Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Knowing that he was close by and ignoring her shattered her earlier contentment. Sometimes Yvonne Roussel, tutor to the Murphy children, would catch sight of Dorothy in the garden “looking a little lost.” Suddenly she felt bewildered and miserable. “I don’t know how much I have built up for myself of his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness—even of his good looks. I honestly can’t remember what it was like to be alone with him; I couldn’t possibly recall any of our conversation.” She was mourning the loss of a fantasy, but a part of her enjoyed the unhappiness of her position, for she believed that a broken heart was no disgrace; indeed it was rather romantic.

  In early August she checked her funds and was disagreeably surprised to discover she had only forty dollars left. She knew that Harold Guinzburg was in Paris with his wife, Alice, and she lost no time in speeding back there to discuss a further advance. To prove to Guinzburg how conscientious she had been, she brought along as much of the typed manuscript of Sonnets in Suicide as she had completed to date. Even though it was a stupendous stack of work, the partial manuscript began to look puny to Dorothy at the last moment, so that she decided to fatten it up by inserting carbons of old articles and letters from friends.

  Dorothy was incapable of asking anyone for money. Pride would not allow her to beg. What she would do instead was to look woebegone, wring her hands, and confess that she simply had no idea what she was going to do because she was broke and feeling scared about it. What usually happened was that the offer of a loan would be forthcoming, which she could then be prevailed upon to accept. On this occasion, she managed to convey her predicament to Guinzburg, who sympathetically doled out an amount sufficient for her to remain in France and finish the book. Afterward, alone in the Paris flat loaned to her by the Saalburgs, a good dingy hovel she called it, she plunged into depression. She found herself “looking thoughtfully at the Seine,” although prior to that time she had never seriously considered suicide by drowning. In this agitated frame of mind, she began to torment herself and indulged in a bit of typical pathology—she made the mistake of sending Garrett a pleading letter that confessed her longing to see him and concluded by asking what she should do, as if she expected him to offer helpful advice.

  His reply, another collect cable, could not have been more insulting: LOVED LETTER DEAR SO HAPPY YOU ARE WELL.

  Young Patrick Murphy was gravely ill. In Dorothy’s absence, Villa America had been transformed from a paradisiacal retreat to a house of anxiety and horror when his affliction was diagnosed as tuberculosis. Later, the Murphys’ doctors traced the incubation of the disease back to February, when the family was living in Hollywood and employing a chauffeur who subsequently proved to be tubercular. Sara and Gerald were determined that their son must be cured, even though no known cure for tuberculosis existed at that time, only methods of prolonging the patient’s life by cold mountain air and a rich dairy diet. Just as they had poured their energies into creating a magical life for themselves, they began to rechannel that same passion for living well into a counterattack on a fatal illness. At once, they dismantled Villa America in preparation for moving their whole establishment—children, servants, and pets—to Montana-Vermala, a health resort for tuberculosis patients near Sierre in the Swiss Alps.

  Dorothy prepared to return home, although she dreaded living in New York, where she seemed to do nothing but drink and entertain “horrible” people in the afternoons. During the weeks before the Murphys left, she traveled to Paris to interview Ernest Hemingway for a New Yorker profile. A Farewell to Arms had just been published to superlative reviews and had jumped to the top of the best-seller list. To her disgust, the restrictions he put on her made a decent story practically impossible. He would not permit her to mention his family in Oak Park, his divorce from Hadley, “or anything he ever did or said,” she later complained. In trying to respect his wishes, she was reduced to filling the space with compliments about his writing, but the gushy, fan-magazine tone of “The Artist’s Reward” was less her fault than Hemingway’s.

  Her departure plans were suddenly revised when Sara and Gerald asked her to accompany them to Montana-Vermala, as a favor, because Sara found her a comfort to have around. Dorothy immediately cabled Benchley for advice, but “the big shit” was away or never answered or both, she said, “so I came anyhow.” That is what she guessed Benchley would have done. Staying was not in her best interests; in fact, it was probably the worst decision she could have made. The first project of hers to be abandoned was Sonnets in Suicide, even though she cabled Viking to assure Guinzburg that she was WORKING HARD, as if saying it would somehow make it true. He answered that he expected Sonnets to be a best seller and to mail the manuscript special delivery when it was completed and also include an autobiographical blurb for the dust jacket.

  By the third week of October, the Murphys had vacated Villa America. Only Dorothy remained to gather up Timothy and the four Murphy dogs, plus the rest of the baggage, which consisted of eleven trunks and seventeen hand pieces, and follow along behind. Shepherding the baggage caravan entailed three changes of trains and the greasing of several palms to pass the animals through customs at Geneva, but otherwise she accomplished the trip without incident. She had always considered Switzerland “the home of horseshit,” she wrote Benchley, and saw no reason to revise her opinion. Montana-Vermala was built on the side of a “God damn Alp,” from which she had no idea how she would descend; before she risked her life a second time on the funicular, she would prefer to remain among the bacilli.

  The Swiss Family Murphy, as she had dubbed them, were installed in a row of six rooms at the Palace Hotel (all the sanatoriums were called Splendide or Royale) and Dorothy’s room was located on the floor above. Standing on her terrace, staring at the peaks, she remembered how strongly she had always hated mountains. She overheard a woman in the next room dying audibly one night. Day or night, she froze because there was no way to keep warm. Indoor temperatures had to be maintained at practically subarctic levels for the patients. Dorothy’s pretty Parisian clothes remained in her trunk while she bundled up in tweed suit, overcoat, and woolen muffler. Out of doors, where it was warm in the sun, she removed either the coat or the mummer

  Dorothy tried not to think about Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer. When she received a panicky telegram from them saying that the spring catalogue was closing December 15 and they had to know immediately if Sonnets in Suicide would be ready, she did not reply.

  Once the children were in bed at nights, Dorothy joined Sara and Gerald in their room, where Gerald had arranged a makeshift bar and would ceremoniously put out a bottle of wine, a bag of cinnamon, some lemons, and a spirit lamp. Huddled in their mufflers and talking in whispers because Patrick’s room was next door, they drank the wine out of hospital tumblers and spoke of past good times and absent friends, especially Benchley. “Ah, old Boogies Benchley,” Gerald sighed. “Ah, old imaginary good lucks. Let’s cable the old fool to come over.” On Sara’s birthday they celebrated with cake and champagne and presents for everybody, including dogs, canaries, and Coquette, the parrot Dorothy bought for the children, which turned out to be a vicious creature. Afterward Dorothy went back to her room and cried.

  On alternating days, Patrick received pneumothorax treatments, a procedure in which a hollow needle was inserted through his ribs into the pleura and gas pumped through it to make the lung collapse, so that if one lung was isolated perhaps the other could be saved. The thought of it made Dorothy shudder. “Christ, think of all the shits in the world and then this happens to the Murphys!”

  Apart from one or two glasses of wine at bedtime, amounts that scarcely counted as drinking in her opinion, Dorothy tried to stay on the wagon. Hard liquor was not recommended at those altitudes, but some days she didn’t care; getting drunk was a necessity. One of those days she frightened Patrick and Honoria when she narrowly missed killing their canary. She offered to help Honoria clean the bird’s cage, but her hands were so unsteady that
she dropped it.

  Liquor, she found, did little to lighten her somber mood, which she described to Benchley as like having the “slow, even heebs.” At times she caught herself examining a clean white towel that the hospital had thumb-tacked above the washstand. “It’s a good thing to look at. You can go all around the edges very slowly, and then you can do a lot of counting the squares made by the ironed-out creases.” She felt bushed—her favorite word for exhausted—without having done anything at all, and she also felt curiously cut off from the world at the foot of the mountain. The Wall Street crash, for example, might have taken place on another planet. Since she owned no stocks, the trouble in the market had no effect on her finances, which suffered from major depressions year in, year out, but she wrote anxiously to friends asking if anyone they knew had been wiped out.

  On Thanksgiving Day the Palace Hotel served veal for lunch, not unusual because nine meals out of ten featured veal. Afterward, Dorothy wrote a homesick, eleven-page letter to her sister saying how much she missed “youse guys.” Christmas proved more cheerful because company arrived: John Dos Passos and his bride, Katy, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, and Pauline’s sister, Virginia Pfeiffer. They celebrated an all-American Christmas with a tree and a goose that Ernest had shot especially for their dinner. The bird was roasted in the hospital kitchen and served with mashed chestnuts and a flaming brandied pudding decorated with holly. The guests were eager to spend their days on the ski slopes, where Hemingway taught Honoria and Baoth how to herringbone and sidestep. Dorothy, who viewed a ski slope with the same enthusiasm as she did an electric chair, declined to accompany them.

  In the evenings, Dos Passos recalled, Dorothy made “her usual funny cracks with her eyes full of tears,” and he described them eating cheese fondue and drinking the local white wine while laughing their heads off, which suggests that the merriment was a bit forced. For five or six days the Christmas visitors brought a respite of sorts, but after they departed the little group was alone again, and Dorothy began to bombard Benchley with cables and letters. She wrote,

  SEE BY PARIS HERALD HOOVER SAYS NO NEED OF PESSIMISM EVERYONE HERE GREATLY ENCOURAGED STOP LOVE AND HOW ARE YOU.

  YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR.

  And the plain truth:DEEPLY SUNK LOVE YOU SOMETHING TERRIBLE.

  The atmosphere of death in Montana-Vermala was inescapable. She dreaded going out for a walk and dreaded meeting people who stopped to admire Timothy. Some of them told her that they had a Dandie Dinmont at home, but of course they would never see home again. No doubt the Murphys sensed her mood, because when she talked about going home for a while, they made no attempt to dissuade her. She decided to spend a month in New York to take care of business and collect her five-hundred-dollar O. Henry prize for “Big Blonde” before rejoining Sara and Gerald. Mid-January 1930, she and Timothy braved the terrifying funicular descent down the mountainside on the first leg of their journey home.

  When the De Grasse docked at the end of January, Benchley was on hand to welcome her. A crowd of newspaper reporters trailed them back to the New Weston Hotel, where they jammed themselves into Dorothy’s suite and began asking questions that immediately irritated her. She felt far from comical, but they expected to be entertained. Curled up on the sofa, with Timothy blinking soberly next to her, she insisted that she was not a wit but “only a hardworking woman, who writes for a living and hates writing more than anything else in the world.” She intended to stay a month, she said, before returning to Switzerland to finish a novel whose subject she did not care to reveal. She tried changing the subject to the economic situation and wondered whether people were nicer now that they were poorer, but the press seemed uninterested in serious subjects. When somebody asked what she thought of the New York skyline, she’d had enough of dumb questions and snapped, “Put a little more gin in mine!” as she shooed them out.

  A few days later, Sara Murphy’s sister threw a welcome-home party for Dorothy. The chief topic of conversation was of course the illness of Patrick Murphy. Archibald MacLeish, meeting her for the first time, reported to Ernest Hemingway that her reputation for being affectionate with her right hand and murdering people with her left had always made him fear her. When she began to talk about the Murphys, “she took me in about eight minutes. She may be serving me up cold at this minute for all I know but I doubt it and if she is it doesn’t matter.”

  After the months in Montana-Vermala, she had to reaccustom herself to the quick pace of Manhattan life. While she was away, her friends had been busy: Don Stewart wrote a successful comedy that opened on Broadway in February and so did Marc Connelly, whose biblical play with an all-black cast had finally found a producer. With The Green Pastures, Marc finally proved he could accomplish a work of consequence without George Kaufman. Between attending first nights and meeting with Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, who were growing concerned by now, Dorothy tried to resurrect Sonnets in Suicide but knew it was useless. It would never be finished, and she began to grow angry at herself for listening to those who had encouraged her to start the book in the first place. “Write novels, write novels, write novels—that’s all they can say. Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.” A poem required days to write, a short story perhaps several months, but a novel seemed to last forever. The process seemed unnatural, for she had neither the taste nor the endurance for marathons. Knowing that most of her friends, writers like Benchley and Lardner for whom she had the highest regard, were also sprinters did not make her feel any happier about acknowledging her limits.

  That winter she drank with Benchley at Tony’s. Aleck Woollcott purchased an apartment on the East River (named Wit’s End by Dorothy), where she turned up on Sunday mornings for his weekly breakfast party and kept his guests entertained with her wry observations. Outwardly she appeared calm, but actually she was an emotional wreck. March passed without her booking a return passage to Europe or solving the problem of the novel. It would have been sensible to tell Guinzburg that even though she wished desperately to write it she was “quite incapable of it—I’m a short-distance writer.” Almost from the start, she realized that the autobiographical material was “too painful” and that, moreover, a novel would take a very long time to complete because she wrote so slowly. This was the reason she had so little to show for her months abroad. Leveling with Guinzburg was impossible or perhaps never crossed her mind. Instead, she panicked and drank a bottle of shoe polish. While it failed to kill her, the shoe polish made her quite ill, and she was hospitalized.

  Since Sonnets in Suicide had almost proved a prophetic title, Oppenheimer and Guinzburg were quick to reassure her of their understanding. Submitting to force majeure, Viking accepted the fact that no Dorothy Parker novel would top the best-seller list in 1930, even though Guinzburg did not give up hope that eventually she would fulfill her contract. To make the best of the situation and to recoup Viking’s investment, he scooped up thirteen of her short stories and sketches and announced the publication of a collection, called Laments for the Living, published in June, on Friday the thirteenth. The book’s centerpiece was “Big Blonde.” It also included “Mr. Durant” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” as well as some minor pieces, like the tiresome “Mantle of Whistler,” which Viking threw in as filler.

  At the end of May she left for Montana-Vermala. GOODBYE DARLING, George Oppenheimer cabled to the Leviathan, AND ALL LOVE WRITE ME SOON.

  The painful issue of the unfinished novel was resolved, but probably her greatest accomplishment in New York was that she made no effort to contact John Garrett. She had finally been able to accept his rejection. Garrett did not marry until 1945. He and his wife, Madeleine, had no children, but after his retirement, when he was living in Martha’s Vineyard, he became director of the Edgartown Boys Club. In the summer of 1961, at the Martha’s Vineyard airport, he sent his chauffeur into the airline office to pick up some tickets, then fired a gun into his mouth and blew his head
apart.

  She found Switzerland in summertime, especially the lakes, to be extravagantly beautiful, even though she still detested the Alps and continued to regard Montana-Vermala as a village of death houses. It did not surprise her to learn that the country’s per capita consumption of alcohol was the highest in Europe.

  In her absence, Patrick’s condition had improved so greatly that the Murphys left the hospital. They now lived in a chalet about a mile away and had purchased a house in town, which they refurbished as a nightclub, decorated with mirrors and red stars and named Harry’s (after Harry’s American Bar in Paris), a legitimate business open to the public and featuring good food and a dance band from Munich. Bars always comforted Dorothy, and Harry’s was one of the bright spots of her summer, a place familiar and fun that reminded her of home.

  At the end of July, Benchley came over for a visit. They met him at Sierre with a car. After several welcoming rounds of Cinzanos at the depot bar, they motored up to the village because he was no more enthusiastic about the funicular than was Dorothy. His arrival put them all in a bright mood, but for Dorothy it was pure pleasure. Though he stayed at the Regina Hotel while she was at the Murphys, they immediately fell into their old routine of drinking and talking until dawn. At noon, they woke with hangovers and met for lunch at Harry’s to greet the new day with a drink. She was working diligently on a story for Cosmopolitan, about a pair of nervous, quarreling newlyweds on their honeymoon. She expected the handsome payment of twelve hundred dollars for “Here We Are.” During the afternoons, she spent several hours at her typewriter before rushing out to Harry’s to meet Benchley and the Murphys. One evening after Dorothy and Benchley closed up Harry’s and the local casino, they walked along the dark, silent streets when it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere in the desolate village there might be a lonely Harvard man. If he were condemned to live in this mining camp, Benchley declared, nothing would be more inspiring than to hear football songs, and so they began to sing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing,” a serenade more for themselves than for any Harvard men in the neighborhood.