Lost barbs by Dorothy Parker that skewered great and good

Four waspish poems by Dorothy Parker that were printed anonymously in 1923 have been identified nearly a century later.

Dorothy Parker was noted for her wit. Picture: Alamy

Four waspish poems by Dorothy Parker that were printed anonymously in 1923 have been identified nearly a century later by a literary detective who found a ­record of a payment in the ­archives of the New York Library.

The poems appeared as “valentines” in a humorous New York weekly, beneath cartoons by Rea Irvin.

One was devoted to the English sculptor Clare Sheridan, a cousin of Winston Churchill who conducted exclusive interviews with the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins and Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader.

Parker recalled how “when the lady used to sculpt/ Mixed emotions made us gulp”. But when “the lady’s interviews / Crashed upon the daily news,/ Moan we now ­another lay, -/ ‘Give, oh give her back her clay’”.

Another took on Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the head of Harvard University who excluded black students from freshman dormitories and sought to impose a quota on Jews.

Parker compared America’s grandest institution of learning to a racist “summer hostelry”.

Stuart Y Silverstein, a lawyer, came across the poems in 1994 in a 1923 issue of Life magazine. “They looked very similar to something that appeared the year before (in the same magazine) that were also ‘valentines’, that were attributed to Dorothy Parker,” he said.

Clare Sheridan, right. Picture: Getty Images

One gleefully described the “maiden blush” in the cheek of Princess Mary. (“Shall we say a royal flush?”).

But the 1923 poems were published anonymously. Mr Silverstein made a copy, “wrote at the top of the page ‘Parker?’” and filed it in a box. Going through the box again last year, he came across the question mark. In the intervening years he had discovered a possible means to identify the author, he said. In the manuscripts and ­archives division of the New York Public Library, he found Life magazine’s accounts from 1923. There, in plain ink, was a record of a payment, apparently of $US50, to one “Dorothy Parker” for “Verses for Rea Irvin Valentine”.

The library’s archives division did not tend to encourage screaming celebrations, Mr Silverstein said on Thursday. “Restraint is suggested”. Still, it had been “a ­eureka moment”, he said. “It was as conclusive documentation as you are going to get for something like this.”

Kevin Fitzpatrick, of the Dorothy Parker Society, was astounded and thrilled by the discovery. The poems “brought all these people back to life”, he said. Mr Silverstein, 65, arranged for them to be read out at the Lambs Club near Times Square by a young novelist named Tara Isabella Burton, who at 29 is the age that Parker was when she wrote the poems.

Once her audience had been apprised of who the personages were, the performance became like a comedy roast, Burton said. “They are absolutely hilarious.”

One poem was addressed to William Allen White, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist from “way out west” whose name adorns a journalism school in Kansas. “(He) dashes off philosophy, / Sure that every homely crack / Will be worth its weight in jack.”

In another valentine poem, ­addressed to a Russian theatre producer named Morris Guest, Parker notes that every critic “has graven on his heart; If it’s Russian, then it’s art”.

The Times