Only in The New Yorker
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story. This is not the collected non-fiction, or “essays and criticism,” or “writings on life, literature, and art.” Mirabile dictu, these are book reviews, albeit unusual ones. (They are called columns in the title of the collection, but reviews in Sloane Crosley’s introduction and by Parker’s pen.) Now, the reader will surely agree that the book review is suffering, lacking love and support. Newspapers have simply gone and cut their books sections, the straight review is missing from newer literary magazines in favor of longer essays and cultural commentary loosely pegged to new books; authors, when they do write them, then turn around and refer to them in more dignified terms, as essays or pieces. Maybe because reviews are things you can also write about restaurants, movies, albums, and home appliances, the younger scribblers, who have more academic credentials than previous generations, are a little uncomfortable with the term.
But the attitude towards the book review you’re privy to in Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927-28—and these reviews are largely about attitude—is that this writer is if anything below it, not quite up to the task. Crosley’s introduction is mostly dull and padded with foamy stuff like “There’s no dismissing her sharp one-liners” and “Many elements of her essential Parkerness,” but it does warn us that Parker procrastinated, got frustrated with bad books, wondered if she ought to be doing something else, and then narrated all of that in the reviews themselves. Parker had been fired from Vanity Fair when her theatre reviews offended some of the wrong people, though her poetry was thought of well. For The New Yorker, which only a couple years in was primarily a humor magazine, this was to be funny, personal, somewhat colloquial writing under the ironic byline “Constant Reader.” For us, it might be a bit startling to see how much there is here of what makes up the confessional and concertedly zany magazine writing that we’ve lately been enjoying so much, from the likes of Patricia Lockwood or Caitlin Moran. As Parker said ruefully in an interview, everyone was trying to be funny in the 20s. Her way in was to adopt a persona, that of a most confiding, playful critic who can report that while she is holding a collection of doggerel in her left hand, the right is “guiding the razor across my throat.”
One has heard of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Upton Sinclair, whose books are reviewed here, and possibly of Ford Madox Ford and Booth Tarkington, too. It turns out that Benito Mussolini wrote a novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress, which Parker ridiculed under the title “Duces Wild.” Another historical curiosity here is a review of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (Winnie’s), where she is finding all the whimsy very sickening. “Whimsy” is also derided in another children’s book, by Christopher Morley, and in Aimee Semple McPherson’s autobiography, where the celebrity evangelist alternates between her “cackling exclamations” and her “bead-curtain-and-chenille-fringe style.” Parker is concerned with style above all else, as she needed to be in her own writing to get laughs, and often displeased by what she finds too artificial, or “pompous,” as she calls M. André Maurois’ Disraeli biography, or even “tortuous.”
She uses that last adjective both on Fannie Hurst, guilty of one-word sentences and “curiously compounded adjectives,” and Ford Madox Ford, whose The Last Post she yet admires in a funny review where the conceit is that she is being distracted from the very serious book at hand by the lurid story of a man named William Doe from the newspapers. Style being everything down to punctuation, Parker finds space in a review of Nathalie Colby’s Black Stream, apparently an imitation or even parody of Virginia Woolf, to take issue with the “trios of periods in irritating profusion” and “dashes, the ladies’ pets among punctuation marks.” One has seen the first alienating trick, which is just pretending not to know the term “ellipses” to make them sound silly, but this second observation is the excellent kind most critics do not or are not willing to make. It is also true, and if this constant reader can venture a hypothesis, might have something to do with the cultish aura surrounding Emily Dickinson.
As for what she likes, while she disdains the “doggedly muscular” prose of the many “young mezzo-Hemingways,” she thinks that Ernest himself, in his collection Men Without Women, had achieved a “sad and terrible” quality, a very fine thing, and that his “unerring sense of selection” was a kind of genius. It is a cliché of the counterintuitive sort to say that things like Hemingway’s style are much more difficult to work up than they seem, but Parker, having read some of the mere “boys,” now forgotten, who attempted it (and who one can imagine gave it a good go herself), offers a weightier corroboration. After using ample embarrassing quotation to take care of a slim volume of platitude called Happiness by William Phelps, Parker finds much better a novel by the wonderfully named Zona Gale, who writes with a “beautiful precision” and “says what she must say.” Because Parker used up too much of one week’s column space on Margaret Asquith and Robert Hyde, André Gide’s The Counterfeiters gets only a couple hundred words, and appropriately since Parker believes it beyond praise: “To say of it ‘Here is a magnificent novel’ is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and remarking, “Well, well, well; quite a slice.” Trusting Parker’s report of the Gide, we can perhaps recall that when we read something really good there isn’t much to be said, and that there is nothing quite so eloquent as that silence after the last page.
When these reviews are read in this collected form, the most pronounced theme is Parker’s battle with the temptations of hackery. She does not use the word “hack,” but the sight of that low condition is a vexation to her, not so much in the authors she is reviewing as in other critics. She recalls that when Hemingway’s first collection In Our Time came out, most reviewers didn’t get what he was doing and “dismissed the volume with a tolerant smile and the word ‘stark.’” Sometimes she gives in, and rather than correcting herself, exclaims in horror at the slip: “The book shows a cross-section (‘cross-section!’—I’ve been reading too many publishers’ blurbs!).” How taciturn our critics would be if they didn’t feel comfortable paraphrasing or even parroting such promotional materials! In a quieter moment, she writes, again parenthetically, after her comment on Zona Gale’s good and bad characters, that “I wrote that last sentence like a book-reviewer. This thing is getting me.” The persona, with her strong tastes and joking, probably just joking disclosures, allows Parker to avoid the critic’s conventional phrases, and the persona is in play not just in asides and digressions, but also when giving broad judgements.
Parker rather liked A.A. Milne’s contributions to Punch and his novel The Red House Mystery. “But when Mr. Milne went quaint, all was over. Now he leads his life and I lead mine.” It might not even occur to us to wonder why less than a year later she reviews his next book, but something is more apparently wrong when she has resorted to petulance and written that upon reaching Winnie’s childish neologism “hummy” (hummable, catchy), “Tonstant Wader Fwowed up.” This is not something anyone else could have written, but that is not always a good thing. There is an effect of inflation on all the gags about her age, suicide, inability to finish books, throwing them out the window, etc. so that when distaste is to be expressed, and it won’t be with “beautiful precision,” she has to push on beyond attitude and into parody and the occasional invective. One may need to gracefully accept those lows in exchange for the airy, joyous highs of playful non-sequitur, as when Parker, graceful herself, says that if the otherwise excellent All Kneeling, by Miss Anne Parris, is “occasionally over-written,” as she “was saying to the landlord only this morning, you can’t have everything.” Her praise for that novel was the recognition of a record she very nearly managed in this odd little run at The New Yorker: “constantly amusing.”
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The Adroit Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Chicago Review of Books. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
