Gail Crowther, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood (Gallery Books); Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader (McNally Editions)
In the background of many 'colourful' characters is a difficult upbringing. Dorothy Parker's brilliant, acerbic, contrary and yet much-loved personality very likely owes much to the damage done in her early years as outlined in Gail Crowther's first chapter before she goes into further detail about the 35 years spent on and off in Hollywood, itinerant, marrying the same man twice either side of one more addicted to booze than she was and gradually declining into squalor and spirited hopelessness.
Remembered mostly for her wit, which was both self-deprecating and at the savage expense of others in the Algonquin Hotel, New York, or in book reviews in The New Yorker, it was not always as much fun as that ongoing party might appear. Psychiatrists might diagnose it all as an elaborate defence mechanism but she was very good at it, her contracts as a screenwriter in Hollywood being of a magnitude that took quite some squandering. She did it all, though, not without a conscience and supported the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the anti-fascists in Spain and other leftist causes with considerable commitment.
However greatly in demand she was for her film dialogue, it was precarious employment, often uncredited, with writers the most disposable of those involved in making films. Dorothy professed not to like films while being Oscar-nominated twice. She preferred books -or some of them- and they made up most of her few material possessions along with, strangely, a set of toy Napoleonic soldiers.
She might have written a great novel or two and been remembered alongide Ernest Hemingway who she had some time for but I suspect that sustained effort might have been beyond her. There are stories and poems and the short form appears to have suited her better, not least in her New Yorker book reviews, 1927-28, collected in Constant Reader, which are discursive and regularly dismissive although she knows what she likes which makes her praise worth having. As, for example, the unusual lengths she goes to in favour of Villon by D.B. Wyndham Lewis,
His latest biographer seems to be the only one who can know the poet and the thief with intimacy and affection, and yet hold back from getting a crush on him.
She can't allow herself to express too much admiration for one book without taking out a handful of others in the process. That sort of dissatisfaction might be where she feels most at home since sustained happiness is something she doesn't appear to have the capacity for. Her two marriages to Alan Campbell, glamorous, good-looking and bi-sexual, were acts of great mutual devotion but possibly two people depending on each other, each believing the other to be their raft and salvation.
There's a danger that we might be entertained, compelled or mortified by Dorothy Parker and her turbulent life rather than read her writing, as happens with Oscar Wilde perhaps, and so a return to the Penguin Collected is something to do in the near future.
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