Folio Books: The Portable Dorothy Parker

The Portable Dorothy Parker

by Dorothy Parker, ed. Brendan Gill

Viking Press

1991

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild) married twice, had no children, and bequeathed her literary estate to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). She was a perfectionist and therefore not a prolific writer. Most of her work is collected in this one volume, with an introduction by Brendan Gill: the short stories, the poetry, the theatre and book reviews for The New Yorker and Esquire. (The equivalent Penguin Twentieth Century Classic is called The Collected Dorothy Parker.) It's a nice fat book of never-ending reward. Her reviews are hilariously funny, her stories are bittersweet, as delicately perfect as you're ever likely to see. This review cries out for a few words of her own; but lately that little bit allowing "brief quotations in a review" has dropped out of copyright notices. It's hard to tell any more what restrictions might apply.

She was an original and has aged well, as originals tend to do. I can always find something refreshing in these pages -- her funny, prescient review of Lolita, for instance; or "A Telephone Call", a short story which lingers in the memory and yet demands to be read again and again. Or her intriguing review of a performance of J.M. Barrie's Dear Brutus, which hints at a reason for Barrie's present obscurity. I read the review with bated breath, terrified she would demolish it (Dear Brutus being a lifelong favourite of mine); but the lady knew her stuff. As she said of Isidora Duncan, we shall not look upon her like again. This is one of the books I'd want on a desert island.

Order the paperback from Amazon.com (US$14.95)

610 pages
humour, essays, fiction, poetry

M.A., 8 March 1997