Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Parker didn’t need to hold a grudge against Condé Nast, anyway. Forging out on her own, she never lacked for work now that she had a reputation. A magazine called Ainslee’s quickly hired her as its theater critic. Her light verse appeared almost weekly in newspapers and magazines all over town, the theater reviews monthly, and she was doing prose pieces besides. Throughout the 1920s she worked constantly. And though she’d say her verse never made her enough money to live on, she was managing to survive on her earnings and some form of contribution from Eddie; they were living apart by 1922, though they would not formally divorce until 1928.

  So her work was certainly popular. But was it good? The poetry has suffered badly in that regard. The American appetite for light verse diminished, then disappeared by the 1930s, and admittedly its appeal is hard to see now. It seems clichéd, overwrought. Her usual subject was romance, too, which got her accused of sentimentality. Parker internalized the criticism and came to feel her poetry was worthless. But read carefully, and you can see flashes of brilliance in the verses that took on the world around her. Even her throwaway poems still pack punches, as in 1922’s “The Flapper”:

  Her girlish ways may make a stir,

  Her manners cause a scene,

  But there is no more harm in her

  Than in a submarine.

  This was no random attack. Parker was taking quiet aim at her contemporaries. Her star had risen alongside that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the chief mythologizer of flappers and flapperdom. His This Side of Paradise, a campus novel about a young student in love with a flapper, was published to huge sales and critical fanfare in 1919. It made him a star; it also made him, briefly, into a kind of oracle for his age. Parker knew Fitzgerald personally before he published the book, when he was still struggling. Still, after his success, the sort of figure he cut in the media irked her. In March 1922, Parker published a hate song called “The Younger Set”:

  There are the Boy Authors;

  The ones who are going to put belles lettres on their feet.

  Every night before they go to sleep

  They kneel down and ask H. L. Mencken

  To bless them and make them good boys.

  They are always carrying volumes with home-cut pages,

  And saying that after all, there is only one Remy de Gourmont;

  Which doesn’t get any dissension out of me.

  They shrink from publicity

  As you or I would

  From the gift of a million dollars.

  At the drop of a hat

  They will give readings from their works —

  In department stores,

  Or grain elevators,

  Or ladies’ dressing-rooms.

  Rémy de Gourmont, now mostly forgotten, was an enormously popular French symbolist poet and critic of the day. But here he is clearly a cipher for Fitzgerald, who was the true patron saint of Boy Authors. When This Side of Paradise was published, Fitzgerald was only twenty-four. And his contemporaries couldn’t help noticing him, and envying him. “It makes us feel very old,” complained another member of the Round Table who read the novel.

  Did Parker envy him? She never admitted to it—always called Fitzgerald a friend and said she loved his work. But there are other hints she felt competitive. In 1921, she had published a parody under the title “Once More Mother Hubbard,” the idea being that this was the classic fairy tale “as told to F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in the pages of Life.

  Rosalind rested her nineteen-year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.

  Amory leaned against the door, softly whistling “Coming Back to Nassau Hall” through his teeth. Her young perfection kindled a curious fire in him.

  “Tell me about you,” he said, carelessly.

  This parody, like all good ones, was the product of close attention to its target’s work. If there was jealousy here, there was also some pretty trenchant criticism. Fitzgerald did fetishize high-class “carelessness.” He was indeed sentimental about the Ivy League (“Coming Back to Nassau Hall” was a Princeton fight song). He was also fond of putting certain kinds of beautiful but not altogether together young girls in his heroes’ sights, most of them simulacra of his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald did not leave behind any response to the piece, but if he read it, he surely saw that some of its slings and arrows were well aimed.

  That Fitzgerald’s treatment of women caught Parker’s eye was no accident either. Like a lot of Fitzgerald’s friends, Parker wasn’t particularly fond of Zelda. “If she didn’t like something she sulked,” Parker told Zelda’s biographer. “I didn’t find that an attractive trait.” Perhaps there was a feeling of competition: there are rumors of a sexual affair between Scott and Parker, though no proof of that survived. It was also something about image, about the way Zelda so often appeared to embrace a role Parker often resisted, so willing to be the press’s ultimate flapper. In the publicity wave that hit Scott after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Zelda was usually part of the package. She’d say in interviews that she loved Rosalind, the character based on herself. “I like girls like that,” she’d say. “I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftiness.” Parker, by contrast, thought the whole thing a sham, couldn’t give quotes like that, couldn’t relate.

  Nonetheless, Parker and Scott Fitzgerald remained friends most of their lives. They were just too much alike, rarely solvent alcoholics who suffered from writer’s block. Eventually, too, he would come to agree with her both about the weakness of his earlier work and about the emptiness of Jazz Age excess. By the time Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, he wouldn’t fetishize carelessness anymore. The flappers and scions of fortune were by then the cankers in their respective roses. But people were drawn still more to the shimmering mirage of places like Gatsby’s West Egg than they were to the reality that all the glitter was counterfeit. Gatsby was a commercial flop. People weren’t ready to hear that message from Fitzgerald in his lifetime. It wouldn’t become popular until it was revived by an armed services edition distributed free to troops during World War II.

  Unlike Parker, Fitzgerald died young, only forty-four when the alcoholism conspired with a bout of tuberculosis to kill him in 1940. Parker lived almost thirty years longer than he did. When she went to see him in his casket she quoted a line from Gatsby at him: “That poor son-of-a-bitch.” No one caught the reference. By the late 1920s, Parker could not escape her own persona. She was in every newspaper, every magazine, everyone wanting to publish a poem, or a quip. In 1927, she released a collection of poetry called Enough Rope. To her surprise, and everyone else’s, it promptly became a bestseller. Her poems became so popular that their lines and rhythms morphed into commonplaces, things people would say to each other at parties to seem witty and impressive. “Almost anyone you know can quote, re-quote, and mis-quote at least a dozen of her verses,” complained a dour reviewer in Poetry in 1928. “She seems to have replaced Mah Jong, the crossword puzzle, and Ask Me Another.”

  Her popularity was even more surprising because Parker’s poetry was not exactly relaxing to read. People simply loved the way she shocked them. There was something about her technique that, although repetitive, managed to deliver every time. Edmund Wilson, who had by then left Vanity Fair to become an editor at the New Republic, reviewed Enough Rope—it was not strange until relatively recently for literary friends to review each other—and gave an excellent summation of how a typical Parker poem worked:

  A kind of burlesque sentimental lyric which gave the effect, till you came to the end, of a typical magazine filler, perhaps a little more authentically felt and a little better written than the average: the last line, however, punctured the rest with incredible ferocity.

  The strategy had its drawbacks. Leading up to the zin
ger, the poems often use what look like clichés, purple language, the tools of what Wilson called “ordinary humorous verse” and “ordinary feminine poetry.” Reviewers often complained about Parker’s rote images, and often called her derivative for that reason. But they were missing something. When Parker used clichés, it was generally with a sense of their insufficiency; their emptiness was usually the joke. Nonetheless, she absorbed that criticism of her work, and often repeated it herself. “Let’s face it, honey,” she told her Paris Review interviewer, “my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now.”

  It bears mentioning this was not how Wilson, among others, saw her work at the time. In his review of Enough Rope he wrote that he noticed certain infelicities in the poems, but he also thought they had “the appearance of proceeding, not merely from the competent exercise of an attractive literary gift, but from a genuine necessity to write.” He saw the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s style in Parker’s work, but he found little similarity in their philosophies. The “edged and acrid style” Parker employed was something entirely her own, he insisted, and he felt it justified a lot of the weaknesses in her poems. He was certain it was a voice worth listening to.

  Parker’s voice was self-hating, masochistic, but the abuse had a target beyond herself. You could call that target the confines of femininity, or the falseness of the myths of romantic love, or even, in poems like the world-famous “Résumé,” the melodrama of suicide itself:

  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.

  Though most of her readers didn’t know it, this poem was a bit of self-satire. Parker had first attempted suicide in 1922. She had chosen razors for the first outing. She had been despondent over a breakup with Charles MacArthur, a newspaperman who’d go on to write The Front Page, the template for the 1940s hit film His Girl Friday. At the bitter end of their affair, Parker had had an abortion. She did not pluckily pick herself up and recover afterward. Instead she seems to have told the story, again and again, sometimes not to the most sympathetic of audiences. A case in point: one of the people she chose to tell was a very young, very green writer named Ernest Hemingway.

  Like Parker, Hemingway is now so famous it seems his genius must have been greeted with instant recognition, his reputation established the moment he published his first line. But when Parker first met him in February 1926, he was the author of a single collection of short stories, In Our Time, published by a tiny press called Boni and Liveright. The book did not make great waves in New York. Parker would later describe its reception as about as stirring as “an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” It was Fitzgerald who would suggest Hemingway to his own publisher, the richer and more prestigious Scribner’s. It was the negotiations over that first truly major book deal that brought Hemingway to New York in the spring of 1926, a deal that would eventually see Scribner’s publish Hemingway’s first truly successful book, the novel The Sun Also Rises.

  So Parker and Hemingway did not meet as professional equals. By any measure of public acclaim, she was better known than he. This seems to have bothered him. It no doubt also bothered him that, having heard all his tales of the delightfully cheap life of the expatriate writer in France, Parker decided to prolong their acquaintance and sail back to Europe on the same boat as Hemingway. Over the next few months, she ran into Hemingway more than once on the Continent, in France as well as in Hemingway’s beloved Spain. And she clearly began to grate on Hemingway’s nerves.

  Exactly what happened on that ship, and later in Spain and France as Parker and Hemingway met and talked, is lost. One of Parker’s biographers said she somehow insulted Hemingway by questioning the honor and suffering of the Spanish people, in that she had made fun of a funeral procession. Certainly, though, she also talked of MacArthur, and of her abortion. We know Hemingway resented these confessions, because he was so bothered by them he decided to memorialize his irritation in a poem he called “To a Tragic Poetess”:

  To celebrate in borrowed cadence

  your former gnaw and itch for Charley

  who went away and left you not so flat behind him

  And it performed so late those little hands

  those well formed little hands

  And were there little feet and had

  the testicles descended?

  The poem ends on what Hemingway plainly considered a devastating note: “Thus tragic poetesses are made / by observation.”

  Parker may never have heard “To A Tragic Poetess.” She left behind no hint that she knew it existed. But her friends did. Hemingway read it aloud at a dinner party at Archibald MacLeish’s apartment in Paris, which was attended by the Round Tabler Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife. All present were reportedly appalled. Stewart himself had been in love with Parker at one point. He was made so angry by the poem that he promptly severed his friendship with Hemingway. Still, Hemingway clearly didn’t regret having written it. He kept a typescript of the poem among his papers.

  Parker registered Hemingway’s disdain for her, even if she never heard the poem. And she could not simply brush it off. While not yet famous, Hemingway had the approval of a literary set whose approval she wanted too. Her ambitions were not as small as other people thought. Hemingway became a flash point for her. She apparently had a habit of asking their friends if they thought he liked her. Then she wrote two articles about him, a book review and a profile, both published in the then still fledgling New Yorker—both admiring, but written with palpable anxiety.

  “His is, as any reader knows, a generous influence,” she wrote in the review. “The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.” She wasn’t normally that good with straight compliments. The profile, too, was filled with awkward and perhaps unintentional barbs. Parker kept remarking on Hemingway’s seductive effect on women, blaming his author photograph. She said he was overly sensitive to criticism, but that it was justified because “his work has begot some specimens that should be preserved in alcohol.” In the end she said he had surpassing bravery and courage, and praised him for calling that “guts,” instead. The whole thing reads like an apology that has gone on too long, making its recipient uncomfortable instead of forgiving.

  As always, Parker excelled at internalizing the criticism of others. No one could hate Dorothy Parker more than she hated herself. That was something Hemingway did not understand. The New Yorker was then helmed by Harold Ross, another Round Tabler, who’d founded the publication in 1925. The magazine was meant to be a statement of sophisticated, metropolitan tastes, seeking an audience beyond that “old lady from Dubuque.” But Ross was never a particularly refined character. Though the staff of the New Yorker would eventually become devoted to him, he was rough around the edges. He couldn’t decide what he thought of women. On the one hand, he married a woman named Jane Grant, an avowed feminist whose beliefs likely explained why, in the early years of the New Yorker, men and women were published in roughly equivalent numbers. On the other hand, James Thurber, who would join the magazine in 1927, records Ross as continually blaming the incapacities of men on the “goddam women schoolteachers.” Parker enjoyed Ross’s complete confidence, but then she had already established a reputation before she began writing for him. In fact, she was far more instrumental in making the magazine’s reputation than it was in making hers.

  For the first troubled years of the New Yorker’s existence she simply contributed the occasional short story or poem. It was only when Robert Benchley needed to bow out as a book reviewer for the magazine for a while, and Parker filled in, that she made the magazine a famous outlet. She wrote under Benchley’s chosen sobriquet: Constant Reader.

  As a book reviewer, Parker was the queen of memorable one-liners. Her jab at the trea
cle of A. A. Milne, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up,” is still famous. But many of the targets of Parker’s most memorable insults—”the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature”—are now forgotten by the larger public and thus often seen as beneath her notice. On that point Joan Acocella compared her unfavorably with Edmund Wilson, who was covering less popular but ultimately more important writers. “The Constant Reader columns are not really book reviews,” she wrote. “They are standup comedy routines.” This is slightly unfair owing to the aims of the different magazines, for the New Yorker never aspired to be the home of serious intellectual criticism; it aspired only to good writing. And good writing would always be easier to do in the context of a negative review, where it was possible to power through on jokes.

  The comedy had smarter, more self-aware barbs than it’s typically given credit for. My favorite of Parker’s Constant Reader pieces isn’t really a book review at all. It’s a column, dated February 1928, about what Parker calls “literary Rotarians.” The objects of her ire are a class of people who hang around the literary scene in New York attending parties and speaking knowledgeably of publishers, and who may even be writers of a sort themselves. She identifies them as writing columns with names like “Helling Around with the Booksy Folk” or “Turns with a Bookworm.” In other words, they are posers, people who want to wear the trappings of literature without exercising any judgment: “The literary Rotarians have helped us and themselves along to the stage where it doesn’t matter a damn what you write; where all writers are equal.”