Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown

When I think of Dorothy Parker’s hangovers, and I do, the image that comes to mind is that of the U.S.S. Arizona. A sunken battleship resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, the Arizona is slowly leaking oil as you read this. The ship loaded up on 1.5 million gallons of fuel on December 6, 1941, and has approximately half a million gallons to go. Parker drank with such consistency and complaint that I suspect her headache is proceeding on a similar schedule, throbbing from beyond the grave, ever so slightly, to this day. References to alcohol are rife in her poems (the famous quatrain “after three I’m under the table / after four I’m under my host” may be apocryphal but it’s also emblematic). But it is in her weekly books column for The New Yorker, “Constant Reader,” comprised of thirty-four entries between 1927 and 1928, that one senses that she is this close to asking the reader for an aspirin.

Some of this is the brilliantly honed shtick of a standup comedian. Some of it is Parker being an alcoholic. But some of those allusions to unproductive mornings and squinting unpreparedness belie an unease with the endeavor of book reviewing itself. She writes, at times, as if the column were happening to her: “This thing is getting me. I should have stopped before this and gone back to my job of cleaning out ferry boats.” Or, more bluntly: “Here it is high noon, and this piece should have been finished last Friday. I’ve been putting it off like a visit to my aunt.” Years later, when given the opportunity to select her own greatest hits for a Viking compendium, she included precisely none of these reviews.

Yet “Constant Reader” is a work of art, or at least a seminal artifact, which shows the evolution of her comic form and, therefore, of ours. It came into existence during the hugely creative seven-year period, between 1926 and 1933, when Parker published five books, including her best-selling début, “Enough Rope,” and “Death and Taxes.” Despite her best efforts to kill a successful writing career with booze and Hollywood, Parker’s legacy is also like that of the Arizona: enduring, grand, and forever leaking into the shallow waters of other people’s prose. If you are a woman who has dared to take a phrase and turn it, you will have been compared, unfavorably, with Dorothy Parker. This comparison, never a writer’s own, mind you, has the benefit of being not only reductive and disrespectful but baiting, practically begging readers to scoff at it (Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy). Do let me know if you find that aspirin.

There is no need for this writer or any other to bang the drum for this undiscovered rookie. Parker owns her throne at the Algonquin and her reputation as one of her century’s great wits. She was adored, emulated, and compensated in her time (for someone who loved to complain about money, she made a ton of it). I will only add that she invented American comedy as we now deploy it. (Or, as we make our attempts.) She did this by making it beautiful. She refined the wisecrack, and in particular she packed the aside with meaning (from her review of a book titled “Happiness”: “ ‘I have observed many cows,’ says the professor, in an interesting glimpse of autobiography . . . ”) She also had a way of putting society on trial while, at the same time, taking its side, a magic trick if there ever was one. There’s no dismissing her sharp one-liners: “I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.” But, as these reviews show, she liked to develop a joke at leisure, so that by the time the kicker came its impact was felt as far back as the first line. For such a self-professed grump, she never left a reader hanging after a seemingly desultory setup. There was always a reward. And the jokes still work. A century later, one has to take teeth-gnashing “damn, that’s good” breaks from Parker, just as one does from the most stirring prose, the kind she so longed to write in novel form but never did.

All that said, you’re likely in no mood to read a bunch of century-old book reviews, cover to cover. Not to worry, you’re in good company. Collections are a dish best served buffet-style—and Parker would be the last to shame you. If you take “Constant Reader” at her word, she was rarely in the mood to slog through a book, any book, and she made her feelings abundantly plain. Watch your head, there’s much talk of tomes being hurled across the room. At a certain point, she reads a book called “Appendicitis” and one gets the impression she’d prefer the condition to the assignment. (She proceeds to credit the book for putting her to sleep and maligns a better one for keeping her up.) However, if you do decide to ingest “Constant Reader” whole, you will emerge steeped in the atmosphere of The New Yorker (the column began two years after the magazine was founded), not to mention the politics and celebrity culture of the late nineteen-twenties. You will also get a chance to watch a legend fight her way out of a corner with the dependability of format but without the benefit of time.

Parker was thirty-four when she started “Constant Reader,” and many elements of her essential Parkerness were already in place (her irreverent theatre reviews had already got her fired from Vanity Fair). But with the column, she reinvents herself as a neurasthenic bear, dragged out of hibernation. “Emotionally, I am a bridge-player of the manic-depressive type . . . ” She aches, she trembles, she longs for her youth. Début authors vex her, popular ones perplex her, seasoned ones let her down. Of the Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne: “I have a very strong feeling about the whimsicality of Milne. I’m having it right this minute. It’s in my stomach.” Or take the third line of her very first column: “It is but fair to remark that this is my virgin try at any of the works of Mr. Hamilton; and perhaps it is necessary to eat seven before acquiring the taste.” This is someone who felt all pleasantries had been dispensed with after typing the title of a book and the full name of its author.

It’s important to note that these reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike. Of the novelist James Branch Cabell, she concludes that, though “his books are of the golden great,” she “couldn’t read all the way through one of them, to save my mother from the electric chair.” You want bridled, you can look elsewhere. At, say, our contemporary idea of a “pan” or a “takedown.” Please. Are we a consortium of kindness? A society of good will? No. But it takes us four times as long to kill our prey, and, too often, our motivations are so convoluted that future generations will wonder what brought forth this screed of violence. Part of this is because the line between the personal and the critical has grown thin. And self-serious. Our literary criticism features a great deal of “I,” the pronoun most likely to overstay its welcome. In the right hands, this conflation of narrative and critique can have dazzling results. But on the whole? Imagine waiting twenty minutes for a medical diagnosis while your doctor walks you through her commute. Whereas Parker’s use of “I” is practically a “we.” She approached “Constant Reader” assuming a shorthand with her audience, as if they shared her assessments, and, hooray, now we can bitch and moan about the thing together.

Parker was not the only fearsome critic of her day. At the top of that list would have been Edmund Wilson, whose reviews ran concurrent with hers in The New Republic. Wilson dressed down formidable opponents, like E. E. Cummings (“his emotions are conventional and simple in the extreme”), or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in his words, “has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” He’d also championed “The Waste Land.” Surely, Parker had no desire to be measured against that sort of rigor.

To read Parker is to get an everyman’s sense of the late-twenties literary scene. She had a penchant for low-hanging fruit—children’s books, comic strips, Margot Asquith, Emily Post—anything that allowed her to tangle with silly material on adult grounds. One could argue there’s something cowardly about her selections (though she did review Hemingway and Sinclair, and laud her compeers Mencken and Lardner). Not only were the books easy targets but they were also generally selected after their life cycles had begun, having been digested by other critics who’d formed their opinions from scratch. Parker took those earlier reviews into account, then gave herself the last word.

“Constant Reader” is a people’s snapshot of the Jazz Age bookshelf. Parker may have avoided tough targets, but still she knew how to point and shoot, making short work of, for instance, a romance novel penned by Signor Benito Mussolini. When she got around to talking about the book, that is. I would not want to be a regular, non-dictator author during this time, receiving a call from my publisher that my book is being reviewed by the Dorothy Parker, running to the nearest newsstand . . . only to wade through six hundred words on the weather before getting to my own obituary.

For all Parker’s megrims, performed or sincere, her delight in filleting a book is hard to disguise. “There is nothing better for that morning headache,” she wrote, “than taking a little issue.” But the same bees do buzz around her bonnet, over and over. Her hate has more facets than her love. She goes easier on biographies and autobiographies, on big books about serious persons with noteworthy lives: “For fine and honest biography, you can’t do much better than ‘François Villon,’ by D. B. Wyndham Lewis.” She also likes a true highbrow. She finds “Journal of Katherine Mansfield” to be “a beautiful book and an invaluable one.” But step into her arena (dialogue, style, humor, etiquette) and her eyes narrow. Of “Crude,” the first and seemingly last novel by Robert Hyde: “A few more of these young mezzo-Hemingways, and I am going to put on the black bombazine and go Henry James.”