Dorothy Parker unmasked as New York magazine poems’ mystery wit

A trawl through Life magazine’s accounts revealed much more of her work.

Dorothy Parker wrote the series of comic poems when the Algonquin Round Table was at its zenith.

Just more than a century ago a writer with a snappy turn of phrase wrote a series of comic poems for a New York magazine under pseudonyms such as Florence Lippencott Towel or Waldemar Cringe.

Now she has been unmasked. It was Dorothy Parker, immortal wit of the Algonquin Round Table and great poet of the Jazz Age.

Stuart Silverstein, a literary detective and Parker enthusiast, has identified seven poems previously unknown to Parker’s legion of fans inside editions of Life magazine from 1921 and 1922.

He has proved it by combing the magazine’s accounts. “Dorothy Parker”, says one entry from August 1922, indicating that she was paid $US35 for a column called The Flywheel, which appeared the following month. This column includes a poem about a controversy over hemlines on the Jersey Shore, titled My How Short the Skirts are Growing!: “Mary had a little lamb/But that is not the half/We see without a diagram/She had a little calf.”

In the same column is a poem mocking Frank Adams, a columnist and fellow drinker at the Algonquin, who published a diary in the style of Samuel Pepys.

Titled The Profane Colyum Conductor, it laments the lot of the poor columnist toiling through a Manhattan summer while others frolic by the sea: “In an office as gay as an empty barn/Through days that are hot as – well/ He dashes off jokes, with a murmured d-rn/Oh, a colyumist’s life is h-ll!”

Parker was also paid for a series of poems parodying sentimental ballads popular at the time. There is The Three Blue Women O’Lochmalone, who “sit at their wheels all day/And the peat-bogs echo the seagull’s moan/But never a word they say”.

Another, written under the name Fiona McCrumb, makes what for Parker would be a rather unlikely declaration: “And I say to my heart: ‘These are the things that matter:/A field of young let­tuces, stretching clean and cool and wide;/The feel of earth; and the smell of crisp, new thistles;/And the weary plough-horse, that dreams by the fireside.”

Parker had “dipped a toe into parody of popular poetic styles before”, Silverstein says.

“But this is the first time we’ve seen her produce a series of such items, all with her stiletto-like wit.”

Parker published three collections of poetry but wrote a lot of verse she did not consider worth preserving.

In 1994, while researching the Algonquin Round Table, Silverstein discovered a trove of discarded gems and put together an edition of 120, called Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, published by Scribner.

Three years later Penguin released Dorothy Parker: Complete Poems, incorporating the verses Silverstein found. Silverstein sued and there was a legal battle over whether his research was protected by copyright. Parker, who died in 1967, had bequeathed the rights to the poems to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

With husband Alan Campbell, 1934.

After an initial ruling in Silverstein’s favour, in which Penguin was ordered to recall its book, and a deposition from one of its editors who acknowledged that she had merely photocopied pages from Silverstein’s book, cutting out the poems and pasting them on to paper, a judge dismissed the case.

Silverstein believes his discovery should force Penguin to recall its Complete Poems: “Do they want to continue to publish and advertise a book as ‘complete’ that isn’t?” Penguin did not respond to a request for comment.

Steven Fox, an expert in copyright and trademark law, says Penguin’s title is “risky because they don’t know what’s undiscovered, by definition”. But he also says it would be hard to show that anyone is being harmed.

Cynthia Arato, a specialist in intellectual property and media law, says it can be argued that consumers understand that “complete” is not intended to be a representation that the work contains every poem ever written by Parker. Whatever the ramifications, literary experts are delighted by the find. Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, says: “They definitely do read like her.”

When she wrote them the Algonquin Round Table was at its zenith, he says.

In January 1920 Parker had been fired by Vanity Fair after some particularly spiky theatre reviews. Her colleague, humorist Robert Benchley, resigned in protest and the two of them repaired to a hotel, later renamed the Algonquin. Several stories about this, including one by Adams, the “colyumist”, helped to establish the idea of the “round table” around which the wits of the Jazz Age drank and jousted.

Parker and Benchley rented a small office on Broadway.

“It was just big enough for two desks,” Fitzpatrick says. “The joke was that one foot less and it would be adultery.”

One of Life’s ledgers Silverstein found says Parker was paid $US39.48 in July 1921 for a Good Housekeeping Burlesque parody, including a poem called Just Mother. Beneath it are two entries for Benchley, for a Nat Geographic Burlesque and for a New Republic Burlesque.

“These parodies in the ’20s were a big deal,” Fitzpatrick says. Famous writers and journals would be exhaustively parodied.

Regina Barreca, a humorist, Parker enthusiast and English literature professor at the University of Connecticut, finds the new poems fascinating.

She recognises Parker’s voice most clearly in the rhyme about short skirts, in which “she’s taking the language and making it somersault. There’s a deftness in that.”

In some of the other parodies she has the sense of Parker saying, “Yeah, I could do this with my left hand”, but they were also done “with a wicked gleam in her eye”, Barreca says.

She chuckles at the line: “And I say to my heart: “These are the things that matter:/A field of young lettuces.”

This was what mattered to Parker? “I don’t think so,” Barreca says. “A field of olive martinis? Maybe.”

The Times