The wit between the rams

“What fresh hell is this?” – a useful expression – was Dorothy Parker’s customary response to the ringing of the telephone or doorbell, and it is not hard to imagine her ghost muttering it now: just when her ashes have been scattered at last, after twenty years in the drawer of a lawyer’s filing cabinet, along comes a glossy, exhaustively researched, blow-by-blow account of the life she tried unsuccessfully to leave on three occasions. Time has robbed the glitterati of the famous Algonquin Round Table of much of their glamour, and the story of the “Gonk”‘s brightest star dying in a squalid hotel room, alone and almost friendless, makes unhappy reading. Most of the Round Tablers were what Marion Meade terms “substance abusers” – Alexander Woollcott ate himself to death – and the details of their descents, variously bloated and emaciated, into untimely graves add up to a convincing temperance tract: “their collective excesses made Dorothy’s problem appear unexceptional”. In fact, she neither smoked nor drank until she was twenty-five. Her first husband, Edwin Pond Parker II, was an alcoholic who had become hooked on cocaine during his service in the army in the First World War, and it is probable that Dorothy found it easier to drink with him than to be a disapproving bystander. Her drinking, however, is not the most interesting thing about her.

This new biography, although somewhat censorious of its subject, demonstrates that while Prohibition was, for some, one long party, Dorothy Parker was an extremely hard-working writer who cared deeply about her craft, as much in her apparently effortless but in fact highly polished theatre and book reviews as in her own poetry and fiction. She may have invented increasingly Gothic excuses for missing deadlines, she may have drunk boot polish in an attempt to end it all when unable to finish a commissioned novel – and many writers will sympathize with her there – but the body of work that she did manage to complete, despite the “howling horrors” and “the rams” (horrendous hangovers graphically and amusingly described, and jauntily dismissed by her), is impressive. There is no getting away from the fact that she was witty, a word which she came to detest, but her pen was not always dipped in vitriol, and, notably in her book reviews for the New Yorker, she could be generous as well as perceptive. She championed Lolita as well as, less astutely, Hemingway, unaware of the vicious antisemitic poem which he composed about her in revenge for her flight from a bullfight.

Her short stories have affinities with those of Katherine Mansfield, whose Journal she described as “the saddest book I have ever read”. Marion Meade, for the purposes of this account, is concerned less with literary evaluation than with the minutiae of daily life, but her judgment that the best of the stories are those which draw on Dorothy Parker’s own experience is probably correct. In the beautifully paced and sustained “Big Blonde”, a woman is driven back to the bottle, after a suicide attempt, because nobody can stand her when she is blue. “The Standard of Living”, a blending of tender observation and imagination, is almost perfect: it opens with two little stenographers emerging from a tea-room, goes on to describe their diet, and just at the point when she has induced nausea in the reader with the glut of grease, oil, fat, sugar, bland meat, pastries and confectioner’s custard, Parker slams home “And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.”

Her poems, slight and heartless or poignant and lyrical, are riddled with worms. Her graveyard imagery and obsession with death, Meade suggests, stem from the guilt which she felt as a child when “my mother promptly went and died on me”, and her hated stepmother followed suit a few years later. Meade ascribes, without specifying, Parker’s adult behaviour to the fantasy that she was responsible for their deaths, and adds “Her short stories were understandably devoid of loving mothers … many are either indifferent or actively abusive to their children”. Dorothy had to endure macabre Sunday outings to her mother’s grave with her father and stepmother: Henry Rothschild would beat his breast and weep and shout “We’re all here, Eliza! I’m here. Dottie’s here. Mrs Rothschild is here – .” Life was not made easier for the second wife by the fact that her stepchildren, Dorothy and two brothers and a sister, refused to address her as anything other than Mrs Rothschild.

Henry Rothschild (“we’d never even heard of those Rothschilds”) made his money in the garment industry. Both his wives were Gentiles, and Dorothy was always ambivalent about her own part-Jewishness, referring to herself as a “mongrel” and hinting at miscegenation. Henry was a sentimental and expansive man and family life was for the most part comfortable and relaxed, if too rumbustious for Dorothy’s later taste. Her relationship with her father appears to have been loving, although she was to reconstruct it, for reasons which are not clear, in adult life. It was he who inspired Dorothy’s first verses, replies to the doggerel about the family dogs which he sent her when she was away from home. Throughout her life Dorothy was to lavish affection on her dogs: she once, too, kissed a cab horse and then worried that the horse might feel that he had to marry her.

Her formal education, partly by nuns, ended when she was fourteen, and she took for her role model Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. Her second job, after Vogue, was on Vanity Fair magazine. Heady days at the Algonquin followed, with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, Edmund “Bunny” Wilson et al, but it is interesting to note that the writers of Parker’s acquaintance whose work has survived are those like Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Ring Lardner, who stayed on the edge of the Round Table’s magic circle. After her divorce from Edwin Pond Parker, Dorothy, who always had a penchant for handsome young men, married the probably bisexual Alan Campbell; possibly under her influence, he became another boozer. They formed a successful team, wrote for the movies in Hollywood, divorced and remarried. At the age of forty-three Dorothy, who had suffered an early abortion and several miscarriages, found herself pregnant again. She lost the baby, and here Meade seems rather to underestimate Parker’s pain and sense of loss, falling for her “brave little trouper” act.

After a visit to Spain during the Civil War, Parker had campaigned tirelessly for the Loyalist cause, and especially for the children. She was courageous, despite the damage to her own and Alan’s careers in the McCarthyist anti-Communist witch hunts and, her reputation for bitching behind people’s backs notwithstanding, could be a loyal friend. When she died, aged seventy-three, in 1967, she left her literary property to the NAACP, and it passed directly into the hands of Martin Luther King. This infuriated Lillian Hellman, who had been given to expect that she would get her hands on it first. She was responsible, through giving no directions as to their dispersal, for the long-delayed scattering of the ashes, and she may have been responsible for destroying the few private papers which Parker left. This was possibly because they shed doubt on her own account of her time in Spain. Much has been written about Hellman’s credibility, and after reading her own description of the prolonged torture which she and Dashiell Hammett inflicted on a turtle who was reluctant to be made into soup, I am prepared to believe anything of her. However, she was one of Parker’s last friends and helped to ameliorate her final days, when she had become one of the Ladies of the Corridor of her play of that name – lonely old women living out their lives in hotel rooms.

Dorothy Parker knew everybody for a while, and almost everybody knew of her. Marion Meade’s book, while perhaps underemphasizing her talent (whatever and whoever else she may have abused, she did not abuse that), is a balanced and generally sympathetic study of an artist and her era, rich in detail and gossip.

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