Dorothy Parker, 1956.
Dorothy Parker lives at present in a mid-town New York hotel. She shares her small apartment with a youthful poodle which has the run of the place and has caused it to look, as Miss Parker says apologetically, somewhat “Hogarthian”: newspapers spread about the floor, picked lamb chops here and there, and a rubber doll—its throat torn from ear to ear—which Miss Parker lobs lefthanded from her chair into corners of the room for the poodle to retrieve—which it does, never tiring of the opportunity. The room is sparsely decorated, its one overpowering fixture being a large dog portrait, not of the poodle, but of a sheepdog owned by the author Philip Wylie and painted by his wife. The portrait indicates a dog of such size that in real life it must dwarf Miss Parker. She is a small woman, her voice gentle, her tone often apologetic. But occasionally, given the opportunity to comment on matters she feels strongly about, her voice rises almost harshly, her sentences punctuated with observations phrased with lethal force. Hers is still the wit which made her a legend as a member of the Algonquin’s Round Table—a humor whose particular quality seems a coupling of a brilliant social commentary with a mind of devastating inventiveness. She seemed able to produce the well-turned phrase for any occasion. A friend remembers sitting next to her at the theatre when the news was announced of the death of the stolid Calvin Coolidge. “How do they know?” whispered Miss Parker.
Readers of this interview, however, will find that Miss Parker has only contempt for the eager reception accorded her wit. “Why it got so bad,” she has said bitterly, “that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth.” And she has a similar attitude disparaging her value as a serious writer.
But Miss Parker is her own worst critic. Her three books of poetry may have established her reputation as a master of light verse, but her short stories are essentially serious in tone—serious in that they reflect Miss Parker’s own life which has been in many ways an unhappy one. “She has distilled,” one commentator said of her, “her sorrow for the light quaffing of a flippant generation.”
If the tone of her short stories is serious, so is her intent. Franklin P. Adams has described it in an introduction to her work: “Nobody can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice—injustice to those members of the race who are the victims of the stupid, the pretentious and the hypocritical …”
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 