Lately I’ve been in a Dorothy Parker state of mind (minus the suicidal thoughts). No matter what I do, it always comes back to Dorothy Parker. She’s appeared here on occasion in my blog, as long-time readers will note. I first discovered her in high school, and throughout the years, I’ve felt her lure. For my research on my next novel–which will take place in the 1930s–I’ve been reading a lot about the Depression years as well as reading of the Depression years, which of course includes old New Yorkers and Dorothy Parker.
Whenever I think of Dorothy Parker and the New Yorker, I think of my paternal grandfather and his stack of magazines that he worked his way through, reading them cover to cover even when they were decades beyond current. Reading things from that era, I can hear my grandfather speaking; his language had the same rhythms, the same refinement as the literature. People were erudite in those days, their vocabularies so much richer. If someone spoke today in the language of the 1930s, people would think he was putting on airs. Oh, excuse me. That phrase is not really used today, is it? They would think he was showing off.
Tonight, I revisited Dorothy Parker, but when I went to look for my trusting Viking Portable from 1980something, I couldn’t find it. I did, however, find a second copy that I didn’t realize I had, the seventeenth edition printed in 1964 (originally published in 1944). The introduction alone, by W. Somerset Maugham, is amazing, and a topic for another post.
Flipping through it, I saw that it belonged to my maternal grandmother, who is not someone I associate with Dorothy Parker. Yet when I started re-reading it for the first time in over a decade, I saw where my grandmother might have been drawn to it. All the pretense for society, the masking of true emotion. That was my grandmother. My grandmother always underlined her books, and I scour those notations trying to decipher what she related to, what she found interesting.
I have inklings, and I’ll draw conclusions when I finish the book, plot out all my grandmother’s lines. But I need to get into a 1930s state of mind. So I switch from martinis to whiskey sours (Dorothy’s favorite drink), place a hat on my head, and travel back to the 1930s.
*”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me…” —Dorothy Parker**
**EDITED: My father insists this quote should be attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth. My web searches indicate it’s Longworth. And Parker. And even Gertrude Stein. So I will leave you with something that is definitively Dorothy Parker:
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
