Today’s Poem: Convalescent

The brittle laughter of Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

In a New York Times obituary, Alden Whitman (who wrote most of the Times obits in the 1960s and 70s) evoked Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), seminal New Yorker writer and member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, as “a little woman with a dollish face and basset-hound eyes, in whose mouth butter hardly ever melted.” Her fellow Algonquian Alexander Woollcott, even less flatteringly, is said to have described her as “so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” Whitman also labeled Parker a “literary wit,” an appellation both apt and telling. She wrote both poetry and short fiction, yet on her death both those art forms were subsumed, in the public memories of people who had known her, into the larger category of wit, which might or might not be a polite way of saying bitch.

For better or worse, it’s as a wit that Dorothy Parker largely perdures: the arch, lacerating voice of a 1920s screwball comedy…