Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (20 page)

She became intrigued with suicide and began to research the subject like a bloodhound sniffing out a scent. She took the trouble to pore over daily newspapers in pursuit of suicide accounts, hoping to find useful details. Far from frightening her, the universe of self-inflicted destruction seemed cozy and reassuring, almost spellbinding. Somehow she managed to get through a bleak holiday.

At 412 West Forty-seventh Street, Jane Grant and Harold Ross’s newly purchased brownstone, there was a tree hung with gifts for their friends. Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun gave their annual New Year’s Eve party. Dorothy joined an informal bridge class with Jane, Peggy Leech, and Winifred Lenihan. They began meeting once a week at each other’s homes to brush up on their game. She kept her expression cheerful at parties while she continued privately to obsess on ways to kill herself. She wondered how people actually went about it.

When the time finally came, it was easy. Midway through January, on a gray Sunday when mountains of dirty snow melted at the curbs, she slept until late afternoon, as was her habit. It was unusually quiet in the flat because the Sixth Avenue elevated trains ran less frequently on Sundays. The room smelled of perfume, whiskey, and dog droppings, all aromas to which her nose had become inured. Feeling wretched, she huddled under the bed clothes with a bottle and a glass, drinking until she could delay getting up no longer. That evening she was supposed to go to the theater. When she did get out of bed, she hurriedly dialed the Swiss Alps restaurant to order up a meal and then pottered off to the bathroom where her eyes alighted on a discarded razor that Eddie had left behind, an object that must have been in plain view for six months. Whiskey, she would write in “Big Blonde,” “could still soothe her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously away from her.”

She cut the long bluish vein on her left wrist, then quickly slashed at the right one.

Some time later, when the Swiss Alps brought her dinner, she was slumped unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed by ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital.

When Dorothy was sufficiently recovered to receive visitors, she prepared her performance. Even though she looked wan and still felt weak from crying, she greeted her Round Table friends with a cheerful grin and her customary barrage of four-letter words. Pale-blue ribbons were gaily tied around her bandaged wrists, and she waved her arms for emphasis as if she were proudly sporting a pair of diamond bracelets from Cartier’s. Had she been candid about her despair, they might have been forced to acknowledge the depth of her suffering and probably would have responded in a manner more suitable to the occasion. Playing it for laughs, she gave them an easy out.

By the time she left Presbyterian, her self-mutilation had found its place in Round Table lore as one of her unpredictable eccentricities, a gesture not to be taken wholly seriously since she had the foresight to arrange for her own rescue by the Swiss Alps. This version enabled them to shrug off Dorothy’s unhappiness. Marc Connelly was not the only one who had the mistaken impression that “it was a little bit of theater, a young lady’s romantic concept of Victorian melodrama. Coffins and all that, you know.” According to Margalo Gillmore, “some people believed she did it because she wanted attention, although I didn’t understand that because she had a lot of attention.”

Convalescing at home, she was finally well enough to entertain the bridge group. Jane Grant and the others knew she had tried to kill herself but Dorothy chose not to mention her bandaged wrists, which she had tied with black velvet ribbon and oversized bows.

“What’s the matter, Dottie?” someone finally asked.

“I suppose you might as well know,” she answered defensively. “I slashed my wrists. Eddie doesn’t even have a sharp razor.” It was the sort of tough talk that discouraged expressions of sympathy.

Toward the end of January, Eddie returned from Hartford and quietly moved in with her. Dorothy agreed to try again because it seemed to be a logical solution, but she was not optimistic about their future. Charles MacArthur had returned to Chicago, there was no man in her life, and she felt grateful to have someone there. On Valentine’s Day it snowed almost all day and the city looked wonderful through swirling snowflakes. That evening they made their way through the snow-silented streets of the Upper West Side to attend a dinner at Frank and Minna Adams’s apartment. The only other guests were Frank Case and his wife Bertha. Everyone made a special effort to make Parkie feel at home and to regard them as a couple again.

Soon afterward Neysa McMein did an oil painting of Dorothy. She was, Neysa declared, “a design” that was perfect in proportion and linear beauty. She insisted that in her experience no more than five women in a hundred could be called designs. Since Dorothy had always considered her figure badly proportioned, she may have suspected Neysa of pulling her leg but she did agree to pose for the painting, which subsequently was exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute and won an award. Dressed in a simple frock with a demure white collar, she looked at once younger and older than her twenty-nine years. She seems noticeably thin and pale, fragile, her hands clasped tensely on her knees. Her eyes seem to be regarding the world with the dulled cynicism of a woman who knows a great deal more than the viewer.

Feeling the need for reforms in her life, she resigned her theater column in
Ainslee’s
, the literary magazine she joined after
Vanity
Fair. After five years as a drama critic, she saw relatively few plays she did not detest. She was beginning to run out of nasty cracks and to repeat herself. The magazine replaced her with a writer who aped her literary mannerisms, an irony because Dorothy was now eager to abandon them. Nineteen twenty-three marked a major turning point in her prose. Until that year, she had taken as her themes subjects that reflected not so much her own preoccupations as the country’s. Throughout the first years of the decade, she was sensitive to the mood of contemporary America. Since that mood tended to be one-dimensional and frivolous, so was her work. For her light verse, she mined and remined familiar terrain—cynical flappers, mothers from Montclair obsessed with Junior’s tonsils, self-conscious young marrieds desperate to be thoroughly modern, America’s obsession with prosperity and mediocrity. Much of what she wrote was mediocre. Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on the quality of her work.

What seemed acceptably cute in 1921 made her wince in 1923, and mortified her by 1925. Still, the dozens of hokey verses and prose pieces that she continued to publish initially established her reputation as a humorous poet. Critic-friends such as F.P.A. and Heywood Broun held a high opinion of her verse and so did enthusiastic editors like George Horace Lorimer, who was willing to pay top dollar because it sold his magazine. The content of her verse began to change drastically, as she now marched past her readers a procession of macabre images not generally associated with popular humor. Satin gowns turn into shrouds, decomposing corpses clinically observe the activity of worms, the living dead ghoulishly deck themselves with graveyard flowers. There were alarming glimpses, no more than a series of snapshots, of the tragedies that would be recognized by twentieth century women as peculiarly their own: the gut-searing loneliness of the women who have “careers,” the women who don’t marry, the women who do but divorce; the women deprived of maternal warmth and comfort who are condemned to seek love forever in the barren soil of husbands and children and even animals; women howling primitively for nourishment, flanked on one side by rejecting mothers and on the other by rejecting lovers. Her verse began to acknowledge the timeless subject of female rage.

As the weeks passed, her mental condition became more vigorous, as if the experience of almost dying had cathartically released pent-up energies and purged her depression. Sometimes she felt as if she had died, except that she continued to walk around, holding herself tall “with my head flung up” and carrying “between my ribs ... a gleaming pain.” She began writing another short story, “Too Bad,” this time evidently feeling more confident of herself because she was able to leave Benchley’s life as a fictional subject and move on to her own experiences for the first time:

“Like your pie, Ernie?” she asked vivaciously.

“Why, I don’t know,” he said, thinking it over. “I’m not so crazy about rhubarb, I don’t think. Are you?”

“No, I’m not so awfully crazy about it,” she answered. “But then, I’m not really crazy about any kind of pie.”

“Aren’t you really?” he said, politely surprised. “I like pie pretty well—some kinds of pie.”

“Do you?” The polite surprise was hers now.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I like a nice huckleberry pie or a nice lemon meringue pie, or a—” He lost interest in the thing himself, and his voice died away.

Grace and Ernest Weldon are a childless couple who have been married seven years and are regarded by their friends as models of marital devotion. In reality, they are uncongenial strangers who happen to share the same bed. Warily cheerful, unbelievably polite, they have passed far beyond the point where either of them cares enough to fight, drink, or hate, and they have absolutely nothing to say to each other. The Weldons, unlike the Parkers, do not drink and are in no sense people who lead unusual lives. Otherwise, the alliances are identical. When the Weldons split up, their friends find it incomprehensible and can only murmur trite condolences: It’s too bad.

Just as Dorothy eventually portrayed the early years of her marriage in “Big Blonde,” she recounted its demise in “Too Bad,” which appeared in the July 1923 issue of
The Smart Set
. The fact that she wrote and published this story while still living with Eddie indicates it was a public announcement, not only to her Round Table friends but perhaps also to Eddie and his family. The concealed message was that while they were not yet ready to part, they had given up.

For the rest of the year, they preserved appearances. In contrast to the frenzied years, they lived peaceably, and once they had accepted the hopelessness of their situation, began to behave like schoolchildren showing their best manners. An understanding of who had been at fault was important to Dorothy. In seeking causes, she blamed the Rothschilds and went on to flagellate herself because as a half-Jew she should have known better than to have married a Gentile, particularly a Gentile above her station. In the peculiar poem inspired by this analysis, she hastened to absolve Eddie from any responsibility in the matter:

Who was there had seen us
Wouldn’t bid him run?
Heavy lay between us
All our sires had done.

In the anti-Semitic “Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” where her self-loathing suddenly bobs to the surface, Eddie’s forebears are portrayed as far from perfect but her own people are dark, very nearly evil, “devil-gotten sinners” dismissed by the Gentile world as fools. Eddie’s rejection of her was only natural. She ignored such factors as their immaturity and the emotional fissures caused by a world war. She also pushed aside the devastating injuries done to their marriage by alcohol and morphine dependencies, which enabled her to avoid asking two crucial questions: What caused her attraction to an addict in the first place, and what was it about her that drew unstable men? She never acknowledged her need for the chemically addicted. It seemed a random event rather than a pattern. Since she could not confront the issue, it was always there, the prepared trap into which she would stumble again and again.

The healing scars on her wrists almost defied detection. As they faded, so did her earlier sense of despair. Suddenly she seemed to be having fun and prospering, earning decent money from
Life
and
The Saturday Evening Post
for verse and long feature articles. She guessed that it would be a long time before she made, as she wrote, “a few million—I figure, by the way things are running now, I ought to have it piled up somewhere around the late spring of 2651.” She and Benchley had given up their office. Though she was working from her apartment, they continued to take a close interest in each other’s writing and even collaborated on an advertising brochure for Stetson hats. In “What a Man’s Hat Means to Me,” she was in her usual droll form:

I don’t say that I am one of those big business women that make anywhere between ten and twelve dollars a month, in their spare time, by reading character from the shape of the hair-cut or the relative positions of the mouth and the ear. In fact, if I were to sit down and tell you how often I have been fooled on some of the most popular facial characteristics, we’d be here all afternoon. All I say is, give me a good, honest look at a man’s hat and the way he wears it, and I’ll tell you what he is within five pounds, or give you your money back.

That winter she became friendly with the tall, dark-haired poet Elinor Wylie, whose work Dorothy admired. Most likely, they met for the first time at one of Mrs. Simeon Ford’s poetry dinners, rather hoity-toity literary affairs at which writers were served an excellent meal in exchange for an after-dinner recitation. (“Everyone,” Mrs. Ford would remind her more retiring guests, “must sing for his supper.”) During dinner, conversation turned enthusiastically to Walt Whitman, with one of the guests declaring that the two greatest people who had ever lived must have been Whitman and Jesus Christ. Wylie, asked for her opinion, named John Milton as her favorite poet. Amid cries of general horror and disapproving murmurs of “She says she likes Milton!” (all of which had to be repeated loudly for the deaf Mrs. Ford), the fan of Whitman and Jesus turned to Wylie and said, “I thought you were a good poet. You haven’t been influenced by
Milton
!” To which Wylie promptly replied, “You admire Jesus Christ, but you don’t behave like him, do you?” Dorothy could not help liking Elinor at once.