Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (32 page)

Enough Rope
received impressive reviews. The
Nation
said that in the book’s best lyrics “the rope is caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity.” The
New York Herald Tribune
praised her work as “whisky straight,” an unfortunate metaphor considering her drinking problem. Poetry observed that she had in fact carved out her own niche in American literary humor with poetry that was fashionably chic, “ ‘smart’ in the fashion designer’s sense of the word.” A few disapproving reviewers couldn’t wait to slap her down on the very same grounds, calling
Enough Rope
flapper verse that seemed to them slangy, vulgar, and frivolous. All in all,
Enough Rope
could not have suited more perfectly the tastes of readers in the year 1927.

By far the most thoughtful assessment came from Edmund Wilson, who believed that even though “few poems in this book are completely successful,” the best of them were extraordinarily vivid and possessed a frankness that justified her departure from literary convention. It was incontestable that her verse gave off the essence of the Hotel Algonquin. He wrote in
The New Republic
that “her wit is the wit of her particular time and place.” Her writing had its roots in contemporary reality, which was precisely what he had been pleading for in poetry. Dorothy had emerged as “a distinguished and interesting poet,” he wrote, an opinion later seconded by John Farrar in
The Bookman,
when he called her a “giantess of American letters secure at the top of her beanstalk,” who wrote “poetry like an angel and criticism like a fiend.”

Any kind of praise made Dorothy uncomfortable. Even though she was extremely gratified by the book’s reception, she dismissed compliments and tended to downplay her new popularity. When
McCall’s
magazine invited her to join Edna Millay, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Elinor Wylie in contributing to a Christmas feature that would be titled “Christmas Poems by America’s Greatest Poets,” she was perfectly happy to oblige and threw together “The Gentlest Lady.” Not for an instant did she fancy herself among America’s greatest poets, if indeed the editors of
McCall’s
were competent to make that judgment, which she must have questioned. As she later wrote in
The New Yorker,
“There is poetry and there is not.” Her writing, she believed, fell into the latter group. Once Hendrik Van Loon said to her that if a reader has any doubt about a poem, then it isn’t one. Dorothy had nothing but doubts about her work. Regardless of
McCall’s
, she felt that her true aptitude might lie in fiction. Her intention was to give up verse and concentrate entirely on short stories, but this raised other problems. How could she quit writing poetry now? She was too famous.

Anarchism was a theory she understood naturally. During the summer of 1927, she published a poem in
The New Yorker
that she appropriately titled “Frustratior”:

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folks who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon—
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

Among those she hated were the powerful who had no qualms taking advantage of the weak. It was a revulsion against mistreatment of all creatures, human and animal, that dated back to her earliest days. That summer, her own past (heretofore fairly well concealed) suddenly began to interlock with disturbing current events, and she became absorbed in a political cause. Like Katherine Anne Porter and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she was drawn to this particular issue because of her conviction that a shocking miscarriage of justice was taking place. She entered the fight with the intention of stopping the execution of men she believed innocent, but by its conclusion, her experiences had thoroughly radicalized her. She would remain unalterably committed to radical principles for the rest of her life, even when it meant sacrificing her livelihood.

To a large degree, her reputation had been built on tough talk and a whiplash tongue, a style that was synonymous with taking little seriously. Not only the public but some of her closest friends wrongly concluded that her feelings could not be altogether sincere. Certainly she had indicated absolutely no interest in organized politics before 1927. Women won the vote in 1920, but not once had she taken the trouble to cast a ballot. Politicians of both parties bored or appalled her, and not until after the election of Franklin Roosevelt was she heard to speak kindly of any candidate. Little wonder that those who saw newspaper photographs of policemen bundling her off to jail were astonished.

The explanation for all this was simple: It was not the American political system that succeeded in firing her imagination, but foreign-grown philosophies that most Americans found extreme and distasteful.

Her first memories of course were of a family whose every comfort depended upon a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people. Whether or not she ever saw the inside of a sweatshop is immaterial, because she surely absorbed the essence of the conflict between bosses like J. Henry Rothschild and the cloakmakers he employed. In 1927, she began to recover pieces of her past and apply them to the present.

Three decades of rage came roaring to the surface.

As soon as she stepped off the train at South Station two detectives pounced on her, asking if she was from New York and to state her business in Boston. Since she was decked out in creamy-white gloves, smelled of gardenias, and was obviously a gentlewoman if not an aristocrat, they let her pass.

Boston was under martial law. Across Prison Point Bridge, in Charlestown, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti waited in their death-house cells. The two Italian-American anarchists, fish peddler and shoemaker by professions, had been tried and found guilty of the murders of a paymaster and a guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920. What had begun as an obscure, routine murder trial had developed into an international cause célèbre. Seven years of legal maneuvering—a tortured stew of motions, petitions, and reviews—had held off the electric chair until all legal remedies had been exhausted. Sacco and Vanzetti were to die at midnight.

At three o’clock, Dorothy arrived at 256 Hanover Street in the North End and climbed two dark, narrow flights of stairs. Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters was located in a poor Italian neighborhood where peddlers’ carts made splashes of color with big ripe peaches, plums, and pears. Rookie policemen, nice-looking youngsters who seemed self-conscious, were stationed on the sidewalk. The thermometer read in the low eighties and the shabby two-room office was stifling. On the wall a poster announced JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE!, and alongside somebody had tacked up a remark being attributed to Judge Webster Thayer: I’M GONNA GET THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS GOOD AND PROPER.

Heading the defense committee were Mary Donovan, formerly an industrial inspector for the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and Gardner “Pat” Jackson, a journalist who handled publicity. For both of them, Sacco and Vanzetti had become the center of their existences. On this afternoon, August tenth, discouraged beyond measure, they were almost ready to concede that the months of unrelenting letter writing and pamphleteering had been wasted. At that moment, Governor Alvan Fuller was debating at the State House on Beacon Street whether or not to grant a last-minute reprieve. Demonstrations and strikes had erupted all over the world, but in Boston the thousands of protesters that Donovan and Jackson expected to turn out were nowhere to be seen. By mid-afternoon there had rolled in only a single bus whose gaudy, red banner proclaimed SENT BY THE SACCO-VANZETTl DEFENSE COMMITTEE OF NEW YORK. Aboard were a dozen Communist Party workers.

Dorothy had changed into an embroidered dress with a matching scarf, high-heeled ankle-strap shoes, and a Hattie Carnegie cloche; her gloves were spotless and she moved in a cloud of perfume. Donovan and Jackson stared at her as if she were an apparition. They did not stare long because an hour later she found herself leading a file of demonstrators down Beacon Street. A convoy of men in shirt-sleeves and women wearing cotton house-dresses, sensible shoes, and black armbands marched behind her in a single line. Many of them carried placards. Dorothy had only her handbag, tucked properly under one arm. The marchers were mostly local Party members, among them several well-known New York writers:
New Masses
editor Michael Gold and Sender Garlin from
The Daily Worker
. The only person she knew was John Dos Passos, who explained that he was covering the execution for the
Worker
and who squeezed into the queue ahead of her. Soon everyone started to sing “The Internationale,” then “The Red Flag.” Dorothy mouthed the words.

Across the street, near the Shaw Memorial, a crowd rapidly collected. Four or five policemen stood there, twirling their clubs and observing the promenade with sleepy interest. Before long two police wagons tore up the street with their sirens screaming. The captain got out and ambled over.

“It’s against the law to do this,” he warned. “I’ll give you seven minutes to go away.”

Dorothy kept on walking and singing.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

At the end of the block she turned and started back. The seven minutes passed. Nothing happened.

Arise, ye wretched of the earth!

Another long seven minutes ticked by. The number of gogglers across Beacon Street had grown to several hundred. The crowd wanted a glimpse of Dorothy Parker, who was being exotically identified as “the Greenwich Village poetess.” They stretched their necks and looked her clothing up and down while they sucked at bottles of soda pop, as if they were watching an American Legion parade. To her, the worst of it was the name-calling: “Bolsheviki!” “Guinea lover!” “New York nut!” “Red scum!” Some people addressed Dorothy by name. One man warned her the police were coming. She’d better run.

“I don’t mind being arrested,” yelled Dorothy, seething.

When finally a whistle shrieked and the police came directly at the line, the marchers broke rank and some began to run. Two policemen herded Dorothy toward a patrol wagon but she refused to get in. When the captain ordered her, she insisted on walking the three blocks to the Joy Street Station.

The police held her arms, hustling her roughly down the middle of the street. Her high heels caught on the cobblestones. When her scarf slipped to the ground, they would not stop so that she could retrieve it. As they yanked her arms, she began to curse them. Behind her followed along a dogged crowd, shouting “Hang her!” “Give her six months!” “Kill her!” At the station, she was booked and then a sour-looking matron with a gold tooth took away her cigarettes and led her to a cell.

Before long, Ruth Hale came to bail her out. Behind Ruth stood a flustered, panting Seward Collins. Sewie, never at a loss for words, said that he felt terrible because he had arrived late and missed the glory of being arrested. The sight of him angered Dorothy. There was still time, she told him. It was not too late to go back to the State House and get himself arrested.

There were reporters waiting for her outside. She responded to their questions by lobbing out the wisecracks they expected of her.

“I thought prisoners who were set free got five dollars and a suit of clothes,” she said, to loud laughter.

“Is this your first arrest, Mrs. Parker?”

It was, and she had found it disappointing. Her fingerprints had not been taken, “but they left me a few of theirs. The big stiffs!” She pushed up a sleeve to show that bruises were already forming.

The execution had convulsed Boston. Overhead she saw planes circling, as if the city anticipated a full-scale invasion by the Red Army. Every policeman and fireman was on twenty-four-hour duty; grim-faced squads patrolled public buildings. Near Prison Point Bridge, streets had been roped off, and state troopers blocked the intersections. The Charlestown prison was fortified with machine guns, tear gas, and double guards wearing bulletproof vests. Dorothy persuaded a newspaper reporter to take her into the prison and once inside found that nobody paid any attention to her. She strolled around freely looking at the machine guns and patting the noses of the troopers’ horses. In the cell blocks, prisoners were screaming, “Let them out! Let them out!”

As the evening wore on, Dorothy sat in the pressroom and observed. Dozens of telegraphers and reporters played cards and smoked, scavenging for the tiniest crumbs of news to put on the wires. The more cynical were eager-beavering ahead and filing execution pieces, as though Sacco and Vanzetti were already dead. When the warden barreled in to say he’d just heard from the governor and the execution was off, telegraph keys began to cackle madly. Five minutes later, the warden ran back—it was on—midnight, and that was final. There was a round of applause. Dorothy found a telephone and called defense headquarters. She may have been talking too loudly because she was spotted by a deputy warden who went haywire, called her an enemy spy, and threatened to have her driven out of town. Luckily for her, the man had more important things to worry about. At eleven-thirty, Warden Henry burst in again. Off again, for twelve days. That was final. Like a man whose wife has just had a baby, he passed around a box of cigars.

Meanwhile, a pair of detectives in a Ford spent the night opposite Hanover Street headquarters. A reporter who noticed them keeping watch and asked what they were doing was told that they had received a straight tip on a bomb plot. They were watching for the bombers: “Two women from New York. Ruth Hale and Dorothy Parker.”