Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  On this trip, she spent time with Charles MacArthur, whose new girlfriend, Helen Hayes, was away on tour. After dining together one night, they made a circuit of the speakeasies, the consumption of innumerable highballs constituting an evening’s entertainment for both of them. As the evening progressed, they began to quarrel. Charlie, as Benchley later told his wife, “bawled the life out of her.” His condemnation proved more than she could bear, because the following day she hurried back to Stamford and told Taylor that she felt like killing herself.

  Frank and Esther Adams, who had just returned from Italy, appeared on Saturday and insisted that she go for a drive with them to visit actress Fay Bainter. Dorothy was in good form that afternoon. When Bainter expressed affection for her husband and mentioned that she had been married seven years, Dorothy replied, “Don’t worry, he’ll come back in style again.” Despite the jokes, she continued to feel depressed.

  As the summer drew to a close, Dorothy was forced to acknowledge that her affair with Taylor had reached its conclusion because Mary Kennedy Taylor returned from Europe and Deems began to see her again. Appearing to accept this turn of events, Dorothy bowed out gracefully. Since she and the Taylors socialized in the same circles and could hardly avoid each other, their relations remained cordial. The following year the Taylors had a child, and their marriage survived until the mid-1930s.

  Chapter 9

  GLOBAL DISASTERS

  1926

  BARTENDER: What are you having?

  PARKER: Not much fun.

  All around people seemed to be having fun, but recently Dorothy had begun to suspect that there might be a “flaw in paganism” and even thought she knew what it might be:Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

  Love, the reeling midnight through,

  For tomorrow we shall die!

  (But, alas, we never do.)

  After returning from Stamford, she continued to feel as low as mud. She drank more but with an aggressive quality that had not been present before. At Tony’s, she started out by ordering Scotch with plain water, then called back the waiter and defiantly switched her order to straight Scotch, which she swallowed with alarming speed. Touchy and foul-tempered, she bit off people’s heads. When Johnny Weaver remarked that he was glad to see her looking so well, she snapped, “Where the hell are you looking?”

  Her friends had seen her in bad shape, but never like this, when it took so little to kindle her rage. People, she wrote, “can say what they like about me,” but they should remember that she was not a troublemaker. “I make my own living, and I don’t have to ask favors off of anybody.” If trusted friends chose to insult her, they knew what they could do and where they could do it. “Tiffany’s window, see?” Into these diatribes she injected bits of autobiography about her heart murmur, the respectability of her upbringing, and the handsome houses her family had owned, vague references that were more relevant than anyone suspected. Finally she would subside, whispering that she wished she were dead.

  Whenever friends named the things she might live for, she refused to listen. “When she would be really blue,” said Allen Saalburg,she would begin talking about how worthless life was. Marc [Connelly] once got down on his knees and took her hands in his. He started telling her how valuable she was, how wonderful life could be, how everybody had troubles, and she should cheer up. She didn’t say anything, but after he had left she said, “What a silly old fool.” And she was right. He had been sort of silly, because he overplayed it in a theatrical way. Nothing he’d said were the things that might have impressed her.

  Knowing that she was edging close to danger scared her. The story that she began to write was an almost-verbatim account of her irascible behavior and an apology for it, an attempt to articulate her mood and an effort to dissipate it. In a speakeasy at three in the morning, a woman wearing a petunia-colored hat is overheard throwing a fit as she unleashes a tearful monologue, the gist of which seems to be that life is not worth living. She is good and drunk. Her companion, a man described as owning ice-blue hair and who probably was a thinly disguised portrait of Seward Collins, keeps trying to placate her but is unable to get a word in. In this story, she was eager to put a comic face on her fears. Harold Ross thought that “Dialogue at Three in the Morning” was amusing enough to publish in The New Yorker for, on its most superficial level, as a portrait of a drunk wallowing in willful self-pity and paranoia, it had meaning for Prohibition readers.

  At a party one night, Peggy Leech introduced her to a doctor she was dating. Alvan Barach was thirty, an earnest young intern from Newcastle, Pennsylvania, who had taken his degree at Columbia Medical School, read Bergson and Goethe, and wrote poetry and fiction as a hobby. In 1925 Barach had yet to begin his lifelong specialty in pulmonary medicine and his work leading to the development of the oxygen tent. He taught at Columbia and privately practiced psychotherapy. In spite of his attraction to the Algonquin writers, he felt somewhat out of place. His idea of cocktail-party conversation was a discussion of Tolstoy’s ideas; theirs was not. During the evening, he rose up and initiated a comparison of Dostoyevsky with Tolstoy that provoked indulgent smiles from Woollcott and the others, who thought he was laying it on a bit thick. Undeterred by their amusement and Marc Connelly’s repeated interruptions, Barach pressed on without taking offense. Dorothy observed him approvingly. His manner had a purposefulness that impressed her; she called his office the next morning to make an appointment for a consultation.

  Barach decided that she had a lot of “tender expectancies” that were not being fulfilled, but the problem in need of most urgent attention was her drinking, which he felt had reached pathological proportions. While he tried to emphasize the subject in their sessions, he was met with almost total resistance. Dorothy found it impossible to participate in any productive way. As is often the case at the beginning of psychiatric treatment, her symptoms became exacerbated and she felt more depressed than ever. Yesterdays blurred into todays and she forgot the day of the week. Drinking no longer produced an automatic high. In fact, she now had to work at it, increasing the dosage to get the same sensation. What frightened her most were those times when the effects of the whisky suddenly deserted her without warning and she would be swamped by anxiety so powerful that she seemed to be sinking in her tracks, literally unable to move forward or backward. She felt misery was crushing her “between great smooth stones.” Terrified to discover that Scotch could not be trusted, she began to view it as an old friend who had inexplicably refused to do her a simple favor.

  As she drifted from drink to drink, her anguish mounting, she also had to deal with parting from the dog Eddie had brought for her. The Airedale kept growing until she joked about entering him in a horse show. Even more troublesome was his habit of eating the Algonquin’s furniture. Dorothy called him “a veritable addict” who could make a whole meal out of a sofa and when he ran out of sofa turned to a chintz-covered arm chair for a light snack. “It was eventually decided—and maybe you think that tears weren’t shed over that decision!—that he was not the dog for apartment existence.” She presented him to friends in the country, but felt miserable over the loss.

  As Dr. Barach urged her toward sobriety, Dorothy was meantime investigating a different kind of insurance policy. She discovered Veronal, a popular sodium barbital-type sedative, and took it when Scotch failed to put her out. In New York State, Veronal was available by prescription only, but she learned this was not the case in New Jersey. She made a special trip to Newark, where she tramped from drug store to drug store buying Veronal, as well as sundries such as talcum powder and emery boards so that her purchases would not arouse suspicion. She concealed this cache of pills in the drawer of her dressing table. Knowing it was there made her feel better.

  She failed to mention the Veronal to Dr. Barach. While she was willing to give him a chance to repair her, she remained secretly unconvinced that she was worth the trouble. One night when she returned to the hotel, drunk but not high, she car
ried the Veronal bottles into the bathroom and filled a glass of water. It took a long time to swallow the tablets because they kept sticking in her throat. Then she laid herself down on the bed and waited. According to Dr. Barach, she saved herself by hurling a glass through the window at the last moment. Dorothy herself suggested later in “Big Blonde” that the attempt failed because she had not taken a sufficient dosage and also because Ivy (called Nettie in the story) discovered her in time.

  After two days she returned to consciousness at the Harkness Pavilion of Presbyterian Hospital, where her first thoughts were rage at Barach for daring to interfere. Then the tears fell “as if they would never stop.” When the nurses said she was lucky to be alive, she thought the opposite was true. She felt unlucky to have failed. She also needed a drink badly.

  She didn’t get one, because now that Barach had her in the hospital, he insisted she dry out and knew there was no earthly way of her getting a drink. After a few days, he was astonished to notice that she was tight. On his 4:00 P.M. rounds, she would be sober, but, when he stopped again at six, it was clear that she had been drinking. Investigation revealed that every day at five she had a visit from Heywood Broun, who by this time was also a patient of Barach’s. As always, Broun carried with him a hip flask of gin, and Dorothy persuaded him to share it. She could not wait to find out if alcohol would again be her friend; the prospect of not being able to get drunk filled her with terror.

  After the first week, she felt bored and eager for company. When Frank Sullivan stopped by, he found her with “the insides of her arms black and blue from the saline injections they had pumped into her, but putting up a brave front.” Benchley tactfully acknowledged this latest attempt to terminate herself by cloaking his emotion in banter. He warned her that if she didn’t stop it she would make herself sick. From a chair next to her bed, he began to unburden himself as though he were the one who had caved in. By now, his love affair had become an emotional and financial strain. He owed the Shelton Hotel so much money he couldn’t afford to move. When Edmund Wilson appeared shortly afterward, she reported that Benchley was at the end of his rope. The hospital, she joked, “was getting the room across the hall ready for him.” The last subject she wanted to discuss was herself. Instead, she began describing other patients on the floor: a girl who tried to teach her rug weaving and a genuine vicomte who presented her with an anthology of French poetry and a turtle that ran away. Wilson noticed that she looked thinner and “her intelligence and sensibility came back into her eyes.”

  After her release from the Harkness Pavilion, she kept regular appointments with Dr. Barach. Treatment at twenty-five dollars an hour was expensive, but Dorothy seldom (perhaps never) got around to paying and the doctor did not press her. Her recovery depended upon her ability to control her drinking. Making Dorothy understand this was difficult because she remained unconvinced of her alcoholism. Having lived with Eddie, she considered herself an expert on drunks. It was hard to dissociate the problem from his rampages. She decided her own afflictions had nothing in common with Eddie’s. Dr. Barach did not insist that she give up alcohol, only cut down. It was his opinion that reasonable amounts were harmless and furthermore he believed that people who drank moderately probably lived longer than abstainers. Dorothy promised to curb her consumption and for some weeks liberally diluted her Scotch with ice and White Rock club soda, and then nursed it.

  As before, she tried to make light of her impulse to self-destruction, although this time psychiatric treatment made it harder to accomplish. In verse, she compiled a consumers’ report for those contemplating suicide and rated the various methods of killing one’s self: Razors, as she knew from experience, were painful, and drugs caused vomiting and cramps. Other methods she had not actually tested had to be dismissed on hearsay as hopelessly unreliable: Given the inadequacy of what was available to an aspiring suicide, Dorothy figured she might as well go on living. When “Résumé” was published in The Conning Tower, some people admired the way she had transformed a near-fatal experience into dark humor. As might be expected, Dr. Barach was not among them.

  Even though Barach was a convivial man who enjoyed partying with the Round Table and was a regular weekend guest at the Swopes in Great Neck, his overall view of the group tended to be critical. He told Dorothy that the tragedy of life was not so much what people suffered, but what they missed. In his opinion, she and her friends were missing a great deal. Their need to spend so much time together was a measure of their insecurity, he thought. Their compulsion to be entertaining and their reluctance to discuss anything for more than a few minutes—and then never in depth—forced them to neglect the purposeful, striving side of their natures. By developing her instinctual drives at the expense of her serious nature, by then compounding the problem by partying and drinking, she was losing the energy to progress as a writer. While it was valuable to live in the moment and to enjoy her impulse for pleasure, he believed she should also acknowledge the opposite principle of purpose and restraint, to appraise her life as she was living it.

  Perhaps influenced by Barach, Dorothy suddenly began to knock the Round Table. She talked bitterly about how the group had spoiled her and how she regretted having wasted so much time trying to dream up witticisms when she could have been doing serious work. Although those close to her listened to these critical remarks without much enthusiasm, they had to agree that a new way of life would be in order.

  Dorothy turned to Seward Collins. Having kept him at a distance during her affair with Deems Taylor, she now decided to sleep with him. Despite the fact that he was always available (therefore weak and unexciting), she knew that he meant well and was eager to coddle her. In her precarious state, it must have been reassuring to have him around. As one of her friends later observed, Collins regarded her as a madonna, while she treated him like a dust mop and wiped up the floor with him. What motives Collins had for entering into this arrangement are unknown.

  Collins not only had plenty of money, but he was also a generous lover. He bought her a beautiful wristwatch studded with diamonds. Of even greater value to her was his know-how when it came to marketing her work, what little there was of it. It is very likely that he had a hand in her resurrecting a passage from the novel she had begun in Stamford, the section depicting her father’s death, and shaping it into a short story. Whatever her original intention for this piece of writing, it was able to stand alone satisfactorily. She titled it “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” (with the pointed subtitle, “A Story Proving That No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative”) and immediately sold it to the Pictorial Review, where it appeared in January 1926.

  In February, still lying on Dr. Barach’s couch and trying to get straightened out, she met Ernest Hemingway. He was in New York to break his contract with Boni and Liveright because they had rejected a novel he had written. For some months now, she had been hearing favorable things about Hemingway from Don Stewart, who had been his friend for several years, and also from Benchley, who had met him in France the previous summer. She knew that Hemingway was working on a semiautobiographical novel about bullfighting, in which one of his characters was based on Stewart and another on Benchley. All this had predisposed her toward the man before she ever set eyes on him.

  Hemingway intended to stay a week. He arranged to move from Boni and Liveright to Scribner’s, who agreed to bring out both The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises. He was pleased to have Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, as his new editor. After his business had been taken care of, he lingered for a second week of partying, drinking, and getting acquainted with the local literary crowd. Dorothy ran into him often. All that she knew of his writing was In Our Time, a recent collection of short stories. His stark prose had impressed her even though the book had caused, she recalled, “about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” What interested her more than his fiction were his views about the process of writing itself, a task that by now
she had come to view as painful. In talking to him, she soon learned that their methods of composition had much in common. He told her that writing did not come easily for him; invariably, he would set down a word or a sentence, scratch it out, then have to begin all over. For Dorothy, the discouraging slowness of her work—the isolation, the claustrophobic silence—was enough to make her flee, and often she did.

  When she wondered if Hemingway ever found writing unpleasant, he said he did but dismissed this as too obvious to worry about. Writing was hard and dirty work, he said; you had to accept this and not expect conditions to improve, because they wouldn’t. He also told her that sometimes he would rewrite a single page sixty or seventy times without feeling satisfied. The whole secret of writing was to work like hell.

  Dorothy managed to overlook the fact that Hemingway’s pronouncements were a touch condescending and his judgments not unique; he was not the first novelist to rewrite a page sixty times. Still, she valued his views for their common sense and also found him to be an especially engaging person whose masculinity was magnificent. She would not have agreed with Zelda Fitzgerald, who, about this same time, branded him as a phony and witheringly described The Sun Also Rises as being about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull———.” In New York, charming and modest, Hemingway was at his most agreeable. His blowhard side, soon to grow more prominent, was not yet evident to Dorothy, who felt eager to know him better and pursued his friendship like everyone else.