I don’t recall exactly when I became enthralled with art deco. I was certainly in my mid to late thirties. I suspect I first recall seeing a few buildings designed in that fashion in Detroit (yes shocking isn’t it?) and it went on from there.
Back in the day when TV offered little on weekends daytime but old movies, I recall the ones I loved best were of those times–the 20’s and 30’s, when New York and High Society ruled.
Women in elegant silky gowns exited large limos on the arm of dashing men in tails and slick hair, to dine and theatre about the town.
I loved the jewelry, the art, I just thought it all so utterly perfectly grand. I thought it must have been a marvelous time to live in.
But what always impressed me most were the women. Somehow they were different–they were in control of their lives, they were strong and independent. Mostly they were pushing the envelope, stepping out into unknown waters. And that appealed greatly to me.
But this is not about art deco. Rather it is about Dorothy Parker, who certainly didn’t look like these dazzling models, but she was an independent woman, a great writer, and as some said, perhaps the best “conversationalist” in all New York of that time.
Conversationalist? Who uses that term nowadays as an congratulatory appellation? With virtually no education to speak of, she went on to be an editor at Vogue, a writer for Vanity Fair and later the New Yorker, and with her second husband Alan Campbell, a Hollywood screenwriter (A Star is Born). Her career was short-circuited to a degree because of her ultra left wing activities and subsequent blacklisting in Hollywood.
She wrote a plethora of short stories, poetry, reviewed plays, and of course was noted as one of the regulars at the Algonquin, where she joined Robert Benchley, George Kaufman and others at the Round Table (still there they claim) where they spent long leisurely afternoons at lunch in “conversation.”
As I declared myself a writer a few months ago, I have been deliciously lazing in her work these past few days, and trying to learn from my hero/mentor. I of course have no claim on the title writer, for Dorothy herself announced that no one could claim to be such who had not written a book. Dorothy herself failed in this, and I take some solace in the fact that she is undoubtedly thought of as a writer, and though I am but a puppy in comparison, I too can at least identify with that name too.
Dorothy, along with Lillian Hellman were two of the premier women of their time in the writing world. In fact, I look up to both of them with fondness and as guides.
It is undeniable that I don’t write anything like Dorothy. She once said, “I can’t write five words, but that I change seven.” And that would hardly be me. She was known for her acerbic wit, and some of her one liners are famous:
When the doorbell chimed she was wont to say–“What fresh hell is this?”
She warned that a performance of Katherine Hepburn “runs the gamut of emotion from A to B.”
When advised that President Coolidge had died, she quipped, “how do they know?”
Her advice as to how to write comically strikes home:
There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Those are shocking words indeed. Not care about my reader? And yet, I suspect she is spot on. To be all to all is the end of good writing, and probably good anything. True to oneself, ahh, now that is more like it, as Hamlet might agree. And yet, Dorothy struggled, as we all do to honor self in the living of life.
While many might have thought otherwise, she claimed that she too was guilty of playing the proper woman, holding her tongue when it seemed politic. I think that every woman, hopefully reaches some point in life when the words of Mrs. Parker echo truer and cleaner in their lives:
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!
It makes me smile to read that, and I realize the deep truth. We, as we age, strip, strip, strip away the veneer, the layers of going along to get along, until we are left with that still raw reality of who we really are. We test it on short trips into the world, retreating to the safety of cave, perhaps sharing with one other, licking our wounds, repairing, growing strong, and doing it all over again.
Little by little, the scars are healed, the skin becomes thicker and stronger. We are able and willing to withstand the “slings and arrows” of conformity, and stand finally fully human and woman, naked and uncaring before the world.
Dorothy brings that feeling out in me, and makes me want to expose myself, uncaring of the reception, being true. Was she all that? I have no idea really, but I know that she made the attempt and offered herself upon the scaffolding of public ridicule. She suffered deeply at times, she was not entirely sane at times, yet, she was true in some manner to self. And that is a gift that she gives to me and to all who take the time to get to know her.
Thank you dear Dorothy for having been.
Boris Lovet Lorski
Existential Ennui 