the venerable old gentleman. Part of the entertainment was an African spear dance; as the dance increased in intensity and the spears jabbed back and forth with less and less precision in front of Mr. Du Bois, Dorothy Parker leaned over to him and said, “Watch out, mate, or you’ll never see 93.”
Robert Sherwood was frequently the butt of quips and jokes concerning his towering height. After a prolonged spell of Sherwood absences from the Round Table, Dorothy Parker wired him: “WE’VE TURNED DOWN A VACANT STEPLADDER FOR YOU.”
Asked why she had named her pet canary Onan, Mrs, Parker explained, “Because it spills its seed upon the ground.”
One evening Mrs. Parker arrived late to a party given by Herbert Baynard Swope, and observed the guests engaged in some sort of group amusement. Swope explained that the guests were “ducking for apples,” and Mrs. Parker reflected, “There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.”
On being shown a plush Manhattan apartment by a real estate agent, Mrs. Parker complained, “Oh, dear, that’s much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.”
Informed that the world-famous she-male Christine Jor-gensen was planning a trip to the States in order to visit her mother, Mrs. Parker inquired: “And what sex, may I ask, is the mother?”
Playing “I-Can-Give-You-A-Sentence” with the word horticulture, Mrs. Parker said: “You may lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”
Reviewing actress Billie Burke in Maugham’s play Caesar’s Wife, Mrs. Parker wrote: “Miss Burke is at her best in her more serious moments; in her desire to convey the girlishness of the character, she plays her lighter scenes rather as if she were giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.”
Mrs. Parker once said of a Katharine Hepburn performance: “She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.”
Of the play House Beautiful Mrs. Parker commented: “House Beautiful is the play lousy.”
Leonard Lyons once asked Dorothy Parker to describe her Bucks County farm in two words, to which she replied, “Want it?”
Of her poetry Mrs. Parker said, “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”
Mrs. Parker taught for a time at Los Angeles State College, where she found the students very “narrow.” When reading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for example, the students felt that the book was too dirty. “But then Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize,” Mrs. Parker recalled. “After that they behaved as if they had given it to him.”
Sitting next to a middle-aged woman acquaintance at a supper engagement, Mrs. Parker became annoyed at her neighbor’s constant overattentiveness—amounting to outright ogling—to an embarrassed Army colonel seated opposite them. “It’s his uniform; I just love soldiers,” the lady remarked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Parker agreed, “you have in every war.”
Dorothy Parker and Beatrice Kaufman once visited Hey wood Broun’s home (Hey wood’s house clearly reflected his well-known sloppiness) and Beatrice reportedly discovered a couple of yellowed, worn-out toothbrushes hanging in the bathroom. Shocked, Mrs. Kaufman asked, “What on earth are these things?”
“Don’t you recognize them?” said Mrs. Parker, “those are the broomsticks the witches ride every Halloween.”
“Most good women are hidden treasures who are only safe because nobody looks for them.”
Mrs. Parker, who did not relish playing the celebrity, was confronted at a party by a woman who inquired, “Are you Dorothy Parker?”
“Yes, do you mind?” Mrs. Parker answered.
Speaking of Hollywood money, Mrs. Parker said: “It’s congealed snow; it melts in your hand.”
Mrs. Parker once advised a young reactionary: “Stop looking at the world through rose-colored bifocals.”
Told that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors, Mrs. Parker asked, “And where does she find them?”
‘The reading of Dawn [by Theodore Dreiser] is a strain upon many parts, but the worst wear and tear fall upon the forearms.”
“Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
“You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
Discussing a job with a prospective employer, Mrs. Parker explained, “Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”
On her seventieth birthday Dorothy Parker said: “If 1 had any decency, I’d be dead. Most of ray friends are.”
Of her poetry: “I’m always chasing Rimbauds.”
Expressing her opinion of a writer whom she considered overpraised, Mrs. Parker said, “He’s a writer for the ages —for the ages of four to eight.”
Dorothy Parker once requested that her epitaph read: “Excuse my dust.” Later she suggested another reading: “This is on me.”
“A list of our authors who have made themselves most beloved and, therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.”
A young playwright, who Mrs. Parker felt had been copying her themes, described his most recent play to her as follows: “It’s hard to say—except that it’s a play against a
ll isms.”
Mrs. Parker added, “Except plagiarism.”
Speaking of a stage director with whom she had never gotten along, Mrs. Parker’s comment was: “A cad. A card-carrying cad.”
Once, while convalescing in the hospital, Mrs. Parker wished to dictate letters to her secretary. Pushing a button marked “Nurse,” she said: “This should assure us of at least forty-five minutes of undisturbed privacy.”
Two full-length plays were written about the fascinating character of Dorothy Parker—one by George Oppen-heimer, the other by Ruth Gordon. Mrs. Parker once commented, “Now, I suppose, if I ever wrote a play about myself I’d be sued for plagiarism.”
Alexander Woollcott
Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags Page 6
