Mr. Keats Lays It on with a Trowel
BELL, PEARL K.
Waiters & Writing MR. KEATS LAYS IT ON WITH A TROWEL BY PEARL K. BELL "Mr. Lewis Lays It on with a Trowel," read the headline to one of the sparkling columns Dorothy Parker, as "Constant Reader,"...
...Of the Round Table, she said: "These were no giants...
...Luckily, he can escape what would surely have been the devastating judgment of Dorothy Parker herself...
...Parker's caveat, if committed by a less pompous and ham-handed, more perceptive and graceful biographer, might have seemed not only forgivable but even commendable...
...The consumer society was shortly to appear...
...Especially in the decade before she died in 1967, the life of this brilliant holdover from the '20s was a drunken, garrulous, embarrassing mess, a disordered betrayal of her extraordinary talents as poet, short-story writer and critic without portfolio...
...Only once, as the Constant Reader, did she forsake the witty soul of brevity in order to clarify her credo--which she would certainly never have called it...
...She might well have said of this biography what she once said of another book: "It is not something to be tossed aside lightly, but thrown away with great force...
...Dark, pretty, deceptively ladylike, she could speak softly with a tongue of forked lightning...
...Lewis Lays It on with a Trowel," read the headline to one of the sparkling columns Dorothy Parker, as "Constant Reader," contributed to the New Yorker in the years 1927-33...
...The great Woman of Wit was born in 1893, of a Scottish mother and a New York Jewish garment manufacturer (no relation to the bankers) whom she so thoroughly detested, one can believe the tale that she married her first husband, Eddie Parker, mainly to shed her father's name...
...Incredibly, not until now have the best of her "Constant Reader" columns been reprinted...
...Had Keats ended his book with this extraordinary evidence of her continuing powers of judgment, one might overlook all the hot-air history and analysis...
...She was the adored entertainer, the wisecracking mascot of the Round Table regulars like Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams and Alexander Woollcott...
...Parker's express desire, flouted by Keats, never to be the subject of a biography...
...Not that Keats has been slipshod, or has let the smallest fact or anecdote escape his wide net...
...In her heyday on Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, she was publishing expertly devised, sardonic light verse, and beginning to make her reputation as a writer of short stories that caught to the life the speech and yearning of all the sad, lonely, preposterous, inhuman types populating her beloved New York...
...Dreiser, she complained, was a boring and ridiculous writer, not least because he lacked a sense of humor...
...Describing America in the early 1900s, when the young Dorothy Rothschild was at the fashionable Miss Dana's School, Keats brightly digresses: "In that first decade of the twentieth century, changes were taking place in the economy...
...You Might As Well Live is intolerable in part because Keats never fashions a recognizable, convincing portrait of the woman he buries in this shroud of ill-digested detail...
...and that humor is snooted upon, in a dignified manner, by the lofty-minded...
...The possession of a sense of humor entails the sense of selection, the civilized fear of going too far...
...Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge had been greeted with predictable yips of praise by such tastemakers of the time as Henry Seidel Canby and William Lyon Phelps, but Mrs...
...More than the others in her circle, she appreciated the loneliness of Everyman as he drifted along in the impersonal, aimless urban throng...
...And so he makes almost all of the other dramatic commentators...
...An old friend has remembered that "Dottie set up a standard of political behavior with a stringent set of rules...
...In describing scenes that could never have been recorded with such a wealth of trivia, he rivals that other maniac of irrelevant concoction, William Manchester (Jacqueline Kennedy is always putting down not just a telephone but a Princess telephone...
...Those were the real giants...
...Theodore Dreiser has no sense of humor...
...Think of who was writing in those days--Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway...
...How that word "existentialist" would have made her hoot...
...How could the 60-year-old, sodden, self-deluding, teary Mrs...
...Henry Ford was beginning to use the methods of mass production that would later drive prices down and wages up...
...It keeps you, from your respect for the humor of others, from making a dull jackass of yourself...
...In the '30s, with the same reckless exaggeration she gave to husbands and drink, she became a passionately dedicated Communist, and her dogmatism and contemptuous intolerance for dissenters swelled in proportion to the vast sums she was shoveling in for her movie scripts...
...George Jean Nathan, she remarked, "can, in short, write...
...Had he stuck to the story of Dorothy Rothschild Parker Campbell--and left the changes the era was pregnant with to emerge, like babies, in the natural course of time--this would be a far more interesting and informative biography, for her life was anything but the droll and clever lark it has been made by legend...
...Even more irritating is his need to stop the action at significant moments to launch into solemn recitatives of parboiled instant history and ludicrously primitive psychology...
...Instead, he gives us an epilogue...
...Where had that gaily exuberant, liberated woman of the '20s vanished...
...She had her reasons...
...There was no truth in anything they said...
...The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were...
...It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...
...Humor, imagination, and manners are pretty fairly interchangeably interwoven...
...After the War they were both blacklisted by the big studios, and she sank into an increasingly vicious, alcoholic bitterness that was often shockingly anti-Semitic...
...she was one of the first to report on the gathering tragedy of twentieth-century anomie...
...Taking on such disparate writers as Ford Madox Ford, Aimee Semple McPherson, Hemingway, Dreiser, and one Thew Wright, M. D.--author of a layman's guide to appendicitis--she registered more clout with a honed-down sentence than many an author with multivolumed works...
...If you continued to see people with whose political viewpoints she disagreed, she found you guilty by association...
...One need only change the name in the headline, for the same damnation applies to the title and substance of John Keats' You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (Simon & Schuster, 315 pp., $7.50...
...And though she spoke hard, dirty words of freedom in her youth, her reputation as a liberated woman of the Jazz Age now seems more literary myth than social fact...
...Parker have betrayed the scornful, hilariously irreverent mocker of Victorian piety and booboisie smugness...
...But Keats is a free-lance journalist of a pedestrian sort, and for all the indefatigable researcher's energy he has trained on Dorothy Parker's life, times and tortured soul, his book is untempered by humility, understanding or necessary literary competence...
...look as if they spelled out their reviews with alphabet blocks...
...Keats spares us no demeaning detail of those last painful years in seedy genteel hotels...
...So she had a life that was pretty much of a mess, as any existentialist's is apt to be...
...When, for example, Dorothy Parker's husband, Alan Campbell, goes off to war in 1940, we are told he looked "so happy and handsome in his carefully tailored uniform that Dorothy wept...
...the little volume of the same title (Viking, 157 pp., $5.95) is a bracing antidote to the Keats fanfaronade of times and trends...
...It was Mrs...
...she was not their equal, partly because she saw through them...
...Parker deftly cut through the guff by labeling the book "as heavy-handed, clumsy, and dishonest a burlesque as it has been my misfortune to see in years...
...And how fortunate we are to have at the moment something more than Keats' biography to remind us of what a pro Dorothy Parker could be...
...Her poems about men, women and love have always been immensely popular with college girls, but most of them outgrow the easy cynicism and the veiled sentimentality after a time...
...Yet I am unable to feel that a writer can be complete without humor...
...The era was also pregnant with changes to come in dress and morals...
...Of course this violation of Mrs...
...Now I know that the term 'sense of humor' is dangerous...
...Even in her drunken and often incoherent last years, her intellect could be painfully sharp...
...How could the righteous apostle of world Communism have sunk to anti-Semitic raging...
...When her husband asked her to cool it, in fear that her politics might kill the Hollywood golden goose, she spread the word that he was a homosexual...
...Perhaps the answer is that Dorothy Parker had always been more of a snob than a socialist, awed by high rank and disdainfully bored by the common man...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 21
