[ed. I appended some of Ms. Parker's best quotes at the end of this article.]
Today In Literature
On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the “Reign of Terror” she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. This last stint was only a two-month stand-in for Robert Benchley, and altogether she reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a fifty-year career, but Parker’s Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.
Parker’s debut column at Vanity Fair in 1918 was that of a twenty-four-year-old newcomer filling in for P. G. Wodehouse, but it gave notice: of the five musical comedies reviewed, one got “if you don’t knit, bring a book”; another got a review that did not include any names, because she was “not going to tell on them”; another did not get reviewed at all, Parker deciding instead to review the performance of the woman sitting next to her as she searched for her lost glove. “I went into the Plymouth Theater a comparatively young woman,” she said of a production of Tolstoy’s Redemption, “and I staggered out of it, three hours later, twenty years older. . . .” More to her taste, and a relatively rare recipient of her good will, was Sem Benelli’s The Jest: “The simple, homely advice of one who has never been outside of these broadly advertised United States, is only this: park the children somewhere, catch the first city-bound train, and go to the Plymouth Theater, even if you have to trade in the baby’s Thrift Stamps to buy the tickets. The play will undoubtedly run from now on.”
The more famous lines — that a Katharine Hepburn performance ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, etc. — came later, and by this time she was herself a favorite target. Her quips and habits became characters in a half-dozen plays — to the point that when a publisher offered big money for her autobiography, she said that she couldn’t because she’d be sued for plagiarism. When introduced to one young man who, she’d been told, had lifted some of her witticisms, she innocently asked him what his play was about:
“Well, it’s rather hard to describe, except that it’s a play against all ‘-isms.’” “Except plagiarism?”
By 1925 Parker confessed to being weary of reviewing plays, and by this time her own writing career was well underway. So too were the drinking, the suicide attempts, and the string of broken relationships — including the one with Hemingway, which declined from her praising his “grace under pressure” novels to his writing of ‘Dottie under hatchet’ poems:
Little drops of grain alcohol
Little slugs of gin
Make the mighty notions
Make the double chin –
Lovely Mrs. Parker in the Algonquin
Loves her good dog Robinson
Keeps away from sin
Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses
Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses —
via:
Favorite Quotes
Today In Literature
On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the “Reign of Terror” she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. This last stint was only a two-month stand-in for Robert Benchley, and altogether she reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a fifty-year career, but Parker’s Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.
Parker’s debut column at Vanity Fair in 1918 was that of a twenty-four-year-old newcomer filling in for P. G. Wodehouse, but it gave notice: of the five musical comedies reviewed, one got “if you don’t knit, bring a book”; another got a review that did not include any names, because she was “not going to tell on them”; another did not get reviewed at all, Parker deciding instead to review the performance of the woman sitting next to her as she searched for her lost glove. “I went into the Plymouth Theater a comparatively young woman,” she said of a production of Tolstoy’s Redemption, “and I staggered out of it, three hours later, twenty years older. . . .” More to her taste, and a relatively rare recipient of her good will, was Sem Benelli’s The Jest: “The simple, homely advice of one who has never been outside of these broadly advertised United States, is only this: park the children somewhere, catch the first city-bound train, and go to the Plymouth Theater, even if you have to trade in the baby’s Thrift Stamps to buy the tickets. The play will undoubtedly run from now on.”The more famous lines — that a Katharine Hepburn performance ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, etc. — came later, and by this time she was herself a favorite target. Her quips and habits became characters in a half-dozen plays — to the point that when a publisher offered big money for her autobiography, she said that she couldn’t because she’d be sued for plagiarism. When introduced to one young man who, she’d been told, had lifted some of her witticisms, she innocently asked him what his play was about:
“Well, it’s rather hard to describe, except that it’s a play against all ‘-isms.’” “Except plagiarism?”
By 1925 Parker confessed to being weary of reviewing plays, and by this time her own writing career was well underway. So too were the drinking, the suicide attempts, and the string of broken relationships — including the one with Hemingway, which declined from her praising his “grace under pressure” novels to his writing of ‘Dottie under hatchet’ poems:
Little drops of grain alcohol
Little slugs of gin
Make the mighty notions
Make the double chin –
Lovely Mrs. Parker in the Algonquin
Loves her good dog Robinson
Keeps away from sin
Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses
Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses —
via:
Favorite Quotes
- “You can drag a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”on being challenged to use the word Horticulture in a sentence.
- “Lips that taste of tears, they say/ Are the best for kissing.”
- “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
- "Too fucking busy, and vice versa." (reply to her editor who was bugging her for her belated work while she was on her honeymoon)
- "Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.”
- “I wish I could drink like a lady / I can take one or two at the most / Three and I'm under the table / Four and I'm under the host”
- “If you want to see what God thinks of money, just look at all the people He gave it to.”
- “My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.”
