Alpine Giggle Week Read online

  Words refused to come; meanwhile, what she had done over the summer suddenly looked horrible, and before long she began tearing up pages. Despite her desperation, none of it shared with Viking, she lied to Harold and said that she was hard at work. His reply simply reinforced her guilt. Mail the manuscript special delivery, he told her, and remember to include a bio for the dust jacket. He persisted in calling the book a best seller.

  At Christmas, feeling practically catatonic after two months in Montana-Vermala, she was able to escape her misery for a few days. Making their way to the mountain came some of the old gang: Ernest and Pauline Hemingway and Pauline’s sister, Jinny Pfeiffer; John Dos Passos and his new wife, Katy. This was 1929, the year when Wall Street fell apart and who knew what that was going to mean, perhaps merely a footnote of history, perhaps not. As in better days, there was laughter again as everybody gathered around singing carols and drinking the local Riesling, their holiday supper complete with a plum pudding and a handsome goose shot by Ernest. But not long afterward an agitated wire from Viking warned Parker that the spring catalog was closing. Where was the manuscript?

  The honorable resolution to this ugly situation, she decided, would be to make a fast trip home and confess to the kids that her life had temporarily come apart and she needed more time to meet her obligations. February 1930 found her at the New Weston hotel in New York, being interviewed by a herd of reporters fishing for colorful observations on the state of the union. Over martinis in her suite, she plopped on a sofa and insisted that she was a writer, not a comedian. Her stay would be brief in that she was rushing back to Switzerland to finish a novel.

  Did Mrs. Parker care to reveal the subject?

  She did not. Honestly, she hated writing “more than anything else in the world.”18 Brushing off the dumb questions people were always asking her, she hastily turned into a prima donna. Raising a glass, she burst out “put a little more gin in mine,” before losing patience and shooing everyone out the door.

  Numbed by shame, she never did manage to level with the kids. They had been kind to her, but she had let them down in the most disgraceful way – she had no illusions about that – and all she could do now was shrink away from the unbearable truth. Lacking proper equipment for cutting a vein or two, with no access to arsenic either, she instead turned to a commodity close to hand and tried to poison herself by drinking a bottle of shoe polish (at the time containing the highly toxic chemical nitrobenzene). Ingestion of polish could be, and often was, fatal, but Parker, while going too far, did not go far enough. Extremely ill during the winter of 1930, she was hospitalized and recovered, though the story went around that what she really drank was silver polish, as if that would have made a difference.

  Shocked, facing an unheard-of predicament, an author who had tried to self-destruct over a late manuscript, George and Harold came up with a plan to postpone Sonnets and substitute for its spring 1930 list a collection of her published short stories and sketches. Laments for the Living tied together some of her most gripping work: daring tales like “Arrangement in Black and White” that presaged the convictions of a person who one day would bequeath her estate to a civil rights organization; two stories (“Little Curtis” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman”) salvaged from her abandoned 1925 novel; and the beautifully wrought “Big Blonde.”

  In the winter of 1930, Viking Press had no reason to doubt that it would ultimately publish her novel. (She must have known better.) Certainly, she was not ready to begin writing again anytime soon. Out of some wildly misguided notion that the Murphys could not get along without her, magnified by her own reluctance to address her difficulties, both personal and professional, she made plans for returning to Montana-Vermala. The family, meanwhile, had left the sanitarium once their son’s condition improved and were living in a chalet; Dottie would find lodging in a nearby pension.

  The subject of Sonnets in Suicide? There’s no way of knowing, but it would seem to be the messy lives of single women who drink too much and seek love from jerks, with the main character recognizable as Parker herself, the most autobiographical of writers. Presumably, it would revisit themes of importance to her, the bigger picture of female independence and the routine tension between the sexes. As the title implies, the narrative probably detailed the complex inner life of a misfit poet who had not yet come to terms with existence, whose fantasies of suicide lay curled inside each lyric, her head throbbing with the fury of a modern-day John Knox. Certainly, Sonnets would have reflected the world as Parker knew it, reckless, money-mad New York in the 1920s, whose excesses Fitzgerald had examined in The Great Gatsby but here viewed from the unique viewpoint of a Dorothy Parker character instead of a sexually uncertain bond salesman. Parker’s big blonde, Hazel Morse, could easily have been a convincing character in Gatsby.19

  By June, Parker was back in Switzerland observing the fate of Laments for the Living from a distance. Although the book became an immediate success and went through four editions the first month, sales failed to interest Parker whose expectations had risen to unrealistic heights. She needed praise. Reviews were generally positive, but a few panned the stories as slight. “Sharply keen in so far as it goes,” the New York Times reported, adding that its range of subjects was limited, which seems a peculiar put-down for a collection that includes “Big Blonde” and “Arrangement in Black and White.”20

  Parker told herself that the notices were “beyond words awful.”21 On the heels of her failure to complete Sonnets in Suicide, any nasty comments added to her pain. “You think you’re not going to care, but you do, somehow.”22 When she wrote George Oppenheimer that she felt sickened (actually, enraged), he refused to sympathize. For shame, he scolded, because readers were “drinking magnums of champagne in your honor.”23 After that she retreated into silence and sent no further personal letters until one day during the first week of September 1930, when she rolled a sheet of paper into her new German typewriter and typed, “Kids, I have started one thousand (1,000) letters to you” and tore them up because her life was so dull.24 But in honor of what she cheerfully called “Alpine Giggle Week,” she was going to give it another try.

  Her rambling saga of that summer is addressed to George and Harold along with several mutual friends (Muriel King, Allen Saalburg, and Marc Connelly) and is a rare example of her unbuttoned humor. The longest letter she ever wrote, probably the funniest, and surely the bitchiest, it is vintage Parker that demonstrates what her friend S. J. Perelman meant when he said she was hard to quote because so much of her humor, while irresistible, was almost religiously offensive. Parker would forever cherish the Murphys, but damn near everyone else in Alpine Giggle Week is not so fortunate.

  During her first visit to Montana-Vermala, the TB patients had aroused every iota of her natural sympathy. Nine months later, however, her pity for “the sicks” had hopelessly curdled, and she makes fun of their posturing and sense of entitlement simply because they happen to be dying. Repeating one of their corny puns – “T.b., or not t.b., that is the question” – she loosens up and blasts a blitzkrieg of stink bombs against “the lung-ers.” Their names are freely offered, of course. (The baroness who shares her bed with men, women, dogs, or ducks, “with equal good-humor,” is a real person.)25

  Projected against this morbid setting is not solely Parker’s own self-portrait but unsanitized sketches of her famous friends. There is Hemingway who has sent her a “lovely, lovely” letter about how much he likes Laments for the Living, which means a great deal to her coming from a writer whom she regards hugely in spite of his blood-and-guts machismo. There is Fitzgerald, who pops in after depositing his wife in a Swiss sanitarium and who evokes nostalgic memories of the couple at the time of their marriage along with sorrow over their recent circumstances (“Ah, hell,” she erupted. “If I were a God, I’d be a God.”).26 She writes about Sara and Gerald Murphy, intimate observations revealing the impossible burdens their son’s illness h
as placed on their lives, and there are glimpses of the healthy son, eleven-year-old Baoth, who has managed to annoy Parker to the point where she feels like shoving him off an Alp. “Oh kids, kids, have I got a bellyful of Baoth!”27 She shows no remorse about unmasking him, only partly in jest, as “a thief, a liar, a bully.” Neither can she resist a cheeky aside that the curriculum of a certain Lausanne boarding school, where it turns out Baoth won’t be going after all, is said to include sodomy.

  The summer’s high point is the arrival of Robert Benchley. His first night in Montana-Vermala the two of them get drunk (on champagne with shots of cognac) and stroll through the streets shouting Harvard fight songs. With Sara and Gerald, they spend a grand week in Venice before continuing on to Munich, where she buys the typewriter and another dog, this one an aristocratic dachshund puppy she names Robinson.

  Alpine Giggle Week ends on a pleading note: please write, she says, because “any news is big news here.”

  In September melancholy hung over Montana-Vermala. No more visitors appeared and everybody’s health began to unravel, with a frazzled Sara developing jaundice and rheumatism, and Parker shattering a kneecap and dislocating a thumb. Gerald, sliding into one of his hopeless moods, departed abruptly on a trip to the States, and when he got back he consulted a Jungian analyst. Two months went by. Feeling more miserable each day, Parker finally sent a telegram to Benchley: she was sailing from Cannes on November 15, “and will I be glad to see you dearest Fred.”28

  Immediately upon her return, Viking Press threw a home-coming party that brought out practically everybody she had ever known. To get her back they’d had to wire $2,000 for her bills and passage, but it was worth every penny because six months later they were to release her third best-selling volume of verse, Death and Taxes. In January 1931, when her New Yorker column appeared for the first time in twenty months, she sprayed readers with a volley of jokes. “Maybe you think I was just out in the ladies’ room all this time.”29 God help her if it sounded chauvinistic, but after immaculate Switzerland, where nobody was under the age of seventy-five, swarming, polluted New York seemed heavenly. “Oh, this is a lovely city you have here!”

  Lovely perhaps, but once that initial euphoria wore off, it was a struggle to rebound, and she backslid to the sort of madcap life she used to lead. She never got over her failure to complete Sonnets, indeed the fiasco permanently eroded her self-confidence as a serious writer. The most chaotic year was 1932, when the Great Depression was enveloping the wider world, and a foolish romance led to another suicide attempt. But soon came a dramatic turn that set her life whirling in a different direction altogether: she fell in love with a handsome actor eleven years her junior. After their marriage, Parker and Alan Campbell decamped to Hollywood where they became a fabulously paid, Oscar-nominated screenwriting team. Thanks to a brand-new career, she could own a Picasso and a farm in Pennsylvania while also engaging in work on behalf of the Communist Party. Never again would she attempt to end her life, despite a future that held as many thorns as roses. Even if her ambition to do a novel ended in failure, she succeeded as a writer of pretty near everything else: screenplays, short fiction, verse, song lyrics, criticism, stage plays – all told an impressive résumé.

  For the Murphy family, who felt safe leaving Montana-Vermala but never returned to their fairy-tale life at Villa America, the 1930s brought additional suffering. In the real America, they settled in Saranac Lake, New York, and Gerald took charge of his family’s leather goods business, but they were fated to bear the crushing blows that Hemingway would describe as “the very worst end that all bad lucks could go.”30 In 1936, Baoth died suddenly of meningitis, and his brother finally succumbed to tuberculosis a year later.

  The young go-getters at Viking, meanwhile, had turned thirty. As their firm continued to thrive, Guinzburg and Oppenheimer remained hopeful, in spite of everything, that Mrs. Parker would complete Sonnets in Suicide.

  Viking Press over the years went on to become a distinguished house that remained true to its original creed (fiction of “permanent importance”) and whose history would subsequently include five Nobel Prizes for Literature, numerous Pulitzers and National Book Awards, and the publication of major writers such as John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and J. M. Coetzee. For the last eighty-four years, Viking has continued to publish the work of Dorothy Parker.

  George Oppenheimer, dissatisfied with book publishing, left the company in 1933 for a screenwriting career. But before his departure he wrote a Broadway comedy featuring a character whose mannerisms, quite obviously, suggested Parker’s. Her friend Bennett Cerf, who escorted Parker to the opening of Here Today, was expecting fireworks. Backstage, he recalled, she hugged Georgie Opp: what a wonderful show; how cleverly the dear boy had captured her foibles. Moments earlier, however, she had been ready to skin him alive.

  Regrettably, everything connected with Parker’s ambition to write a Great American Novel has evaporated. Not so much as a paragraph of the mysterious manuscript survived. In the 1970s, Harold Guinzburg’s son and successor, Thomas, reported that Sonnets in Suicide remained the longest unfulfilled contract in the company’s history. By 2013, a search by Viking’s contracts department was unable to locate the agreement, so deep had it sunk into the Sargasso Sea of publishing.

  —Marion Meade

  ALPINE GIGGLE WEEK

  Châlet La Bruyère

  Montana-Vermala

  (and not, as Tzortzie so invitingly puts it, Vermala, Montana)

  Switzerland, or some such place

  Kids, I have started one thousand (1,000) letters to you, but they all through no will of mine got to sounding so gloomy I was afraid of boring the combined tripe out of you, so I never sent them. Now, however, it seems just the ripe time to pen these few poor scraps, for we are having what is known as Alpine Giggle Week. Gerald left hastily for America to catch what is doubtless a last glimpse of his dear old mother, whose blood-pressure is so high there is snow on it; Sara is in bed with a pretty attack of jaundice, and rheumatism, than which nothing makes you feel heartier; the Russian trained nurse who takes care of little Patrick has gone completely Muscovite and after a week of strained silence has shut herself in her room and cannot be coaxed out; the pet monkey bit one of the townsfolk so badly that both blood-poison and a law suit set in; and I, in my role of the old family friend always right there in time of trouble, fell off an unnamed Alp, cracked my right knee-cap and ripped all the ligaments free, and it will be many a bright September day before I will be able to walk the length of the room. And how are all of you?

  However, there is always this, my beautiful, fairly new typewriter – hey look, will you? Can’t you LOOK? It is of German make but has a French keyboard, so that I can do è or é or ù or à or even ç, whenever I want to. This, up till a few days ago, took the place of sex life. And now I have my smashed knee.

  Well, well, it is certainly horrible here, but I would be a fine louse to complain, for only last month occurred nearly three of the swellest weeks I have ever had; and Goethe says that three weeks’ fun was all he ever had in his life. (Oh, I’ve been reading and reading!) A man calling himself Benchley, an alleged American, although nothing was known of him at the Embassy at Geneva, came and visited here for a few days – during which, of course, he discovered that he had tuberculosis in all the most advanced forms. There just isn’t any way to say what a blessing he was. He and I got to laughing a good deal about what the hell were we doing up here on an Alp in a last-resort t.b. colony, and a pretty long way had we come from that little three-cornered office in the Metropolitan Opera House. He also got many a hearty giggle out of the resident consumptives, who ARE pretty funny at that, and God help you if you don’t take them that way.

  There was one young man, I recall, with a cough that was a real museum piece. Mr. B. heard him going really good one afternoon, and that same night, much to his amazement, saw him dancing assiduously, clad in im
maculate evening dress. “Well, well, well,” was the comment of Our Fred. “I certainly never thought he’d wear a stiff shirt again until they put it on him with thumb-tacks.”

  There was also the evening when we built ourselves up a little beauty on champagne with hookers of cognac poured into it, and marched single file through the dark and silent street, singing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing.” This was done in deference to Mr. B.’s romantic notion of “Here’s a thing. Suppose you were an old Harvard man, lying dying on your back in a sanatorium on top of an Alp, and you suddenly heard a Harvard song roared out at midnight in the village street – wouldn’t that be the strangest thing that could happen to you?” . . . . . Although I am unable to devise such fantasies, I can at least fall in with them; and so from twelve to two, in the pouring rain and the cold dark, we marched in the pouring rain and the cold dark, and FOUGHT for the NAME of HAR-vard till the LAST white LINE was PASSED – all in order to bring one flicker of romance to an old dying Harvard man. Bobby in Edelweiss-Land: or Fun among Life’s Misfits.

  I forgot to say that there are but three ill adult Americans in Montana. Two of these are not college men, and the third, a woman, never even got through grammar school.

  So the next day we were in great shape to motor to Italy with the Murphys, which is what we did, and was I splendid going over the Simplon Pass – a jaunt which I should like to bet is enough to scare a certain commodity out of even the best-balanced. (I have recently been afflicted, when I had the use of my knees, with sporadic attacks of a malady I had never quite believed: mountain sickness, or height-heebs. It hits you when you are in the middle of a narrow ledge, and you think before you can reach the other side the whole works is going to curve outward and roll down with you to the Rhone valley, two vertical miles below. I couldn’t remember whether it was up or down that you mustn’t look; but both are wrong. The thing to do is not look at all. . . . Even the hairiest of the mountaineers when they must use one of the little wooden, rail-less bridges flung like a spider’s thread across a mile-deep abyss, the guidebook advises, always cross it blindfolded; or am I boring you with Alpine lore? . . . . Anyway I found out that what you do is close your eyes, complete the passage on your hands and knees, irritate the hell out of Gerald by this confession of weakness, and give up mountain-climbing forever. It is the most horrible feeling I ever had. Please excuse me for a minute – I have to go be a little sick on account of thinking of it.)