That someone with as cutting a mind as Parker’s might take offense at a literary Rotarian attitude can’t surprise anyone. But she was doing something more complicated and less abstract than simply defending the use of judgment in evaluating literature. After all, what Parker is writing here will be published under the rubric of a column called Constant Reader. She herself is known as a girl about town, albeit one who is producing poetry of a well-known sort. She could still be describing several members of the Round Table here, many of whom wrote under cuter-than-cute column names. Most of all she is describing what she seemed later to come to fear was true about herself: that she and most of her friends were simply working at trifles.
“I wanted to be cute,” she told the Paris Review in 1957. “That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.” This feeling dogged Parker more and more as she became more successful. The knife had traveled inward, and instead of urging her to do increasingly better work, it shredded her will to do it at all. Parker was hardly alone in hating the “sophisticated” aesthetic of the 1920s by then. An article in the October 1930 Harper’s, for example, bade “Farewell to Sophistication,” and sideswiped Parker as a leading proponent of empty, useless “sophisticated talk.”
The disillusionment began to play out in earnest in 1929. Paradoxically, that year began with a career triumph: Parker published a short story that would win her the O. Henry Award, and prove her talent could be directed at fiction. But it plays like a parable of Parker’s disappointment with herself. The story is called “Big Blonde,” and the heroine, Hazel Morse, has hair a color Parker describes as “assisted gold.” Indeed, nearly everything about Hazel seems artificial, an act. We meet Hazel in middle age, after a successful youth spent entertaining men as a “good sport.” “Men like a good sport,” the narrator tells us, ominously. But Hazel tires of her own act—”she had become more conscientious than spontaneous about it”—and, growing older and less able to command the attentions of rich men, or to keep up the “good sport” appearance, secures a number of veronal tablets (a barbiturate, the 1920s version of Ambien) and botches a suicide attempt.
“Big Blonde” has obvious autobiographical elements. Parker had also tried (and failed) to commit suicide the same way, and she and Eddie had parted in the same mood of ambivalence that characterized the breakdown of Hazel’s marriage. The depth of Parker’s anguish, though, wasn’t entirely about Eddie Parker, or about men in general.
Neither Parker nor Hazel was man obsessed in the traditional sense. If anything, both the writer and her character were on the fence about men. They had an idea of what fulfillment would look like, and they thought men would be part of that. But in practice, men were disappointments. They offered only surface engagement and were looking only for “good sports” instead of whole human beings with desires and aspirations and needs of their own. The autobiographical resonance of the story isn’t in the details, then, in the number of tablets of veronal taken, in Hazel’s devotion to whiskey as succor, in the elements of the divorce that may have been drawn from Parker’s abandonment of Eddie. It’s in the overwhelming feeling of disappointment: in men, sure, but also in the world, and in herself.
That year Parker also received the first of several offers to go to Hollywood and fine-tune the dialogue in screenplays. As a noted wit, she was offered more than the going rate. She took an offer for three hundred dollars a week for three months. She needed the money, of course, but she was also longing for escape. And while she mostly hated Hollywood, found it as stupid as all her contemporaries did, she was reasonably successful there. She cowrote many successful pictures and even received a credit on the original 1934 version of A Star Is Born starring Janet Gaynor. For that she won an Oscar and made a lot of money. It bought a lot of gin and a lot of dogs—one of which was a poodle she called Cliché. Parker clearly took great comfort and enjoyment in the things this money bought, while they lasted.
The problem was that the work proved so lucrative it took up most of her time. She more or less stopped writing poetry altogether. Once in funds, she’d put out a short story. At first this worked well; she’d manage to publish a story every few months in 1931, 1932, 1933. Then it tapered off. Soon there were entire years between stories. She was given an advance for a novel at least once, but never finished it and had to return the money. She became the sort of writer whose communications with publishers consisted primarily of apologies. She could concoct the most charming “dog ate my homework” notes, as in this telegram from 1945 regarding some now-forgotten project she had going with Pascal Covici, an editor at the Viking Press:
This is instead of telephoning because I can’t look you in the voice. I simply cannot get that thing done yet never have done such hard night and day work never have so wanted anything to be good and all I have is a pile of paper covered with wrong words. Can only keep at it and hope to heaven to get it done. Don’t know why it is so terribly difficult or I so terribly incompetent.
There were a few soothing balms for her disappointments. First, there was her second husband, a man named Alan Campbell, tall and slim and actorly handsome, whom she married in 1934. He appointed himself the caretaker in their relationship, controlling her diet. He took such a strong interest in her outfits that others speculated about his sexuality. (Be that as it may, friends and observers always said that when the relationship was on, there was obvious physical attraction between them.) The course of the relationship did not always run smooth: the Parker-Campbells would divorce, then remarry, then divorce again, and ultimately Campbell would commit suicide in the small West Hollywood house they shared even in separation and divorce. But when it was good, it was very good.
Parker also found herself in politics—though many of her admirers would have said she was lost there, too. The spark was the late 1920s protests against the execution of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Known to the Boston police for their anarchist political activities, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on charges of murder and armed robbery—charges of which many American literary and political elites insisted they were wholly innocent. Along with the likes of the novelist John Dos Passos and the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, Parker was a fervent advocate for Sacco and Vanzetti’s release. Ultimately the appeals of writers and politicians were ignored, and the men executed. But not before Parker was arrested at a march in 1927 and made numerous headlines before being released a few hours later. She pleaded guilty to “loitering and sauntering” and paid the five-dollar fine. When asked by the press if she felt guilty, she said, “Well, I did saunter.”
This first taste of protest gave her an appetite for more. In subsequent years Parker would attach herself to innumerable political and social causes. She began to have real sympathies with the un-unionized, participating in a protest of the plight of service workers at the Waldorf-Astoria. She was constantly appearing on the masthead of some new Hollywood political organization: the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain, and eventually, too, the Screen Writers Guild.
Some found it hard not to question these newfound egalitarian convictions, given her frequent association with the glamorous and the rich. But whatever her present situation, Parker knew what it was like to have material comforts suddenly disappear. She could well have been drawing on her own occasional panics over finances in sympathizing with the plight of others. And no matter how much time she spent in the company of the rich, her eye for the ridiculous, honed all those years back by Frank Crowninshield, kept her from fully sympathizing with them.
Besides, her political ventures provided new avenues for self-criticism. Parker often used the seriousness of the social and political causes she now involved herself with to club her prior activities. She did so, for example, in an article she wrote for the New Masses, the journal of the American Communist Party, in 1937:
I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affi
liated with is that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out-of-date garment of a sense of humor. I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don’t suppose I ever really believed it, but it was easy and comforting, and so I said it. Well, now I know. I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
As the Depression waned and the country moved toward World War II, her self-flagellation intensified. In 1939, Parker gave a speech to the American Writers Congress, an openly Communist group, in which she elaborated on her disillusionment:
I don’t think any word in the language has a horrider connotation than sophisticate, which ranks about along with “socialite.” The real dictionary meaning is none too attractive. The verb means: to mislead, to deprive of simplicity, make artificial, to tamper with, for purpose of argument, to adulterate. You’d think that was enough, as far as it goes, but it has gone farther. Now it appears to mean: to be an intellectual and emotional isolationist; to sneer at those who do their best for their fellows and for their world; to look always down and never around; to laugh only at those things that are not funny.
There was some truth in this. “Sophistication” had its foibles, an obsession with surfaces, a casual quality. And yet the things Parker said and wrote turned out to be anything but ephemeral. People still send each other “Résumé.” They quote Parker’s criticisms of A. A. Milne and Katharine Hepburn. They remember that she said, in 1957, long after she thought she’d been wrung out as a writer: “As for me, I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”
But after Hollywood, after politics, nearly everyone who knew Parker well seems to have counted her a failure. The movies she worked on were thought to be beneath her. Her embrace of political sloganeering seemed devastatingly earnest in someone whose special skill was making fun of everything. Her ambitions to be a good short story writer were thought to wane because she never managed to repeat the success of “Big Blonde.” Perhaps worst of all was how these criticisms leaked into her assessment of herself: she was a successful writer by any standard, even a “good” writer, but it never sank in. By the mid-1930s, Parker seemed to believe herself as washed-up as anyone else. Her stories became halfhearted; she quit writing poetry altogether.
Others, without Parker’s punishing self-monologue, were easier with their praise. Reviewing a new and apparently surpassingly ridiculous book about the Russian mystic Rasputin in 1928, a writer by the name of Rebecca West said it had to be written by an American humorist. She identified in it “traces of the unique genius of Dorothy Parker,” whom she considered a “sublime artist.” West had particularly liked “Just a Little One,” a short story Parker published in the New Yorker some months before, a story about a woman who becomes so drunk in a bar she dreams of bringing a cab horse back to her apartment to live with her. West knew something of despair over men, and how to write about it.
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West
Rebecca West was something like the English version of Parker, in that she was a woman writer who was greatly celebrated in her own time. But as a young person, West had steeped in Fabian Socialism and the experimental morals of the artists and writers, like Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, of the Bloomsbury set. She had a comfortable footing among the “serious people” of her world from the beginning, a kind of sureness that she belonged among them that had always eluded Parker. But then, West rarely suffered from a lack of self-confidence. If anything, her confidence was what often sent her to the brink of her ambitions.
West made her mark when she introduced herself to the novelist H. G. Wells by attacking him in a newsletter called the Freewoman. The episode marked possibly the only time in history that future lovers have met when one gave the other an abysmal book review. The very young West had read Wells’s now-forgotten novel Marriage and hadn’t liked it. The fact that Wells was among the most respected writers of his day did not frighten her. “Of course, he is the Old Maid among novelists,” she wrote, taking direct aim at Wells’s proud claims to sexual radicalism:
Even the sex obsession that lay clotted on [his novels] like cold white sauce was merely Old Maids’ mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.
We now remember Wells best for his airships, the scientific romances like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. But by the time West met him, Wells’s oeuvre consisted chiefly of books like Marriage: confessional, thinly veiled autobiographical novels about love and sex. The novel before that one, Ann Veronica, had told the story of a scandalous affair very like one Wells had just conducted herself. The plot details of these books are less memorable than the dim view of matrimony they took; wedded bliss was a kind of prison for Wells. Every story was meant to chip away at marriage’s claims to bestow eternal comfort and happiness.
In theory, this should have made West and Wells natural allies. Certainly, Wells thought of himself as an advocate of equality for the sexes. He was a supporter and regular reader of the Freewoman. He was usually careful to frame his criticisms of marriage as being about the liberation of women as much as men. He thought marriage took women away from their most important and fulfilling pursuits. Somewhat undermining his sense of female personhood, though, was his apparent belief that most women were exclusively interested in interior decorating and fashion. West called him to task for it:
I wonder about the women who never come across any man who was worth loving (and next time Mr. Wells travels in the tube he might look round and consider how hopelessly unloveable most of his male fellow-passengers are), who are not responsive to the lure of Dutch clocks, and forget, as most people do, the colour of the dining-room wallpaper, who, being intelligent, can design a becoming dress in five minutes and need think no more about it. I wonder how they will spend the time. Bridge-parties I suppose, and possibly State-facilitated euthanasia.
To Wells’s great credit he was not offended. He did not write some glowering, condescending letter to the editor. Instead, he invited West to the rectory where he resided with his wife, Jane, in what was a thoroughly admirable display of maturity when faced with harsh criticism. West turned up there for tea by the end of the same month she’d publish the review. She made a good impression, possibly a better one than she intended. Somehow she was always at her most charming when she was disagreeing with someone.
West came by her combative spirit honestly. Partly it was the environment she grew up in. In the first years of the twentieth century, London was a more militant place than New York. Great Britain was not quite the cultural center of the world—that would have been France, or perhaps Germany—but it was the political and economic one. The preoccupations of its thinkers and writers were hard matters of votes and money, less suited to the kind of carefree jesting style that had come to annoy the hell out of Parker in New York. Societies of intellectual socialists, suffragette demonstrations: these were the things of an English writer’s life, circa the 1910s.
But West had a romantic streak and didn’t head straight for politics or writing. She had at first thought she might be an actress, inspired by several months she spent hanging out with an Edinburgh theater company when she was a teenager. The Fates, unfortunately, had other ideas for her. On the way to her audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1910, West fainted on the tube station platform. Three women helped her up. One of them could not hold her pitying tongue, West wrote to her disapproving elder sister: “Poor child—an actress! I’ll pay for the brandy.”
It was a bad sign. West did get into the school in the end, but she barely lasted a year. The fainting happened again and again, the result of a delicate constitution. And although pictures of West in the era show a young woman with large, expressive eyes and mounds of gloss
y hair, she always said she wasn’t considered pretty enough to be an actress. It became clear early on that she would have to write her own place in the world, if she was to have one.
She was still going by her long-winded birth name then, Cicely Isabel Fairfield, a fussy name that evoked someone of the sort of meek, obedient disposition West never in her life possessed. Like Parker, West came from a shabby-aristocratic background that had bequeathed her a certain reflexive defensiveness. Her drifting father, Charles Fairfield, was the sort of paternal figure you find in Frances Hodgson Burnett novels: a dashing man, great fun, adored by his children. But only when he was around, and he wasn’t around very often. In a novel based on her childhood, West would call him a “shabby Prospero, exiled even from his own island, but still a magician.” This was more apt than she knew. Her father had a real talent for sleight of hand. He kept secrets of near-epic scope; a West biographer recently dug up a prison stay, prior to his marriage, that his wife and daughters never seem to have known anything about.
Fairfield’s defects of character might have been easier to forget had he been a good provider. But he could not seem to concentrate on anything long enough to make a proper go of it. He had started out as a wayward journalist, then morphed into an entrepreneur. What little income he did make, he gambled away. In the last of his schemes, he went to Sierra Leone to try to make a fortune in pharmaceuticals. Within a year he was back in England, penniless. Too ashamed to return home, he lived alone for the rest of his life, dying in a squalid boardinghouse in Liverpool before his three daughters had left adolescence.
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