Gary Lehmann
 
EXIT A LADY:
         THE POETRY OF DOROTHY PARKER
 
When Dorothy Parker died in 1967, most people had long since forgotten about her, and those few who read her obituary were surprised to find out that she died of natural causes.

Mostly, people thought she had died long ago probably by her own hand. It was hard to believe that a writer known for her theater reviews in the '20s could have survived into the '60s unbeknownst to the literary world. So much had happened since her brilliant essays and reviews were the toast of New York. Her wit and poetry were associated with the wild flapper period just before the Great Depression. Mrs. Parker, as she was generally known then, was the leading light of the Algonquin Hotel's famous luncheon club known as the Algonquin Round Table.

For a time, it was the place to be and to be seen to be by a certain group of up-and-coming writers such as Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Alexander Woollcott, George F. Kaufman, and Edna Ferber. In her middle years, Dorothy admitted that the Round Table consisted mostly of second and third raters, self-promoters hoping to make a name for themselves, while the real writers looked in on them from time to time but wisely moved on to Paris and elsewhere to create the masterpieces of the twenties.

Thus, Hemingway, Faulkner, Lardner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cather, Crane and O’Neill were only sometime members of the club. If there was anyone at the regular table who deserved attention for the long run, it was the one person who thought least of herself and all of them. And she regularly told them so.

She later said, "I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more."

"I write doo-dads because this is a doo-dad kind of town." In fact, she did do things. She was a staff writer for Vogue. She was the theatre critic for Harold Ross' newly founded New Yorker. She made her living from her brilliant articles. They were clever and witty. In one book review, she simply said, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." You could say, in the long run, she suffered from the bad company she kept.

The power of her reputation was founded on her famous one-liners, and boy could she deliver.

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end,
I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

If you want to know what God thinks of money,
just look at the people he gave it to.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone:
Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Speaking of Katharine Hepburn:

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

If her meal ticket was paid for by her popular essays, now mostly unread, her lasting fame is based on her poetry. Here we see her at her best.

Two Volume Novel
 
The sun's gone dim, and
The moon's turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn't love back.
 
 
Theory
 
Into love and out again,
Thus I went, and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen--
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Some one dropped me on my head?
 
 
Observation
 
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
 
 
Indian Summer
 
In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.
 
But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

For pure cynicism there is hardly anyone to match our Dorothy. It is interesting that most of her poems deal with the inability to love or be loved. It is unlikely that she ever encountered unconditional love in any form at any time.
 
She was born in 1893 to the family of Jacob Henry Rothschild, a successful sweat shop owner in the clothing trade in New York. She grew up lonely and increasingly poor. Her mother died when she was four, and her stepmother died when she was ten. Her father's declining fortunes forced her to seek gainful employment at a very early age. Her father died penniless when she was 20. She was a voracious reader, but never had time to complete high school, much less college. For a time, she taught dance but soon sold her first piece to Frank Crowninshield, the trendy editor of Vanity Fair. She thought her career in magazines was made, but one of her cynical witticisms did her in. She got fired when she attacked the actress Billie Burke who turned out to the wife of one of the magazines biggest advertisers.
She never really experienced love in her life, not maternal or paternal, platonic or lasting. Her long-term relationship with Robert Benchley, a hard-core mid westerner, and married, was as close as she ever came. Even her marriage to Edwin Pond Parker, she later admitted, was based on mutual physical attraction--alone.
The trouble with outspoken cynicism, of the kind she developed in her writings, is that even if there is an initial attraction, the lover never knows when the tables will be turned and the next witty barb will be aimed closer to home. Naturally, she came to believe over the years that love was unattainable, which just fed more cynicism.

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he swears his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

The other reason that people were surprised to find Dorothy Parker still alive in the 1960s was that she constantly wrote about suicide. People just naturally assumed that when her literary light was snuffed out by the Great Depression in 1929, she encountered some sort of similar fate, overlooked in the general melee of disasters. Her most famous suicide poem is this one:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

So how did a lady who professed so much hatred of life, and espoused so many ways to divest herself of it, ever live to be 73 years old? Suzanne L. Bunkers, a modern feminist critic, has suggested that Parker's cynicism, though perhaps sincerely felt, was part of her humor, a calculated stance designed to suit the times. She saw the flapper era, with its short skirts and open sexuality, dancing the Lindy, smoking in public, drinking to excess, as reactions to the hum-drum day-to-day drudgery of the great mass of American women whose opportunities were extremely limited.
 
By debunking traditional love and romance, by running down families and middle-class life, even by advocating suicide as the best way out, she was playing into a need to acknowledge openly the desperation of the times, like some sort of personal film noir. Every time she took this stance, she declared her independence from the female mold that broke so many others. Her cynicism acknowledged her desperate condition and made fun of it. But, fighting back was not easy. Her sardonic wit was driven by the tacit acknowledgement that despair supported and drove the excess gaiety of the '20s. Her attitude mirrored the times, which is why she was so suddenly and completely silenced by the Crash.

One Perfect Rose
 
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure with scented dew still wet--
One perfect rose.
 
I knew the language of the floweret;
"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
 
Why is it no one ever sent to me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose

It must have been hard to be eclipsed for almost 40 years. She did what many writers did. She went to Hollywood and wrote on dozens of scripts which she uniformly hated. Her love life was not much better. She remarried, divorced, reconciled, separated and re-reconciled. She supported leftist causes like the Spanish Civil War, raised funds for radical causes, and wrote for Vanity Fair where she had the audacity to pan The House on Pooh Corner with deadly sarcasm. When she died in a New York hotel room in 1967, her body was cremated and her remains stayed in her lawyer’s office for over twenty years before the NAACP dedicated a small garden in her memory where they spread her ashes. She left her entire estate to Martin Luther King Jr. to support his Civil Rights activities.
 
I don't want to end on such a grim note. There is a story that once, when Dorothy was the theatre critic for The New Yorker, she was invited to a weekend party on Long Island. A theatre producer got her drunk and took her into the bushes but couldn't finish the job. Buckling up afterwards, he begged her to be silent about it. "Don't worry," she told him. "I never review rehearsals."

__________

Gary Lehmann teaches writing and poetry at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His essays, poetry and short stories are widely published––about 60 pieces a year. He is the director of the Athenaeum Poetry group which recently published its second chapbook, Poetic Visions. He is also author of a book of poetry entitled Public Lives and Private Secrets (Foothills Press, 2005), and co-author and editor of a book of poetry entitled The Span I Will Cross. His poem “Reporting from Fallujah” was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize. His short play, “My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry” was selected for professional production in January 2006 at Geva Theatre, Rochester, NY. Visit his website at www.garylehmann.blogspot.com