Alpine Giggle Week Read online

  CONTENTS

  Author and Introducer Bios

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  A Note on the Text

  Introduction

  ALPINE GIGGLE WEEK

  Cast of Characters

  Notes

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  ALPINE GIGGLE WEEK

  DOROTHY PARKER was born in West End, New Jersey, in 1893 and grew up in New York, attending a Catholic convent school and Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1916 she sold some of her poetry to the editor of Vogue and was subsequently given an editorial position on the magazine, writing captions for fashion photographs and drawings. She then became drama critic of Vanity Fair and the central figure of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table.

  Famous for her spoken wit, she showed the same trenchant commentary in her book reviews for the New Yorker and Esquire and in her poems and sketches. She wrote several poetry collections, including Not So Deep as a Well and Enough Rope, which became a best seller, along with numerous short-story collections, including Here Lies. She also collaborated with Elmer Rice on a play, Close Harmony, and with Arnaud d’Usseau on the play The Ladies of the Corridor. She had two Broadway plays written about her and was portrayed as a character in a third. Renowned for her cynicism and the concentration of her judgments, Parker’s name remains practically synonymous with modern urbane humor.

  Parker (née Rothschild) married Edwin Pond Parker II, and although they were divorced some years later, she continued to use his name, which she much preferred to her own. Her second husband was actor-writer Alan Campbell. They went to Hollywood as a writing team in 1934 and maintained a tempestuous marriage until his death in 1963, when she returned to New York. Dorothy Parker died in New York of a heart attack in 1967.

  MARION MEADE is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Nathanael West, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Victoria Woodhull, and Madame Blavatsky, as well as two novels about medieval France. For Penguin Classics, Meade has edited The Portable Dorothy Parker and has introduced Parker’s Complete Poems and The Ladies of the Corridor.

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  “Kids, I have started one thousand (1,000) letters to you, but they all through no will of mine got to sounding so gloomy and I was afraid of boring the combined tripe out of you, so I never sent them.” Thus starts a little-known and until now unpublished letter by Dorothy Parker from a Swiss mountaintop. Parker wrote the letter in September 1930 to Viking publishers Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer – she went to France to write a novel for them and wound up in a TB colony in Switzerland. Parker refers to the letter as a “novelette,” yet there is nothing fictional about it. More accurately, the biting composition reads like a gossipy diary entry, typed out on Parker’s beautiful new German typewriter. She namedrops notable figures like Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald while covering topics running from her various accidents and health problems to her opinions on dogs, literary critics, and God. The writing is vintage Parker: uncensored, unedited, deliciously malicious, and certainly one of the most entertaining of her letters – or for that matter any letter – that you will ever read.

  This edition features an introduction, notes, and annotations on notable figures by Parker biographer Marion Meade.

  ALPINE

  GIGGLE

  WEEK

  How Dorothy Parker Set Out to Write

  the Great American Novel and Ended Up

  in a TB Colony Atop an Alpine Peak

  Dorothy

  Parker

  Introduction and Notes by MARION MEADE

  A PENGUIN SPECIAL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in Penguin Books 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2014 by Marion Meade

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15377-6

  Version_1

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The following letter written by Dorothy Parker is entitled Alpine Giggle Week for this special edition and incorporates handwritten edits by the author. Misspellings and obvious errors have been silently corrected.

  INTRODUCTION

  Dorothy Parker was beginning the new year cautiously jubilant. It was not only her escape from Hollywood after three months slaving for Cecil B. DeMille, but also the raves for “Big Blonde,” her just-published story that was to win the O. Henry prize for best short fiction of the year. When the thirty-five-year-old author sped home that January morning in 1929, she stepped off the 20th Century Limited at Grand Central Terminal and made straight for the Algonquin Hotel four blocks away. This redbrick and limestone building, on West Forty-fourth Street, was her home and her office; in fact, it was just about the center of her universe: two rooms for writing and having a few friends in for drinks. (“Please send up two bottles of White Rock and some ice.”)1 Robert Benchley, sometimes, talking poker and Heywood Broun bewailing IOUs, and randy John O’Hara looking to get lucky in Parker’s exclusive circle. Downstairs, parades of tourists hoping to lunch at the Round Table where the fast-talking, wisecracking literati once buzzed. Up the street, the Marx Brothers hyperventilating in a show called Animal Crackers. Around the corner, Ross driving poor Thurber mad at the New Yorker. Everywhere, illegal what-have-yous promising the real stuff. And in the midst of this hive fluttered Parker in her Hattie Carnegie cloches, the New Yorker thought to know everybody worth knowing, have everything worth having.

  In the days that followed, the woman who had it all found herself being courted by a pair of wealthy young men offering the one thing she didn’t have: a published novel. Harold Guinzburg was twenty-nine, George Oppenheimer twenty-eight; both were charmers. Undeterred by limited experience in the book business, these privileged fledglings had founded the Viking Press with the lofty ambition of publishing works that would have “permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”2 Parker could see that the “kids” (as she liked to call them)3 were not merely engaging but exceptionally clever too. Already they had bought the illustrious B. W. Huebsch, consequently acquiring a backlist that numbered the early works of Joyce, Lawrence, and Anderson; next they launched a mail-order book club, the Literary Guild of America, to compete with the Book of the Month Club. Yet even so, after four years they remained a small house with an unremarkable track record, still shopping around or hustling for authors by practicing, whenever necessary, discreet poaching.

  The intellectual of the team appeared to be Harold Guinzburg, bookish by nature, who was a family man and father of a little boy named Tommy. If Guinzburg’s tastes tended toward the highbrow, his partner’s interests were more attuned to the flash of show business. George Oppenheimer, known as “Georgie Opp,” swooped upon Parker in a rush of brea
thless “Dotty Darlings,” his effusive manner unusually close to the kinds of comic characters who sometimes appeared in her sketches.4 Although the dear boy could not have been sweeter, his maddening habit of tripping over himself to mention important people irritated her. One time, hearing a loud crash, she was overheard to say, “Pay no attention, it’s only George Oppenheimer dropping a name.”5

  Around bowls of Fish House Punch at boozy publishing teas, at a Literary Guild party in the Viking office on Irving Place, the kids continued their pursuit. To entice a marquee author, who might well give them a best seller, they offered a contract with an advance against royalties to subsidize the writing. Bubbling with assurances, they confidently predicted that any novel coupling her literary gifts with her understanding of human complexities would command plenty of attention.

  She naturally felt flattered as it was the age of the so-called Great American Novel (a story defining its era), and writing a GAN was the aspiration of practically every writer she knew. Anyway, short fiction was on its way out, she reported to readers of her New Yorker book column. People were likely to put down a volume of stories, sniffing “Oh, what’s this? Just a lot of those short things.”6 A case in point was Ernest Hemingway, whose In Our Time stories had attracted as much curiosity as an “incompleted dog fight on upper Riverside Drive.”7 His next works, however, The Torrents of Spring novella followed by The Sun Also Rises, rocketed him into the major leagues. Parker believed that any ambitious writer must graduate to long-form fiction.

  Temptation aside, she nevertheless hesitated because it would mean leaving her current publisher, the imaginative showman Horace Liveright. Known as the house of Dreiser and Anderson, Boni & Liveright had released two collections of her verse, and both had become best sellers, always an impressive achievement for poetry. Besides, she was at the top of her game, and if she were to switch, a wiser choice might be Scribner’s, which was publishing some of her friends. F. Scott Fitzgerald urged his editor Maxwell Perkins to sign Parker while she was riding a hot streak: “I wouldn’t lose any time about this.”8

  As it happened, Viking’s proposition had stirred up some old ambitions; above all else, her heart’s desire was to write a novel. In 1925, the year Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, she had attempted one that drew on her early years as the daughter of a New York cloak and suit manufacturer, but discovered it was trickier than she thought. Subsequently, the material was revised and appeared as magazine stories. The kids’ enthusiasm, however, began to eat at her self-doubts. Could she really pass up this opportunity to reshape her career and to make critics take her seriously?

  And so, inspired, she succumbed. In short order, Viking drew up a contract for a book with the tantalizing title Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox (a sixteenth-century firebrand of a cleric who overthrew the Roman Catholic church in Scotland). Of greatest significance is not the curious title but a clause expecting delivery of the manuscript in under a year. Such a timetable, if unusual, was not totally unknown because John O’Hara several years later would write Appointment in Samarra in just four months. Parker, however, who was known to slap together one of her New Yorker columns over a weekend, wrote fiction at glacial speed. In her restrained, cut-to-the-bone style, she was a particularly fastidious writer whose method, she famously joked, was to set down five words and erase seven.

  Which isn’t to say she was kidding. She had completed a draft of “Big Blonde” in a month, while housebound after an appendectomy, but then tinkered with it for another six months. The notion of her producing a full-blown book in a year was laughable, but this apparently did not occur to Harold and George.

  Armed thus with the advance, soon Parker was on her way to France, which in 1929 continued to be the mecca for expatriate writers.9 Living abroad was not only a lot cheaper but would allow her to leave behind the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, those aimless parties and toxic love affairs that became so distracting. After a ruinous affair with an investment banker, whose dirty tricks had inspired some of her sharpest verses, she resolved to spend the rest of the year free from diversions. It was not too late for reform.

  In the company of friends, the painter Allen Saalburg and his fashion designer wife Muriel King, she made a brief stopover in London where she couldn’t resist buying a fourteen-month-old Dandie Dinmont terrier named Timothy. In Paris, however, work on Sonnets had to be postponed due to illness, her ailment diagnosed as an enlarged liver (hepatomegaly) probably brought on by alcohol use. Just about all of June, “rotten sick,” she could hardly move from her hotel room.10 All she could do was see Ernest and Pauline Hemingway and mosey out to shop for chemises and panties every once in a while. To cheer herself up, she bought the most useless delight imaginable, a summer fur coat made of creamy unborn lamb, having “all the warmth and durability of a sheet of toilet paper.”11

  Toward the end of June, though, her steadfast pal Robert Benchley showed up with his wife and sons. Bound for the French Riviera, the family planned to spend the summer with Sara and Gerald Murphy, a well-to-do American couple in their early forties who owned a villa in Cap d’Antibes, and Parker, knowing the Murphys slightly, needed no urging to join them.

  Tucked away in the garden of Villa America was a guesthouse that became her home for the summer. The bastide, a tiny Provençal cottage with electricity and plumbing, was a sort of writer’s tree house, and it was in this sweet-scented retreat, within shouting distance of a busy household, that she discovered the perfect conditions for work. Typically an Olympian fussbudget, she could find nothing to complain about at Villa America, except the ripe purple fruit outside her window. She hated figs in any form.

  Sara and Gerald Murphy were an enormously attractive couple full of panache and positive attitudes completely unlike Parker’s own cynical views. In their villa above the sea, set amid the Aleppo pines and shrubby eucalyptus, life was full of sugar. According to their philosophy, each day ought to be celebrated as special, each detail deserving of attention; it was the artistic, made-up part of life, and the imagination to live well, that truly had meaning, as Gerald later said. Inside their lollipop kingdom, whose simplicity was naturally built on a foundation of leisure and money, they appeared to be living very well indeed.

  Not previously known for advocacy of childbearing or domesticity, Parker was nonetheless drawn into this odd, unconventional family in which caring parents put everything into bringing up their offspring. At La Garoupe beach, Sara (a string of pearls dribbling down her back) worked on her household accounts under a roof of umbrellas and Gerald calmly raked the sand of dead seaweed as their three sunny-haired, Botticelli-faced children played in the water. Interestingly, Parker seemed to draw a great deal of pleasure from the various activities of the youngsters who owned a menagerie of dogs, rabbits, turtles, and pigeons and demonstrated an unexpected sense of humor by naming a chicken after her.

  So far she had written hardly a thing, but sanctuary in the bastide filled her with energy and she quickly made up for lost time. In July and August, her daily regimen included a dip in the freezing Mediterranean, keeping tabs on local crime news, and occasionally a jaunt to Antibes’s crowded watering holes, but mostly it was sitting at the typewriter and reminding herself that the important thing was to keep going. After a few weeks, continuing to pick up speed, she had a stack of finished pages and was sputtering comical prayers: “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.”12 When Harold and his wife, Alice, turned up on vacation in Paris, she took a break to see them and to ask Viking for more cash. Soon afterward she returned to interview Hemingway, whose A Farewell to Arms had just been published, for a New Yorker profile.13 Otherwise there were no interruptions, and she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday believing herself on the road to a reformed life of self-discipline.

  Next door someone died during the night.

  A short while ago, she had been rattling along on Sonnets, snug in the bastide amongst
the fig trees, when the Murphys’ youngest boy was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the dread disease for which there was no cure in those days. Suddenly, they were shuttering Villa America and moving their household to Montana-Vermala, a health resort in Switzerland, for eight-year-old Patrick’s treatment.

  She was packing for the journey home when, much to her surprise, Sara implored her to come along with them. At first, Parker could think of nothing to say. Aside from her unfinished book, she was not fond of mountains, which always made her feel “a little yippy.”14 Seeking advice, she wired Benchley who had been her confidant for a dozen years, but the “big shit” didn’t answer.15 Evidently, he wasn’t going to get involved.

  Before she knew it, she was somehow living on top of an Alp, in a crowded, freezing sanatorium, listening to people die. For anyone rattled by death, Montana-Vermala was an eerie place. It was, she supposed, slightly better than the year before, the three months of 1928 when she had been stranded in Hollywood, but not much. Lacking entertainment of any kind, the former party girl had to settle for sensible shoes, sobriety, and a nine o’clock bedtime huddled together with Timothy for warmth.

  If meeting Harold and George marked a watershed moment, even more pivotal was her decision to join the Murphy family as an unpaid companion because it would have consequences for the rest of her life. Had she gone home as planned, she would have forced herself to honor the Viking contract, perhaps not with a blockbuster, not even with a book that satisfied her, but at the very least with a work reflecting effort and boosting her self-respect as a writer.

  Death-infested Montana-Vermala plunged her into depression, a paralysis so severe that she could not write and even reading was a struggle. “Write novels, write novels, write novels – that’s all they can say,” she wrote to Benchley, then added, “Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.”16 To her sister Helen, she admitted hating Switzerland but offered no regrets about her loyalty to “my best friends in bad trouble.”17 More than anything she wanted to finish “that Goddamn book,” but it was “terribly hard.”