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.