The closest thing I have to a mission statement for this blog is Post One. I explain I am intending to provoke thought and discussion, encourage other readers, and introduce thinkers and writers by posting entries of five hundred words or fewer each week. (Post One). If I were to draft a mission statement now, after writing nineteen posts, I would write something like: “To Write As Dorothy Parker”.
Dorothy Parker famously quipped: “I like to have a martini, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.” These lines are but one example of her quick wit and sense of humor.
Parker wrote an almost weekly column as a book critic for the The New Yorker from October 1927 until November 1928 under the byline “Constant Reader”. Her reviews are collected in book form published by McNally Editions in 2024 under the same title.
The New Yorker published, and publishes, weekly, and Parker’s assignment was writing a column reviewing a recently published book or books for almost every issue. The columns had to be short– approximately seven hundred to a thousand words– to fit the strict, consistent format of the magazine.
In my blog since Post Ten – Errata, I have published nine posts in fourteen weeks– not weekly as I aspired to do. FAIL.
I have dispensed with the five-hundred-word limit because saying anything of consequence in five hundred words is very difficult. My posts are approximately a thousand words. The New York Times expresses the size of articles in time rather than word count (e.g. 4 min read). Perhaps, I will impose a time limit in the future. PASS.
I like my post titles. The titles usually do not make clear the content of the post in advance. They are relevant to the content, but relevance does not become clear until one reads the post (the title of this post is a good example). Search engines are not friendly to unusual or creative titles; however, I will trade search engine optimization for unusual and creative. PASS.
I have continued to write about a variety of writers and thinkers, and I continue to hope at least some are new to readers. In the last nine posts I have discussed the following writers and thinkers: Marquis de Sade, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson (Post Eleven); Herman Melville, economist and professor Richard H. Thaler, and legal scholar and professor Cass R. Sunstein (Post Twelve); grandmaster and World Chess Champion Alexander Aleksandrovich Alekhine, Stefan Zweig, psychologist and professor William G. Chase, psychologist and professor Herbert A. Simon, and folklorist Vladimir Propp (Post Thirteen); mathematician and professor Jordan S. Ellenberg, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and John B. Rawls (Post Fourteen); Marguerite Duras (Post Fifteen); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Aldous Huxley (Post Sixteen); physician and Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae, William Shakespeare, professor Catherine Robson, and Ian Sansom (Post Seventeen); Eric Blair (Post Eighteen); and Salman Rushdie, and Paul Sayer (Post Nineteen). PASS.
Parker published almost weekly, with consistent word count, and addressed a variety of writers. PASS, PASS, PASS. If I had a criticism, it would not be with the title of her column “Constant Reader” (I like it), but with the title of individual reviews. In her defense, she was writing for The New Yorker, and she had an editor that probably required her titles to inform readers what to expect, but Parker would have had better titles had she been in charge.
Parker entitled a review of a book by Ernest Hemingway and books by James Branch Cabell “A Book of Great Short Stories– Something about Cabell”. I would not have wanted to be Cabell, as she says of his books: “And I couldn’t read all the way through one of them, to save my mother from the electric chair.” (Parker 33).
On 29 October 1927, Parker reviews Men without Women that Hemingway published earlier in the month. Along the way, she discusses Hemingway’s two previous books: In Our Time, his first book, in 1925, and The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, in 1926.
She explains that In Our Time “caused about as much stir as an uncompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” (Parker 29). Perhaps, even better, she says:
And besides, In Our Time was a book of short stories. That’s no way to start off. People don’t like that; they feel cheated. Any bookseller will be glad to tell you, in his interesting argot, that “short stories don’t go.” (Parker 30).
In contrast to what she writes about In Our Time, she reports that reviewers called The Sun Also Rises “the greatest American novel, tossing Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter lightly out the window.” (Parker 31). Parker, however, disagrees: “I may say, with due respect to Mr. Hemingway, that I was never so sick of a book in my life.” (Parker 31).
But, Parker loves Hemingway’s short stories, and she has many laudatory comments for his work:
. . . Mr. Hemingway’s style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving, in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist. (Parker 31).
Her sampling of Hemingway’s short story writing was limited to In Our Time and Men without Women. Hemingway writes about boxing, bullfighting, dying, failing at love, fly fishing, and recovering from wartime trauma, among other topics– all activities Hemingway knew first-hand. Parker says it better:
Hemingway writes like a human being. I think it is impossible for him to write of any event at which he has not been present; he is, then, a reportorial talent, just as Sinclair Lewis’s is. But, or so I think, Lewis remains a reporter and Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness; he keeps his words to their short path. He is, as any reader knows, a dangerous influence. The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it. (Parker 32).
Parker also shares that Men without Women includes “The Killers” “which seems to me to be one of the four great American short stories.” (Parker 32).
I selected the review of Hemingway to share here, but the whole Constant Reader is the same in all thirty-four: clever reviews that are brutally honest– positive and negative– and funny.
David Mitchell describes pigeons as “rats in avian drag” in his novel The Bone Clocks. I have just completed my boring, self-referential, second after action review disguised in Dorothy Parker drag.
I. Librarian
Works Cited:
Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. Boni & Liveright, 1925.
Hemingway, Ernest. Men without Women. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
Mitchell, David. The Bone Clocks. Sceptre, 2014.
Parker, Dorothy. Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28. McNally Editions, 2024.
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