I have taken the liberty of borrowing one of Dorothy Parker’s favourite expressions for the name of my blog as an homage to her, and also because it sums up my heartfelt response to many of life’s little surprises. I could never hope to aspire to the peculiar, acid wit that characterized the late Miss Parker, however, I share her penchant for being nosy, difficult, and dedicated to speaking her mind.
She didn’t mind much about consequences, whether it was telling the House of Un-American Activities to shove off when they asked her to name names, or leaving her estate to the NAACP. She was one of that rare breed who never betrayed her ideals even if others betrayed her.
Dorothy Parker is mostly remembered now for her bon mots at the infamous Algonquin Round Table, but that era represented only a small part of her long life. She was a working woman, a journalist, critic, literary writer and screenwriter in an era when few women led public lives. Ahead of her time, and her gender, she struggled against inequality and injustice — her radio broadcasts from Madrid during the Spanish Civil War were passionate in their defense of ordinary people pushed to the brink — and she pushed the boundaries in her own life.
Regina Barreca wrote in the introduction to Parker’s Collected Stories, that “Parker’s wit caricatures the self-deluded, the powerful, the autocratic, the vain, the sill, and the self important; it does not rely on men and small formulas, and it never ridicules the marginalized, the sideline or the outcast. When Parker goes for the jugular, its usually a vein with blueblood in it.” That reminds me of the old journalistic adage to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Parker’s penchant for ridiculing the rich is well known: the media magnate William Randolph Hearst was one of her favourite targets, and hosts. Biting the hand that fed her was another of her specialties.
But the publicly effervescent and witty Miss Parker had a dark side — she drank too much, smoked too much, was unlucky in love and she outlived nearly all of her contemporaries. She died alone in her beloved New York with only a daschund for a companion. While her writing may be largely forgotten now, her spirit lives on in this blog. I raise my glass in a toast to the indomitable MIss Parker. Hear, hear!
