Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (29 page)

As Dr. Barach urged her toward sobriety, Dorothy was meantime investigating a different kind of insurance policy. She discovered Veronal, a popular sodium barbital-type sedative, and took it when Scotch failed to put her out. In New York State, Veronal was available by prescription only, but she learned this was not the case in New Jersey. She made a special trip to Newark, where she tramped from drug store to drug store buying Veronal, as well as sundries such as talcum powder and emery boards so that her purchases would not arouse suspicion. She concealed this cache of pills in the drawer of her dressing table. Knowing it was there made her feel better.

She failed to mention the Veronal to Dr. Barach. While she was willing to give him a chance to repair her, she remained secretly unconvinced that she was worth the trouble. One night when she returned to the hotel, drunk but not high, she carried the Veronal bottles into the bathroom and filled a glass of water. It took a long time to swallow the tablets because they kept sticking in her throat. Then she laid herself down on the bed and waited. According to Dr. Barach, she saved herself by hurling a glass through the window at the last moment. Dorothy herself suggested later in “Big Blonde” that the attempt failed because she had not taken a sufficient dosage and also because Ivy (called Nettie in the story) discovered her in time.

After two days she returned to consciousness at the Harkness Pavilion of Presbyterian Hospital, where her first thoughts were rage at Barach for daring to interfere. Then the tears fell “as if they would never stop.” When the nurses said she was lucky to be alive, she thought the opposite was true. She felt unlucky to have failed. She also needed a drink badly.

She didn’t get one, because now that Barach had her in the hospital, he insisted she dry out and knew there was no earthly way of her getting a drink. After a few days, he was astonished to notice that she was tight. On his 4:00 P.M. rounds, she would be sober, but, when he stopped again at six, it was clear that she had been drinking. Investigation revealed that every day at five she had a visit from Heywood Broun, who by this time was also a patient of Barach’s. As always, Broun carried with him a hip flask of gin, and Dorothy persuaded him to share it. She could not wait to find out if alcohol would again be her friend; the prospect of not being able to get drunk filled her with terror.

After the first week, she felt bored and eager for company. When Frank Sullivan stopped by, he found her with “the insides of her arms black and blue from the saline injections they had pumped into her, but putting up a brave front.” Benchley tactfully acknowledged this latest attempt to terminate herself by cloaking his emotion in banter. He warned her that if she didn’t stop it she would make herself sick. From a chair next to her bed, he began to unburden himself as though he were the one who had caved in. By now, his love affair had become an emotional and financial strain. He owed the Shelton Hotel so much money he couldn’t afford to move. When Edmund Wilson appeared shortly afterward, she reported that Benchley was at the end of his rope. The hospital, she joked, “was getting the room across the hall ready for him.” The last subject she wanted to discuss was herself. Instead, she began describing other patients on the floor: a girl who tried to teach her rug weaving and a genuine vicomte who presented her with an anthology of French poetry and a turtle that ran away. Wilson noticed that she looked thinner and “her intelligence and sensibility came back into her eyes.”

After her release from the Harkness Pavilion, she kept regular appointments with Dr. Barach. Treatment at twenty-five dollars an hour was expensive, but Dorothy seldom (perhaps never) got around to paying and the doctor did not press her. Her recovery depended upon her ability to control her drinking. Making Dorothy understand this was difficult because she remained unconvinced of her alcoholism. Having lived with Eddie, she considered herself an expert on drunks. It was hard to dissociate the problem from his rampages. She decided her own afflictions had nothing in common with Eddie’s. Dr. Barach did not insist that she give up alcohol, only cut down. It was his opinion that reasonable amounts were harmless and furthermore he believed that people who drank moderately probably lived longer than abstainers. Dorothy promised to curb her consumption and for some weeks liberally diluted her Scotch with ice and White Rock club soda, and then nursed it.

As before, she tried to make light of her impulse to self-destruction, although this time psychiatric treatment made it harder to accomplish. In verse, she compiled a consumers’ report for those contemplating suicide and rated the various methods of killing one’s self: Razors, as she knew from experience, were painful, and drugs caused vomiting and cramps. Other methods she had not actually tested had to be dismissed on hearsay as hopelessly unreliable: Given the inadequacy of what was available to an aspiring suicide, Dorothy figured she might as well go on living. When “Résumé” was published in The Conning Tower, some people admired the way she had transformed a near-fatal experience into dark humor. As might be expected, Dr. Barach was not among them.

Even though Barach was a convivial man who enjoyed partying with the Round Table and was a regular weekend guest at the Swopes in Great Neck, his overall view of the group tended to be critical. He told Dorothy that the tragedy of life was not so much what people suffered, but what they missed. In his opinion, she and her friends were missing a great deal. Their need to spend so much time together was a measure of their insecurity, he thought. Their compulsion to be entertaining and their reluctance to discuss anything for more than a few minutes—and then never in depth—forced them to neglect the purposeful, striving side of their natures. By developing her instinctual drives at the expense of her serious nature, by then compounding the problem by partying and drinking, she was losing the energy to progress as a writer. While it was valuable to live in the moment and to enjoy her impulse for pleasure, he believed she should also acknowledge the opposite principle of purpose and restraint, to appraise her life as she was living it.

Perhaps influenced by Barach, Dorothy suddenly began to knock the Round Table. She talked bitterly about how the group had spoiled her and how she regretted having wasted so much time trying to dream up witticisms when she could have been doing serious work. Although those close to her listened to these critical remarks without much enthusiasm, they had to agree that a new way of life would be in order.

Dorothy turned to Seward Collins. Having kept him at a distance during her affair with Deems Taylor, she now decided to sleep with him. Despite the fact that he was always available (therefore weak and unexciting), she knew that he meant well and was eager to coddle her. In her precarious state, it must have been reassuring to have him around. As one of her friends later observed, Collins regarded her as a madonna, while she treated him like a dust mop and wiped up the floor with him. What motives Collins had for entering into this arrangement are unknown.

Collins not only had plenty of money, but he was also a generous lover. He bought her a beautiful wristwatch studded with diamonds. Of even greater value to her was his know-how when it came to marketing her work, what little there was of it. It is very likely that he had a hand in her resurrecting a passage from the novel she had begun in Stamford, the section depicting her father’s death, and shaping it into a short story. Whatever her original intention for this piece of writing, it was able to stand alone satisfactorily. She titled it “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” (with the pointed subtitle, “A Story Proving That No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative”) and immediately sold it to the
Pictorial Review
, where it appeared in January 1926.

In February, still lying on Dr. Barach’s couch and trying to get straightened out, she met Ernest Hemingway. He was in New York to break his contract with Boni and Liveright because they had rejected a novel he had written. For some months now, she had been hearing favorable things about Hemingway from Don Stewart, who had been his friend for several years, and also from Benchley, who had met him in France the previous summer. She knew that Hemingway was working on a semiautobiographical novel about bullfighting, in which one of his characters was based on Stewart and another on Benchley. All this had predisposed her toward the man before she ever set eyes on him.

Hemingway intended to stay a week. He arranged to move from Boni and Liveright to Scribner’s, who agreed to bring out both
The Torrents of Spring
and
The Sun Also Rises
. He was pleased to have Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, as his new editor. After his business had been taken care of, he lingered for a second week of partying, drinking, and getting acquainted with the local literary crowd. Dorothy ran into him often. All that she knew of his writing was
In Our Time
, a recent collection of short stories. His stark prose had impressed her even though the book had caused, she recalled, “about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” What interested her more than his fiction were his views about the process of writing itself, a task that by now she had come to view as painful. In talking to him, she soon learned that their methods of composition had much in common. He told her that writing did not come easily for him; invariably, he would set down a word or a sentence, scratch it out, then have to begin all over. For Dorothy, the discouraging slowness of her work—the isolation, the claustrophobic silence—was enough to make her flee, and often she did.

When she wondered if Hemingway ever found writing unpleasant, he said he did but dismissed this as too obvious to worry about. Writing was hard and dirty work, he said; you had to accept this and not expect conditions to improve, because they wouldn’t. He also told her that sometimes he would rewrite a single page sixty or seventy times without feeling satisfied. The whole secret of writing was to work like hell.

Dorothy managed to overlook the fact that Hemingway’s pronouncements were a touch condescending and his judgments not unique; he was not the first novelist to rewrite a page sixty times. Still, she valued his views for their common sense and also found him to be an especially engaging person whose masculinity was magnificent. She would not have agreed with Zelda Fitzgerald, who, about this same time, branded him as a phony and witheringly described
The Sun Also
Rises as being about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull———.” In New York, charming and modest, Hemingway was at his most agreeable. His blowhard side, soon to grow more prominent, was not yet evident to Dorothy, who felt eager to know him better and pursued his friendship like everyone else.

Hemingway proved to be a most attractive delegate from the expatriate paradise that she had heard so much about. She was an avid and soon envious listener to his stories about how American writers were living and working in Paris. She found enchantment in his repeated accounts of the Dingo bar, the Closerie des Lilas, a café where Hemingway did his writing, and the flat over a sawmill he shared with his wife, Hadley, and an infant son whom he called Bumby. Everyone in her crowd was fascinated by him, but nobody took a closer interest or asked more questions than Dorothy.

Within a few days, she made up her mind to go abroad to live. It was an impulsive decision, characteristic of her love of drama, but it managed to catapult her out of her gloom so successfully that none of her astonished friends or Alvan Barach attempted to dissuade her. In later years, she explained her move to France by noting that “everybody did that then,” Paris being a fashionable address for writers who took their work seriously. By 1926 the exchange rate had become so favorable that it would be possible for her to live there more cheaply, certainly more grandly, than in New York.

Her real motives were personal. After the painful times she had experienced recently, she wanted to forget and hoped that a new environment might enable her to cure herself, or at least to insulate herself from dangerous habits and unsafe relationships. She wanted to believe that in France she could somehow become a different person, a real writer like Ernest Hemingway, and envisioned herself in the comfortable cafés of the Left Bank writing diligently.

Once her decision was made, she lost no time and booked passage for the February 20 sailing of the
President Roosevelt
, the same ship on which Hemingway was returning to France. In her impatience to be off, she allowed herself only one week in which to tidy up her past and arrange for her future. Seward Collins probably paid for her passage. The problem of how she might scrape up enough money to support herself abroad resolved itself with remarkable swiftness when she decided to collect the verse she had written for The Conning Tower and
Life
and publish them in book form. Collins most likely originated this plan; Dorothy herself had strong doubts about it. She thought her poems were “not good enough for a book” and had no wish to make a fool of herself by calling public attention to the fact. Yet Horace Liveright immediately expressed enthusiasm for the idea. Their friendship did not affect his business judgment; he believed that Boni and Liveright could make a decent profit on a volume of light verse. Liveright had recently contracted with another light-verse writer, Sam Hoffenstein, for a similar collection and saw no reason not to publish a pair of poetry volumes. Among the items hastily thrown into Dorothy’s steamer trunk were folders of clippings and carbon copies of her published verse. She planned to select those poems she considered good enough to include in the book she had tentatively titled
Sobbing in The Conning Tower
once she got settled in Paris.

At the last minute, Benchley volunteered to shepherd her to Paris, but second class on the
Roosevelt
was fully booked. All the United States Lines could offer was a promise of cancellation. He had difficulty convincing Gertrude that the journey was absolutely necessary—and indeed it was not. For a while, it looked as if Gertrude might exact a price by insisting he take nine-year-old Nat along for company, chaperonage that Benchley was doubtless not anxious to have. In the end, she relented and gave permission. Benchley could joyride across the Atlantic with Dorothy and Hemingway without any strings attached, but he had to come straight home on the next boat.