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.
