Today’s Poem: Convalescent
The brittle laughter of Dorothy Parker
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 whose curtain never comes down. The line of hers that recurs most often — aside from that famous quip about girls who wear glasses and the men who don’t make passes at them — comes not from a poem, but from her review of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, in which “Tonstant Weader,” assaulted one too many times by the word hummy, “fwowed up.”
Mind you, there’s much to be said for cleverness. It is its own kind of gift, and not everyone has it. As wielded by Dorothy Parker, cleverness reveals itself as an especially versatile gift, useful as a weapon, for example, but also as an entire suit of armor. At least, self-protection seems to be how she meant to use it. But Alden Whitman recalls a characteristic, yet strangely revelatory, Parker remark. “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Parker reputedly said, “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”
It’s a telling admission. Parker draws the perhaps-inevitable comparison between Edna St. Vincent Millay and herself before anyone else has a chance to. Additionally, and preemptively, she moves to self-deprecation. It’s a feint, meant to ward off an anticipated blow. But accidentally or not, the feint itself, in giving away that anticipation, reveals as well the insecurity beneath the carapace, the intuitive assumption that of course the blow is coming, and is deserved.
As, perhaps, it was. Millay, with her similarly brittle sense of irony — “I being born a woman and distressed” — presented an obvious poetic rival. But as Aaron Poochigian has noted, Millay was capable of other emotional registers. She could risk herself in her poems, in ways that transcended the level of the wit. For all the bitterness she could apply to poems about failed love, there’s also the Millay of “Recuerdo,” capable of writing straightforwardly about a remembered joy — fleeting joy, perhaps, but a small modernist spot of time called up without evident irony. To show one’s emotional hand, to have been happy and to remember that happiness without acid reflux: Millay could go there and did.
Whatever Parker could or couldn’t have done, she chose to keep her armor on, a more or less changeless emotional uniform. Still, Today’s Poem, “Convalescent,” gives us her range, which is more nuanced and complicated than we might want to give her credit for. It shows us also the craft and timing that she was always at pains to perfect. Her accentual pentameter lines, for example, begin consistently with stressed syllables: the strong attack, the brave approach, the speaker’s unflinching look in the mirror.
For all the archness of the voice — darling, look how terrible I am — in the haste to proclaim and make a joke of her own weakness we can detect, again, the little slippage of the armor. It’s the same Parker modus operandi, to criticize herself before anyone else has a chance to. In the brittle, artificial laughter, we hear the faint ring of something more painful, more vulnerable, and more true.
Convalescent
by Dorothy Parker
How shall I wail, that wasn’t meant for weeping? Love has run and left me, oh, what then? Dream, then, I must, who never can be sleeping; What if I should meet Love, once again? What if I met him, walking on the highway? Let him see how lightly I should care. He’d travel his way, I would follow my way; Hum a little song, and pass him there. What if at night, beneath a sky of ashes, He should seek my doorstep, pale with need? There he could lie, and dry would be my lashes; Let him stop his noise, and let me read. Oh, but I’m gay, that’s better off without him; Would he’d come and see me, laughing here. Lord! Don’t I know I’d have my arms about him, Crying to him, “Oh, come in, my dear!”
