In the catalogue of human cruelties, Dorothy Parker's book and theater reviews rank somewhere between Aztec blood rites and the discovery of Paul Anka. Wittily, wickedly, and without remorse, she carved up her victims for the sacrifice, excoriating Sir James Barrie and Mussolini with about equal relish, and not one word wasted. No, Dorothy Parker didn't hate everything. She could utter praise upon occasion, especially if the subject happened to be a good friend of hers, or Ernest Hemingway. But who remembers the praise? It's her eviscerations that impress, that linger in the mind long after the reading—and oh, how fun those reviews are to read aloud! For example:

Of A.A. Milne's Give Me Yesterday: "Its hero is caused, by a novel device, to fall asleep and a–dream; and thus he is given yesterday. Me, I should have given him twenty years to life."

Of an actress in Barrie's The Admirable Crichton: "Miss Estelle Winwood, as Tweeny, gave a performance such as would cause your fourteen year–old sister to be blackballed for the high–school dramatic club."

Of Aimee Semple McPherson's autobiography: "Aimee Semple McPherson has replaced Elsie Dinsmore as my favorite character in fiction."

With Parker's name slipping from public memory, it's great to think that another generation of readers may discover a few of her guilty pleasures in a brand–new edition of The Portable Dorothy Parker. I confess mixed feelings about this updated version from Penguin Classics. On the one hand, some of my favorite pieces from the previous edition are gone, GONE I tell you, including the aforementioned review of McPherson's In the Service of the King (I must have been out when they called). Editor Marion Meade deserves praise, though, for a few new additions, including a 1956 interview with Parker, some late pieces of fiction, and a selection of letters to family and friends. The tender tone of the letters belies Parker's usual toughness, especially when she speaks of her animals (not including husbands). It's quite likely that the great love of Dorothy Parker's life was a Sealyham.

And speaking of ironies: one more fetching feature of the 2006 edition is the early New Yorker –style jacket art by Seth, including whimsical cartoons inspired by Parker's fairly desperate personal life (she tried to kill herself four times, but only if you count the shoe polish). Imagine Sylvia Plath's biography printed on a Monopoly board.

Now that we're so far removed from the 1920's, we may look back and recognize Dorothy Parker as the geminatrix of a familiar species: the female media icon, a woman famous for being famous.  In the wild days of pre–crash New York, reporters hung on her every word, waiting for the brilliant repartee, the fireworks of wit. She got credit for witty things she never actually said, though she did say plenty of them (not least, her famous answer when challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think"). Still, Parker resented her own reputation as a joker. She had no delusions about her circle of literary friends (Benchley, Woolcott, etc.), or their significance in American letters. Where was the genius in so much drinking and talking? The real writers of the time (Ring Lardner, Hemingway) were hard at work, changing the world. And anyway, life was a tragedy, love stunk, and suicide didn't work out.  In the late 1920s, Parker wandered from party to lover to speakeasy (and lunched at the Algonquin, of course, by day), sinking into alcoholism and deep depression—a cocktail of troubles that plagued her for the rest of her unexpectedly long life. To her friends, she seemed the most lost of the Lost Generation.

If Parker's story fails to move us (if we can imagine her life as a cartoon strip, for instance, without wincing), perhaps it's because we've become cynical about unhappy lives lived in public. Since her time, we've endured Garbo, Marilyn, Diana, Madonna, Britney, and now (surely the end is near!) Paris. To some extent, Dorothy Parker created the stage on which such fragile, difficult women act out their troubles. At the very least, she helped raise the curtain and focus the lights. But before we blame her for the decline of Western Civilization, we should remember that she had something most of her successors have lacked: a prodigious talent, a genius for something outside herself.

Because, for all her own self–deprecation, Dorothy Parker was a gifted writer, especially of short fiction. She wrote prose that was sometimes sharp, invariably funny, and often heart–wrenchingly empathetic. And it didn't come easy: the challenge was to be transparent (hard enough for those writers who aren't well–known) and yet write from life as she knew it. In her O'Henry–winning story "Big Blonde," for instance, she draws on her experience of a failed suicide to create Hazel Morse, a good–hearted working–class woman who tires men out with her tears. Hazel only starts drinking to please her husband (she's more fun when she drinks, he says) but keeps at it long after he leaves her. When she wakes from a sleeping–pill induced coma, Hazel finds a postcard waiting from her latest boyfriend: "Greetings and salutations. Hope you have lost that gloom. Cheer up and don't take any wooden nickels."

Ah, a suicide story with a punch line. In a sense, that's a summary of Parker's own life. Knowing what we know about her, we can't help imagining her (not big and blonde but waifish and dark) with that boorish postcard in one hand, raising a glass with the other and saying to the person who's just waked her from the possibility of eternal peace, "Here's mud in your eye." Beware, all you clumsy writers and overwrought actors, all you prissy sentimentalists and sophisticated bigots, all you dictators and fools: in spite of her best efforts, Dorothy Parker's not going anywhere.

Betty Smartt Carter is a writer at large in Alabama.

Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture.Click for reprint information.