"We Had To Be Smarty" Dorothy Parker

One of the most effective means of suppression of  real liberalism as opposed to pseudo-liberalism is the peer coercion that enforces a code of expression, of  preventing anyone from violating the kind of middle-brow idea of something called "modernism".  Or, more often, the something being violated isn't actually there but is some vaguely sensed notion of What's Unacceptable To Those Cooler Than You.   Often that takes the form of associating the person who violates being up-to-date with dreadful people or some region of the country.  I suspect some of that comes from those nervous provincials who, intellectually able but very unsure of themselves, try to fit in to some self-defined sophisticated scene in New York or some other Big City.  The price for violation of their code is deadly, to be shunned as a hick.

Hilariously, for me in the past weeks pornography discussion, that has taken the form that I was, "Like a gay Clarence Thomas."  Oh, yes.  The entire world must have seen the similarity between my arguments against pornography  as inevitably objectifying women, men, children, violating their rights, their dignity, their safety and lives and one of the most infamous porn consumers and sexual harassers in recent American history - "a pubic hair in my Coke can" "The Adventures of Bad Mama Jama" -  and who, for the record, is a reliable vote in favor of porn on the Supreme Court.  There were other equally absurd comparisons.  I only pointed that one out because it was so hilariously clueless.

Those attempts to give someone who violates the pseudo-liberal code of thought cooties give rise to all kinds of hilarious and silly statements made with the brainless self-assurance of someone who knows they're upholding a conventional point of view but who doesn't know much more than that.   The way to free yourself from them and their index of prohibited thought is to go right ahead not caring about them.  They're not the world, they're certainly not worth losing your soul over.   We're online now, it's a big internet.

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But I'm going to start somewhere else with an excerpt from an interview that Dorothy Parker gave late in her life, when she was sadder but wiser but still paying a huge price for her former days.

INTERVIEWER
It’s a popular supposition that there was much more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example.

PARKER
I wasn't there very often—it cost too much. Others went. Kaufman was there. I guess he was sort of funny. Mr. Benchley and Mr. Sherwood went when they had a nickel. Franklin P. Adams, whose column was widely read by people who wanted to write, would sit in occasionally. And Harold Ross, the New Yorker editor. He was a professional lunatic, but I don’t know if he was a great man. He had a profound ignorance. On one of Mr. Benchley’s manuscripts he wrote in the margin opposite “Andromache,” “Who he?” Mr. Benchley wrote back, “You keep out of this.” The only one with stature who came to the Round Table was Heywood Broun.

INTERVIEWER
What was it about the twenties that inspired people like yourself and Broun?

PARKER
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, “You’re all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people and we all said, Whee! We’re lost. Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren't. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

INTERVIEWER
Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?

PARKER
Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.... 

... 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.

INTERVIEWER
How about satire?

PARKER
Ah, satire. That’s another matter. They’re the big boys. If I’d been called a satirist there’d be no living with me. But by satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists—creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is. Lord knows, a writer should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Their stuff is not satire; it’s as dull as yesterday’s newspaper. Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow.

INTERVIEWER
And how about contemporary humorists? Do you feel about them as you do about satirists?

PARKER
You get to a certain age and only the tired writers are funny. I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven’t been funny for twenty years. But anyway there aren't any humorists anymore, except for Perelman. There’s no need for them. Perelman must be very lonely.

INTERVIEWER
Why is there no need for the humorist?

PARKER
It’s a question of supply and demand. If we needed them, we’d have them. The new crop of would-be humorists doesn't count. They’re like the would-be satirists. They write about topical topics. Not like Thurber and Mr. Benchley. Those two were damn well-read and, though I hate the word, they were cultured. What sets them apart is that they both had a point of view to express. That is important to all good writing. It’s the difference between Paddy Chayefsky, who just puts down lines, and Clifford Odets, who in his early plays not only sees but has a point of view. The writer must be aware of life around him. Carson McCullers is good, or she used to be, but now she’s withdrawn from life and writes about freaks. Her characters are grotesques.

Dorothy Parker, The Art of Fiction No. 13
Interviewed by Marion Capron

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If Dorothy Parker had  talked like that on online comment threads she'd have been told she sounded just like some right wing Republican hack and told to "lighten up" or something.   She left her entire estate to The Reverend Martin Luther King, jr.   I remember some people were stunned that she had a serious idea in her head, never mind a moral and spiritual center.   She paid an enormous price for being part of that famous Round Table.

Update:  I just noticed that I neglected to indicate the ellipsis, where I left out material from the interview that didn't address my point.  I hope the link provided to the complete interview prevented possible misunderstanding.