You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

by John Keats

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671206605
• ISBN13: 9780671206604
• Release Date: October 1970
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

She didn't wear glasses/ they made many passes

In this book it is possible to learn much more about Dorothy Parker than most people I believe will ever want to know. Somewhere in the middle I began to feel that I was just giving too much time to a personality which certainly was worthy of some interest, but perhaps not that much. Keats does a very good job of explaining where Parker (nee Rothschild) came from , and why she hungered for dialogue with others yet was always quite alone. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist and a non- Jewish mother of Scottish background who passed away before Parker ever came to know her. Parker was not liked by her step-mother and her father too farmed her out most of the time.She was given a strict Catholic education which she deplored and rebelled against. Emotional warmth real love was not part of her childhood. She had no Jewish education and apparently no real knowledge of much Jewish. Later in life however she became active in anti- Nazi causes. Parker was married or rather connected with for twenty- nine years with her second husband Allan Campbell who was also like her half- Scottish and half- Jewish. Parker became famous for her Algonquin Round Table wit,for her witty and often acidly pessimistic verses, for her short stories, for her book- reviews in the "New Yorker" in which she displayed a special excellence at demolishing the pretentions of others. She was like many small town people who come to the Big City , a fiercely loyal New Yorker who suffered in the years she and Campbell were on the Coast writing mediocre screenplays for Hollywood.At one point she was one of the most famous writers in America, and there is no denying her very tough and quick wit, her ability to condense in a line or two the definition of a situation, a mood. A small woman only five feet tall with piercingly beautiful dark eyes she was much pursued, much admired, and much lover-ed , if that is the word. She deeply loved Charles MacArthur later the husband of Helen Hayes, but for him she was just one of many. Her disappointments in many ways led her to at least two suicide attempts, and one of her best known poems from which the title of this book is taken. All the fun, the wit, the good times, the drinking, the effort at pretending that they were not taking themselves too seriously of the Round- Tablers seems quite meretricious now. Keats often compares Parker with Hemingway and seems to feel they have something like equal weight as short- story writers. Though Hemingway was not a very nice person in general, and was a bit cruel to Parker at one point the truth he is a great short story- writer a major figure in the American Literary Tradition. Parker is much less than that. There is something however touchingly, painfully sad about her life. The loneliness was always with her even when the crowd was applauding and her witticisms were being celebrated everywhere.

A Compassionate Look at a Tragi/Comic Life

We learn in this book that Dorothy Parker's great talent was the ability to see both the tragic and comic in any situation simultaneously. She abhorred pretense and skewered pretenders mercilessly, herself included.During the good times, she fell into bouts of despair and tried to commit suicide a couple of times. During the bad times, later, she drank too much and allied herself with progressive causes, facing the McCarthy inquisition with courage and grace.This book is at its best when it allows us to feel the constant strain of contradictions in Ms. Parker's life, at its worst when it occasionally strays into preachiness at her excesses, hardly necessary, as the excesses carried with them their own punishments.All in all, an enlightening glimpse of a thoroughly unique lady.