Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories

I read the Penguin Classics edition of Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories a little at a time--mostly on plane-rides to New York--over the course of a couple of years, so I can't recall a lot of detail about the stories. This is the first Parker I've read--I knew her by reputation, of course. Well, mostly for her famous, "I like to have a martini, two at the very most; three, I'm under the table, four I'm under the host!" Which, I just learned via Google, you can get on a bevy of martini glasses. It also appears on the cocktail napkins at the Algonquin Hotel bar, her famous haunt. What I enjoyed most about the stories, besides of course her acerbic wit, was how she could write a dinner party scene and reveal every character's foible through nothing but dialogue. The way her characters talk give away all the flaws they should be trying to cover up. And the way she uses details to poke holes in the image the character is trying to convey: "Lily Wynton wore, just as she should have, black satin and sables, and long white gloves were wrinkled luxuriously about her wrists. But there were delicate streaks of grime in the folds of her gloves, and down the shining length of her gown there were small, irregularly shaped dull patches; bits of food or drops of drink, or perhaps both, sometimes must have slipped their carriers and found brief sanctuary there. Her hat--oh, her hat. It was romance, it was mystery, it was strange, sweet sorrow; it was Lily Wynton's hat, of all the world, and no other could dare it. Black it was, and tilted, and a great, soft plume drooped from it to follow her cheek and curl across her throat. Beneath it, her hair had the various hues of neglected brass. But, oh, her hat." "In his zeal for order Mr. Wilcox strongly urges military discipline. In fact, he verges on the fanatical on this subject. He ardently believes that the louder an argument is uttered the more convincing it is; therefore, he is wont almost to shout, with accompanying virile thumps on a neighboring table, that the only thing which can save this country from ruin is three months' compulsory military training, annually, for all the men between the ages of eighteen and forty. Mr. Wilcox was forty-one last January." And, of course, none of her characters can seem to refuse a drink: "This is a nice highball, isn't it? Well, well, well, to think of me having real Scotch; I'm out of the bush leagues at last. Are you going to have another one? Well, I shouldn't like to see you drinking all by yourself, Fred. Solitary drinking is what causes half the crime in the country. That's what's responsible for the failure of prohibition. But, please, Fred, tell him to make mine just a little one. Make it awfully weak; just cambric Scotch." It makes you wonder if she ever met anyone she actually admired.

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy was quite the surprise. I'd heard mixed reviews of Hardy, so I didn't know what to expect, but I rather liked this book. I thought it had surprisingly modern ideas for a nineteenth-century novel. Jude is tricked into marriage by one girl, so it is already salacious when he starts pursuing Sue Bridehead, his true love. After his wife runs off to Australia and later seeks a divorce, he is free to marry Sue. But she is gun shy after her own failed marriage, so they live together and pose as a married couple without ever making it official. While this is nothing out of the ordinary in 2011, it seems pretty revolutionary for 1895.

And apparently many found it a little too nontraditional. The book was met with outrage when it was published, surprising Hardy, who thought of it as a moral tale. It was burned publicly and nicknamed Jude, the Obscene according to the Wikipedia article. Like many of today's accusations against books, it seems like an over-reaction. It's not giving too much away to say the couple faced many hardships due to their choices, so it was in no means an endorsement of the lifestyle.

Controversy aside, this was a pretty good read. I would definitely pick up more Hardy.