Just over 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 $35 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!”
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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 said. “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.
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.
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Silverstein believes that 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, thought Penguin’s title was “risky because they don’t know what’s undiscovered, by definition”. But he also thought it would be hard to show that anyone was being harmed. Cynthia Arato, a specialist in intellectual property and media law, said it could be argued that consumers understood that “complete” was not intended to be a representation that the work contained every poem ever written by Parker.
Whatever the ramifications, literary experts were delighted by the find. Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, said: “They definitely do read like her.”
When she wrote them the Algonquin Round Table was at its zenith, he said. In January 1920 Parker had been fired by Vanity Fair after some particularly spiky theatre reviews. Her colleague, the 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 Frank 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 said. “The joke was that one foot less and it would be adultery.”
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One of Life’s ledgers Silverstein found says Parker was paid $39.48 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 Twenties were a big deal,” Fitzpatrick said. Famous writers and journals would be exhaustively parodied.
Regina Barreca, a humorist, Parker enthusiast and English literature professor at the University of Connecticut, found the new poems fascinating. She recognised 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 had 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 said. She chuckled 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 Dorothy Parker? “I don’t think so,” she said. “A field of olive martinis’. Maybe.”
The seven new poems*
Just—mother
By “Florence Lippincott Towel”
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Maybe some would like to be
Queens or princesses or such;
But those titles, seems to me,
Never mean so awf’ly much.
When the evening shadows fall
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Tender little voices call
Bestest title of them all:
Just—Mother.
Don’t know what the right words are,
But I’ve always sort of thought
There are some things better far
Than those which with gold are bought.
Queens know no such joy profound
As baby arms their necks around.
Lord, some day let me be crowned—
Just—Mother.
Bessie’s wish
By “Harriette Chichester Cree”
Doodness, how I wish’t I wuz
All drowed up, so old and tall.
It would be des fine, becuz
I’se so tired of being small.
Wish’t I’d drow up awful far,
Higher than the golden rod.
Wish’t I wuz as old as Ma—
Almost nearly old as Dod.
Pear blossom
By “Fiona McCrumb”
(From the Manchester Musk-Ox)
The apple tree scratches and rasps at my window;
Sick and twisted it is, with the gnarling years.
It raises its boughs to the Heavens, whining for rain—
Rain that rolls down blowsy clouds, like strumpets’ tears.
And I say to my heart, “These are 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.
You are a little like April
By “Waldemar Fringe”
(From Good Times: A Magazine of the New Verse)
My spirit smothers in this prison-house,
This stultifying cage of flesh, this cell.
I pant to cast it from me, as the husks
Drop from the still, gold wonder of the corn.
I go at midnight to the moon-cold pool,
And stand there, lithe and stifling; gazing-deep
At this effrontery of white young flesh,
And cry aloud to burst these galling bonds.
Air, air, air …….. Give it me, give it me!
The three blue women o’ Lochmalone
By “Seumas Ahrensbacher”
(From Inertia)
The three blue women o’ Lochmalone,
They sit at their wheels all day.
And the peat-bogs echo the seagull’s moan,
But never a word they say.
The three blue women o’ Lochmalone,
Their shuttles rattle and creak.
And the fisherwives keen a long “Ochrone,”
But never a word they speak.
The three blue women o’ Lochmalone,
The threads of them twist and break.
And the devil sits fine on his shining throne,
But never a crack they make.
The profane colyum conductor
By “The Fly Wheeler”
The happy crowds flock to the countryside,
While some to the sea do swarm,
But the colyumnist swelters his desk beside,
Though the weather is moist and warm.
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 colyumnist’s life is h-ll!
My, how short the skirts are growing!
By “Jay Ell Eff”
Mary had a little lamb,
But that is not the half—
We see without a diagram
She had a little calf.
