Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
FEW people under 30 know who wrote these lines, but the perceptive will readily date them from the 1920s. They have that slightly posed air of gay gallantry and tender toughness that marked the era of "But Jesus we had fun." After four decades, its heroes and heroines look as comically self-conscious as silent-movie characters, trying to gather their rosebuds in vigorous deadpan. What comes through most clearly is the sentimentality lurking beneath. Hemingway, hard as nails on the outside but soft as a baby impala on the inside, was an archetypical son of the era. And Dorothy Parker, who died last week of a heart attack at 73, was one of its most representative daughters.
If one wonders today what so captivated her contemporaries, the answer is probably that she viewed the period as it liked to picture itself: a time of grace and intelligence, when irony could conquer sentimentality and laughter would always overwhelm tears. Her chief reputation was as a quipster, the Guinevere of the Algonquin Round Table. Hers was the tongue heard round the world. Her famed couplet, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses," not only set a style for lonely movie heroines but may well have spurred the development of contact lenses. During the long Victorian era, wit had hardly been considered a feminine attribute. Dorothy Parker proved again that bitchiness could be the soul of wit. When she heard the news that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked: "How can they tell?" Of Katharine Hepburn she said: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." After a Broadway evening, she reported: "The House Beautiful is the play lousy."
One Perfect Rose. In The New Yorker, she signed her book reviews, "Constant Reader." As a critic, she was really a constant housekeeper, tidying up after messy writers, but humming impudently as she went about her business. She could tweak A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner in one line:
"At this point Tonstant Weader fwowed up." She was never merely a lady wiseacre: she was a hard-working writer with serious literary aspirations. But she became one of those writers who are not so much read as heard.
Her creative output was meager by most standards: she published only seven trim collections of poetry and short stories. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay," she said, "unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damned good." In fact, her verse was carefully shod, precise, often dazzling. It was shot through with self-pity and brittle melancholy. Her frequent approach was to make herself the fall girl in the battle of the sexes, and her favorite method was the abrupt change of pace. She might gush sentimentally and then suddenly clamp on her cynic's mask:
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.
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.