Quote of the Day: Dorothy Parker
Ta-Nehisi Coates digs up an old Paris Review interview with Dorothy Parker, full of great Parker observations, and Rod Dreher flags this keeper:
INTERVIEWER: You have an extensive reputation as a wit. Has this interfered, do you think, with your acceptance as a serious writer?
PARKER: I don’t want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. I didn’t mind so much when they were good, but for a long time anything that was called a crack was attributed to me—and then they got the shaggy dogs.
Dorothy Parker and Clare Booth Luce at the entrance to “21” Restaurant in New York:
“Legend has it that while walking through the front door, Clare Booth Luce stepped aside and muttered, ‘Age before beauty,’ to Dorothy Parker. Her reply, ‘Pearls before swine.’”
http://www.21club.com/web/onyc/fun_facts.jsp
Some of Dorothy Parker’s short stories contain wit and humor–”The Standard of Living” is a classic–but her fictional work is uneven. Her book and theater reviews are, I think, her best work, and earned her a place as a withering culture commentator.
Parker’s scorn could be grating, and at times seemed gratuitous. But I will be forever grateful to Parker taking on A. A. Milne and his cretinous bear in her Constant Reader column. After trying to muck through the “The House at Pooh Corner,” Parker noted that “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
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