…And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
—by A. E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees”
I never see that prettiest thing—
A cherry bough gone white with Spring—
But what I think, “How gay ‘twould be
To hang me from a flowering tree.
—by Dorothy Parker, “Cherry White”
It’s hard to believe Dorothy Parker was born in the 19th century, like Queen Victoria and A.E. Housman. She seems too modern, with her hard edge, martinis, cigarettes, wisecracks, and affairs — savoir and otherwise. Although born in Long Branch, New Jersey, she became the ultimate “New York girl,” born yesterday (August 22) in 1893. I picked up an old book of hers, Death and Taxes, to remind us why we liked her. We still do.
Parker entered our lives in diverse ways. When we were children, we spent weekends in Long Branch, a sleepy town where our families stayed when we visited the Jersey shore. Her family’s cottage is long gone, but a handsome pedestal and plaque on Ocean Avenue marks its exact location. The town’s proud of Parker, and she would’ve been amused by the small monument. She also went to “Miss Dana’s School” — a “finishing” school in Morristown, NJ — graduating in 1911. (Jeanne was born in Morristown, but claims she was never finished.)
Decades ago, Jeanne started publishing her drawings in The New Yorker, and I became writer-in-residence at Thurber House, in Columbus, Ohio. James Thurber and Parker were prominent members of the Round Table, a group of young writers connected to The New Yorker (including humorist Robert Benchley, critic Alexander Woollcott, and others), who regularly had lunch at the nearby Algonquin Hotel.
Jeanne and I have always felt like country mice, but because of these small connections to Parker and Thurber we started going to the Algonquin when we were in New York, usually just for a drink, though for a few years they had post-Christmas half-priced tiny rooms, which we always enjoyed. We had a passing acquaintance with the Algonquin cat, Matilda, or maybe it was Hamlet; we were never sure.
Dorothy Parker’s poetry holds up. Like her barbed conversation, it’s sophisticated and light, with a relentlessly dark underpinning. An early feminist, she was often racy, always surprising. When told she had a phone call, “Tell him I’m too fucking busy,” she said, “or vice versa.” This tone carried over to her criticism, where her byline in The New Yorker was “Constant Reader.” When reviewing A. A. Milne’s beloved children’s book, The House at Pooh Corner, her conclusion was “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
In her later years, she became a successful screenwriter, and an untiring fighter for progressive causes, though her Hollywood career was cut short when she was placed on the FBI’s blacklist in 1951.
She looked at herself as a minor writer, but her poems and stories were collected in the famous “Portable” series back in 1944. The Portable Dorothy Parker has joined Shakespeare and the Bible as the only ones that have never gone out of print.
Her poems are Parker’s real monument. Her life was difficult and even tragic, with a troubled childhood (she called her stepmother “the housekeeper”), failed marriages and affairs, alcohol problems and depression. Another New York City poet, Sara Teasdale, nine years older than Parker, wrote that “my soul is a broken field, plowed by pain.” Though Teasdale’s lyrical poems were popular during her life, she committed suicide in 1933. Parker joked about suicide, but died of a heart attack at 73, bequeathing her estate to Martin Luther King.
Maybe wit is a life force. Parker’s life, like Teasdale’s, was a “broken field,” but she kept her life-spark to the end. She always liked a party, ready with a rueful quip for the end to come: Happy Birthday, Dorothy!
“Here’s a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against my better judgment.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
This article appears in Aug 23-30, 2018.