The 'It' girl of wit

THE PORTABLE DOROTHY PARKER

Edited by Marion Meader

Penguin Classics, 626 pages

Available at National Book Store

These days, when we think of witty women, we tend to mention Maureen Dowd, Nora Ephron, Tina Fey. Our notion of feminine wit comes with an arched eyebrow, a little perfumed vial of poisoned sarcasm. Maybe a Sarah Palin impersonation or two.

Back in the 1920s and ‘30s, around the Algonquin Hotel Round Table in NYC, Dorothy Parker was the personification of feminine wit. She was the “It” girl of wit. She was George Sand in a cloche hat, Oscar Wilde with female equipment, F. Scott Fitzgerald in a wryer mood.

She was also often depressed, alcoholic, and occasionally suicidal. You could draw comparisons with a later American female icon, Marilyn Monroe: both transformed their internal angst and unhappiness into comedy, transcending the roles society had dealt out to them. Parker incidentally found the actress “terrific,” calling her, in a 1962 letter, “not so different from me, only prettier.”

Monroe could have been the stand-in for the title character in Parker’s most anthologized story, “Big Blonde,” about an over-the-hill party girl, a voluptuous “good sport” whose final romance is with whiskey and lethal sleeping pills. Hazel Morse slides down a slippery slope from easy attention from males — her zaftig figure lures them in — to being so desperate for peace, she can’t even properly commit suicide. But the details — hiding her sleeping pill purchases among more innocuous drugstore items — come straight out of Parker’s life.

Beyond all the drama, Mrs. Parker, as we know from the voluminous Portable Dorothy Parker, could also write like a dream. For short sprints, that is. The novel form always eluded her, something she rued again and again, even in letters to friend Robert Benchley (“Write novels, write novels, write novels… that’s all they can say”). She dismissed her own output (“Who reads these little things?”) as well as her “pomes,” short missives that read like Emily Dickinson full of piss and vinegar. These are endlessly quotable gems, almost tweet-like in length, such as:

By the time you swear you’re his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying —

Lady, make a note of this:

One of you is lying.

But bite into the stories, and you’ll see why Parker was made for the times, before she was made for the ages: stories like “Mr. Durant,” about a philandering businessman who, after ordering his secretary to have an abortion, refuses to take a female stray dog into his home; the pitch-perfect eavesdropping of “Arrangement in Black and White” (in which an Upper East Side racist denies — and confirms — her own racism with every slip of the tongue), or the hilarious pas de deux of “The Sexes” all conjure up the spirit of the Jazz Age even better than Fitzgerald’s magazine fiction. They’re all here, along with poetry, articles, literary criticism, letters (these are often hilarious).

Presented in handsome rag-leaf paperback with cover illustrations by cartoonist Seth (Palookaville), this is the one to tote around if you want to be reminded of how funny women can be (as if you didn’t know already). Unlike a lot of “portables,” you will definitely find yourself dipping into this one frequently… for laughs.

Parker herself admitted she had no visual sense; rather, she allowed, “I hear things.” Her ability to capture speech patterns of everyone from the lowliest G.I. to the loftiest matron made her a natural for magazines, and she and a gallery of talented writers — including Benchley and George S. Kaufman — helped lift The New Yorker to exalted heights through the ‘20s. She and her crew made the Algonquin their home, inviting in any new acolyte who could withstand the withering crossfire of wit. (Fitzgerald to the assembled Roundtable members: “Drinking is a slow death.” Benchley: “So who’s in a hurry?” Asked to use “horticulture” in a sentence, Mrs. Parker came out with: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”)

Her knack for dialogue led her to Hollywood — along with Fitzgerald, Faulkner and other boozy writers seeking an easy paycheck in the sun. She did get an Oscar nomination for co-writing A Star Is Born with her second husband, Alan Campbell, but not even blue skies and palm trees could tame her incorrigible tongue.

This hefty volume goes beyond the original Portable Dorothy Parker handpicked by the author for its first edition in the 1940s. It includes an extra batch of wry pieces from Vanity Fair and Vogue that still read as fresh and funny today as when they were published back in the ‘20s.

But what comes through most in Mrs. Parker’s fiction is the world of women, pre-feminist days. So many of her characters are shackled to a male, whether it’s a dance partner or a sugar daddy. Usually it’s a man who holds all the cards, whether it’s the playboys looking for a “good sport” in “Big Blonde,” or the soldier who spends his 24-leave polishing his boots instead of paying attention to his wife in “The Lovely Leave.” No wonder a gal has to have wit, an armor of irony, just to get her through a fumbling partner’s attentions (such as in “The Waltz”). It’s a prickly perceptiveness that works its way down to Nora Ephron complaining about her neck, Maureen Dowd skewering George W. Bush, Tina Fey delivering another wicked impression. Wit is strength, and strength is power; and women still have to fight for every bit of power they have.

“The Waltz” is typical of Parker’s first-person narratives: light on physical detail, told strictly through first-person monologue. You can almost feel Parker’s mouth curl into a smile as she hovers over her typewriter to describe a dancing partner with two left feet:

What can you say when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you, I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d love to awfully, but I’m having labor pains. Oh, yes, do let’s dance together — it’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri...

I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to have my tonsils out. I’d love to be in a midnight fire at sea...

Parker herself had no shortage of guy trouble. Married to a soldier who, upon returning from the WWI front, turned out to be a morphine addict, she dropped the husband but retained the name, calling herself “Mrs. Parker” ever afterward (she was born Dorothy Rothschild). Her mother died when she was young, a shock that led her to ask herself, each time the doorbell rang, “What fresh hell is this?” She hated politics, but helped friends who were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era and willed most of her inheritance to Martin Luther King’s estate (she was a quiet but firm civil rights activist).

But women are lampooned just as much as men in Parker’s battle of the sexes. She may have leaned towards self-pity in much of her poetry and essays, but she was clear-headed about the absurdity implicit in either gender. She wasn’t religious, but, seeking strength while trying to write a novel in France, Parker had this to say: “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.” Ultimately, her stormiest relationship was with her typewriter — or in the case of “The Precious Thoughts of a Writer at Work,” her missing pencil.

There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil. I’d like to know what anybody wants to be a writer for, anyhow. And what do you do, Mrs. Parker? Oh, I write. There’s a hot job for a healthy woman. I wish I’d taken a course in interior decorating. I wish I’d gone on the stage. I wish I didn’t have to work at all. I was made for love, anyway.

Made to write, in any case.