Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
By Marion Meade
London: Minerva. 459 pp. $15.95
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Dorothy Parker was the USA's "foremost female wit in the 1920s", writes Marion Meade. Parker certainly excelled at the one- liner. For example, she preferred to live in hotels "because all I need is a room to lay my hat and a few friends".
Benny Hill humour, perhaps, but sophisticated Benny Hill, as when she described moving into a tiny office with her friend and humourist, (the married) Robert Benchley: "an inch smaller and it would have been adultery". Parker was in a different league to the average RSL club comedian, naming her pet canary after the Biblical masturbator, Onan, "because he spilled his seed on the ground".
Even when her light verse resorted to bodily functions humour, it was more stylish — her poem on turning 33 was "Time doth flit/Oh, shit".
Women weren't supposed to use such "racy" language in those days, anyhow. So Parker's rough tongue, says Meade, was a sign of her being "a born rebel who enjoyed thumbing her nose at the rules that women were expected to obey". Parker held her own amongst the egos of her male co-writers of New York's literary high life, and she flaunted her sexuality (much to the chagrin of the arch macho-patriarch Ernest Hemingway).
Nevertheless, it took a little time for this natural rebel to act on her instincts in a political way. A member of the literary petit- bourgeosie, she led a life of parties, alcohol and being clever for the sake of being clever, without questioning the world outside of the urban after-dark speakeasies. Prior to 1927, says Meade, Parker showed no interest in politics.
Perhaps it was something her psychiatrist (a standard feature of the litterati's lifestyle in those days) said when he described Parker's circle as being unable to tolerate solitude because they could not bear self-examination. Parker's constant socialising was suppressing the "purposeful, striving side" of herself. Then, in 1927, the looming execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two anarchists framed on a murder charge in 1920, ignited Parker's ardour.
Her involvement with the campaign for their freedom radicalised her. In the process she also re-examined her past as a pampered daughter of a Jewish cloak maker whose sweatshops exploited poor Jewish immigrants. She now saw "a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people".
She had always experienced this "revulsion against mistreatment of all creatures, human and animal". Although she admired Hemingway and his writings on bullfighting, she walked out of a bullfight in Spain at her first sight of blood. She left parties when racist jokes were pull of her class was strong. She employed a maid, a young black single mother, because she always expected to be served by others. Life's "necessities" for her were "clothing, perfume, Johnny Walker cigarettes and liquor" and hundred dollar underwear.
Similarly, after her Sacco and Vanzetti experience, although she declared "my heart and soul are with the cause of socialism", her head wasn't: she kept company with assorted "conspicuous capitalists", bankers, Wall Street businessmen and other millionaires.
To her credit, however, she "invariably found them dull, silly and almost totally ignorant". As the Depression darkened the lives of millions of workers, she ridiculed in prose her bourgeois friends who "still rose at the crack of noon to gossip with the manicurists who arrived to do their nails" and who agonised over whether to wear "the blue with the white jacket or the purple with the beige roses".
The caring side of Parker was still drawn to anti-racism, trade union rights and labour struggles, including her setting up of a Hollywood screenwriters' union. In 1938 she declared "the bravest, proudest word in all the dictionaries" was "organise". She was a leader of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and supported the Spanish Republic against Franco's fascists. When Madrid fell in 1939, the humourist found herself "whistling sad songs" because "nothing was funny in the world any more".
"Nothing but theatrics", said her New York colleagues, dismissing her activism as "playing amateur revolutionary". This was a shallow judgment to excuse their own lack of passion and moral earnestness. Senator McCarthy's "anti-communist inquisition" took her more seriously, says Meade, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee dogged Parker and "destroyed her career during the 1950s" as a screenwriter.
Fittingly, by the time recurring alcoholism took her life, Parker's last act was to will her estate, copyright and royalties to the Reverend Martin Luther King.
Meade, unfortunately, doesn't do much with this development of Parker. Meade's narrative is relentless — the marriages, divorces, affairs, suicide attempts and drinking companions whistle past in a meteorite shower of artistic stars.
What the reader is left with is the tragedy of a woman of lively intelligence, generosity and humanity whose gifts were often wasted because she couldn't break free from the alcohol-hyped glitter and alcohol-hidden hollowness of her class.
She couldn't anchor herself with the common people and their political life, though when she did make contact, she did some of her best work, sharpening her humour with socially aware barbs (she also did some of her worst work too — a kind of writing-by-Zhdanov-dots as the Mother Russia Complex of the CPUSA affected many an artistic
Because she didn't have the Marxist politics to make sense of the defeats of the '30s, or of her own troubled life, pessimism got the better of her, and alcohol administered the knockout punches.
Dorothy Parker tried to do good, to make us laugh and move us to compassion and action. We can be thankful that she often succeeded.