Don't Stop Me if You've Heard This One: A love letter to the matchless wit of Dorothy Parker

(This is, very roughly speaking, a review of Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories; edited by Colleen Breese; with an introduction by Regina Barreca; Penguin Books, 2003. It was previously published in Metropole magazine.)

Once, in a novel that will probably never be published, I had my little heroine think bitterly to herself that she was trapped like a trap in a trap. My husband, who acts as my editor in all things because he's too damned nosy not to constantly read over my shoulder, asked what exactly the hell I was talking about. "That's from Dorothy Parker," I said.

"I'm supposed to know that?"

"I read you that. I must have."

"You did?"

"Well, I will now."

He interrupted by pointing out that even if I'd read him the Parker piece in question, I couldn't expect my readers to know the reference, unless of course I was planning on being the first writer to make housecalls. My defense was that it didn't matter if people didn't know the quote per se, since it didn't really make any sense even when Parker said it. It just sounded like it did. Parker always sounds right. Hitting the nail on the head is her job. Just call her the Jael of twentieth-century writers. (Now, there's a reference you'll have to go check.)

My first Dorothy Parker was, of course, the Portable. I didn't then and don't now understand the logic of that term: if this volume, at six hundred plus pages, is portable, heaven save us all from the immovable. But I didn't care about semantics that day I was formally introduced to Dorothy Parker after having heard so much about her. I hadn't gone out in search of her work; I certainly wasn't hurting for something to read. (I've heard of that affliction, but never suffered from it, though it does sound restful.) I just saw that mustard-yellow remainder copy the first week I started working at a now-defunct women's bookstore, and I wanted it and I took my employee's discount for a test drive and bought it. It felt right. It felt like a celebration. I started reading it on the way home, almost missing my bus stop in the process, and it was like going to a party where the food was divine and the music rocked the house and the only strangers were people I'd always wanted to meet anyway.

I have read that Portable to the proverbial tatters in the decade or so since I bought it, and have made some progress in breaking what I know is a less-than-winning habit of reading aloud whole paragraphs at a stretch if I happen not to be alone when I have her work in front of me. But I haven't lost my delight in her, and so I went ahead and started shrieking when I saw that Penguin had released a volume of her complete stories -- including, as they were careful to point out on the back cover, thirteen never previously collected pieces. Since most of my favorite writers are dead, it's a rare day that I have the pleasure of seeing new stuff by any of them, the slackers.

But when I got this collection, I didn't just zip straight to the good stuff. I went ahead and actually read the introduction and everything. Which is apparently more than the editors did. Checking the copyright dates I see that this "new" collection was actually released once before, albeit with a different cover, in 1995. Still no big deal, aside from the fact that that "never previously collected" line suddenly seems a tad disingenuous. But the first sentence of the introduction reads a lot differently now than it did eight years ago, and I think a sensitive editor might have responded to that:

Why is it that many critics seem so intent on defusing the power of Dorothy Parker's writing that she appears more like a terrorist bomb than what she really is: one, solitary, unarmed American writer of great significance?

Like I said: little different impact, especially to American readers. (And what the hell is that comma after the word "one" doing there, anyway?) Maybe the beginning set me up to be less than happy with the rest of the essay, but I have to say I wasn't thrilled, and I think I have cause. It's one of the most defensive pieces of writing I've ever seen. If Parker needs defending from "male critics" (again, direct quote), and my jury's out as to whether or not she does, surely one could do a better job than this.

Just to give you another for-instance: Regina Barreca, the author of the introduction, takes issue with a critic who claims that "The span of [Parker's] work is narrow and what it embraces is often slight." Takes issue, hell -- she goes off like a bottle rocket. And the thing is, I'm not sure that this unnamed critic is entirely incorrect. With the striking exception of "Clothe the Naked," Parker wrote most, or at least most comfortably, about a specific class of person and a certain kind of unhappiness. Her pieces have aged well and the issues she addresses are still vital, but you can definitely tell when, where, and about whom they were written. In less skillful hands, they would be period pieces. (A few are little more than that -- but don't let me get ahead of myself.) The stories are very much of their time. Barreca's mistake is in assuming that's a bad thing. One could just as easily and accurately say that Jane Austen's fiction has a narrow scope: women at the ragged edge of the leisured class in Regency England. That's what's so brilliant about it, though. She wrote about so little and managed at the same time to write about everything. And so with Parker.

Another critic to whom Barreca objects described Parker as "morally a child." In what seems, in an educated writer, to be an almost willful misunderstanding, Barreca huffs that "Parker was many things, but naïve wasn't among them." But there's a difference between childish and naïve. Drinking heavily, sleeping around, thumbing one's nose at deadlines, and spending money faster than one can make it isn't naïve. But in the sense of putting one's own immediate pleasures, wishes, and convenience ahead of everyone else's, and not thinking or caring much about the future, these are very childish patterns of behavior. And they're a very apt description of Parker's life.

(Just as there's nothing more cheering than reading Parker's work, by the by, there's nothing more depressing than reading about her life. And that's assuming you can get reliable information, since, as Marion Meade points out in Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, "Parker herself left no correspondence, manuscripts, memorabilia, or private papers of any kind." Meade's biography is readable and engrossing; whether I'd put any real faith in it is another matter, since she insists that Parker's descriptions of her own childhood -- related decades after the event to a friend -- and worse yet lines from Parker's fiction, are perfectly sound biographical sources. The facts that can be confirmed about Parker's life -- her drinking, her marriages and divorces, her husband's suicide and her own ineffectual attempts -- add nothing to one's appreciation of Parker's work, other than my now regarding it as a miracle of genius that she ever got any work done at all.)

Having completely savaged Barreca's introduction, I would like now to risk all credibility by mentioning the fact that some of it is very, very good. Her analyses of Parker's writing itself, rather than what others have made of it, are at once sharp and thoughtful. "Her business," Barreca says at one point, "was to make fun of the ideal, whatever it was, and trace the split between the vision of a woman's life as put forth by the social script and the way real women lived real lives." And then, later, "Her skill does not depend on the breathless rush towards the unknown but instead on the breathless rush towards the known -- even, or especially, when that which is known is what should be known and avoided." Which is as apt a turn of phrase as I've ever been treated to. When Barreca sticks to Parker's work, her introduction is incisive and insightful and all those other wonderful ins; responding to other critics, she becomes too angry to reason or write well.

So. I read the introduction, like a good girl, and then I decided I'd be really good and just read the stories I hadn't read before. I'm a busy woman, after all. Got no time to sit around guffawing over stories I already know whole bits of by heart.

So it was nice that the Penguin collection started right off with something new. "Such a Pretty Little Picture." It's a strange story, especially for Parker. It's almost the only story she ever wrote with a male main character -- "Mr. Durant" is the other one -- and absolutely the only one in which the male main character is sympathetic. This story's economy of words and phraseology seem to me distinctly reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett:

Mr. Wheelock was clipping the hedge. He did not dislike doing it. If it had not been for the faintly sickish odor of the privet bloom, he would definitely have enjoyed it.

Mr. Wheelock, a man referred to as "Daddy" by both his wife and his daughter (who is called Sister, though she has no siblings), is a study in quiet desperation. He has lately become obsessed with a story he has heard concerning a man who simply up and leaves his wife and home and job one day. Just says "Oh, hell," and turns his back on the lot of them. Mr. Wheelock can't get this story out of his mind, and as we read the petty humiliations and numbing dullness of his existence, we begin to understand why. We become convinced as well of the impossibility of his ever leaving. He is married to a woman who "never waited for a button to come off, before sewing it on." He is the father of a child he doesn't particularly like, one whose name is a direct reproach to him:

She had been known as Sister since her birth, and her mother still laid plans for a brother for her. Sister's baby carriage stood waiting in the cellar, her baby clothes were stacked expectantly away in bureau drawers. But raises were infrequent at the advertising agency where Mr. Wheelock was employed, and his present salary had barely caught up to the cost of their living. They could not conscientiously regard themselves as being able to afford a son. Both Mr. and Mrs. Wheelock keenly felt his guilt in keeping the bassinet empty.

How strange, how almost shocking that the woman who wrote this would later be known primarily for her comic work, and can be introduced to those who don't know her as the author of "News Item" ("Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses").

I was able to skip, or at least only skim, the next two stories -- "Too Bad" and "Mr. Durant." Not because they're not good. They're brilliant; but "Too Bad" relies on a gimmick and once you know the punchline there isn't much to tell, whereas Mr. Durant is so utterly repulsive to me that, having read his story once, I want nothing more to do with him. So far I was doing splendidly. Very efficient.

So much so that when I got to "The Wonderful Old Gentleman," I figured I'd earned a little reward, and I went ahead and read it through though of course it's in the Portable. And that was the end for me. I didn't even try to put up a fight after that. I read every word of the rest of the book. The difference between a great and a merely good writer is how much re-reading the writing will support. Parker's rereadability is damned near endless.

There are a few exceptions, of course. I will say that other than the above-mentioned "Such a Pretty Little Picture," there aren't any long-lost gems in this collection. Some semi-precious stones, perhaps, but nothing that will make the reader cry out against the injustice of a particular story having moldered uncollected for so long.

Some of the pieces feel in fact as if they've been lying alone in the darkness too long, or maybe not long enough. They're in the last section of the book, titled "Sketches," and I think it's questionable to have them here at all. What I mean is, yes, all right, they're fiction. Kind of. Some of them. Fictional, anyway. But they're not stories, and right there on the cover it says "Complete Stories." Just that. There is no subtitling of "And Other Material That Didn't End Up In The Portable And We Thought It Should Be Published Somewhere, So Why Not Here."

Frankly, if you're going to have not technically fiction pieces in a collection of Parker's work, why not throw in some of her book or play reviews? Sure, they're in the Portable already, but they're so good that any collection of hers feels incomplete without them. Also I want an excuse to talk about them, especially since I did go ahead and reread a bunch of them while I was on a Parker roll.

What surprised me on first reading them was what surprised my husband on first even hearing about them from a college dorm mate with unusually good taste in literature: namely, how could reading about a bunch of books no one's even heard of anymore or a lot of plays that were performed before most of us were born possibly be any fun at all? But the reviews are some of her most rereadable work. And not just the ones in which Parker justly savages some mediocrity, although I routinely rupture something whenever I'm lucky enough to read her review of A. A. Milne's Give Me Yesterday. What's really amazing is how good her good (as in favorable) reviews are. Anyone can trash someone else's work and sound halfway funny, but, as Parker recognized and pointed out in one of her own reviews, "superlatives are tiresome reading." But not from her. Oh, just read them and see. You won't think it a wasted evening, I promise.

I may have felt the lack of the reviews, but I wasn't sorry at all to find an all-prose collection. Though Parker may be most famous in some circles for her poems, they are now the weakest examples of her work, not having aged as well as the rest of it. I'll go out on a limb now and say that most of her poems could drop out of sight altogether and not cause a ripple. Oh, "One Perfect Rose" will always be fun, I suppose; but "The Maid-Servant at the Inn" should never have even been thought of, let alone recorded for posterity, and it's far more representative of Parker's poetry.

For all my kvetching, I still went out and bought -- a hardcover copy, yet -- Stuart Y. Silverstein's compilation Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. It was just okay. Her "Hate Songs" were enjoyable, but so are a lot of things that won't set you back twenty-two 1996 dollars. But the introduction, which is sixty-five pages long, was worth the price of the book, aside from Silverstein's distressing habit of always referring to Parker by her first name: Dorothy in the text, Dottie in the copious footnotes. (Other than in books intended for children, I never see famous male artists or writers referred to by first name, let alone nickname. That Barreca may have a point, damn her eyes.) Anyway, the anecdotes about Parker are fantastic. My favorite lies in footnote 32: "Dottie excelled at the popular Algonquin game where the players challenged each other to use a long word in a punning sentence. She was challenged with 'horticulture.' Dottie: 'You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.'"

But getting back to what was actually in the collection I'm allegedly reviewing. I will now say something that I never thought I would say in connection with any of Parker's writing: the pieces in that last section, "Sketches," were hard going. I almost gave up, and only my journalistic integrity, which is virtually indistinguishable from a weaselly fear I have that someone will make a direct inquiry about the very bit of book I decided the hell with, kept me slogging away. Some of them, such as "As the Spirit Moves," are literally historically interesting. I was a minor participant in the Ouija craze of the '70's; I had no idea that there was (apparently) a pretty sizeable one in 1920 as well. Coincidentally or not, the piece devoted to it is also one of the more readable of this section.

The rest start to wear on one. Maybe the problem was slamming them all together in the same room, so to speak, instead of scattering them throughout the book. As it is -- well, look. There is a piece entitled "A Dinner Party Anthology." It's nothing but three- to four-paragraph descriptions each of all the different people at a dinner party. Every description ends with a one-two punchline, like this one about Mr. Charles Frisbie: "Well may his guests remark, as they frequently do, that Charlie is a regular case.

"But of what they neglect to add."

Some of these summings-up are funnier than others. All follow the same formula.

So then we get "A Summer Hotel Anthology," which is -- surprise! -- a collection of three- to four-paragraph descriptions of all the different people at a summer hotel. Each description ends with a one-two punchline, like this one about Mrs. Earle Staley: "She must either speak her mind or else she must not speak at all.

"There are many who feel that she makes an unfortunate choice."

After that, we are presented with "An Apartment House Anthology," which is -- dear God, don't make me tell you all this again. Are you beginning to get the picture? Are you beginning to understand how a reader, especially an innocent reviewer who is only trying to add to the sum total of joy and enlightenment in the world, might start to feel positively beaten up by so many formulaic punchlines?

All this is a fine example of Dorothy Parker's strength and weakness: the dependability of her brilliance. There can be at times something glib or automatic about her wit. Something dutiful: she's winding up for the pitch -- and there it is. Right over the plate, as always. This may be an inherent problem with being a great stylist, especially in humor. It's not just that Parker is funny; she's funny in a distinct and recognizable fashion, and one can keep that up only so long, either on the giving or the receiving end.

Fortunately, Parker has more than one-liners to fall back on. She is a great humorist who can also write effectively and affectingly of grief and pain. But not of fear or suspense, which brings us to the one real failure in the "Stories" section of this story collection. "The Game" just doesn't work. Its tone is trying too hard to be offhand in a deliberately chilling kind of way, and the ending really is trying to be a surprise and really doesn't make it. At all. I think it may be significant that "The Game" is listed as having been merely co-authored by Parker. Barreca suggests in her introduction that "Parker did not list among her many talents The Ability to Play Well with Others," and "The Game" is a case in point. Parker's style is too sharp and distinctive to be melded with or muted against someone else's.

The stories that can also be found in the Portable are the strongest, which is to be expected. There are my favorites and there are those that really are, objectively, her best stories, and those aren't always the same thing because Parker at her best can be so wounded and wounding that I want, selfishly, to just curl up and laugh at her funnies.

For instance. It's probably her lightest, slightest piece, but to me "The Standard of Living" is so funny no matter how many times I read it that for a long time I remembered it as the first story of hers I ever read. I don't know why it's so wonderful to me, except that Parker seems won over by her own heroines and the innocent distress that briefly clouds their day. Perhaps she was happy to be making a mockery of real, deep, lasting pain -- mocking not its sufferers or even its inflicters, but pain itself. Banishing the bare idea of it. The story is a romp, and that's rare for Parker. She can be and often is humorous, but her humor often derives from most unhappy circumstances.

Some of her funniest writing is in "Dusk Before Fireworks," a very unfunny story about a woman in love with a subtly sadistic man with whom apparently half the female population of the city is also in love. Kit, the miserable heroine, gets some of the most hilarious dialogue Parker ever wrote:

"She says she has something she wants to tell me."

"It can't be her age," Kit said.

He smiled without joy. "She says it's too hard to say over the wire."

"Then it may be her age," she said. "She's afraid it might sound like her telephone number."

And then, later on that same bitter evening:

"Hobie," she said, "is there a livery stable anywhere around here where they rent wild horses?"

"What?" he said.

"Because if there is," she said, "I wish you'd call up and ask them to send over a couple of teams. I want to show you they couldn't drag me into asking who that was on the telephone."

"Oh," he said, and tried his cocktail.

..."I can't stand it," she said. "I just lost all my strength of purpose -- maybe the maid will find it on the floor in the morning. Hobart Ogden, who was that on the telephone?"

It may be that humor stands out in greater relief against such a stark background, but this seems just as funny as, if not funnier than, anything in Parker's just plain humorous stories. Although come to think of it, there aren't many of those. Even in a piece like "Here We Are," which has a laugh in almost every paragraph -- every line, even -- there's an edge of anxiety in all the newly-wedded couple's banter and bickering. As the bride confesses after a heated exchange, "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone."

It's a relief to turn to Parker's malice. Sometimes she just picks a deserving target and has at it. Like in "Arrangement in Black and White," which pins a certain kind of racist to the page like a bug in a shadowbox. The bulk of the story is a pretty one-sided conversation between the long-suffering host of a party and one of his guests, a woman with "assisted gold" hair eager to prove how enlightened she is:

"Oh, I get so furious when people are narrow-minded about colored people. It's just all I can do not to say something. Of course, I do admit when you get a bad colored man, they're simply terrible. But as I say to Burton, there are some bad white people, too, in this world. Aren't there?"

"I guess there are," said her host.

This story is pure brilliance. It would have been so easy for Parker to choose as a main character the Burton mentioned, a man who would refuse a million dollars if he had to sit down at the table with a black in order to earn it. Instead, Parker lets his wife have the stage, and her attempts at egalitarianism are somehow more ghastly than her husband's unbudging racism. The story puts the reader in the position of the host, who must be spending his entire party cringing every time this woman corners him. We can laugh at her without for a minute losing sight of how horrific her attitudes are. They're deadly, yet at the same time so ridiculous as not to seem a threat. We can derive a certain comfort by the end of the story that ideas and people this stupid can't possibly live forever, though their existence is always too long by half.

Parker is at her finest when writing about racism, though she doesn't touch directly on it often. "Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street" has to be one of the earliest studies of internalized racism, written long before the syndrome had a name. And "Clothe the Naked" is entirely uncomic, a simple, tragic work written without condescension or platitudes. It is the only story Parker wrote in which all the main characters are black; and while Parker, whose ear for the spoken word was matchless, wrote many stories that were either entirely or almost entirely in dialogue, this one is unique in containing not one spoken word. It is very different from her usual work, without feeling experimental. The writing is strong and sure of itself.

Another story that stands apart from Parker's generally funny, if rueful, fiction is her masterpiece, "Big Blonde." In it she achieves a story of real depth without an ounce of sentimentality or, more surprisingly, a trace of irony or satire. It is, like "Clothe the Naked," simple, well-told, and tragic.

I found it puzzling when I read it the first time, over a decade ago. It separates itself from the rest of her work by dint of its high quality as well as its utter hopelessness. If I had it to read fresh now, I might wonder why a writer capable of such solid, unimpeachable fiction would pour any energy into pieces like "The Sexes" or "The Waltz" -- pleasurable, but slight. Happening upon it then, I was stumped as to why someone who could write with and for such evident enjoyment stories such as "The Standard of Living" would descend into the depths to bring such a gloomy work to the light.

The answer to either question suggests itself. Parker's talents and inclinations refused to be confined. She was one of the keenest observers of the human condition of her own or any other time, and perhaps the most dauntless. She wrote what she saw, and her gaze was unblinking. But the only way for the possessor of such a wide-open stare to cope for long with what was shown to her was to have a ready wit to match. She laughed often, but never unworthily. Her targets were all those who took themselves too seriously, and sometimes that included herself. And so the survivor of suicide attempts couldn't keep an entirely straight face when reporting what she found on the road to a death that refused to let her catch up with it. In one of her best-known poems, "Resume," she informs us:

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.

"You might as well live." A mocking tone -- but the mockery is for herself, arrogant enough to think that she had the strength (or the weakness) to hand herself over to death without a murmur. But on exactly the same subject in a very different work, she is sympathetic, even tender, because Hazel Morse, the big blonde in question, has not a trace of arrogance or unkindness in her. You can feel Parker's protectiveness, even as she leads Morse relentlessly through her miserable existence. There is nothing self-aggrandizing or melodramatic about Hazel's wish to die. She's simply worn out, tired of being sad and of being expected to cheer all those around her. "The thought of death came and stayed with her and lent her a sort of drowsy cheer," Parker tells us. "It would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead." There is no undertone of mockery, no bolt behind the blue. Nor is there in Hazel's being confounded as to a usable path to her goal, which reads like a dark mirror image of "Resume":

But how would you do it? It made her sick to think of jumping from heights. She could not stand a gun. At the theater, if one of the actors drew a revolver, she crammed her fingers into her ears and could not even look at the stage until after the shot had been fired. There was no gas in her flat. She looked long at the bright blue veins in her slim wrists -- a cut with a razor blade, and there you'd be. But it would hurt, hurt like hell, and there would be blood to see. Poison -- something tasteless and quick and painless -- was the thing. But they wouldn't sell it to you in drugstores, because of the law.

She had few other thoughts.

That the same subject could have such a different visage depending on the vantage point isn't surprising in theory. But for just one writer to be able to make it either laughable or well-nigh unbearable is strange and rare, indeed. Which is a fitting epitaph for Dorothy Parker herself. Though perhaps not as good as her own suggestion for the carving on her gravestone: "If you can read this, you've come too close."

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