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.

11 Days On

 Eleven days is more than the usual time elapsed since the last post here. It's most gratifying to hear from the other side of the world, asking if I'm okay, but I don't think the delay was the issue. For whatever reason, I was 'not available' in Japan by whichever means I was being accessed.

Sometimes one doesn't feel like it. It doesn't seem appropriate. Art might be all there is but not be enough, as one of my favourite poets observed. I've got a lot of time for St. Cuthbert on his remote island contemplating things beyond all this worldly fiddle but, needs must and one has to press on.

For all her levity and party-going approach, Dorothy Parker knew. Today was worthwhile for reading her late play, The Ladies of the Corridor, co-authored with Arnaud D'Usseau but with Dottie lines all the way through. Set in a hotel with superficiality eventually gathering into crises, perhaps the most telling passage is where Lulu reflects,

We were told you grew up, you got married, and there you were. And so we did, and so there we were. But our husbands, they were busy. We weren't part of their lives; and as we got older we weren't part of anybody's lives, and yet we never learned how to be alone.  

It's almost Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill except neither of those were very funny very often.

 

That came after You Might As Well Live by John Keats - a different John Keats, the standard biography before it was said to be improved upon by What Fresh Hell is This? by Marion Meade. We will see. One can't read everything at once. With the Hardy survey left not properly finished, the Shostakovich symphonies requiring another run through, the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas so great, the Sofia Gubaidulina Quartets due here soon, two hefty Shostakovich volumes arriving today and that's not all, I need a committee meeting with myself to establish the way forward among so many projects. 

But later tonight, although I sometimes take a dim view of BBC4's Friday nights of ready-made old TOTP scheduling, we are offered 'another chance to see' the Alan Hull documentary, a labour of love about a singer-songwriter whose work it was easier to love than it seemed he himself was but then Rock Goes to College with Lindisfarne from Essex University, 1978. That would have been on the same tour as when I saw them at Lancaster.

Not all of those I mixed with there shared my enthusiasm for the Newcastle folk-rock temporary sensation because Coltrane, Zappa et al were judged to have suffered more for their art and it was felt we should, too, but not much gets ahead of those first loves, the first records one ever spent one's limited money on and I'll be back there with Lindisfarne, about 99% word perfect.

More Dorothy

 A love affair, as Dorothy Parker would attest, I'm sure, needs to get beyond its initial infatuation. Anybody can be enamoured on a short term basis with different people from one day to the next but anything lasting that might justify that many-splendoured term, Love, needs to have the durability that enables it to survive difficulties.

There was a possibility that after a dozen stories I might have seen a pattern emerging. It might have been something to do with ladies hopelessly devoted to men who were strongly suspected of being devoted to other ladies, too, as well as their goodtime crowd of dubious other men. That was not compensated for by the dim view she took of the dull security of marriage, though.

While that is a compelling point of view, brilliantly observed in her case, one might think it not quite enough of a theme to make her 'great', like Shakespeare. It was important that further stories in the Collected went further or did it in different ways or else it was only going to be variations on a theme.

One of the many memorable sentences in what I first read was in The Little Hours, about a sleepless night that extends into an essay about La Rochefoucauld,

Twenty minutes past four, sharp, and here's Baby wide-eyed as a marigold. 

Isn't that slick, isn't it just the prettiest thing you ever saw, relegating Ted Hughes's use of 'marigold' in October Dawn to an honourable but clear second best.

I almost ordered La Rochefoucauld on the basis of it but had a look at him and found his Maxims trite, maybe true but far too easy to do.

But what I read today piled evidence upon evidence of what a great writer she is and, if anything, almost improved upon first impressions because the genuine artist improves as they go along rather than repeats the same trick with diminishing returns. 

Glory in the Daytime is like Maupassant in glamour-stricken 1920's or 30's America, the downbeat, suburban wife having the chance of meeting an actual actress, who turns out to be outrageously overdone, but she can't see that because she's starstruck. She thinks she's been taken outside of her ordinary life but she's probably witnessed something even more meaningless but thought it looked good. It's a brilliant piece of work.

 

The Dorothy titles are piling up. Good. Each new one that arrives is further insurance against despair because although they will contain much of it, it's like a flu or Covid jab. One is innoculated against wholesale infection by the whole shebang by knowing that a class act like Dorothy thought the same as what you think.

She didn't end happily and neither does it seem do most of her characters but, like she said, there have been millions and millions of human beings and not one of them ended happily.

I commend her stories to you with the highest reference on the understanding that you've read other things on this website, too, and didn't disagree with too much of it.

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.  

Dorothy Parker

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.