Read Online Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade - Free Book Online
Authors: Marion Meade
Tags: United States, Fiction, Literary, General, Historical, History, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, 20th Century, Women Authors, Authors, American, Biography, Women, Women and Literature, American - 20th century - Biography, Parker, Dorothy, Women and literature - United States - History - 20th century
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Franklin Pierce Adams conducted a column called The Conning Tower. F.P.A. printed only the wittiest contributions and never paid a penny for any of them. It was considered a great honor to be published anonymously by Adams and to receive an invitation to his annual dinner, where he bestowed a gold watch on the poet he most admired.
There is no way of knowing how many submissions Dorothy made to The Conning Tower, The Saturday Evening Post , to all the likely markets, and how many rejections she received. Her typical subjects epitomized trivia: wrong telephone numbers, bloopers made at the bridge table, the pros and cons of nutmeg in rice pudding. In late 1914, she wrote a poem that poked fun at married women summering at resort hotels, those same hotels where she had stayed with Helen and later with her father. She had quietly and contemptuously observed the upper-middle-class matrons, imprisoned in their banalities and self-righteous bigotries. All the long summer afternoons, fixtures on shady hotel porches, they had chattered about the same diets, the same servants, the same unexamined frustrations. In winter, these women transferred their perorations and fancy sewing to city parlors, where they served tea and peppermint creams and triangular sandwiches made from the remains of last night’s chicken. Again and again in her writing Dorothy would return to these women, and for good reason. She feared becoming one of them.
“My husband says, often, ‘Elise,
You feel things too deeply, you do—’ ”
“Yes, forty a month, if you please,
Oh, servants impose on me , too.”
“I don’t want the vote for myself,
But women with property, dear—”
“I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,
She’s talking about her ‘career.’ ”
Her rapid interleaving of colloquial fragments was an original and amusing technique, but such parallelisms allowed for little progression of ideas, and the nine individual stanzas in “Any Porch,” despite their bite, soon grew repetitious. Nonetheless, she had nothing to lose by sending it to the new Condé Nast magazine, Vanity Fair.
One morning the mail brought a letter of acceptance and a check for twelve dollars. She dressed up in her best suit and hat and splashed herself with cologne. By the time she reached Vanity Fair and marched into the office of editor Frank Crowninshield, she had picked up an impressive head of steam. She told him:
“Any Porch” was “the first thing” she had ever written.
Her father had died just “a month or two” earlier. She was an orphan.
She was working at a dance school, even though she lacked “the faintest idea” how to teach, couldn’t distinguish the lame duck from the bunny hug, and was expecting to be fired any day.
She was “tiring” of a musical career, which she had learned was not a bowl of cherries.
“A literary life” would suit her far better.
Could Mr. Crowninshield give her a job?
Crownie, as he was called, who had come from a distinguished New England family and spent his youth abroad, was one of the most notorious snobs in New York. People seldom found this an offensive quality in him, for he was full of seeming modesty and charming self-deprecations. He was a gentleman of wit and urbanity—tall and slender with an elegant mustache, watchful brown eyes, and a carnation in his buttonhole. Never had he touched alcohol or tobacco or had a sexual relationship with a woman to anyone’s knowledge (although he had no objections to others’ indulging), and he scorned modern conveniences such as telephone directories, saying of someone, “But how will we ever get in touch with him? He’s not in the Social Register.” When Crownie needed to hire secretaries, he never inquired about typing and shorthand skills; what mattered to him was that a woman be well-bred and come from a “good” family. Sizing up Dorothy, he must have been impressed because he gave her an enigmatic smile and promised to keep her
There is no way of knowing how many submissions Dorothy made to The Conning Tower, The Saturday Evening Post , to all the likely markets, and how many rejections she received. Her typical subjects epitomized trivia: wrong telephone numbers, bloopers made at the bridge table, the pros and cons of nutmeg in rice pudding. In late 1914, she wrote a poem that poked fun at married women summering at resort hotels, those same hotels where she had stayed with Helen and later with her father. She had quietly and contemptuously observed the upper-middle-class matrons, imprisoned in their banalities and self-righteous bigotries. All the long summer afternoons, fixtures on shady hotel porches, they had chattered about the same diets, the same servants, the same unexamined frustrations. In winter, these women transferred their perorations and fancy sewing to city parlors, where they served tea and peppermint creams and triangular sandwiches made from the remains of last night’s chicken. Again and again in her writing Dorothy would return to these women, and for good reason. She feared becoming one of them.
“My husband says, often, ‘Elise,
You feel things too deeply, you do—’ ”
“Yes, forty a month, if you please,
Oh, servants impose on me , too.”
“I don’t want the vote for myself,
But women with property, dear—”
“I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,
She’s talking about her ‘career.’ ”
Her rapid interleaving of colloquial fragments was an original and amusing technique, but such parallelisms allowed for little progression of ideas, and the nine individual stanzas in “Any Porch,” despite their bite, soon grew repetitious. Nonetheless, she had nothing to lose by sending it to the new Condé Nast magazine, Vanity Fair.
One morning the mail brought a letter of acceptance and a check for twelve dollars. She dressed up in her best suit and hat and splashed herself with cologne. By the time she reached Vanity Fair and marched into the office of editor Frank Crowninshield, she had picked up an impressive head of steam. She told him:
“Any Porch” was “the first thing” she had ever written.
Her father had died just “a month or two” earlier. She was an orphan.
She was working at a dance school, even though she lacked “the faintest idea” how to teach, couldn’t distinguish the lame duck from the bunny hug, and was expecting to be fired any day.
She was “tiring” of a musical career, which she had learned was not a bowl of cherries.
“A literary life” would suit her far better.
Could Mr. Crowninshield give her a job?
Crownie, as he was called, who had come from a distinguished New England family and spent his youth abroad, was one of the most notorious snobs in New York. People seldom found this an offensive quality in him, for he was full of seeming modesty and charming self-deprecations. He was a gentleman of wit and urbanity—tall and slender with an elegant mustache, watchful brown eyes, and a carnation in his buttonhole. Never had he touched alcohol or tobacco or had a sexual relationship with a woman to anyone’s knowledge (although he had no objections to others’ indulging), and he scorned modern conveniences such as telephone directories, saying of someone, “But how will we ever get in touch with him? He’s not in the Social Register.” When Crownie needed to hire secretaries, he never inquired about typing and shorthand skills; what mattered to him was that a woman be well-bred and come from a “good” family. Sizing up Dorothy, he must have been impressed because he gave her an enigmatic smile and promised to keep her
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