The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘After the Laughs’, by Joan Acocella

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella.

Known for her wit, one-liners, and caustic attitude, Dorothy Parker is one of those rare writers who didn’t write all that much during her lifetime (her last 30 years were particularly unproductive), and yet her shadow is long, her influence huge. People quote her off-hand all the time. Her brutal assessments are legendary (she saw Katharine Hepburn in an early Broadway show and declared that she “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B”.) Although she wasn’t as prolific as Oscar Wilde (and she also lacked his kindness), her prose is memorable in a similar way. She wrote a short poem about Oscar Wilde, which shows her influences, and what she was shooting for:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Her mother died when she was four and her father died when she was twenty. She was thrust out into the world with no money, no inheritance, but she had a talent for writing and (more important) she had a talent for making friends. Her friends were probably all terrified of her (she could be very mean, was a huge gossip, and would smile to your face and then slay you behind your back), but they were all part of a group of young, talented writers in New York in the 20s, who all hung out with each other (they became the members of the famed Algonquin Round Table), and got each other jobs. They were all mainly alcoholics, and were devoted to keeping things light, silly, on the surface. Nothing could be taken too seriously. That was the biggest sin. Hearing about the doings of this circle of friends, it reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which describes the manic and heartless years between the World Wars in England, when everyone was devoted to Fun at the expense of everything else. The 1920s was the birth of the “smart magazine”. Vanity Fair was born. The New Yorker was born. The Smart Set was born. Dorothy Parker was hired to write for The New Yorker, doing book reviews and theatre reviews. She didn’t like anything. She was impressed by nothing. Her prose was biting and funny. She would admit that maybe she didn’t like such-and-such book because she was too hungover to enjoy it. That was the style that The New Yorker encouraged early on: not too intellectual, not taking itself too seriously, funny, chatty, breezy. Her columns became famous. Her book column in The New Yorker was called The Constant Reader, and it was the first thing people turned to when they bought the magazine.

Parker also wrote poems and short stories, which were brought out in collections and were big sellers. Her love life was unhappy, and you get the sense when you read interviews with her that she herself was unhappy with her writing. It didn’t seem to add up to much. When she was interviewed by The Paris Review, she said:

I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

She would never come out and say, “I could have done so much more”, but that’s the sense I sometimes get. She moved to Hollywood in the early 30s, and got a writing contract with a studio, and that was really the end of Dorothy Parker. At least of her writing. She wrote the occasional review, but her heyday was in the 20s, that was when she did the work for which she is now known. But remember: she didn’t die until 1967! There were many decades of nothing happening. She tried to commit suicide multiple times. She descended into overt alcoholism. She sipped Scotch all day long because it made the day go by quicker. It’s a very sad story. When she died, people expressed surprise: “She was still alive? I thought she had died years ago.”

Many writers are alcoholics, especially of her generation. The track record of that generation is not good. F. Scott Fitzgerald died at 40. He raced to the bottom. Dorothy Parker strolled to the bottom, and it had to have been agony. It pains me to read about it.

Acocella’s essay is a wonderful assessment of Parker’s various gifts, and where she fell short, perhaps. She analyzes the prose itself, how in the poems Parker would use a sucker-punch for the last line or stanza. In the previous stanzas, she would lull you into a feeling of safety and nostalgia (she was very influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, as many writers were at that time), and then jujitsu you with the pain/despair in the final stanza (“one perfect rose” being a perfect example). Her short stories bring out something very different, an aching vulnerability, the insecurity of love, of waiting for him to call, of loneliness.

While Acocella’s entire essay is worth reading, I’d like to excerpt one of the sections having to do with the short stories, because I think her analysis is fascinating and really adds a lot to our understanding of this famous writer.

Here is an excerpt.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘After the Laughs’, by Joan Acocella

Everything Parker wrote that is memorable, and much that is unmemorable, fits neatly into the Biking Portable Dorothy Parker, the only comprehensive Parker collection still in print. According to a Biking editor, that book is one of the ten best-selling Portables – one slot below Emerson, one slot above Poe. Interest in Parker has not died. The director Alan Rudolph is making a film about her right now, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. The script is one of those “Ridi pagliacco” affairs: how bright the Round Tablers were on the surface, how neurotic and miserable underneath. Needless to say, the scriptwriters were not at a loss for snappy dialogue. All of Parker’s famous quips are there. Conversation, actually, may have been her best genre. In any case, it is for her wisecracks, and for the poems that read like wisecracks, that she seems to be remembered by the public.

But her unique contribution was her portrait, in the stories, of female dependence. This was a central concern of nineteenth-century women writers – Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes – and also some of the men, notably Thackeray. (Parker said that she read Vanity Fair “about a dozen times a year.” Meade believes that Parker modeled herself on Becky Sharp.) But in the twentieth century the rules changed. With the move to the city and the loosening of ties to family and class, women were thrown into a new situation – one in which they should have been freer, and in which some were (witness Sister Carrie) but in which others found themselves wholly abandoned, both by the system that had formerly hemmed them in and by the new one, which still had no place for them (witness Lily Bart). Even after women began to make their way economically in twentieth-century culture, they were still left with an ages-old inheritance of emotional dependency, the thing that marriage and the family, having created, once ministered to and now did not. If in the old days women were enslaved by men, they nevertheless had legal claim on them. Now they had no legal claims, so all the force of their dependency was shifted to an emotional claim – love, a matter that men viewed differently from women. Hence Parker’s heroines, waiting by the phone, weeping, begging, hating themselves for begging. This is a story that is not over yet. Parker was one of the first writers to deal with it, and she addressed it in a new way. Because, it seems, she identified with the man as well as the woman, she saw these women from the outside as well as from within, heard the tiresome repetitiousness of their complaints, saw how their eyelids got pink and sticky when they cried. She did not feel sorry for them. They made her wince, and we wince as read the stories – for, burning with resentment though they are, they are even more emphatically a record of shame. Female shame is a big subject, and for its sake Parker should have been bigger, but she is what we have, and it’s not nothing.