In the 1930s, even in New York City, few women got tattoos. But Dorothy Parker, then in her 40s and one of the most famous writers of her time, went to the Bowery with a man 11 years her junior, where they got matching blue stars inked on their upper arms.
They got married, divorced, remarried and divorced again. Parker’s first marriage, when she was much younger, also ended in divorce after her husband became a drug addict. When not married, Parker had a series of relationships, including one with a manipulative married man that led to an abortion.
Much about those doomed romances made their way into Parker’s writing, but as her biographer Marion Meade noted, “She was good at using confession to hide some parts of her life and humor to camouflage the rest.”
Not even five feet tall, Parker possessed a formidable wit that made her a star of the famed Algonquin Round Table and enabled her to make her living as a writer, even as she routinely missed deadlines. A legendary drunk, she claimed, “I’m not a writer with a drinking problem. I’m a drinker with a writing problem.”
She wrote poetry, fiction and Hollywood screenplays. (“Hollywood,” she said, “is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.”) With her writing partners, she was nominated twice for an Academy Award, including for the original “A Star is Born.”
One of her most well-known poems is “Resume”:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
By the time Parker wrote “Resume,” she had already experienced the pain of a razor and the cramps from a drug overdose. She would try to kill herself on two additional occasions: another attempt with drugs, and an attempt as original as it was desperate – she drank a bottle of shoe polish.
When Parker was a child, her Jewish father and strict stepmother, a Presbyterian, enrolled her for a time in a convent school, where, the story goes, she shocked the nuns by describing the Immaculate Conception as “spontaneous combustion.” (She probably never learned that the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary’s own conception and birth, not her pregnancy.) An atheist, she was known to constantly utter profanities but never a prayer.
Yet when a national magazine invited poets to contribute to its Christmas issue, she composed a surprisingly tender poem about Mary’s maternal love. In “The Gentlest Lady,” Mary is an affectionate mother who smiles when neighbors praise her son and comment on his growth. But her joy is tempered by the painful knowledge of the death that awaits him. Each birthday, the poem ends, “her heart was like to break/To count another year.”
Parker returned to that theme years later in “Prayer for a New Mother.” The poem implores God to allow Mary to forget, while her child is young, what she has foreknowledge of: “the rumble of a crowd,” “the smell of rough-cut wood,” “the trail of red.”
Parker was 5 when her own mother died and, according to Meade, the loss “left her permanently marked.” She longed to be a mother herself. She miscarried twice, and she remained bitter and guilt-ridden about her abortion.
Parker was often caustic, but she had a lifelong concern for anyone treated unfairly. In her will, she left everything, including all future royalties from her work, to a man who devoted his life to fighting injustice. She had never met or talked to him. Still, she must have known he was a clergyman whose political efforts were inseparable from his religious convictions.
When Martin Luther King Jr., who did not even know who Parker was, learned that he had inherited her estate, he reportedly remarked, “This verifies what I said, that the Lord will provide.”
Among Parker’s more than 300 poems is another about Mary and Jesus. In “The Maid-Servant at the Inn,” the speaker reflects on Jesus’ Birth in the inn’s barn on a cold night more than 30 years earlier. “I’ve prayed that all is well with them,” the maid-servant says, unaware that the mother would see her grown child suffer a brutal death.
The maid-servant also doesn’t understand that the child born all those years ago willingly accepted suffering and death out of love for everyone: for kings and queens and for servants like herself, for people of all races – and also for talented but lonely writers with aching hearts.
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”
