What Fresh Hell Is This?

Marion Meade's Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This? returns me to the glorious wreckage of a story I've read before in slightly different versions. I don't know if she'd qualify for Matthew Parris's Great Lives but 'great' doesn't have to mean 'happy'. I'm sure many a thesis has been written about genius coming out of unhappiness rather than comfort.

More than elsewhere, this book traces the poems and stories back to very close biographical detail. The great shame that she never wrote a novel despite wanting to is explained by an understandable lack of commitment to the big project. On the third occasion that someone used her as the basis for their literary efforts she reflected that if she subsequently wrote her own autobiography the author would sue her for plagiarism but she had all but done it in her own short fiction.

I'll miss her once I've finished this last of the pile of books by or about her. It was thanks to the TLS still sending their e-mail that extended my interest in her when the recent Hollwood book appeared. But next up might be a look back at F. Scott Fitzgerald whose life crossed hers to continue in that shallow, writerly, self-destructive party atmosphere of America then.

After that, a tree trunk of a further volume on Shostakovich will bring me back to level and looking for the next excursion.