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.
