Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (37 page)

Apart from one or two glasses of wine at bedtime, amounts that scarcely counted as drinking in her opinion, Dorothy tried to stay on the wagon. Hard liquor was not recommended at those altitudes, but some days she didn’t care; getting drunk was a necessity. One of those days she frightened Patrick and Honoria when she narrowly missed killing their canary. She offered to help Honoria clean the bird’s cage, but her hands were so unsteady that she dropped it.

Liquor, she found, did little to lighten her somber mood, which she described to Benchley as like having the “slow, even heebs.” At times she caught herself examining a clean white towel that the hospital had thumb-tacked above the washstand. “It’s a good thing to look at. You can go all around the edges very slowly, and then you can do a lot of counting the squares made by the ironed-out creases.” She felt bushed—her favorite word for exhausted—without having done anything at all, and she also felt curiously cut off from the world at the foot of the mountain. The Wall Street crash, for example, might have taken place on another planet. Since she owned no stocks, the trouble in the market had no effect on her finances, which suffered from major depressions year in, year out, but she wrote anxiously to friends asking if anyone they knew had been wiped out.

On Thanksgiving Day the Palace Hotel served veal for lunch, not unusual because nine meals out of ten featured veal. Afterward, Dorothy wrote a homesick, eleven-page letter to her sister saying how much she missed “youse guys.” Christmas proved more cheerful because company arrived: John Dos Passos and his bride, Katy, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, and Pauline’s sister, Virginia Pfeiffer. They celebrated an all-American Christmas with a tree and a goose that Ernest had shot especially for their dinner. The bird was roasted in the hospital kitchen and served with mashed chestnuts and a flaming brandied pudding decorated with holly. The guests were eager to spend their days on the ski slopes, where Hemingway taught Honoria and Baoth how to herringbone and sidestep. Dorothy, who viewed a ski slope with the same enthusiasm as she did an electric chair, declined to accompany them.

In the evenings, Dos Passos recalled, Dorothy made “her usual funny cracks with her eyes full of tears,” and he described them eating cheese fondue and drinking the local white wine while laughing their heads off, which suggests that the merriment was a bit forced. For five or six days the Christmas visitors brought a respite of sorts, but after they departed the little group was alone again, and Dorothy began to bombard Benchley with cables and letters. She wrote,

SEE BY PARIS HERALD HOOVER SAYS NO NEED OF PESSIMISM EVERYONE HERE GREATLY ENCOURAGED STOP LOVE AND HOW ARE YOU.

YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR.

And the plain truth:

DEEPLY SUNK LOVE YOU SOMETHING TERRIBLE.

The atmosphere of death in Montana-Vermala was inescapable. She dreaded going out for a walk and dreaded meeting people who stopped to admire Timothy. Some of them told her that they had a Dandie Dinmont at home, but of course they would never see home again. No doubt the Murphys sensed her mood, because when she talked about going home for a while, they made no attempt to dissuade her. She decided to spend a month in New York to take care of business and collect her five-hundred-dollar O. Henry prize for “Big Blonde” before rejoining Sara and Gerald. Mid-January 1930, she and Timothy braved the terrifying funicular descent down the mountainside on the first leg of their journey home.

When the
De Grasse
docked at the end of January, Benchley was on hand to welcome her. A crowd of newspaper reporters trailed them back to the New Weston Hotel, where they jammed themselves into Dorothy’s suite and began asking questions that immediately irritated her. She felt far from comical, but they expected to be entertained. Curled up on the sofa, with Timothy blinking soberly next to her, she insisted that she was not a wit but “only a hardworking woman, who writes for a living and hates writing more than anything else in the world.” She intended to stay a month, she said, before returning to Switzerland to finish a novel whose subject she did not care to reveal. She tried changing the subject to the economic situation and wondered whether people were nicer now that they were poorer, but the press seemed uninterested in serious subjects. When somebody asked what she thought of the New York skyline, she’d had enough of dumb questions and snapped, “Put a little more gin in mine!” as she shooed them out.

A few days later, Sara Murphy’s sister threw a welcome-home party for Dorothy. The chief topic of conversation was of course the illness of Patrick Murphy. Archibald MacLeish, meeting her for the first time, reported to Ernest Hemingway that her reputation for being affectionate with her right hand and murdering people with her left had always made him fear her. When she began to talk about the Murphys, “she took me in about eight minutes. She may be serving me up cold at this minute for all I know but I doubt it and if she is it doesn’t matter.”

After the months in Montana-Vermala, she had to reaccustom herself to the quick pace of Manhattan life. While she was away, her friends had been busy: Don Stewart wrote a successful comedy that opened on Broadway in February and so did Marc Connelly, whose biblical play with an all-black cast had finally found a producer. With
The Green Pastures
, Marc finally proved he could accomplish a work of consequence without George Kaufman. Between attending first nights and meeting with Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, who were growing concerned by now, Dorothy tried to resurrect
Sonnets in Suicide
but knew it was useless. It would never be finished, and she began to grow angry at herself for listening to those who had encouraged her to start the book in the first place. “Write novels, write novels, write novels—that’s all they can say. Oh, I do get so sick and tired, sometimes.” A poem required days to write, a short story perhaps several months, but a novel seemed to last forever. The process seemed unnatural, for she had neither the taste nor the endurance for marathons. Knowing that most of her friends, writers like Benchley and Lardner for whom she had the highest regard, were also sprinters did not make her feel any happier about acknowledging her limits.

That winter she drank with Benchley at Tony’s. Aleck Woollcott purchased an apartment on the East River (named Wit’s End by Dorothy), where she turned up on Sunday mornings for his weekly breakfast party and kept his guests entertained with her wry observations. Outwardly she appeared calm, but actually she was an emotional wreck. March passed without her booking a return passage to Europe or solving the problem of the novel. It would have been sensible to tell Guinzburg that even though she wished desperately to write it she was “quite incapable of it—I’m a short-distance writer.” Almost from the start, she realized that the autobiographical material was “too painful” and that, moreover, a novel would take a very long time to complete because she wrote so slowly. This was the reason she had so little to show for her months abroad. Leveling with Guinzburg was impossible or perhaps never crossed her mind. Instead, she panicked and drank a bottle of shoe polish. While it failed to kill her, the shoe polish made her quite ill, and she was hospitalized.

Since
Sonnets in Suicide
had almost proved a prophetic title, Oppenheimer and Guinzburg were quick to reassure her of their understanding. Submitting to
force majeure
, Viking accepted the fact that no Dorothy Parker novel would top the best-seller list in 1930, even though Guinzburg did not give up hope that eventually she would fulfill her contract. To make the best of the situation and to recoup Viking’s investment, he scooped up thirteen of her short stories and sketches and announced the publication of a collection, called
Laments for the Living,
published in June, on Friday the thirteenth. The book’s centerpiece was “Big Blonde.” It also included “Mr. Durant” and “The Wonderful Old Gentleman,” as well as some minor pieces, like the tiresome “Mantle of Whistler,” which Viking threw in as filler.

At the end of May she left for Montana-Vermala. GOODBYE DARLING, George Oppenheimer cabled to the
Leviathan,
AND ALL LOVE WRITE ME SOON.

The painful issue of the unfinished novel was resolved, but probably her greatest accomplishment in New York was that she made no effort to contact John Garrett. She had finally been able to accept his rejection. Garrett did not marry until 1945. He and his wife, Madeleine, had no children, but after his retirement, when he was living in Martha’s Vineyard, he became director of the Edgartown Boys Club. In the summer of 1961, at the Martha’s Vineyard airport, he sent his chauffeur into the airline office to pick up some tickets, then fired a gun into his mouth and blew his head apart.

She found Switzerland in summertime, especially the lakes, to be extravagantly beautiful, even though she still detested the Alps and continued to regard Montana-Vermala as a village of death houses. It did not surprise her to learn that the country’s per capita consumption of alcohol was the highest in Europe.

In her absence, Patrick’s condition had improved so greatly that the Murphys left the hospital. They now lived in a chalet about a mile away and had purchased a house in town, which they refurbished as a nightclub, decorated with mirrors and red stars and named Harry’s (after Harry’s American Bar in Paris), a legitimate business open to the public and featuring good food and a dance band from Munich. Bars always comforted Dorothy, and Harry’s was one of the bright spots of her summer, a place familiar and fun that reminded her of home.

At the end of July, Benchley came over for a visit. They met him at Sierre with a car. After several welcoming rounds of Cinzanos at the depot bar, they motored up to the village because he was no more enthusiastic about the funicular than was Dorothy. His arrival put them all in a bright mood, but for Dorothy it was pure pleasure. Though he stayed at the Regina Hotel while she was at the Murphys, they immediately fell into their old routine of drinking and talking until dawn. At noon, they woke with hangovers and met for lunch at Harry’s to greet the new day with a drink. She was working diligently on a story for
Cosmopolitan
, about a pair of nervous, quarreling newlyweds on their honeymoon. She expected the handsome payment of twelve hundred dollars for “Here We Are.” During the afternoons, she spent several hours at her typewriter before rushing out to Harry’s to meet Benchley and the Murphys. One evening after Dorothy and Benchley closed up Harry’s and the local casino, they walked along the dark, silent streets when it suddenly occurred to him that somewhere in the desolate village there might be a lonely Harvard man. If he were condemned to live in this mining camp, Benchley declared, nothing would be more inspiring than to hear football songs, and so they began to sing “With the Crimson in Triumph Flashing,” a serenade more for themselves than for any Harvard men in the neighborhood.

A week later, they made a trip to Venice with Sara and Gerald, staying at the lavish Grand Hotel and enjoying the Venetian sights. They visited glassblowing factories and stared at Titians; they ate lunch at Florian’s and swam at the Lido in the afternoons. For practically every other meal, they dined on scampi. Late in the evenings, when they had run out of amusements, they entertained themselves with a Ouija board. At first they received fairly routine messages from an American woman named Alice who claimed to have died while traveling in Europe but soon a personality who identified herself as Elinor Wylie came through and began to make ghoulish announcements about various crimes and a few poisonings. Alarmed, they abandoned the Ouija board.

The last two days of the holiday were spent in Munich, where they drank beer at the Hofbrauhaus, attended a “not so hot” play, and went sightseeing in the rain. Gerald shopped for records by an unknown singer named Marlene Dietrich from a film called
Der Blaue Engel
and Dorothy bought a dachshund, Eiko von Blutenberg, whose lineage was so noble that “he has no sense and therefore is at ease in any drawing room.” He was accustomed to a diet of bratwurst because he turned up his royal nose when she offered him a dog biscuit. After they put Benchley on the sleeper for Paris, she took Eiko back to the Regina Palace Hotel and began considering a change of name—perhaps something a little less formidable. Eventually she renamed him Robinson, which was probably a tribute to the Swiss Family Robinson. Montana-Vermala seemed less lonely with the haughty Robinson trotting at her ankles.

In the meantime,
Laments for the Living
had been published. Sales started off exceedingly well and the book went through four editions during the first month, but Dorothy thought she deserved critical success as well. The first batch of reviews she received from George Oppenheimer were, on the whole, quite good, but a few scorned her stories as slight. It was on the uncomplimentary critiques that she fastened. All the reviews, she cabled him, SEEM TO ME BEYOND WORDS AWFUL AM SICK THAT MY BOOK FOR YOU IS SO BAD PRETTY DISCOURAGED ABOUT EVER WRITING AGAIN. She wondered whether an intelligent reviewer had given her a decent notice. Oppenheimer replied, “They are dancing in the streets, Mrs. Parker, and drinking magnums of champagne in your honor and yet you sit there and say you will never write another book for shame.” Her neediness was so great that even Oppenheimer’s glib reassurances sounded good. He hoped that she would write eight or nine books, so that The Viking Press could pay its rent and “George can have enough money to go to Europe and see you,” because he missed her so unmercifully that he “couldn’t even go near ‘21’ without shedding tears.”

Apart from the story for
Cosmopolitan
, she completed only a few poems, one of them a memoriam for a tubercular woman of her acquaintance, aged twenty-five, who had recently died.

Once Benchley left, there were visits from other old friends that brought less pleasure. At the end of August, Scott Fitzgerald spent a week in Montana-Vermala; Zelda had entered treatment at a psychiatric hospital near Geneva, and his preoccupation with her schizophrenia and his family’s disintegration had left him insensitive to the agonies of others. One night at Harry’s, talking about the disappointments life had dealt him, he turned to Sara and said, “I don’t suppose you have ever known despair.” Dorothy was furious at him. After Scott, Don and Bea Stewart arrived. Later Stewart admitted finding the town far more oppressive than he had imagined from Dorothy’s descriptions. Despite her jokes and Gerald’s Marlene Dietrich records, the Stewarts suffered from bad dreams and insomnia, and after a few days they hurried back to Paris.