The Vivacious Mrs. Parker

One of the measures of a great artist is that his or her work transcends time. Dorothy Parker's poems and short stories of loss, heartbreak, disillusionment, and dark perseverance still speak to readers over 70 years after they were written.

I'm not quite sure when I fell in love with Dorothy Parker's writing. It must have been at a low point in my love life because I remember reading her words and thinking, "Ah, here's a woman who gets it." I knew from her poems and short stories that she was a kindred soul who understood the joy of falling in love, the loss of heartbreak, and the insanity of picking up the pieces and doing it all over again for love. But, how could she, a woman who lived her 30s in the '20s, understand what I, a woman living her 30s in the '90s, was going through?

Parker was born to a well-to-do New York City family in 1893. Some may have thought she born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her family owned a beach cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey and Parker attended parochial school followed by a finishing school, as every proper New York City girl did in that day. But, money doesn't equal happiness and Parker would face-to-face loss at an early age.

Less than five short years after Parker's birth, it would be in the family's breezy summer cottage that Parker's mother Eliza would die. Two years later, her father remarried, but Parker despised both her father and stepmother. By the time she was 20, both had died and Parker was on her own.

Despite a formal education that ended at age 13, Parker's first poem was bought by Vanity Fair in 1914 when she was 21. She briefly worked for Vogue before returning to Vanity Fair as a staff writer. A true product of her time, Parker's writing exhibited biting wit, striking satire, and often callous candor.

To fully understand Parker's work, you need to have an understanding of New York in the '20s. The city was so alive with a new found energy that you could almost feel its heart beating. The citizens of the city, especially women, were afforded a new social permissiveness during the Roaring Twenties as New York City became a hub of cultural dynamism. No longer emotionally bound to their homes, women had the freedom to take jobs, go to the theater, and smoke and drink in public. It was a great time of personal discovery and growth, with people breaking free of former social constraints.

Like many authors, Parker's writings typically reflected her life experiences. It was a time when people decided embrace the fun and enjoyment life had to offer, long before the Me Generation of the late twentieth century. However, the Great Depression would hammer home hard times and the emotional freedom to enjoy life to its fullest would not return for many decades. This may have put a riff between Parker and readers who couldn't quite relate to how New York socialites lived in the early part of the century.

In her poetry, Parker often wrote of pain and heartbreak. For example, in Symptom Recital, she states "I do not like my state of mind" and goes on to describe herself as no longer having a sense of humor, being "disillusioned," and that her "quondam dreams are shot to hell." Yet the last two lines of the poem are very telling of Parker's nature:

I shudder at the thought of men...
I'm due to fall in love again.

In 1930, Parker proved she was already a slave to the phone in "A Telephone Call." The story begins with the line "PLEASE, God, let him telephone me now." Through the story, Parker looks at the clock, lamenting that her love has not called her as promised. She replays his words, promises herself she won't call him ("I know they don't like that," she says), prays again to God, she tries to rationalize why he isn't calling, tries to convince herself he really likes her, and in the end, ends up counting by fives, hoping the phone will ring by the time she reaches 300. How many women haven't sat beside the phone, waiting for that special someone to call?

Despite her heartbreak, Parker was always willing to fall in love again, both in her poetry and in real life. She met and married Edwin Pond Parker II in 1917. However, when World War I broke out, the author and her stockbroker husband were physically separated by his Army service. Never taking herself too seriously, Parker often joked that she only married Parker to rid herself of her Jewish maiden name, Rothschild.

Along with Vanity Fair coworkers Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood, Parker formed the Algonquin Round Table in 1919. The group consisted of New York wits, actors, critics, and writers including Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Often referred to as "The Vicious Circle" for their cutting wit and sarcasm, they met each day at the Algonquin Hotel for approximately 10 years. Comments made during the lunch were often reprinted, which spread Parker's reputation as a wit throughout the country. The group often played what they called the "I can give you a sentence" game. One member would throw out a word and the others would have to use it in a sentence. Once, someone threw out the word horticulture. Hardly missing a beat, Parker threw out one of her memorable lines - "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." So brutal were the barbs of the Vicious Circle that Groucho Marx, whose brother Harpo associated with those in the Round Table, once said "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." Parker was the table's shining star, the only one whose works would really be remembered.

It would be Parker's acid tongue that got her booted from Vanity Fair in 1920. Benchley and Sherwood resigned and Parker and Benchley would join the board of editors at The New Yorker. While Parker and Benchley would remain close until his death in 1945, many in the Round Table grew apart after their heyday.

Although the '20s were the most prolific writing time for Parker, it was also among the most turbulent time in her life. Parker was disillusioned with freelance writing, which often left her with little money. She began drinking heavily and her marriage to Edwin, who was also drinking and addicted to morphine, was failing. The two split in 1924 only to later reconcile. Parker had an affair with playwright Charles MacArthur. Parker became pregnant with MacArthur's child. After an abortion, a depressed Parker tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists.

Parker attempted suicide once again in 1932 after the dissolution of the Algonquin Round Table. After gulping down a handful of sleeping pills, she awoke in her Algonquin hotel room in time to call her doctor.

Parker was able to recognize the ludicrousness in both her romantic affairs as well as her life in general. Many of her one-liners, such as "Men seldom make passes at girl's who wear glasses" and "I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be a darling at it" remain as part of her legacy.

While sarcastic and sharp, some of Parker's works were all too telling of her discontent with life in general. In Resume, she decides that life is only worth living simply because dying is too much trouble:

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.

Yet many of her poems celebrate her independence. One of my person favorites is "Observation," written in 1926:

If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

She was most productive during the '20s and '30s. In addition to her work in Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker, she also wrote for Life, McCall's, and The New Republic. Her book reviews appeared in The New Yorker from 1927 until 1933. In her review of the The Lake, Parker famously dismissed actress Katherine Hepburn by saying "she ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."

In 1926, Enough Rope, her first book of poetry, was released. A review in The Nation described her poems "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." She poked fun at friends trying to help her over heartbreak in "The False Friends." As with many of her poems, she started out meek and mild, only to let her fierce wit loose at the very end:

They laid their hands upon my head,
They stroked my cheek and brow;
And time could heal a hurt, they said,
And time could dim a vow.

And they were pitiful and mild
Who whispered to me then,
"The heart that breaks in April, child,
Will mend in May again."

Oh, many a mended heart they knew.
So old they were, and wise.
And little did they have to do
To come to me with lies!

Who flings me silly talk of May
Shall meet a bitter soul;
For June was nearly spent away
Before my heart was whole.

Parker would go on to release two more books of poetry, Sunset Gun and Death and Taxes, as well as two short story collections, Laments for the Living and After Such Pleasures. Many of her poems spoke of the demure, proper woman as compared to herself, a modern, outspoken woman. While she suffered heartbreak, she certainly never took it lying down, as is evident in her poem "Godspeed:"

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way;
I'll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday,
Go take your damned tomorrow!

Parker finally divorced Edwin in 1928. Affairs with publisher Seward Collins and author F. Scott Fitzgerald would follow before Parker would marry again. Parker met Alan Campbell, a young Broadway actor that many suspected was bisexual. Although eleven years her junior, the two hit it off and were married in 1934. The couple moved to Hollywood where they wrote film scripts, most notably the Academy Award nominated A Star is Born (1937). The couple divorced in 1947, only to marry again in 1950 and remain married until Campbell's death thirteen years later.

Parker had been outspoken about politics as far back as 1927, when she and Round Table associate Ruth Hale were arrested for protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti executions. Later in life, she focused on left wing causes, including supporting civil rights, the Loyalist cause in Spain, and the Communist Party. When she declared she was a communist in 1934, she found herself on McCarthy's blacklist. Many of her former friends shunned her for her radical thinking.

Parker also later denounced her Algonquin Round Table associates, saying, "just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them.... There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth..."

By the late '50s, Parker's drinking, a lifelong problem, cause erratic behavior and interfered with her work, with her only writing a few book reviews for Esquire.

It seems like a cruel joke of fate that Parker, someone who had courted suicide and embraced thoughts of death, would live to a ripe old age. Having outlived most of her friends and her husband, Parker died alone in New York in 1967 at the age of 73. She left her entire estate to the Martin Luther King Jr. foundation. Her ashes remained unclaimed for 21 years before they were put in a Baltimore memorial garden by the NAACP.