My copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker never stays on the shelf. It travels from room to room in my home, picked up often and read and then moved again back and forth, mingling with anything else that I’m presently reading. I rarely look for it. I always just stumble upon it. One day, it’s on the bedside table. Maybe the next day, it’s on the floor by the living room couch.
Her theatre and book reviews for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Esquire that make up most of the last two hundred pages (pieces written from 1918 to 1962) are particularly good when I need a quick dose of wit. They’re the best reviews of anything that I’ve ever read and are a steady source of inspiration, including when I needed a name for this website. Her New Yorker book review column from 1927 to 1933 was called “The Constant Reader”, which I used about two brain cells to bend to my own purposes here. (Mrs. Parker would probably roll her eyes over it.)
Though I can be hard on my books, I don’t like to mark them with highlighters or pens, but I do like to remember and recognize great and/or interesting passages in what I’m presently reading, so why not do it here? What else have I got going on? Absolutely nothing.
So, haunting me at the moment is the opening paragraph of Parker’s May 1958 book column, in which she tells a brief anecdote about the dearest friend in her life Robert Benchley, before she celebrates a volume of Edmund Wilson’s Jazz Age essays, shrugs her shoulders at Jack Kerouac and smirks over Edna Ferber’s latest potboiler:
The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, ‘There–I’ve done it! I have written THE book. Now it and I are famous forever.” Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams. Eventually, he never went anywhere near a bookshop. If he wanted something to read, he either borrowed it or sent for it by mail.