Dorothy Parker’s long short story, “Big Blonde,” is a masterpiece worthy of Chekhov. if he had written long stories about suicidal big blondes. Parker takes a certain type, a large, attractive, high-breasted blonde, and analyzes the disastrous trajectory of her life.

 In her twenties, Hazel Morse has fun at bars and clubs. She works as a model at a wholesale store, and at night she goes out with men, many men, and gets drunk, and believes being loved by many men is desirable.  

Parker writes, “Men liked you because you were fun, and when they liked you, they took you out, and there you were. So, and successfully, she was fun.  She was a good sport. Men liked a good sport.”

The “good sport” detail is horrifying because you know she won’t be able to keep it up.  And, indeed she can’t: she has a sort of breakdown after she marries the salesman, Herbie Morse, and cries and drinks a lot instead of being a good sport. 

Hazel had been afraid not to get married. She became more and more anxious after “a couple of thousand evenings of being a good sport among her male acquaintances.”  And she isn’t as pretty as she used to be: her blonde hair is turning dark, and she is worried about keeping her job as a model.  But marriage is not the solution:  she spends her days crying after the wedding.

Hazel is not a woman of Dorothy Parker’s type, yet Parker intuits the feelings of this lower-class uneducated woman. Hazel’s husband leaves her when she turns out not to be as much fun as he thought she’d be.  Then a succession of different men “keep” her when she is in her thirties, but all leave when they discover she is not fun.

In many ways this is a story about suicide.  Everything leads up to Hazel’s attempt.  Hazel is perfectly sensible and well-organized when she goes to New Jersey to stock up on Veronal, a sleeping drug, which you needed a prescription for in New York.  She goes from drugstore to drugstore, buying bottles and bottles of the drug.  She is cool-headed,and unafraid.  She doesn’t want to be fun anymore.

I am reminded of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but Lily’s problems are less urgent than Hazel’s.  Lily feels that she’s at the end of her rope because she can’t find anyone rich to marry, so she overdoses on Veronal. But Hazel really is at the end of her rope, because she has no job skills, and men don’t like the real Hazel, and she has no choice but to go from man to man.  Hazel has no fear or regrets when she swallows all the pills. Her casual attitude is astonishing, but presumably Parker, who made four sucide attempts, knows the territory.

But the thing about suicide is that it doesn’t always work out.  In Parker’s poem about suicide, “Resume,” she ends with the phrase, “You might as well live.”  This is more or less what Hazel thinks, with a hysterical humor, when she is saved by the cleaning woman.  One of the first things Hazel does is send the cleaning woman to buy her a bottle of booze. “Oh, please, let her be able to get drunk, pleas keep her always drunk.”

How tragic it is that being “fun” is the measure of success.  One wonders, What IS fun?  How much fun is fun exactly? And perhaps if Hazel had looked that fact in the face, that “fun” of the kind she enjoyed in her 2os isn’t necessarily fun forever, she could have survived more happily. But how could she have supported herself? What happens next? There’s the question.

Despite her success in work and her reputation as a wit sy the Algonquin Round Table, Parker was an alcoholic and struggled with depression..

Her portrait of a “big blonde” is superb and tragic. It is a working-class woman’s tragedy, which I thought about deeply before I could absorb it.

I was laughing sadly over Dorothy Parker’s short stories as I tore through The Portable Dorothy Parker this afternoon. This Penguin Deluxe paperback is so beautifully -designed that you’ll want to read the cover as well. On the back cover flap there is a brief comic book biography of Parker. .

Although I don’t identify with Parker’s women, I empathize with them. They are affectionate and frustrated and eager to have relationships with men but are often paired with insensitive men.

There is a common trope in many of these stories: a man’s praise of another woman’s looks is an irritant to the woman he is dating. In “The Last Tea,” the woman responds by demonizing the woman he admires and ends up making up details about her own dating life. She claims there is a man who calls her 100 times a day to tell her she’s beautiful.

The man, identified only as “the young man in the chocolate-brown suit,” is forty minutes late for their date.  The woman sweetly declares she just got here herself, though of course she has been waiting… and waiting.   Dorothy Parker’s heroines do a lot of waiting.

He is not interested in amusing her. Instead he enthuses about a knockout of a woman he just met.

“Name’s Carol McCall.  Say, why haven’t I been told about her before?  That’s what I call a girl.  What a looker she is!”

“Oh, really?” she said.  “That’s funny – I never heard of any one that thought that.  I’ve heard people say that she was sort of nice-looking, if she wouldn’t make up so much.  But I never heard of anyone that thought she was pretty.”

“Pretty is right,” he said. “What a couple of eyes she has on her!”

“Really?”  she said.  “I never noticed them particularly.  But I haven’t seen her for a long time – sometimes people change or something.”

It is painful to read.

Well,nothing that terrible happened to me in my long-ago dating days, but I did go out with a man who kept raving about a friend’s beautiful voice. I thought it was likely that “beautiful voice” was code for “big-breasted “(N.B. I had read Nora Ephron’s essay, “A Few Words about Breasts.”)

Dorothy Parker’s heroines are not as assertive as women of the 21st century, but they certainly don’t take insults lying down. In another story, “Here We Are,” a young couple have just gotten married. On the train, the man praises a bridesmaid’s appearance. He says, “[When] I saw those two bridesmaids, I thought to myself, I thought, ‘Well, I never knew Louise could look like that.’ Why, she’d have knocked anybody’s eye out.”

The bride’s response, as you might expect, is chilly. 

“Oh, really?”  she asked.  “Funny.  Of course, everybody thought her dress and hat were lovely, but a lot of people seemed to think she looked sort of tired. People have been saying that a lot, lately.  I tell them I think it’s awfully mean of them to go around saying that around her. I tell them they’ve got to remember that Louise isn’t so terribly young any more, and they’ve got to expect her to look like that. Louise can say she’s twenty-three all she wants to, but she’s a good deal nearer twenty-seven.”

I love Dorothy Parker’s plucky women, and their humorous responses to their thoughtless men. The difference between the sexes may seem exaggerated, but there are, presumably, still women who sit by the phone waiting for him to call, like the heroine of “The Phone Call.” Saddest of all is the heroine of “The Lovely Leave,” whose husband comes home on a 24-hour leave from the army, only to learn that he must report back in a few hours. Instead of chatting to his wife, or having sex with her, as she had expected, he takes a bath and polishes his buttons.

That’s the kind of world Parker’s women live in.

First, let me tell you that Dorothy Parker’s poems and prose do not date.  They’re still fresh, witty, and broken-hearted. She knows who women are.  She knows that we all experience disillusion at one time or other.  The difference is I lounge on the floor, while she, I gather, remains vertical.  

HORIZONTALLY YOURS, by Kat

First, I curl up on the dining room floor. I am depressed, crying a bit and moaning. 

“What’s wrong, honey?” 

“Nothing.”  And it is nothing. 

 I’m lying on the floor until I feel up to crawling to the kitchen where I might find a dusty, expired antidepressant.

But then I wonder if it might have lost its anti- effect over the years. I take a vitamin instead.

Afterwards, I read some charming, funny, sad poetry by Dorothy Parker. Always the funniest person in the room, she struggled with depression all her life, but even her sad poems are comical.  

Here are five of my favorite of her poems.

NEWS ITEM

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

OBSERVATION

If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

FROM A LETTER FROM LESBIA (N.B. This is a riff on Catullus’ love poems to Lesbia from the point-of-view of his girlfriend.)

… So, praise the gods, Catullus is away!
 And let me tend you this advice, my dear:
Take any lover that you will, or may,
 Except a poet. All of them are queer.

It’s just the same- a quarrel or a kiss
 Is but a tune to play upon his pipe.
He’s always hymning that or wailing this;
 Myself, I much prefer the business type.

That thing he wrote, the time the sparrow died-
 (Oh, most unpleasant- gloomy, tedious words!)
I called it sweet, and made believe I cried;
 The stupid fool! I’ve always hated birds….

RESUME

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live

ONE PERFECT ROSE

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
     All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
     One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the flowers;
     “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
     One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
     One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
     One perfect rose.