by Margaret Moser
I
was fortunate to grow
grow up around many books, titles that became as familiar as the Bible verses
learned in Sunday school. As the years passed and these titles remained somehow
relevant enough to stay in print, they seemed to be an odd kind of comfort.
They were proof that my childhood had existed, after it was so rudely
interrupted by my parents’ divorce and disappeared in a haze of legal battles
and family restructuring. The books that managed to survive the split and the
moves became strangely divine as I continued to haul them around through
various living situations over the years, as though having a hardback copy of
Pelican’s The Complete William Shakespeare was ever going to matter in
the days when I spent every night at Raul’s. Last week, easily 30 years since
my daddy used it in teaching his classes, I used the Shakespeare book to
reference the poem “Phoenix and the Turtle.”
Indeed, Knopf’s Everyman’s Library, the Vintage International paperback line,
and Random House’s Modern Library reveal the retro-happy publishing industry is
doing an admirable job of keeping classic contemporary books circulating and
looking attractive. These lines continue a tradition of American literature
with titles such as Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels by John
Updike (Everyman’s Library/Knopf, $30 hard), Collected Stories of William
Faulkner (Vintage International, $19 paper), One Hundred Years of
Solitude by Gabriel Garci� M�rquez (Everyman’s Library/Knopf,
$20 hard), Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (Modern Library/Random
House, $20 hard), and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Everyman’s
Library/Knopf, $20 hard), which are welcome sights to these eyes. Knopf keeps
current by adding newer titles such as Midnight’s Children by Salman
Rushdie (Everyman’s Library/Knopf, $20 hard). But the title that most made me
pause was The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker (Modern
Library/Random House, $15 hard). Let me state unequivocally that I adore
Dorothy Parker, her sharp pen having been dipped in such poisonous ink as to
stain even those she loved the very most.
Parker has been somewhat in vogue of late, having been the subject of a recent
film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a reference to a group of her
fellow New York writers known as the Algonquin Round Table. Parker and poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay were the best known of its distaff members, whose male
contingent included Alexander Wolcott, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley.
Parker and friends shone as the literary lights of the Twenties and Thirties,
and even the Forties, as they numbered among themselves both critics and
playwrights.
For all the hosannas that Parker was heaped with, her personal life was an
ever-changing play, a tragicomedy of Shakespearan proportions in which suicide
attempts and heavy drinking played a large part. Out of her pain came her
inspiration, and few writers have ever traded so successfully on personal
problems. But Dorothy Parker gave a kind of legitimacy to those small frailties
of humanity: jealousy, heartache, desire, pleasure. And, much to her disgust,
Parker outlived most of her friends before dying of a heart attack in 1969 at
64 in a residential New York hotel.
There is nothing questionable about Dorothy Parker’s writing. It is tart,
acerbic, poison, and on the mark, whether parodying the trends of the day,
Manhattan high life, or the vagaries of modern living. Her short stories in
particular bear a good deal of real-life qualities that are unhampered by a
slight datedness of surroundings. She honed and reshaped the American short
story during her tenure at The New Yorker, leaving the mold well-crafted
but appearing deceptively easy to fill.
This book is truly one of the great literary treasures of our times, as surely
as Parker herself. Here are her famous short stories, “Big Blonde,” “Dusk
Before Fireworks,” “A Telephone Call,” and the tender elegance of lesser-known
ones like “Clothe the Naked.” Here, too, are the poems, with lines so often
quoted — “and I am Marie of Roumania,” and “you might as well live.” Parker’s
most infamous remark, the one about “men seldom make passes at girls who wear
glasses,” is not among the writings included here, but then her literary
criticism is not, either. It’s just a collection of her poems and short
stories, a legacy of personal pain and dissatisfaction expressed so exquisitely
as to make it seem a prerequisite for being a writer.
Parker’s style was out of vogue for a while, perhaps because for all her
acid-tongued facility, she was a romantic all too willing to believe in the
heart while the brain frantically signaled otherwise. That belief is evident in
her writing, which never lost either its impact or craftsmanship. Almost 30
years after the death of Dorothy Parker, her writing is as much a standard to
be lived up to now as it was then.
This article appears in December 22 • 1995 and December 22 • 1995 (Cover).