Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is this? A Biography by Marion Meade
Last month, I was having dinner at a friends house, when her roommate, a very accomplished film set designer, asked me if I had ever heard of Dorothy Parker? The name sounded familiar but I wasn't sure if I had. She became very excited, and said that, "every writer should know Dorothy Parker!" When I left that night she handed me the bio, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is this? A Biography by Marion Meade. I began reading it right away and found her life very interesting.
The title, refers to Parker's habit of answering the telephone with the unusual question, What Fresh Hell is this? Always bracing herself for some catastrophe, prepared with a sarcastic response. Dorothy Parker was a renowned wit, and poet in her time. She was also one of the members of the famed, Algonquin Round Table, a collection of friends, many unknown in the beginning, who happen to be talented critics, writers, actors, and wits, who began meeting regularly, and whose careers and legacies grew from these legendary meetings. The New Yorker magazine was created during this time, and Parker was one of the first writers of the now revered magazine, though for many years The New Yorker struggled to stay a float, and writers like Parker often wrote for free, reluctantly.
Parker was known for her great, sarcastic, scathing wit. Endlessly quotable, her witty verse, was only second to my favourite, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like Millay, she lived a wild, destructive life, threw herself into alcoholism with a passion, tried to kill herself numerous times, and oddly enough died in her seventies, after outliving most of her friends, and her younger husband. She, of course, had many love affairs, often with men who were very wrong for her. She captured these doomed relationships in much of her verse.
Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one…
Lady, lady, better run!
_________________________________
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying-
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
_________________________________
The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black:
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.
_________________________________
She was also a daring woman, who was not afraid to attract the wrath of both enemies, and even friends. In the book, Meade discusses how she began her job as Theater reviewer for Vanity Fair, with a bang.
From the beginning, she set out to make herself noticed. In her first column, New York's only woman drama critic described herself as "a tired business woman" who was "seeking innocent diversion"-which was the reason she had chosen to review a batch of five musical comedies. With the exception of Wodehouse's Oh, Lady, Lady!, where she deemed it politic to lay praise on thick, she proceeded to slice up the rest with a poison stiletto. Since it is always more fun to revile than extol and because abuse was practically reflexive with her, she made it her modus operandi. One show, for example, got her recommendation as an excellent place to do knitting and "if you don't knit, bring a book." With another, she refused to print the names of author or cast, declaring that she was not "going to tell on them." There was a show she ignored entirely, instead reviewing the performance of a woman seated next to her who had been searching for a lost glove...Altogether her debut in the April 1918 issue of Vanity Fair was a bravura performance that assured maximum pleasure to Vanity Fair readers and maximum annoyance to Broadway entrepreneurs (pg. 45).
Though she had major accomplishments under her belt, such as, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Oscar Nomination for one of her screenplays, best selling books, she was also a lazy writer, who often bit the hand that feed her. Unapologetically ungrateful at times, a neglectful businesswoman, and often disinterested in really writing, she struggled financially throughout her career, experiencing great financial highs that she seem to misuse, only to find herself struggling yet again. Even friends often feared what would be said about them the minute their back was turned but she had a great empathy for those struggling through injustices, and ultimately left her little wealth to Dr. Martin Luther King, who she had never met, in her will.
I love reading bio's, and I especially love reading bio's of famous writers and musicians. It is interesting to see their personal struggles with themselves, how some rebound, how others don't, and to read about the struggles they often have with their own talent. It often gives me great examples of what not to do, and also makes me realize that a life without risks, a life free of taking chances and going after ones dreams, is not a life worth living, or worth writing about.
