‘The Wonderful Old Gentleman’ by Dorothy Parker

Including Parker feels like a cliché, and I can’t imagine she’d appreciate that, but – she’s inescapable. Parker’s inarguably one of the finest stylists of short form writing – poems, reviews, and, of course, short stories.

‘The Wonderful Old Gentleman’ is Parker at her very best. It is set in a family’s hideously stifling sitting room, while the clan’s elderly patriarch is dying in a bedroom upstairs. As Parker can be, it is merciless from the opening lines:

“If the Bains had striven for years, they could have been no more successful in making their living-room into a small but admirably complete museum of objects suggesting strain, discomfort, or the tomb. Yet they had never even tried for the effect.”

As the story unfolds, we learn about the “old gentleman’s” oppressive presence, and the emotional and physical wear and tear he’s inflicted on the family. But is that enough to merit their hypocrisy as they sit, blandly exchanging platitudes as they wait for his death? This story is – like ‘A Telephone Call’ – torturous, as Parker conveys a crushing anxiety. Line by line, Parker’s one of the most cunningly quotable writers imaginable. But it is her ability to inflict emotion on the reader that makes her stories more than cruel caricature. We’re laughing at her characters, but somehow we feel the pain of being laughed at as well.

First published in Pictorial Review, January 1926. Collected in Complete Stories, Penguin, 1995

‘A Telephone Call’ by Dorothy Parker

If all you know about Dorothy Parker is that she had a zinging wit and a sad love life then you will pretty much know what to expect from ‘A Telephone Call’. It’s zingingly witty and achingly sad; it squeezes the rueful empathy of Parker’s longer works like ‘Big Blonde’ into a crammed monologue of infatuation, self-doubt and thwarted hope (we’re a long way, here, from the brilliant but frivolous ‘The Waltz’, a monologue that might seem to be from the same mould). “Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them!” the narrator cries, as she waits for her lover to call. Emotionally, it’s an exhausting thing to read, as one switchback slingshots you into the next; as a commentary on sexual politics, it’s uncompromisingly raw: “They don’t like you to tell them they’ve made you cry. They don’t like you to tell them you’re unhappy because of them. If you do, they think you’re possessive and exacting. And then they hate you. They hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games.”

First published 1950

‘Arrangement in Black and White’ by Dorothy Parker

It’s worth remembering that Dorothy Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr, whom she’d never met, with the proviso that, should anything happen to him, she’d like it turned over to the NAACP. Knowing that, read this scathing story (and clock when it was written).

First published in The New Yorker in 1927, available in their archives and also here.