The New Criterion

Leslie Frewin The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker.
Macmillan, 320 pages, $19.95

Dorothy Parker is one of those literary figures who are more famous for being well known than for being a writer, and she is all the more glamorous for having been associated with every glittering myth that exists about the 1920s, the legendary decade of speakeasies, wisecracks, Vanity Fair, and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” Parker and the Algonquin group tend to be remembered with the kind of second-hand nostalgia one can feel only for those people and periods which one has heard about but never really known. That the Round Table regulars are remembered at all is a measure of the force of their personalities, for it is generally agreed that most of the writers among them produced little of lasting quality. Parker, despite her delicate literary reputation, was the most capable of the group.

Writing about Dorothy Parker in his notebooks from the Twenties, Edmund Wilson observed that she “was the only personality who interested me in this group .... She was naturally spontaneously witty, and the conflicts in her nature made her interesting.” While Wilson did not go on to define those conflicts, he pointed to Lillian Hellman’s portrait of Parker in An Unfinished Woman, which he said is “unlikely to be bettered by anyone else.” Heliman agreed with Wilson that “Dottie” was “a tangled fishnet of contradictions,” and speculated that her friend’s familiar habit of aiming sudden insults at people she seemed to like “came from a desire to charm, to be loved, to be admired, and such desires brought self-contempt that could only be consoled by behind-the-back denunciations of almost comic violence.”

Whatever Parker’s secret desires may have been, it seems certain that much of her behavior originated in a fragile sense of self. She became a celebrity suddenly and on the basis of very little accomplishment; by 1919, at the age of twenty-six, she had developed an admiring audience for her brief Vanity Fair articles and for a series of verses entitled “Hate Songs”; by 1920, having been fired from Vanity Fair, she was famous mainly for her remarks over lunch at the Algonquin.

Parker reacted to fame built upon so unsteady a foundation by behaving in a variety of self-punishing ways. She tended to fall in love with men who did not love her, whom she described as “handsome, reckless, and stupid.” Although she claimed to want to write as seriously and fluently as her favorite contemporary author, Ernest Hemingway, she managed to produce very little, publishing only light verse, slight stories, and a scattering of theater and book reviews. In all, she published seven books, the contents of which fit tidily into Viking’s 1944 Portable edition: Enough Rope (poems, 1926), Sunset Gun (poems, 1928), Laments for the Living (stories, 1930), Death and Taxes (poems, 1931), Not So Deep as a Well (collected poems, 1936), Here Lies (collected stories, 1939), and an omnibus edition of the three poetry books, entitled After Such Pleasures (1933).

Significantly, many of Parker’s verses dwell upon the smug, adolescent notion of neatly taking her own life. She did, in fact, attempt suicide twice; after the second try, Robert Benchley famously warned, “Dottie, if you don’t stop this sort of thing, you'll make yourself sick.” It is ironic that, for all of Parker’s youthful impulses toward self-cancellation, she managed to live to an advanced age, suffering through increasing disappointments and finally through barely tolerable loneliness. She died in 1967 at the age of seventy-three.

The central tragedy of her career was that she continued to live and work long after the milieu in which she had enjoyed her vogue disappeared. Well aware of the drama in her situation, she played this tragedy with enthusiasm in her later years, becoming, according to Brendan Gill, “the guest who is aware that he has outstayed his welcome and who yet makes no attempt to pack his things and go.” Toward the end of her life, her brilliant start now a bitter memory, she became an increasingly pitiable figure. In The Fifties, Edmund Wilson wrote of her, “She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.”

Clearly there is much of interest for a biographer to examine in the character of this difficult woman, whose public life has been extravagantly celebrated but whose private contradictions have been imperfectly understood. An intelligent assessment of Parker’s status as a writer would be welcome as well. There is some disagreement about the value of her small, eccentric contribution to American letters; while the light verse is effortlessly clever and of limited merit— mere wisecracks that rhyme—the stories are interesting not only for their miniature portraits of Twenties society but also for Parker’s unwaveringly cool narration, which bears no trace of self-analysis and is often more studiously concerned with developing an elaborate style than with relating the stories’ plots.

Given the abundant and provocative details available about the author’s life and work, it is especially disappointing that The Late Mrs. Dorothy Parker is a poorly conceived and badly written book. Its author, Leslie Frewin, has published a 1955 biography of Marlene Dietrich and has edited volumes on such subjects as soccer, espionage, and the British Royal Family. In his prologue to this latest effort, he writes that he “has been an intimate party to published literature concerning Mrs. Parker and her familiar Algonquin habitat in those dizzy days of the twenties and thirties,” then goes on to assure readers further of his credentials by mentioning those of Parker’s contemporaries with whom he has conversed at cocktail parties, in an effort “to skim off facets of her personality.” These people include such figures as Robert Mitchum, David Niven, Merle Oberon, and “soi-disant contemporary luminaries like Gloria Swan-son,” all of whom, to be sure, were living at the same time as Dorothy Parker, but who had mystifyingly little else to do with her except to meet her occasionally and hear about her jokes.

At the end of this baffling introduction, Leslie Frewin declares of his subject, “she had a mystery about her; it was, and is, a mystery she cultivated with all the irrelevant innocence which redeemed her days.” That Parker remains a mystery at the conclusion of this book is no surprise, for there are a great number of statements as meaningless as this quotation throughout it. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to credit Leslie Frewin with any original perceptions about Dorothy Parker, because he obscures his narrative so thoroughly with his prose style.

Frewin is excessively fond of Cosmopolitan-style phrases: “fashionable frolics,” “the chanting of Parkerian particles,” “the mad twenties whirl,” “lazy, sun-drenched days,” “diamonds flashing like harbor lights.” One cannot help wondering what Parker would have said about Frewin’s style, for she was most energetic and surgically precise in ridiculing the trite prose of books she did not admire. Occasionally, among these flamboyant descriptions, Frewin offers ruefully sympathetic observations about the less merry aspects of Parker’s life: “They [Parker and her first husband] had walked the pitted lanes of love together and had lost their way.” “Mrs. Parker had long reached out for happiness, but it had been denied her. Life was a business of constant pain; to survive one had to learn to live with that pain. She had not yet discovered that the destruction of dreams is the foundation of hope.”

A superficial style could be considered appropriate if it were the author’s intention merely to produce a giddy profile of a popular figure. But Frewin is more ambitious. He tries, with varying degrees of failure, to place Parker within her specific historical context, to search her fiction for clues to her personality, and to uncover the source of her chronic unhappiness. For context, readers are furnished with details about world events as though these were being announced for the first time: “In October 1929, the stock market trembled violently for a nightmare of days and then crashed with a reverbancy that echoed around the world.” “On the bright Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, America’s antiwar faction was shattered by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” In describing the circumstances of Parker’s childhood and adolescence in Manhattan and New Jersey, Frewin is no smoother in creating a narrative from his outlines and notes; readers are given, for example, much more specific information about the physical characteristics of Parker’s boarding school, Miss Dana’s School for Young Ladies in Morristown, than about her family’s home on West Eightieth Street in Manhattan, only because Frewin apparently had more research material about the school.

Frewin’s discussion of the source of Parker’s melancholy is especially unsatisfactory. His explanation is no more than a juggling of terms borrowed from psychoanalysis which are themselves extremely vague: “. . . she was assuredly what we know today as a manic depressive, suffering from the first depressive syndrome in the psychiatric book —endogenous depression, endogenous indicating that the trouble is generated from within and not as a result of external misfortune.” His observations about her fiction and verse are not especially illuminating, and any merit his opinions may contain is again obscured by his disastrously frivolous style: “But those who study Mrs. Parker’s work know that as with much of her frothy light verse, it takes a good deal of heat to make a perfect soufflé. A soufflé is precisely what her story, ‘Horsie,’ is. It is heated to perfection.”

In the end, Frewin’s biography, like Dorothy Parker herself, must be regarded as a victim of its own high-spirited irresponsibility and disappointed good intentions. Readers hoping for a substantial, finely tuned study of a complex writer, of which a book such as Elizabeth Frank’s recent Louise Bogan is representative, will have longer to wait. Frewin states at the end of his book that “Mrs. Parker . . . had spent her life searching for Dorothy Parker. She never found her.” Neither, unfortunately, has Leslie Frewin.