I Bought the T-Shirt

I have any number of 'special' t-shirts. Two of them, narcissistically, and respectively, feature a painting by me and the cover of one of my books. There's the one of Dietrich Buxtehude I was amazed to find commercially available. There's the Jesus & Mary Chain one. There have been Electric Warrior, a couple of Mozart manuscripts. I forget. I don't really wear them because it looks like one is trying to make a statement about oneself like those who wear a replica football shirt from a club to which their allegiance gives them an identity, they seem to think. However, I still have the t-shirts. And now, soon arriving alongside a new haul of books, is the Dorothy Parker. 

It's been like a long-term friendship that suddenly blazes into a passionate affair. I returned to the Penguin Collected and was very soon wondering why I hadn't read all these tremendous stories when I first got the book several years ago. Did I try the wrong one first and make do with a few poems and articles or did something more pressing arrive and Dorothy got passed over too quickly. I don't know but she was done a grave injustice, whatever it was.

The short story is undervalued by many, I've never understood why. Even without Dubliners, there are Maupassant, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield as well as Hardy and Balzac in their spare time to advertise its potential and in the C20th Raymond Carver, Salinger, Richard Yates and William Trevor and Murakami. I don't think it's any passing infatuation that makes me immediately put Dorothy Parker in their league. 

A lot of it is in the dialogue, as was her gift to screenwriting and as what makes Richard Yates so memorable but it's also in the uncompromising, often world-weary attitude. More than one story, like The Lonely Leave or Dusk before Fireworks, are women overly devoted to men who would appear to have rival priorities. Whereas, in Too Bad, she wonders what on earth married couples talk about to fill their time. 

Like any of the best fiction writers, not a word is wasted. If poetry is somehow credited as being a concentrated form and prose seen as having more space to extend itself into, I can't see why it should be. There's no reason why fiction shouldn't be as tight and economical as a poem and nothing in Dorothy's is extraneous padding. There are no lazy sentences that can be taken out. They are all contributing something or else why would they be there. In The Wonderful Old Gentleman,

Mrs. Whittaker's voice fell into the key used for the subject that has been gone over and over and over again.

It's funny but it's sad to some degree and we recognize it as true. The same could be said for all my list above. Maybe I wish she had written a couple of novels but we must be grateful for what we have.  

I find myself ineligible for The Dorothy Parker Society and so affiliate myself hereby with a poem,

 

The Dorothy Parker Society

 

My morning was all Parker,

erudition and pzazz; 

My afternoon a martyr
To Australian Shiraz.

I’d join the Society

At the drop of a hat 

But proper propriety 

Demands that, to do that,

One needs must be on Facebook 

Which is beyond me, I fear, 

And so I just took one look

And thought, not me, then, dear.