Before I tentatively embarked on an adult life of my own, what bliss to discover a woman who, on being asked how big an apartment she wanted, said: "All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends"; who, on hearing an acquaintance had hurt herself in London, assumed the poor girl must have injured herself sliding down a barrister; and who once sent a first-night telegram to an actress which read "A hand on your opening and may your parts grow bigger".
This woman was to improve my own experience of myself immensely. That Dorothy Parker died in l967 at the age of 73 only made her all the more remarkable. In her heyday, women weren't supposed to be witty about sex or cynical about romance. All very well in these sex-satiated times to think of Parker as old hat, but in terms of women's experiential and emotional history she was a veritable pioneer. It would not - indeed, could not - be until the late 1960s that women in any significant number caught up with her.
In the 1920s, privileged women - privileged in that they were urban creatures living in highly-developed societies (Paris and New York spring to mind) - sought to expand their roles beyond those of wife or mother. These gals bobbed their hair and sniffed cocaine, danced the Charleston, necked and got "caught"(their quaint euphemism for unwanted pregnancy), and, of course, society considered it all dangerously permissive.
Dorothy Parker's verse gave glimpses of the licence they took and weighed its emotional cost long before any of us baby-boomers had the remotest clue about where the experience of being free to lead an independent life would lead us. We didn't have apartments or lovers or any understanding of our burgeoning sexuality. What in the 1920s appeared unique (or at least the province of the very few), only began to become the country of the many in the late 1960s.
At the time they first appeared, Parker's verses were thought strong stuff, going recklessly far in asserting a woman's equal rights in a sexual relationship, including the right to sexual infidelity. These women were "fast" (for "fast" read "promiscuous") and naturally that was considered a very bad thing indeed. Loose women were supposed to suffer but Dorothy insisted on poking fun at the very notion:
Oh gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;
The second love was water, in a clear white cup;
The third love was his, and the fourth was mine;
And after that, I always get them all mixed up.
To make the leap from woman-as-victim to woman-as-survivor takes more than a broken heart or two - it takes attitude, and Dorothy had that aplenty. She was forever unable to say that a human situation was either tragic or comic - for her it was an inextricable tangle of disaster and joy, with the likelihood of experiencing both well-nigh simultaneously. In that sense she speaks to us almost the same way as Oscar Wilde does, aware and accepting of the inherent paradox at the heart of the human condition, particularly where the business of love is concerned.
In his excellent introduction to The Uncollected Dorothy Parker, Stuart Silverstein sees Parker's public fame as having begun with Alexander Woollcott's 1934 magazine profile of her. By then she was 40 and had already published three collections of popular and well-received poetry. However, it was Woollcott's essay, in which he catalogued many of the droll and often lethal quips that had been attributed to Dorothy over the preceding 15 years, that made her an instant celebrity and sealed her fate as a witty, wisecracking cynic. As Silverstein points out, this overwhelmed any other public reputation that she could possibly earn - which is a shame, as her poetry, short stories, essays and journalism deserve a much wider audience.
Within the small and clever circle that made the Algonquin Hotel a place of pilgrimage for years thereafter, she was defiantly one of the boys, and for the first time in recorded 20th-century female experience she kissed and told about what kind of delicious trouble being one of the boys could get you into.
In assembling her previously uncollected early poetry, Silverstein has done the Dorothy Parker fan-base a favour. Although none of it is particularly memorable, one can see how the quality of her verse improved vastly with practice, as she became more proficient with the mechanics of the incongruous ending. His introductory essay is superb, and for those who aren't fascinated enough to devour an entire biography, it will do very nicely in explaining the life and times of the little Jewish girl who, as she said herself, was only trying to be cute.
Jeananne Crowley is an actor and a writer