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Dorothy Parker, the daughter of a clothes salesman, was born in New Jersey on 22nd August, 1893. Her formal education ended at 14 and two years later she sold her first poems to the editor of Vogue magazine. This was followed by other work being published and eventually became poetry critic of Vanity Fair (1919-20).

Her first collection of poems, Enough Rope (1926), was a best-seller. This was followed by three other books of verse, Sunset Gun (1928), Death and Taxes (1931) and Not So Deep As a Well (1936). She also published two collections of short stories: Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasure (1931).

In 1927 Parker joined with other artists such as John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ben Shahn, Floyd Dell in the campaign against the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The day before the execution Parker was arrested at a demonstration in Boston for "sauntering and loitering".

Parker worked for the New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Cosmopolitan and American Mercury, became well-known for her acerbic criticism. Parker once commented that Katharine Hepburn in a Broadway play: "She ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B." Parker also had a reputation for spontaneous wit. When told of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, she replied: "How could they tell?"

In 1933 Parker went to Hollywood with her husband, Alan Campbell. Over the next five years the couple worked on fifteen movie scripts including Three Married Men (1936), Lady Be Careful (1936), Suzy (1936), A Star is Born (1937), Trade Winds (1938), Sweethearts (1938), Weekend for Three (1941) and The Little Foxes (1941).

Parker retained her left-wing political views and with Donald Ogden Stewart formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. She was also a strong supporter of the Popular Front government in Spain and during then Spanish Civil War was a member of the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. In October 1937 Parker visited Spain and made a broadcast from Madrid Radio.

After the Second World War the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigating the entertainment industry. The HUAC managed to get a large number of people, including Parker and her husband, Alan Campbell, blacklisted. Dorothy Parker died of a heart-attack, in New Jersey on 22nd August, 1967.

 

 

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(1) Dorothy Parker, broadcast, Madrid Radio (October 1937)

I came to Spain without my axe to grind. I didn't bring messages from anybody, nor greetings to anybody. I am not a member of any political party. The only group I have ever been affiliated with is that not especially brave little band that hid its nakedness of heart and mind under the out of date garment of a sense of humour. I heard someone say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effective weapon. I don't suppose I ever really believed it, but it was easy and comforting, and so I said it. Well, now I know that there are things that have never really been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

In spite of all the evacuation, there are still nearly a million people here in Madrid. Some of them - you may be like that yourself - won't leave their homes and their possessions, all the things they have gathered together through the years. They are not at all dramatic about it. It is simply that anything else than the life they have made for themselves is inconceivable to them. Yesterday I saw a woman who lives in the poorest quarter of Madrid. It has been bombarded twice by the fascists; her house is one of the few left standing. She has seven children. It has been suggested to her that she and the children leave Madrid for a safer place. She dismisses such ideas easily and firmly.

Every six weeks, she says, her husband has 48 hours leave from the front. Naturally he wants to come home to see her and the children. She, and each one of the seven, are calm and strong and smiling. It is a typical Madrid family.

Six years ago, when the Royal romp, Alfonso, left his racing cars and his racing stables and also left, by popular request, his country, there remained 28 million people. Of them, 12 million were completely illiterate. It is said that Alfonso himself had been taught to read and write, but he had not bothered to bend the accomplishments to the reading of statistics nor the signing of appropriations for schools.

Six years ago, almost half the population of this country was illiterate. The first thing that the Republican government did was to recognise this hunger, the starvation of the people for education. Now there are schools even in the tiniest, poorest, villages; more schools in a year than ever were in all the years of the reigning kings. And still more are established every day. I have seen a city bombed by night, and the next morning the people rose and went on with the
completion of their schools. Here in Madrid, as well as in Valencia, a workers' institute is open. It is a college, but not a college where rich young men go to make friends with other rich young men who may be valuable to them in business with them later. It is a college where workers, forced to start as children in fields and factories, may study to be teachers or doctors or lawyers or scientists, according to their gifts. Their intensive university course takes two years. And while they are studying, the government pays their families the money they would have been earning.

In the schools for young children, there is none of the dread thing you have heard so much about - depersonalisation. Each child has, at the government's expense, an education as modern and personal as a privileged American school child has at an accredited progressive school. What the Spanish government has done for education would be a magnificent achievement, even in days of peace, when money is easy and supplies are endless. But these people are doing it under fire.

 

(2) Dorothy Parker, Heart of Spain (1952)

I stayed in Valencia and in Madrid, places I had not been since that fool of a king lounged on the throne, and in those two cities and in the country around and between them, I met the best people anyone ever knew. I had never seen such people before. But I shall see their like again. And so shall all of us. If I did not believe that, I think I should stand up in front of my mirror and take a long, deep, swinging slash at my throat.

For what they stood for, what they have given others to take and hold and carry along - that does not vanish from the earth. This is not a matter of wishing or feeling; it is knowing. It is knowing that nothing devised by fat, rich, frightened men can ever stamp out truth and courage, and determination for a decent life.

It is impossible not to feel sad for what happened to the Loyalists in Spain; heaven grant we will never not be sad at stupidity and greed. To be sorry for those people - no. It is a shameful, strutting impudence to be sorry for the noble. But there is no shame to honorable anger, the anger that comes and stays against those who saw and would not aid, those who looked and shrugged and turned away.

 

(3) Dorothy Parker on working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

When I dwelt in the East I had my opinion of writing for the screen. I regarded it with a sort of benevolent contempt, as one looks at the raggedy printing of a backward six-year-old. I thought it had just that much relationship to literature.

Well, I found out, and I found out hard, and found out forever. Through the sweat and the tears I shed over my first script, I saw a great truth - one of those eternal, universal truths that serve to make you feel much worse than you did when you started. And that is that no writer, whether he writes from love or from money, can condescend to what he writes. What makes it harder in screenwriting is the money he gets.

You see, it brings out the uncomfortable little thing called conscience. You aren't writing for the love of it or the art of it or whatever; you are doing a chore assigned to you by your employer and whether or not he might fire you if you did it slackly makes no matter. you've got yourself to face, and you have to live with yourself.

 

(4) Dorothy Parker made an attack on Martin Dies and his Un-American Activities Committee in the magazine Directions (April, 1940)

The people want democracy - real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies - that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations - because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country.

 

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