Complete Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  STORIES

  Such a Pretty Little Picture

  Too Bad

  Mr. Durant

  A Certain Lady

  The Wonderful Old Gentleman

  Dialogue at Three in the Morning

  The Last Tea

  Oh! He’s Charming!

  Travelogue

  Little Curtis

  The Sexes

  Arrangement in Black and White

  A Telephone Call

  A Terrible Day Tomorrow

  Just a Little One

  The Mantle of Whistler

  The Garter

  New York to Detroit

  Big Blonde

  You Were Perfectly Fine

  The Cradle of Civilization

  But the One on the Right

  Here We Are

  Lady with a Lamp

  Dusk Before Fireworks

  A Young Woman in Green Lace

  Horsie

  Advice to the Little Peyton Girl

  From the Diary of a New York Lady - DURING DAYS OF HORROR, DESPAIR, AND WORLD CHANGE

  Sentiment

  Mrs. Carrington and Mrs. Crane

  The Little Hours

  The Waltz

  The Road Home

  Glory in the Daytime

  Cousin Larry

  Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street

  Clothe the Naked

  Soldiers of the Republic

  The Custard Heart

  Song of the Shirt, 1941

  The Standard of Living

  The Lovely Leave

  The Game

  I Live on Your Visits

  Lolita

  The Banquet of Crow

  The Bolt Behind the Blue

  SKETCHES

  Our Tuesday Club

  As the Spirit Moves

  A Dinner Party Anthology

  A Summer Hotel Anthology

  An Apartment House Anthology

  Men I’m Not Married To

  Welcome Home

  Our Own Crowd

  Professional Youth

  PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

  COMPLETE STORIES

  Dorothy Parker was born to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild on August 22, 1893. Parker’s childhood was not a happy one. Her mother died young, and Dorothy did not enjoy a good relationship with her father and stepmother. She began her education at a Catholic convent school in Manhattan before being sent away to Miss Dana’s School in Morristown, New Jersey. In 1916, Frank Crowninshield gave Parker an editorial position at Vogue, following its publication of a number of her poems. The following year she moved on to write for Vanity Fair, where she would later become the theater critic. That same year she met and married Edwin Pond Parker II, whom she divorced a few years later. It was at Vanity Fair that Parker met her associates with whom she would form the Algonquin Round Table, the famed New York literary circle. In 1925, Parker also began writing short stories for a new magazine called The New Yorker. Her relationship with that publication would last, off and on, until 1957. Parker went abroad in the 1930s, continuing to write poetry and stories. In Europe she met Alan Camp-bell, whom she married in 1933. The couple divorced in 1947 but remarried in 1950, remaining together until Campbell’s death in 1963. Throughout this period in her life, Parker continued to publish collections of her work, including Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928), Laments for the Living (1930), and Death and Taxes (1931). Her last great work was a play, The Ladies of the Corridor, which she wrote with Arnaud d’Usseau, published in 1954. Parker died on June 7, 1967.

  Colleen Breese teaches in the English Department at the University of Toledo and is the author of Excuse My Dust: The Art of Dorothy Parker’s Serious Fiction. She resides with her family in Sylvania, Ohio.

  Regina Barreca, a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in Literature, Perfect Husbands (and other Fairy Tales), and They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted. She lives with her husband in Storrs, Connecticut.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Penguin Books 1995

  Copyright © The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1924,

  1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1937, 1938, 1939,

  1941, 1943, 1955, 1958, 1995

  Introduction copyright © Regina Barreca, 1995

  All rights reserved

  “The Custard Heart” was originally published in Dorothy Parker’s Here Lies, The Viking Press, 1939. The other selections first appeared in the following periodicals: American Mercury, The Bookman, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Pictorial Review, Scribner’s, Smart Set, Vanity Fair, and Woman’s Home Companion.

  “The Banquet of Crow” is “As the Spirit Moves,”

  “An Apartment House Anthology,” “Men I’m Not Married To,” “Welcome Home,” “Our Own

  Crowd,” and “Professional Youth” are

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Parker, Dorothy, 1893-1967.

  [Short stories]

  Complete stories / Dorothy Parker ; edited by Colleen Breese ; with

  an introduction by Regina Barreca.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14403-9

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.

  I. Breese, Colleen. II. Title.

  PS3531.A5855A6 1995

  813’.52—dc20 95-15524

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  INTRODUCTION

  Why is it that many critics seem so intent on defusing the power of Dorothy Parker’s writing that she appears more like a terrorist bomb than what she really is: one, solitary, unarmed American writer of great significance? Is it because so many of her critics—one might hesitate to underscore the obvious: so many of her male critics—seem to resent, half-consciously, her unwillingness to appease their literary appetites? Is it because Parker did not list among her many talents The Ability to Play Well with Others?

  Dorothy Parker wrote strong prose for most of her life, and she wrote a lot of it, remaining relentlessly compassionate regarding, and interested in, the sufferings primarily of those who could not extricate themselves from the emotional tortures of unsuccessful personal relationships. Her stories were personal, yes, but also political and have as their shaping principles the larger issues of her day—which remain for the most part the larger issues of our own day (with Prohibition mercifully excepted).

  Parker depicted the effects of poverty, economic and spiritual, upon women who remained chronically vulnerable because they received little or no education about the real world—the “real world” being the one outside the fable of love and marriage. But Parker also addressed the ravages of racial discrimination, the effects of war on marriage, the tensions of urban life, and the hollow space between fame and love. Of her dome
stic portraits one is tempted to say that, for Parker, the words “dysfunctional family” were redundant. She wrote about abortion when you couldn’t write the word and wrote about chemical and emotional addiction when the concepts were just a gleam in the analysts’ collective eye.

  Parker approached these subjects with the courage and intelligence of a woman whose wit refused to permit the absurdities of life to continue along without comment. Irreverent toward anything held sacred —from romance or motherhood to literary teas and ethnic stereotypes —Parker’s stories are at once playful, painful, and poignant. Her own characteristic refusal to sit down, shut up, and smile at whoever was footing the bill continues to impress readers who come to her for the first time and delight those who are already familiar with the routine. Her humor intimidates some readers, but those it scares off are the ones she wouldn’t have wanted anyway.

  She didn’t court or need the ineffectual. She would not, for example, have wept too long for having frightened good old Freddie from the sketch titled “Men I’m Not Married To.” Freddie, she tells us, “is practically a whole vaudeville show in himself. He is never without a new story of what Pat said to Mike as they were walking down the street, or how Abie tried to cheat Ikie, or what old Aunt Jemima answered when she was asked why she had married for the fifth time. Freddie does them in dialect, and I have often thought it is a wonder that we don’t all split our sides.” There, in brief, lies the difference between Parker’s gift and much of what passed for humor in her own (and in our own) time: Parker’s wit caricatures the self-deluded, the powerful, the autocratic, the vain, the silly, and the self-important; it does not rely on mean and small formulas, and it never ridicules the marginalized, the sidelined, or the outcast. When Parker goes for the jugular, it’s usually a vein with blue blood in it.

  Certainly the portraits of deleriously pretentious intelligentsia Parker poured onto her pages tweaked at certain readers, and it’s probable that Parker herself was aware of the wince-inducing effect of some of her sharper prose as she left it out of the earlier collections of her work. What is certain is that a number of the stories printed here for the first time since their initial publication in various periodicals contain moments of satire so spectacular that those certain readers mentioned earlier might shrivel up in the manner of a vampire shown a silver cross.

  Her silver crosses are fashioned along the lines of this miniature, presented in Parker’s previously uncollected early sketch “An Apartment House Anthology”:

  The minute you step into her apartment you realize that Mrs. Prowse is a woman of fine sensibilities. They stick out, as you might say, all over the place. You can see traces of them in the handmade candles dripping artistically over the polychrome candlesticks; in the single perfect blossom standing upright in a roomy bowl; in the polychrome bust of Dante on the mantel—taken, by many visitors, to be a likeness of William Gibbs McAdoo; most of all in the books left all about, so that Mrs. Prowse, no matter where she is sitting, always can have one at hand, to lose herself in. They are, mainly, collections of verse, both free and under control, for Mrs. Prowse is a regular glutton for poetry.

  In passage after passage, Parker not only grasps the petit points made by self-proclaimed cognoscenti in order to mock them, but she grasps them hard ’round the throat, and hard enough to put them out of their misery.

  Parker went about the business of writing in a very practical way: she did it and got paid for it. But it seems as if there is a fraternity of disgruntled critics who would like to make her pay for her achievement with her reputation. They speak of her “exile” to Hollywood, where she had the audacity to be successful as a screenwriter and the nerve to be nominated for an Academy Award for writing the cinematic masterpiece A Star Is Born. They argue that she “sold out” and “wasted” herself by writing about narrow topics.

  Let’s clear up this business about narrow topics: Parker concerns herself primarily with the emotional and intellectual landscape of women, the places where a thin overlay of social soil covers the minefields of very personal disaffection, rejection, betrayal, and loss. She manages throughout it all to make her work funny (and that she is funny is one of the most important things about her) while tilling away at this dangerous garden; and for that generations of women and men have thanked her by reading her, memorizing her, making movies about her, performing plays based on her, and writing books analyzing her—but also castigating her most ruthlessly, passing on untruths behind her back and since 1967 speaking most ill of the dead.

  Narrow topics? It is true that Parker often viewed her large subjects through small lenses, and that sometimes—sometimes—her fanatic attention to detail can be mistaken for a passion for minutiae instead of a passion for sharply focused observation. But those disparaging Parker’s accomplishments usually make only passing (if not parenthetical) reference to the fact that she has remained a popular writer for more than sixty years, a woman who constructed a literary reputation for herself by writing satirical and witty prose and poetry when women were not supposed to have a sense of humor, and writing about the battle between the classes with as much appetite and bite as she brought to the struggle between the sexes.

  You might say that Dorothy Parker should be placed at the head of her generation’s class, given her ability to willfully and wickedly push, prod, and pinch her readers into thought, emotion, laughter, and the wish to change the world as we’ve always known it. You might say that she has surely earned recognition by articulating that which is ubiquitous but unspoken, or you might say that she deserves kudos because she managed to say with wit and courage what most of us are too cowardly or silly to admit. Usually when authors manage to do this— write powerfully and passionately about an important and universal topic—they are rewarded.

  Not so with Parker. Parker has been slammed for at least thirty years. One recent critic complains that Parker had “no disinterestedness, no imagination,” and another bows low to introduce Parker with the gallant phrase “The span of her work is narrow and what it embraces is often slight.” It’s clear, however, that such critics write not out of their own convictions but out of their own prejudices. How else could they have read Parker with such blinkered vision?

  Parker’s work is anything—anything—but slight, concerning as it does life, death, marriage, divorce, love, loss, dogs, and whisky. Given the comprehensive nature of her catalog, it is clear that the only important matters untouched by Parker boil down to the impact of microchip technology, sports, and cars. And if you look carefully at her prose, Parker does deal with cars—if only in passing, and only those passing in the fast lane.

  Not that Parker had a great wish to be counted among Those Who Appeal to the Well-Read. Her portrait of literary types, in both her fiction and her nonfiction, is about as flattering as a broken tooth. In another previously uncollected sketch, “Professional Youth,” we are introduced to “one of the leading boy authors, hailed alike by friends and relatives as the thirty-one-year-old child wonder”—uncannily resembling his modern counterparts, who continue to make up the vast population of large parties in large cities celebrating small achievements. Parker informs us about the way in which the junior author declares his greatness and originality:

  Perhaps you have read his collected works, that celebrated five-inch shelf. As is no more than fair, his books—Annabelle Takes to Heroin, Gloria’s Neckings, and Suzanne Sobers Up—deal with the glamorous adventures of our young folks. Even if you haven’t read them, though, there is no need for you to go all hot and red with nervous embarrassment when you are presented to their author. . . . He has the nicest, most reassuring way of taking it all cozily for granted that not a man or a woman and but few children in these loosely United States could have missed a word that he has written. . . .

  And what exactly is the original contribution to thought made by this radical young band of renegade writers?

  They come clean with the news that war is a horrible thing, that injustice
still exists in many parts of the globe even to this day, that the very rich are apt to sit appreciably prettier than the very poor. Even the tenderer matters are not smeared over with romance for them. They have taken a calm look at this marriage thing and they are there to report that it is not always a lifelong trip to Niagara Falls. You will be barely able to stagger when the evening is over. In fact, once you have heard the boys settling things it will be no surprise to you if any day now one of them works it all out that there is nothing to this Santa Claus idea.

  Not that reading fares all that much better than writing. Parker implies that language should be considered a controlled substance, par celed out according to need and only in small amounts. Listen to what, in her classic late-night-alone monologue “The Little Hours,” she has to say about what she might call the “gorgeous” effects of books taken at a high dosage:

  Reading—there’s an institution for you. Why, I’d turn on the light and read, right this minute, if reading weren’t what contributed toward driving me here. I’ll show it. God, the bitter misery that reading works in this world! Everybody knows that—everybody who is everybody. All the best minds have been off reading for years. Look at the swing La Rochefoucauld took at it. He said that if nobody had ever learned to read, very few people would be in love. There was a man for you, and that’s what he thought of it. Good for you, La Rochefoucauld; nice going, boy. I wish I’d never learned to read. I wish I’d never learned to take off my clothes. Then I wouldn’t have been caught in this jam at half-past four in the morning. If nobody had ever learned to undress, very few people would be in love. No, his is better. Oh, well, it’s a man’s world.

  “If nobody had ever learned to undress, very few people would be in love” is one of Parker’s witty lines. It is not her autobiography. When an author’s words are confused with her deeds, they too often act as substitutions for a truly conscientious consideration of her work and life. Yes, Parker married a few times, divorced a few times, drank, and wrote her heart out. Except for the astonishing ability with which she completed this last task, she lived a life much like those of the other writers of her day. It seems odd, then, for an article written on the centenary of her birth (in The New Yorker, ironically enough) despairingly to announce the shocking discovery that for Parker “success did not bring happiness.”