Dorothy Parker What Fresh Hell is This by Marion Meade

Golly, I'm as reluctant to do this blog as I was to sit down and read this book once I got to know Dorothy better.  While I did use some of the time since the last post to get through a lot of Cornell's biography, there just isn't the zingers and humors that I expected in this fresh hell.

Dorothy's alcoholism, sense of entitlement, and overall laziness created her self-made inferno.  An alcoholic reading this book would be sorely tempted to guzzle bottles of bootleg gin and eventually legal scotch to get through it.  It is a story about someone would couldn't write.  (Finally on page 400, when Meade gets to 1964, "For the first time in her life, she had a legitimate pretext to avoid writing, 'I can't use the typewriter,' she announced with the triumph of a person who has spent fifty years seeking such an excuse."

Perhaps, like me, you are under the impression that she was a gifted and honored critic and poet. Because Ms Meade does not quote long sections of Parker's short stories, the book contains only publicly recorded quips from the Algonquin round table or quotes from her doggerel verse.

Assuming the book would read like a "you were there" at the round table, the biography noticeably lags as Parker travels abroad, moves to Hollywood, buys a farm in rural Pennsylvania, directing her sarcasm to outright abuse of her two husbands, both of whom she drove into World Wars and both of whom she found attractive primarily as drinking partners.

I don't remember Parker being a significant part of the book I read about Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman but in this biography their love/hate relationship, as well as their association with the film industry's flirtation with fronts for the Communist Party goes on too long.  Hellman, who went on to be the executor of Parker's measly estate which she willed to the NAACP, observed "that Dorothy's hunger for love and admiration, a craving that led to intense self-loathing, could only be released by the most violent behind the back denunciations."

After a section in the book that details how all of the round table died young, most before 60, from alcohol related illnesses, Meade recounts a plot line of a play Parker wanted to write about Mary and Charles Lamb "and their friends, a collection of manic-depressive Bohemians that included Coleridge and a hopped-up DeQuincy ...all her characters had comforting habits -- opium, laudanum, brandy, homicide -- that she understood and respected."  She must have concluded they were all reincarnated to lunch at the Algonquin..

And in my quest to connect all the biographies together or at least to ferret out some remote link to myself and my surroundings, two points (1) she spent two unproductive months at Yaddo pretending to be sick and not coming out of her room; and (2) she played Botticelli with of all people Zero Mostel.  Botticelli is real! not a faint wisp of a memory from 1968, Purchase NY.

Finally, since I chose the book for snippets of her repartee, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that I did come away with one quote I hadn't heard before but wished I had:  "Wasn't the Yale prom wonderful? If all the girls in attendance were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."