DOTTIE & SAM

Dorothy Parker is contemptuous and irascible – eternally pissed off and never satisfied. Or, it seems that way to anyone not knowing her. She says marrying her husband was just to get a nice Gentile name. She routinely ridicules her employer Vogue, hates women (“they get on my nerves”), loves men but finds them dull, drinks like a fish (hangovers “ought to be in the Smithsonian under glass”), flaunts her sexual prowess (annoying Hemingway), takes painkillers, had abortions and miscarriages, and disdains America’s constant obsession with money (while hailing from wealthy Jewish stock – a grandfather prospering in “gents furnishings,” J. Henry Rothschild being her father). She’s acerbic, witty, irreverent, radical, hypercritical, and anti-establishment (until it brushes against her Gatsby lifestyle).

One day Noel Coward looks at her and remarks, “You almost look like a man,” to which she replies, “So do you.” On another day, at the Round Table, she notices other women looking at a man whose shirt is unbuttoned, and she says, “Well, Frank, I see your fly is open higher than usual.” Incurably pessimistic she expects negativity whenever the smallest things happen. The doorbell rings and she announces her most famous line: “What fresh hell is this?” Yet by the 1930s she’s become the most socially sought after woman in New York, by 1927 the “wittiest woman in America.” As she ages she knows her wilder days are numbered (“I’ll be thirty in a minute,” “Time doth flit, Oh shit”), and in her autumn years, struggling to pay bills, her best companion is a dachshund named Robinson.

It’s the weekend and again I slip down into the All Night Cafe. I’m in the mood for another nightwatch into the subversive. I stop inside and to my right I see Mr. Samuel Beckett pounding away at a classic portable Corona #3 (black, with leather carrying case) – a collector’s item today, even though it’s turned into an ugly workhorse with sticky keys. I motion to him, but his gaze is trained on his work and a cigarette whose ashes have already collected between the Z and M keys. I get no acknowledgment back, but it’s okay. The man’s busy.

To my left and in the corner, at a large table, sits Ms. Parker. She’s looking straight at me and motions me over. A lump swells in my throat and I mumble “oh shit.” I put on a smile and walk over to her table. There are eight chairs lined all around the table, and she points to the one she wants me to take. Suddenly I find myself sitting directly across from her and looking eye-to-eye. I take a deep breath and then hear myself impulsively letting go with my only thought. Out of what I could only surmise is nervousness, I smile and ask, “So … what fresh hell is this?!” She laughs and puts on a Mona Lisa grin dispelling any question of losing her edge for sarcasm and disapprobation. Mona Lisa she is not.

“You don’t like me, do you?” she asks, not wasting any time cutting through the formalities. I say, “I don’t know. I’m not sure if reputations which precede us are always a good thing.” She nods. I say that all I know is what I’ve read about her. She responds, “Be careful what you read. I lived in a cliquish world where reputations were more important than substance and character. I chose that world because I was born into it and was successful at it. What do you expect?”

“Character is something you hide,” she adds. “You almost shun it as it exposes the truth and blows the very cover you need to survive a night of debauchery. You’re supposed to wake up, with hangover, and feign invisibility. You’re expected to invite more of it. If you don’t you become insipid and passe, and before you know it you’re no longer writing for Vogue and Vanity Fair. As a writer you had to be ‘clever and entertaining,’ and when your boss says never to forget ‘that little old lady sitting in Dubuque,’ you have to write about serious subjects sandwiched between polo seasons and ‘how to be idle and rich.’ You figure it out. Real character would have you divorcing the polo crowds and moving in with the lady from Dubuque.”

I say, “So, it’s a little like Spinoza or Jefferson saying religion is okay when taken in small doses?” “Something like that,” she says. “It’s about balance. Otherwise you lose who you are, your soul. There’s something in my Prussian-Jewish heritage that keeps me grounded, never allows me to forget who I am. You don’t understand because you’re not Jewish.”

I decide to change the subject. “So, what are all the other chairs for?” She responds, “We’ll, you’ve heard of the Round Table haven’t you? We called it “the Gonk.” I’m expecting guests tonight.” Suddenly the room fills with the ambiance of the famous Algonquin Hotel – opened in 1902 on West 44^th Street in Manhattan, originally conceived as an apartment hotel, then repurchased and converted into full-time residencies (resold several times, tragically sold off to foreign investors, and today owned by Connecticut company overseeing Marriotts and Hiltons). The Round Table is just one more thing Dorothy loves to spread malicious stories about, even as a member – all “hypocrites and show-offs.” Even an ordinary banquet meeting looks like a “road company for the Last Supper.”

As she speaks I think of what might have been Paris’ equivalent to her Gonk. That would be the Right Bank with its posh hotels, marbled lobbies, and the literary salons. Even the artist’s garret in a small way, since the writers she frequently draws around her are young, ambitious, and full of “cheeky” attitude. But it doesn’t matter to Dorothy (“Dottie” as they call her) – as long as they have talent.

Alas, the Paris rain, her loneliness there (many “nunnish months”), her nonexistent French, her subsequent depressions, drugs, and most of all her abhorrence at witnessing a bull fight in Spain (for which she never forgave Hemingway) slows her poetry and fiction-writing. Overall, despite being feted in Paris by admirers, her memory of Europe is basically “rain and death entwined.” Besides drinking, the only thing which brings a smile to her face is the purchase of a Scottish terrier. It makes Paris bearable.

For a moment I find myself finding some common ground with this woman. “You spoke openly about animal cruelty, didn’t you.” “Hemingway lured me to Spain where he spoke proudly of its history and customs. Then he took me to a bull fight. The first thing I saw was a bull gorging a picador’s horse and its intestines falling out everywhere. Then to watch the senseless killing of animals for public amusement! I don’t give a damn if a matador gets killed because of his own stupidity. That has nothing to do with justifying a tradition of such cruelty.”

To this I respond, “touche to that.” She adds, “I hated Spain after that. It was backwards, illiterate, and indifferent to its own customs. And Hemingway felt personally insulted when I spoke up. After that all he did was speak about me dismissively and insultingly.”

Then she starts off on a spree of “for the record” rants in order to clear the air about a very checkered past. “First, let’s get something straight about my family. My grandparents and parents worked hard. I also knew a thing or two about misfortune. My mother died young, as did my stepmother. My brother vanished without a trace, and my uncle Martin Rothschild died on the Titanic – a small phobia I kept hidden whenever I sailed to Europe. As for women, I’m not the only one who was openly contentious and disdainful. For instance, you should have heard Zelda. She found them predictable and cowardly. In Scott’s novel she says that the only reason women collect men is to shake their boredom.

“As for drinking and smoking, let me say that when I was in my early twenties I was insecure. I needed a faux family around me. That was the Gonk. The fact is, before the Round Table I had never smoked a cigarette or taken more than a sip of alcohol. I hated both and they made me sick. But here I was, skinny, wearing glasses (‘men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’), shy, and I needed to make an impression. I needed to be a flapper – sophisticated, urbane, well-read, able to hold my own with the men. This is also why I still like hotel life. The beauty of it is in its safety – clerks, chambermaids, valets – it’s my faux family. It’s something I need, especially at night, like when I come here. I contemplated suicide several times and at one point, when married to Eddie, slit my wrists. The hotel saved me at that moment. It was safe sanctuary. And I might add it was diversion – a place to lay a hat and a few friends, if you know what mean.” She chuckles.

“And yet,” I say, “when you died of a heart attack there was very little left of your estate, and what you did have left you bequeathed to Martin Luther King, Jr. Is that right?” “Yes, that’s right. And after he died it went to the NAACP. Everyone hated me for that, wanting a piece of me. Lillian Hellman who expected to inherit all my work, called me “a goddamn bitch.” I then ask, “But why MLK, Jr, especially since the two of you had never even met?” She answers, “It shocked the hell out of everyone. I looked around when I knew I was about to die, and King was the only one who seemed to show any integrity. I didn’t have to meet him. I knew his work. It didn’t take much to decide.”

“And strangely enough, you also outlived almost everyone at the Round Table.” She reacts, “Those I’m about to meet here tonight. And would you like a rundown of those soon-to-be arrivals? Too many for the number of chairs available here tonight, about which I simply must talk to the manager. But no matter. I don’t think most will show anyway: Franklin Adams, Henry Wise Miller, Gerald Brooks, Raoul Fleischmann (the butter guy), George Kaufman, Paul Hyde Bonner, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woolcott, Heywood Braun, Robert Benchley, Irving Berlin, Harold Ross, George Backer. Do you want me to go on? And we can’t forget the women: Beatrice Kaufmann, Alice Miller, Joyce Barbour, actresses Margalo Gillmore, Tallulah Bankhead, and Peggy Wood, novelist Margaret Leech, and more.”

Just then I see dark figures approaching from the back. I say to her, “I’d like to visit more, but I’m taking up one of your chairs. And I have another person across the room I wish to visit. He’s been waiting, even though he looks busy at his portable Royal #3.” Dorothy smiles, “That’s fine. Another time perhaps.” We shake hands and I leave the table.

As I float on across the room I’m struck at how different my impression is of this woman, despite her rough edges and many notorious flaws. There’s something fresh, scathingly honest and rare even by today’s standards. Her poetry and articles cut right through hyperbole and obfuscation. While others accuse her of having no soul, she speaks directly from it and to those afraid of showing theirs. As for hedonism (what she calls “paganism”), she finds it flawed:

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

Love, the reeling night through,

For tomorrow we shall die!

(But, alas, we never do).

As for love, she confesses her inability to find any. She realizes that she’s attracted only to men who reject her – “This, no song of an ingenue, This, no ballad of innocence….” And the same applies in reverse: “I loved them until they loved me.” And during moments when she no longer considers suicide, she is amazed at herself:

And when it came November,

I sought my heart, and sighed’

“Poor thing, do you remember?”

“What heart was that?” it cried.

As for any guilt, author Marion Meade says this: “Her first memories … were of a family whose every comfort depended upon a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people. Whether or not she ever saw the inside of a sweatshop is immaterial, because she surely absorbed the essence of the conflict between bosses like J. Henry Rothschild and the cloakmakers he employed. In 1927, she began to recover pieces of her past and apply them to the present. – Three decades of rage came roaring to the surface.”

Dorothy had (still has) a life’s project which is difficult to define. Her Jewishness, wealth, and cheeky chutzpah is gathered, packaged, and redelivered in the visage of a scapegoat. She becomes a willing target and flouts the very worst in herself to reflect a) her status of which she has no control but great disdain (while loving her family), and b) to amplify the same hypocrisies in those around her who are afraid of the truth.

I end up walking away with a strange and hard to define respect for this woman – for her intelligence, her difficult path amidst unreconciled wealth, her stilted recherche, and painfully wicked “take no prisoners” honesty. She’s right, I don’t like her at all. Her personality smells every step of the way. I can take her only in measured spoonfuls. But I also return, in measured increments, as if wishing to capture something lost and very rare, a mystique or an essence which only comes along with serious offense. As she seems to say in between volleys of calculation and timed abrasiveness (borrowing an old adage), “Don’t judge my book by the chapter you walk in on.”

Looking and feeling rather tattered I stumble my way to the other end of this smoky room – what feels like the bridge across forever. A much smaller and quieter corner, Mr. Beckett is living up to his reputation as a solitary man. Feeling like I had just stepped out of a whirlwind, I sit down. His eyes leave the typewriter just long enough to look up and smile. They then return to what appears to be a very serious project, with which I’m completely at ease. I feel like I need to rest my mind anyway. For what seems like a quarter of an hour we both sit in silence, except for the banging of keys. I lose myself in the frescos on the wall trying to piece together my visit with Ms. Parker.

As he works my mind shifts to what traits this writer and I might possibly share. This is an intensely private man, atheistic, introversive, and here to do what writers do – write. I’ve heard that he suffers the same dilemma I do in public places. Many (most) Americans visit cafes with books and pens, but their real intent is to socialize, kibitz, and

create party-like atmospheres. The books get put aside and feelers go out in terms of who recognizes whom for potential “gatherings.” Mr. Beckett is not unsocial and definitely not antisocial. He’s quite amiable and approachable. But he comes here to write. The cafe atmosphere provides the perfect energy from which to vicariously draw for razor-sharp observations. By contrast, the home environment is all but dead, even with caffeine, and “we” end up writing very little. – Louis L’Amour was this way too, only he found a more expeditious way to solve the problem. He rented an apartment directly above a saloon in Durango, Colorado. He was there and not there at the same time.

Alas, Beckett has been accused of snobbery. If onlookers would only engage him to discover the truth. But because he prefers a quiet corner and his books to “the party,” people interpret that as rejection. I relate so well to this that it almost hurts seeing it happen to someone else. I imagine he would see me as someone who “missed his calling,” who should have been raised in England or France where “tables for one” are not just routine and normal but sacred spaces.

Beckett admires Watteau. He knows is work. And I wonder if he’s even aware that Watteau was here just last weekend. It doesn’t matter. He draws to antagonists who are clownish, tragic, as well as to expressionistic (Romantic) landscapes. His own characters tangle with existential loose ends and how (if at all) man fits in the world. He disagrees with Watteau that man and nature can reconcile. There is communion but never total union for Beckett.

It reminds me of the Catholic concept of substantiation (as opposed to consubstantiation and transubstantiation). The first leaves man alone and helpless. The second dignifies “communion but not union.” The third is “Oneness” with nature and God. Beckett seems to stop where Watteau moves on.

The actors in his plays are absurd but serious, simple-minded but convoluted and complex when managing to touch those inner aspects of ourselves. It reminds me of those very subtle features of the human comedy so well drawn by Watteau. We are the simplest when appearing to be complex and most complex when finding our simplicity.

If Watteau is the “first modern artist” as some say, then Beckett is the “last modernist” writer. They seem to be like bookends — parentheses around a revolutionary period. Beckett’s own “bookend” could possibly be his involvement in man’s worst episode of all – helping the French Resistance in World War II, being captured by the Gestapo, escaping and fleeing to safety, awarded the Croix de guerre and Medaille de la Resistance. He stays in the trenches so to speak even after becoming famous, giving away all the money won for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He kibitzes with fellow war writer-artists Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Marcel Duchamp, and others. Meanwhile he lectures at Trinity College and has an affair with Peggy Guggenheim. His passion is Joyce and tries to meet the standard of writing set in Finnegan’s Wake (with which he helps Joyce gather material). He humbly gives up trying to match Joyce’s genius knowing his limitations. He then begins to discover his own style.

Before the war he’s stabbed in the chest by a crazy man who then claims he “doesn’t know why he did it.” Beckett visits him while still healing from his wound and they both seem to share the same question – as if allies facing a common demon. He finds the assailant contrite, troubled, and humble. Based on that he forgives the man, drops the charges, and lets him go free. There is a deep empathy for people of violence who never have a chance to explain why they too are victimized by violence.

Beckett’s life can divided in three phases: the pre-war years up until 1945 when he’s obsessed with Joyce; the next 15 years when he realizes he’s too much in the shadow of Joyce, writes Waiting For Godot, pondering existentialist themes, and myriad theaters of the absurd; and from the 1960s until his death when his themes become abstract and minimalist. From here on he’s clear that, where Joyce went in the direction of fulfillment, he was going in the direction of “impoverishment, in lack of knowledge … subtracting rather than adding.”

Sitting before me is the man in all “three stages.” It’s almost like the parent who sees his infant son’s entire life before him – youth, adulthood, and old age. He is, paraphrasing Siddhartha, “like the river … at its beginning, middle, and end all at the same time.” Looking into Beckett’s eyes is to see the young, mature, and aged artist and the scars of war and sacrifice. I’m rather humbled. But I’m also intrigued with what he’s typing at this moment. Is it an observation from any one phase? Or is it a detached view of seeing how life unfolds and how we get caught in the webs of our naivete?

He tells me how Godot was the result of seeing a psychoanalyst years ago before the war. “How can you not see yourself in the characters you write about, when you yourself are trying to fit in the world? We’re all waiting for redemption, forgiveness, answers, love, friendship and validation.”

Then he looks directly at me and without hesitation shares an observation about literature and creativity. “It seems that writing today seems to be a question of ‘scoring’ more than dealing with emotions and the substance of human conflict. It’s about demystification and the erasure of ambiguity. Don’t writers today understand that creativity is all about embracing ambiguity, letting it follow its own course?”

I’m overwhelmed, but I also realize that we are on the same page. He continues: “Everything is formulaic, genuflecting to a public need for instant resolution. Evil is too feverishly killed by heroes in Arthurian body armor, swinging laser beams and phallic projectiles. This is why nothing ever penetrates too deeply, at the risk of sounding Freudian. Your public can’t handle it. The result is a terrible absence of the kind of edge which is needed to maintain tension and hold the reader’s interest long after the story ends.”

I agree. The new mythology is all about ending ambiguity altogether – the hero’s entrance, killing off the last remnants of uncertainty, rescuing the world, and giving it a Disneyland ending. There no longer exists the patience for loose ends. And it mirrors the political-spiritual atmosphere in which we’re situated. It’s a mythology about sheer power and the utility of violence, and little more. It’s about “warrior righteousness.” We have little tolerance for prolonged fantasies of “killer wish-fulfillment.” The John Wayne Western still leads the way in this manner. It dictates the American state of mind. It tells us we’re living righteous lives, and if there’s darkness over the horizon all we need is perseverance, prayer, and renewed allegiance to Manifest Destiny. God is in our corner – we wear the white hats.

This mirrors America’s disillusionment with an enormous lie. The American West today, where I live, is living testament to this dilemma – where citizens still go to live the “cowboy dream.” By and large it is a colossal disappointment. The dream isn’t there. What is there are modern urban corridors, over-population, pollution, boundary disputes, abused lands, and government intrusion. Many feel betrayed and “the dream” quickly dies while watching more and more people arriving with the same dream. It’s the 1930’s great “California or Bust” migration all over again – the metaphor of migrants ending up in work camps run by brutal union-busting bosses. “Take a number, get in line, and wait” for your dream-life in “Pleasant Valley” and “Rolling Meadows.”

This is what sends Beckett (and myself) underground – here tonight. Instead of seeking clarity from ambiguity, we move into it, embrace it – to deconstruct, to make all things contingent, to open closed systems and question master narratives. A thought which also forces me to look across the room at the newly formed Round Table. It’s a kind of awareness that renews a sense of empathy for Ms. Parker and her “faux family.” It all makes sense.

“Literature is the last banquet of the mind,” says Beckett. “It offers whatever we put on the table.” I’m reminded of a quote by writer Paula Fox: “Hard and unremitting labor is what writing is. It is in that labor that I feel the weight and force of my own life. That is its great and nettlesome reward.”

At this juncture in the evening I can’t help but feel like a cheap matchmaker. What would Beckett look like next to Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead at the Round Table? I wonder, especially since Beckett lived in France and Parker visited there, if the two had ever met. Parker died in 1967, Beckett in 1989. Both lived through the war and knew the giants of literature. – Nonetheless, I remain silent. It’s not my place to force alliances that don’t happen of their own accord, with outside prodding.

I take Beckett’s final comment to heart. Also his critique of modern writers and the American need for simplicity and finality. We live in a culture of “Dick & Jane” sentences. Where literate people used to back into sentences with participial phrases, we now talk in the very manner that Gertrude Stein coached Hemingway on how not to write: avoiding complex sentence structures and unnecessary words. Like Hemingway, we like it tough, simple, direct, quick, and in easy John Wayne catchphrases. If it’s too long-winded for Wayne, you’re “going the long way around the barn.” If you’re moving too fast, “don’t jump in til ya know how deep it is.” If he talks too much, “I’m running outa breath. Now you talk.” And “I won’t be wronged, lied to, or laid a hand on” – simple creed of the (nonexistent) Old West. The world is black & white, just like the 1950s TV screen.

I take Beckett’s final point. But then it’s something he didn’t have to say in the first place. I remind him again that it’s that understanding which brings us here tonight. He smiles. He then returns to his typewriter and begins hitting the keys. I take one last look and realize he is a man of few words, except when written. I say goodnight. Without looking up, he nods.

I get up from my chair and turn in the direction of the evening’s “Gonk.” As Dottie is chatting away with Robert Benchley to her side, cigarette in hand, her eyes lock onto mine. We both smile and send our adieus in silence. I turn to the door and leave. This night has been full.

Share this:

Related