Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Dorothy Parker: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."

--Dorothy Parker, 1956

Dorothy Parker

I started at the beginning when starting The Paris Review Interviews.  Dorothy Parker's was the first.  I had to let it ferment.  Her remarks, for some, will be welcomed and paraded.  For others, they might appear . . . patronizing.  Even sixty-plus years ago, channeling the divide between literary and genre writing was an effective way of defining one's identity as a writer -- even for someone who once worked at Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Life to pay the bills like Parker.  I subtitle the following: "What would she say about Sex & The City? Or Sue Grafton?  Or even Harry Potter?"

Parker: The purpose of the writer is to say what he feels and sees.  To those who write fantasies -- the Misses Baldwin, Ferber, Norris -- I am not at home.

Interviewer: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Parker: As artists they're not, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush.  Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do.  I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.  And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.  I'm a feminist, and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women.  But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality -- dear child, we didn't foresee those female writers.  Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or Oveta Culp Hobby.

Or what about this on Hollywood:

Parker: I think nobody on earth writes down.  Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren't writing down.  That is their best.  If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down.  It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that its the best you can do that kills you.  I want so much to write well, though I know I don't, and that I didn't make it.  But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.

Interviewer: Then what is it that's the evil in Hollywood?

Parker: It's the people.

Today, I repeatedly find myself in the middle of some debate over why anyone should waste a precious three hours of his or her life reading a genre or commercial (read: women's fiction) book that isn't at least a classic in the genre.  Since literature is not the field on which I built my "identity" (art and art history are), I have much less at stake as I debate the various pleasures of reading.  I try to understand the stakes involved for the other, literary-invested person -- largely by acknowledging how elitist and vocal I am about art.  Still, I struggle with categorical denouncements.  A variety of pleasures offer themselves to us in bookstores.  Am I a slut for wanting different kinds?  The brutal, repeated delays of Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras.  The philosophical and psychoanalytic teases in Fragments: A Lover's Discourse.  The winsome grinning kid eating candy and fighting bad guys in Harry Potter.  The Frenchie connundrum of Le Divorce.  The pulsing stillness of Venus in Furs.  Or just the frank acknowledge that some of us don't want children that made that bestseller Eat, Pray, Love worth every moment of reading -- I thought that acknowledgement still taboo, much too hot for Oprah.  The rush of fear of swooping vampires.  Or swooping Nazguls.  I am not defending -- nor do I care to -- every book.  I'm not declaring a mantra.  I'm just saying pleasure has its vicissitudes.  In bed and in books.