Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Hemingway proved to be a most attractive delegate from the expatriate paradise that she had heard so much about. She was an avid and soon envious listener to his stories about how American writers were living and working in Paris. She found enchantment in his repeated accounts of the Dingo bar, the Closerie des Lilas, a café where Hemingway did his writing, and the flat over a sawmill he shared with his wife, Hadley, and an infant son whom he called Bumby. Everyone in her crowd was fascinated by him, but nobody took a closer interest or asked more questions than Dorothy.

  Within a few days, she made up her mind to go abroad to live. It was an impulsive decision, characteristic of her love of drama, but it managed to catapult her out of her gloom so successfully that none of her astonished friends or Alvan Barach attempted to dissuade her. In later years, she explained her move to France by noting that “everybody did that then,” Paris being a fashionable address for writers who took their work seriously. By 1926 the exchange rate had become so favorable that it would be possible for her to live there more cheaply, certainly more grandly, than in New York.

  Her real motives were personal. After the painful times she had experienced recently, she wanted to forget and hoped that a new environment might enable her to cure herself, or at least to insulate herself from dangerous habits and unsafe relationships. She wanted to believe that in France she could somehow become a different person, a real writer like Ernest Hemingway, and envisioned herself in the comfortable cafés of the Left Bank writing diligently.

  Once her decision was made, she lost no time and booked passage for the February 20 sailing of the President Roosevelt, the same ship on which Hemingway was returning to France. In her impatience to be off, she allowed herself only one week in which to tidy up her past and arrange for her future. Seward Collins probably paid for her passage. The problem of how she might scrape up enough money to support herself abroad resolved itself with remarkable swiftness when she decided to collect the verse she had written for The Conning Tower and Life and publish them in book form. Collins most likely originated this plan; Dorothy herself had strong doubts about it. She thought her poems were “not good enough for a book” and had no wish to make a fool of herself by calling public attention to the fact. Yet Horace Liveright immediately expressed enthusiasm for the idea. Their friendship did not affect his business judgment; he believed that Boni and Liveright could make a decent profit on a volume of light verse. Liveright had recently contracted with another light-verse writer, Sam Hoffenstein, for a similar collection and saw no reason not to publish a pair of poetry volumes. Among the items hastily thrown into Dorothy’s steamer trunk were folders of clippings and carbon copies of her published verse. She planned to select those poems she considered good enough to include in the book she had tentatively titled Sobbing in The Conning Tower once she got settled in Paris.

  At the last minute, Benchley volunteered to shepherd her to Paris, but second class on the Roosevelt was fully booked. All the United States Lines could offer was a promise of cancellation. He had difficulty convincing Gertrude that the journey was absolutely necessary—and indeed it was not. For a while, it looked as if Gertrude might exact a price by insisting he take nine-year-old Nat along for company, chaperonage that Benchley was doubtless not anxious to have. In the end, she relented and gave permission. Benchley could joyride across the Atlantic with Dorothy and Hemingway without any strings attached, but he had to come straight home on the next boat.

  As soon as he could get away, Collins was also planning to join Dorothy abroad. Always happy for an excuse to visit France, his chief source of erotica, he looked forward to a buying spree.

  Dorothy, along with Benchley and Hemingway, boarded the Roosevelt in Hoboken at midnight in the midst of a blizzard, none of which was particularly reassuring to Dorothy; since the Titanic, she had always been inclined to associate ocean travel with her uncle Martin’s death. The final day had passed feverishly with farewell celebrations and a trip to the bootlegger to buy Scotch for the crossing. By the time she reached Hoboken, countless shakers of cocktails had been emptied, several additional stops had been made en route to buy bootleg champagne, and the bon voyage party had expanded to include Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy’s sister and brother and their families. Friends sent a dozen steamer baskets of fruit, which she would never eat. According to Hemingway, who had fallen in and out of love with Wylie that day, he was good and pie-eyed, and so was everyone else.

  Despite the champagne, Dorothy felt apprehensive. When the boat was getting ready to depart, she and Benchley ventured out on the icy decks to the slippery rail and looked over. To cheer her up he began to tell stories so silly and tasteless that she could not help smiling. He joked about throwing the children’s life preservers overboard, then started a story with, “God, what a night to go out in the storm!—and I wouldn’t mind if the crew wasn’t yellow.” Benchley could always make her feel better. Once they were under way he learned that the steamship line had no available rooms in first class after all and planned to put him in a maid’s room adjoining a bridal suite. The next day Dorothy discovered that some scoundrel among the bon voyage revelers had stolen all her Scotch. On the fourth day, Benchley said he felt just as he had felt when he’d once had the crabs. On the sixth day out, he realized he did have pubic lice.

  Still, the crossing turned out to be a good time. The Roosevelt was a comfortable ship with excellent food. Despite squally weather, there was only a slight roll to the sea. Dorothy slept late, then played bridge in the afternoons with Hemingway and Benchley. They all took their meals together at the officers’ table, where Hemingway made a serious production out of consuming saltpeter. He told them it was necessary to control sexual appetites. While Dorothy refrained from showing her amusement to his face, she did continue to giggle about it to friends for months afterward. Benchley wrote to Gertrude that Dorothy was “quite all right now that she is relieved of the strain, and there hasn’t been a fight yet.” She arrived in Cherbourg in fine spirits.

  In Paris it felt like spring. The weather was unseasonably warm, all in all a perfect introduction to the city Dorothy had been daydreaming about. Everything enchanted her. It made no difference that nothing much seemed to be happening there and that the few people she knew were about to depart. Hemingway had spoken incessantly about his eagerness to return to Austria, where he had left his wife and son, but then, as though he were in no rush to leave, he offered to show Dorothy and Benchley the sights. The reason for his lingering was actually a Vogue editor with whom he was having an affair. The girlfriend, Pauline Pfeiffer, did not join them, nor was she ever mentioned. There were a couple of convivial meals at the Closerie des Lilas with Scott and Zelda, who, having spent the winter in the Pyrenees so that Zelda could take a cure for colitis, were now stopping briefly in Paris before heading south to the Riviera where they had rented a villa. Benchley too, after ridding himself of crabs and buying presents for his family, soon left. By this time, Seward Collins had arrived.

  Sewie rapidly took charge of arranging a journey to southern France and Spain. Invited to join them were Collins’s good friend Gilbert Seldes, a critic who had been managing editor of The Dial, and his wife Alice. The couple had arrived there some weeks earlier. Collins announced that the Seldeses and Dorothy should consider themselves his guests because he planned to foot the bill for a deluxe tour. Dorothy made no objection. Her unspoken understanding with the rich was that it was part of God’s foreordained plan for them to give and her to receive, with no obligation on her part to feel guilt or gratitude. Before she settled down to work, she wanted to see Europe. With Collins paying the bills, she could save money. Shortly before their departure, the false spring suddenly ended with snow, and she was happy to head South.

  During the previous weeks, Hemingway’s enthusiasm had helped to form her ideas about Spain. The realization that his sensibilities might be quite different from her own and that she was going to hate Spain began soon
after they reached Barcelona. So thoroughly had his tales of the corrida mesmerized her, that she had somehow managed to overlook the fact that animals were involved. From expensive seats in the shade, she watched with interest at first. When the first bull came rushing out, the matador moved in and began to work the bull with his cape. Then the bull charged the picadors and the crowd was noisy around her when suddenly the bull’s horns disappeared into the belly of a picador’s horse. Horrified to see the horse’s intestines spurting into the sand, Dorothy rose and stalked toward the nearest exit with a bewildered Collins coming after her.

  Revolted, sick to her stomach, she cursed Collins, whom she seemed to hold responsible for the Spanish national sport and refused to return to her seat. She could not understand why he had brought her to witness the killing of defenseless animals when he knew she could not bear their slightest mistreatment. It made no difference that bulls sometimes killed matadors, and for that matter she hoped they did because she found matadors disgusting.

  The rest of Spain proved to be equally unpleasant. On the train to Madrid, a guard patrolling past their compartment noticed Gilbert Seldes kissing his pregnant wife on the forehead and reproached him in Spanish for vulgar behavior. Collins, the only one of them who understood anything of the language, warned the guard to mind his own business, then copied down his badge number and threatened to lodge a complaint once they reached their destination. At the Madrid railroad station, in a bizarre reversal, the guard reported Collins and had him hauled down the platform and taken to a police station. Dorothy and the Seldeses trooped helplessly behind. By the time Collins had been released, with a warning to behave himself in the future, they all were furious and marched straight to the American consulate, where they were advised to forget the incident and continue their sightseeing.

  By this time, Dorothy was convinced that Spain was a dreadful country. She was appalled by its poverty and backwardness; she hated its narrowmindedness and believed its treatment of animals barbarous. The only way she could express her disgust was to ridicule the Spanish. She said that their national anthem seemed to be “Tea for Two,” a popular international hit that year, being played ad nauseam in hotel lounges. There was now additional tension among the group because Dorothy had grown to dislike Gilbert Seldes, who was dominating their itinerary. At Hendaye, before they crossed the frontier, Seldes “did not have a stitch of Spanish to his name,” but by the time they had reached Aragon “he was helping the natives along with their subjunctives. It was enough to make me, in a word, sick.”

  They spent Easter in Seville, where the solemnity of Holy Week was thoroughly spoiled for Dorothy by chilly temperatures and the repulsive habit of Spanish men of pinching women’s bottoms. It got so bad that she hated to walk on the streets. To make matters worse, she discovered that Sewie was not a lover who improved with extended contact.

  They returned to Paris, to a round of expatriate-colony parties, invitations to which arrived by pneumatique, and to a city that spring seemed to have bypassed, despite its budding horse chestnut trees. Dorothy mockingly described Paris as “la belle, la brave, la raw, la rainy.” The place was “as cold as a son-of-a-gun,” as gray and cheerless as Hartford. She and Collins moved into the Lutetia, a large hotel on the Boulevard Raspail near the Luxembourg Gardens. Sewie and his mania for dirty postcards got on her nerves and she was no good at controlling her tongue. They continuously argued. In the midst of a quarrel one day, she pulled off the diamond watch he had given her and flung it out the window, whereupon he ran down five flights to the street to rescue it. Her disdain was complete when he returned the watch to her. He decided to go home. Dorothy did not care.

  It rained every day for three weeks. Ordinarily, she enjoyed rain, but not every day. The dark weather made the city sad and dingy and depressed her. Once or twice Hemingway came to visit her. Sitting in the Lutetia, they watched the passage of a funeral procession moving quietly down the rain-swept boulevard. For Dorothy, rain and death entwined were events so awful that she had to make jokes, and she did so. Hemingway lifted his eyebrows at her seeming callousness, but she did not bother to explain herself and merely remarked that the funerals of strangers left her unmoved. When Hemingway, who was leaving shortly for Spain, asked her impression of the country he loved so greatly, Dorothy unthinkingly launched into a massive attack on the place. Her comments deeply insulted him. Furthermore, he was offended by her choice of traveling companions. He did not care for Collins, to whom he facetiously referred as the man who had shot Abraham Lincoln, and he had a long-standing feud with Gilbert Seldes, who had once turned down a story of his and supposedly written a rejection letter advising him to stick to journalism. Hemingway concealed his hurt feelings but privately added Dorothy’s name to his catalogue of people he disliked.

  During the two months she had been abroad, she had written nothing except two poems for The New Yorker, and now it was time to work on her book. She assembled a rough draft of an eighty-eight-page manuscript at breakneck speed. Nearly all the verse had been published in Life and The Conning Tower and their subjects ranged from dogs to domestic crises with Eddie when she still had hopes for their marriage, from her mother to popular Broadway actress Marilyn Miller. Critical examination of the poems dissatisfied her. Too many struck her as undistinguished or self-consciously cute, there was no unifying theme, and even the title Sobbing in the Conning Tower displeased her. Once she had omitted everything she disliked, very little remained, certainly not enough for a book. She began to write substitutions.

  During the summer she worked hard and finished a bundle of new poems, including “Indian Summer,” “Men,” and “Inventory,” and sent them in batches to Harold Ross and Bob Sherwood. These new verses were punchy, cynical, and invited laughter. There was a biting candor about them, a combination of fragility and toughness almost bordering on vulgarity, that was highly distinctive compared to those written by other women poets. Slowly Dorothy could see a central theme of death emerging—the death of loved ones, but more frequently the end of love or the death of dreams. All the verses were by no means successful in her opinion, but she had built up the percentage considerably and now felt far happier about the project.

  Among those she had retained from the original batch was one called “News Item,” which had appeared in The Conning Tower. It was the sort of poem she did so well and so effortlessly:Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.

  Those nine words seemed quite innocuous to her at the time. Later, to her utter amazement, it would be “News Item” that people remembered while they forgot or ignored or never knew any of her other work, and she cursed the impulse that ever led her to republish it.

  Since the French economy suffered a depression at the time and the official rate of exchange had fallen to thirty-six francs to the dollar, Dorothy lived comfortably on very little. She did potboiler articles for Life and three short stories for The New Yorker, but the only one of particular interest is “Oh, He’s Charming!” The story depicts a tea-party encounter between a celebrity novelist and an admiring female reader who is thrilled to meet him socially. Dorothy’s novelist character, with his swollen head, his arrogant manner, and insulting dismissal of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner, strongly suggests Ernest Hemingway. As much as she admired him as a writer and experienced the pull of his personal charm, she must have felt a spurt of dislike for him. While Dorothy counted Hemingway and James Joyce as two of her favorite authors, she was never sufficiently impressed by either to forgo mockery. Joyce, whom she passed on the streets or glimpsed in restaurants, was known to be excessively taciturn. “I guess,” Dorothy later remarked to Elmer Rice, “he’s afraid he might drop a pearl.”

  That summer several of her closest friends visited Europe. Aleck Woollcott and Charles MacArthur passed through Paris on their way to the Riviera. Don Stewart and his new wife, a Santa Barbara debutante named Beatrice Ames, turned up en route to Cap d’Antibes on their honeymoon. For a while
, the Fitzgeralds were in town so that Zelda could have her appendix removed, but they too returned to the south of France. All of Dorothy’s friends seemed to be either just going to, or just returning from, Antibes. They all raved about the Murphys, a wealthy American couple with three young children who lived in Paris and in Antibes, where they were renovating an elegant house they called Villa America. Shortly after her return to Paris in May, Dorothy had met them and liked them very much. Gerald Murphy, who graduated from Yale in the class of 1911, was a tall, redheaded man whose wealth came from the New York leather goods store, Mark Cross. The family business held no attraction for Murphy, who studied landscape architecture and later painting and once called the Mark Cross store a monument to the useless. In 1921, he had married Sara Wiborg, the daughter of a millionaire manufacturer of printing ink, and brought her to Europe, where they were drawn to artistic people such as Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and Scott Fitzgerald. Their many friends considered the Murphys to be an ideal couple who knew how to live with exceptional style and grace. Dorothy did not know them well, but they impressed her as fine people, even if they were extremely rich.

  Although reluctant to admit it, she was beginning to feel lonely. There were few people to converse with because her grasp of French remained poor. She was able to understand the language only if the speaker was “reasonably adept at pantomime” and could read it “at glacier speed, muffing only the key-word of every sentence.” As the months passed there were too many meals alone and too many drinks, so that she had put on weight. In need of fun, she made a brief excursion southwards via Carcassonne and wound up in Monte Carlo, where the casino refused to admit her because she was not wearing stockings. “So I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.” On this trip she bought herself a Scottish terrier whom a previous owner had named Daisy. It wasn’t the name Dorothy would have selected, but she soon realized it made no difference, for Daisy couldn’t be bothered answering no matter what anybody called her. On the other hand, Daisy was unusually smart. “Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw—I don’t say she will, but she can.” Having a dog again cheered her greatly and made Paris more bearable.