Chapter 9
1926
BARTENDER: What are you having?
PARKER: Not much fun.
All around people seemed to be having fun, but recently Dorothy had begun to suspect that there might be a “flaw in paganism” and even thought she knew what it might be:
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
After returning from Stamford, she continued to feel as low as mud. She drank more but with an aggressive quality that had not been present before. At Tony’s, she started out by ordering Scotch with plain water, then called back the waiter and defiantly switched her order to straight Scotch, which she swallowed with alarming speed. Touchy and foul-tempered, she bit off people’s heads. When Johnny Weaver remarked that he was glad to see her looking so well, she snapped, “Where the hell are you looking?”
Her friends had seen her in bad shape, but never like this, when it took so little to kindle her rage. People, she wrote, “can say what they like about me,” but they should remember that she was not a troublemaker. “I make my own living, and I don’t have to ask favors off of anybody.” If trusted friends chose to insult her, they knew what they could do and where they could do it. “Tiffany’s window, see?” Into these diatribes she injected bits of autobiography about her heart murmur, the respectability of her upbringing, and the handsome houses her family had owned, vague references that were more relevant than anyone suspected. Finally she would subside, whispering that she wished she were dead.
Whenever friends named the things she might live for, she refused to listen. “When she would be really blue,” said Allen Saalburg,
she would begin talking about how worthless life was. Marc [Connelly] once got down on his knees and took her hands in his. He started telling her how valuable she was, how wonderful life could be, how everybody had troubles, and she should cheer up. She didn’t say anything, but after he had left she said, “What a silly old fool.” And she was right. He had been sort of silly, because he overplayed it in a theatrical way. Nothing he’d said were the things that might have impressed her.
Knowing that she was edging close to danger scared her. The story that she began to write was an almost-verbatim account of her irascible behavior and an apology for it, an attempt to articulate her mood and an effort to dissipate it. In a speakeasy at three in the morning, a woman wearing a petunia-colored hat is overheard throwing a fit as she unleashes a tearful monologue, the gist of which seems to be that life is not worth living. She is good and drunk. Her companion, a man described as owning ice-blue hair and who probably was a thinly disguised portrait of Seward Collins, keeps trying to placate her but is unable to get a word in. In this story, she was eager to put a comic face on her fears. Harold Ross thought that “Dialogue at Three in the Morning” was amusing enough to publish in The New Yorker for, on its most superficial level, as a portrait of a drunk wallowing in willful self-pity and paranoia, it had meaning for Prohibition readers.
At a party one night, Peggy Leech introduced her to a doctor she was dating. Alvan Barach was thirty, an earnest young intern from Newcastle, Pennsylvania, who had taken his degree at Columbia Medical School, read Bergson and Goethe, and wrote poetry and fiction as a hobby. In 1925 Barach had yet to begin his lifelong specialty in pulmonary medicine and his work leading to the development of the oxygen tent. He taught at Columbia and privately practiced psychotherapy. In spite of his attraction to the Algonquin writers, he felt somewhat out of place. His idea of cocktail-party conversation was a discussion of Tolstoy’s ideas; theirs was not. During the evening, he rose up and initiated a comparison of Dostoyevsky with Tolstoy that provoked indulgent smiles from Woollcott and the others, who thought he was laying it on a bit thick. Undeterred by their amusement and Marc Connelly’s repeated interruptions, Barach pressed on without taking offense. Dorothy observed him approvingly. His manner had a purposefulness that impressed her; she called his office the next morning to make an appointment for a consultation.
Barach decided that she had a lot of “tender expectancies” that were not being fulfilled, but the problem in need of most urgent attention was her drinking, which he felt had reached pathological proportions. While he tried to emphasize the subject in their sessions, he was met with almost total resistance. Dorothy found it impossible to participate in any productive way. As is often the case at the beginning of psychiatric treatment, her symptoms became exacerbated and she felt more depressed than ever. Yesterdays blurred into todays and she forgot the day of the week. Drinking no longer produced an automatic high. In fact, she now had to work at it, increasing the dosage to get the same sensation. What frightened her most were those times when the effects of the whisky suddenly deserted her without warning and she would be swamped by anxiety so powerful that she seemed to be sinking in her tracks, literally unable to move forward or backward. She felt misery was crushing her “between great smooth stones.” Terrified to discover that Scotch could not be trusted, she began to view it as an old friend who had inexplicably refused to do her a simple favor.
As she drifted from drink to drink, her anguish mounting, she also had to deal with parting from the dog Eddie had brought for her. The Airedale kept growing until she joked about entering him in a horse show. Even more troublesome was his habit of eating the Algonquin’s furniture. Dorothy called him “a veritable addict” who could make a whole meal out of a sofa and when he ran out of sofa turned to a chintz-covered arm chair for a light snack. “It was eventually decided—and maybe you think that tears weren’t shed over that decision!—that he was not the dog for apartment existence.” She presented him to friends in the country, but felt miserable over the loss.
As Dr. Barach urged her toward sobriety, Dorothy was meantime investigating a different kind of insurance policy. She discovered Veronal, a popular sodium barbital-type sedative, and took it when Scotch failed to put her out. In New York State, Veronal was available by prescription only, but she learned this was not the case in New Jersey. She made a special trip to Newark, where she tramped from drug store to drug store buying Veronal, as well as sundries such as talcum powder and emery boards so that her purchases would not arouse suspicion. She concealed this cache of pills in the drawer of her dressing table. Knowing it was there made her feel better.
She failed to mention the Veronal to Dr. Barach. While she was willing to give him a chance to repair her, she remained secretly unconvinced that she was worth the trouble. One night when she returned to the hotel, drunk but not high, she carried the Veronal bottles into the bathroom and filled a glass of water. It took a long time to swallow the tablets because they kept sticking in her throat. Then she laid herself down on the bed and waited. According to Dr. Barach, she saved herself by hurling a glass through the window at the last moment. Dorothy herself suggested later in “Big Blonde” that the attempt failed because she had not taken a sufficient dosage and also because Ivy (called Nettie in the story) discovered her in time.
After two days she returned to consciousness at the Harkness Pavilion of Presbyterian Hospital, where her first thoughts were rage at Barach for daring to interfere. Then the tears fell “as if they would never stop.” When the nurses said she was lucky to be alive, she thought the opposite was true. She felt unlucky to have failed. She also needed a drink badly.
She didn’t get one, because now that Barach had her in the hospital, he insisted she dry out and knew there was no earthly way of her getting a drink. After a few days, he was astonished to notice that she was tight. On his 4:00 P.M. rounds, she would be sober, but, when he stopped again at six, it was clear that she had been drinking. Investigation revealed that every day at five she had a visit from Heywood Broun, who by this time was also a patient of Barach’s. As always, Broun carried with him a hip flask of gin, and Dorothy persuaded him to share it. She could not wait to find out if alcohol would again be her friend; the prospect of not being able to get drunk filled her with terror.
After the first week, she felt bored and eager for company. When Frank Sullivan stopped by, he found her with “the insides of her arms black and blue from the saline injections they had pumped into her, but putting up a brave front.” Benchley tactfully acknowledged this latest attempt to terminate herself by cloaking his emotion in banter. He warned her that if she didn’t stop it she would make herself sick. From a chair next to her bed, he began to unburden himself as though he were the one who had caved in. By now, his love affair had become an emotional and financial strain. He owed the Shelton Hotel so much money he couldn’t afford to move. When Edmund Wilson appeared shortly afterward, she reported that Benchley was at the end of his rope. The hospital, she joked, “was getting the room across the hall ready for him.” The last subject she wanted to discuss was herself. Instead, she began describing other patients on the floor: a girl who tried to teach her rug weaving and a genuine vicomte who presented her with an anthology of French poetry and a turtle that ran away. Wilson noticed that she looked thinner and “her intelligence and sensibility came back into her eyes.”
After her release from the Harkness Pavilion, she kept regular appointments with Dr. Barach. Treatment at twenty-five dollars an hour was expensive, but Dorothy seldom (perhaps never) got around to paying and the doctor did not press her. Her recovery depended upon her ability to control her drinking. Making Dorothy understand this was difficult because she remained unconvinced of her alcoholism. Having lived with Eddie, she considered herself an expert on drunks. It was hard to dissociate the problem from his rampages. She decided her own afflictions had nothing in common with Eddie’s. Dr. Barach did not insist that she give up alcohol, only cut down. It was his opinion that reasonable amounts were harmless and furthermore he believed that people who drank moderately probably lived longer than abstainers. Dorothy promised to curb her consumption and for some weeks liberally diluted her Scotch with ice and White Rock club soda, and then nursed it.
As before, she tried to make light of her impulse to self-destruction, although this time psychiatric treatment made it harder to accomplish. In verse, she compiled a consumers’ report for those contemplating suicide and rated the various methods of killing one’s self: Razors, as she knew from experience, were painful, and drugs caused vomiting and cramps. Other methods she had not actually tested had to be dismissed on hearsay as hopelessly unreliable: Given the inadequacy of what was available to an aspiring suicide, Dorothy figured she might as well go on living. When “Résumé” was published in The Conning Tower, some people admired the way she had transformed a near-fatal experience into dark humor. As might be expected, Dr. Barach was not among them.
Even though Barach was a convivial man who enjoyed partying with the Round Table and was a regular weekend guest at the Swopes in Great Neck, his overall view of the group tended to be critical. He told Dorothy that the tragedy of life was not so much what people suffered, but what they missed. In his opinion, she and her friends were missing a great deal. Their need to spend so much time together was a measure of their insecurity, he thought. Their compulsion to be entertaining and their reluctance to discuss anything for more than a few minutes—and then never in depth—forced them to neglect the purposeful, striving side of their natures. By developing her instinctual drives at the expense of her serious nature, by then compounding the problem by partying and drinking, she was losing the energy to progress as a writer. While it was valuable to live in the moment and to enjoy her impulse for pleasure, he believed she should also acknowledge the opposite principle of purpose and restraint, to appraise her life as she was living it.
Perhaps influenced by Barach, Dorothy suddenly began to knock the Round Table. She talked bitterly about how the group had spoiled her and how she regretted having wasted so much time trying to dream up witticisms when she could have been doing serious work. Although those close to her listened to these critical remarks without much enthusiasm, they had to agree that a new way of life would be in order.
Dorothy turned to Seward Collins. Having kept him at a distance during her affair with Deems Taylor, she now decided to sleep with him. Despite the fact that he was always available (therefore weak and unexciting), she knew that he meant well and was eager to coddle her. In her precarious state, it must have been reassuring to have him around. As one of her friends later observed, Collins regarded her as a madonna, while she treated him like a dust mop and wiped up the floor with him. What motives Collins had for entering into this arrangement are unknown.
Collins not only had plenty of money, but he was also a generous lover. He bought her a beautiful wristwatch studded with diamonds. Of even greater value to her was his know-how when it came to marketing her work, what little there was of it. It is very likely that he had a hand in her resurrecting a passage from the novel she had begun in Stamford, the section depicting her father’s death, and shaping it into a short story. Whatever her original intention for this piece of writing, it was able to stand alone satisfactorily. She titled it “The Wonderful Old Gentleman” (with the pointed subtitle, “A Story Proving That No One Can Hate Like a Close Relative”) and immediately sold it to the Pictorial Review, where it appeared in January 1926.
In February, still lying on Dr. Barach’s couch and trying to get straightened out, she met Ernest Hemingway. He was in New York to break his contract with Boni and Liveright because they had rejected a novel he had written. For some months now, she had been hearing favorable things about Hemingway from Don Stewart, who had been his friend for several years, and also from Benchley, who had met him in France the previous summer. She knew that Hemingway was working on a semiautobiographical novel about bullfighting, in which one of his characters was based on Stewart and another on Benchley. All this had predisposed her toward the man before she ever set eyes on him.
Hemingway intended to stay a week. He arranged to move from Boni and Liveright to Scribner’s, who agreed to bring out both The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises. He was pleased to have Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins, as his new editor. After his business had been taken care of, he lingered for a second week of partying, drinking, and getting acquainted with the local literary crowd. Dorothy ran into him often. All that she knew of his writing was In Our Time, a recent collection of short stories. His stark prose had impressed her even though the book had caused, she recalled, “about as much stir in literary circles as an incompleted dogfight on upper Riverside Drive.” What interested her more than his fiction were his views about the process of writing itself, a task that by now she had come to view as painful. In talking to him, she soon learned that their methods of composition had much in common. He told her that writing did not come easily for him; invariably, he would set down a word or a sentence, scratch it out, then have to begin all over. For Dorothy, the discouraging slowness of her work—the isolation, the claustrophobic silence—was enough to make her flee, and often she did.
When she wondered if Hemingway ever found writing unpleasant, he said he did but dismissed this as too obvious to worry about. Writing was hard and dirty work, he said; you had to accept this and not expect conditions to improve, because they wouldn’t. He also told her that sometimes he would rewrite a single page sixty or seventy times without feeling satisfied. The whole secret of writing was to work like hell.
Dorothy managed to overlook the fact that Hemingway’s pronouncements were a touch condescending and his judgments not unique; he was not the first novelist to rewrite a page sixty times. Still, she valued his views for their common sense and also found him to be an especially engaging person whose masculinity was magnificent. She would not have agreed with Zelda Fitzgerald, who, about this same time, branded him as a phony and witheringly described The Sun Also Rises as being about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bull———.” In New York, charming and modest, Hemingway was at his most agreeable. His blowhard side, soon to grow more prominent, was not yet evident to Dorothy, who felt eager to know him better and pursued his friendship like everyone else.
Hemingway proved to be a most attractive delegate from the expatriate paradise that she had heard so much about. She was an avid and soon envious listener to his stories about how American writers were living and working in Paris. She found enchantment in his repeated accounts of the Dingo bar, the Closerie des Lilas, a café where Hemingway did his writing, and the flat over a sawmill he shared with his wife, Hadley, and an infant son whom he called Bumby. Everyone in her crowd was fascinated by him, but nobody took a closer interest or asked more questions than Dorothy.
Within a few days, she made up her mind to go abroad to live. It was an impulsive decision, characteristic of her love of drama, but it managed to catapult her out of her gloom so successfully that none of her astonished friends or Alvan Barach attempted to dissuade her. In later years, she explained her move to France by noting that “everybody did that then,” Paris being a fashionable address for writers who took their work seriously. By 1926 the exchange rate had become so favorable that it would be possible for her to live there more cheaply, certainly more grandly, than in New York.
Her real motives were personal. After the painful times she had experienced recently, she wanted to forget and hoped that a new environment might enable her to cure herself, or at least to insulate herself from dangerous habits and unsafe relationships. She wanted to believe that in France she could somehow become a different person, a real writer like Ernest Hemingway, and envisioned herself in the comfortable cafés of the Left Bank writing diligently.
Once her decision was made, she lost no time and booked passage for the February 20 sailing of the President Roosevelt, the same ship on which Hemingway was returning to France. In her impatience to be off, she allowed herself only one week in which to tidy up her past and arrange for her future. Seward Collins probably paid for her passage. The problem of how she might scrape up enough money to support herself abroad resolved itself with remarkable swiftness when she decided to collect the verse she had written for The Conning Tower and Life and publish them in book form. Collins most likely originated this plan; Dorothy herself had strong doubts about it. She thought her poems were “not good enough for a book” and had no wish to make a fool of herself by calling public attention to the fact. Yet Horace Liveright immediately expressed enthusiasm for the idea. Their friendship did not affect his business judgment; he believed that Boni and Liveright could make a decent profit on a volume of light verse. Liveright had recently contracted with another light-verse writer, Sam Hoffenstein, for a similar collection and saw no reason not to publish a pair of poetry volumes. Among the items hastily thrown into Dorothy’s steamer trunk were folders of clippings and carbon copies of her published verse. She planned to select those poems she considered good enough to include in the book she had tentatively titled Sobbing in The Conning Tower once she got settled in Paris.
At the last minute, Benchley volunteered to shepherd her to Paris, but second class on the Roosevelt was fully booked. All the United States Lines could offer was a promise of cancellation. He had difficulty convincing Gertrude that the journey was absolutely necessary—and indeed it was not. For a while, it looked as if Gertrude might exact a price by insisting he take nine-year-old Nat along for company, chaperonage that Benchley was doubtless not anxious to have. In the end, she relented and gave permission. Benchley could joyride across the Atlantic with Dorothy and Hemingway without any strings attached, but he had to come straight home on the next boat.
As soon as he could get away, Collins was also planning to join Dorothy abroad. Always happy for an excuse to visit France, his chief source of erotica, he looked forward to a buying spree.
Dorothy, along with Benchley and Hemingway, boarded the Roosevelt in Hoboken at midnight in the midst of a blizzard, none of which was particularly reassuring to Dorothy; since the Titanic, she had always been inclined to associate ocean travel with her uncle Martin’s death. The final day had passed feverishly with farewell celebrations and a trip to the bootlegger to buy Scotch for the crossing. By the time she reached Hoboken, countless shakers of cocktails had been emptied, several additional stops had been made en route to buy bootleg champagne, and the bon voyage party had expanded to include Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét, Marc Connelly, and Dorothy’s sister and brother and their families. Friends sent a dozen steamer baskets of fruit, which she would never eat. According to Hemingway, who had fallen in and out of love with Wylie that day, he was good and pie-eyed, and so was everyone else.
Despite the champagne, Dorothy felt apprehensive. When the boat was getting ready to depart, she and Benchley ventured out on the icy decks to the slippery rail and looked over. To cheer her up he began to tell stories so silly and tasteless that she could not help smiling. He joked about throwing the children’s life preservers overboard, then started a story with, “God, what a night to go out in the storm!—and I wouldn’t mind if the crew wasn’t yellow.” Benchley could always make her feel better. Once they were under way he learned that the steamship line had no available rooms in first class after all and planned to put him in a maid’s room adjoining a bridal suite. The next day Dorothy discovered that some scoundrel among the bon voyage revelers had stolen all her Scotch. On the fourth day, Benchley said he felt just as he had felt when he’d once had the crabs. On the sixth day out, he realized he did have pubic lice.
Still, the crossing turned out to be a good time. The Roosevelt was a comfortable ship with excellent food. Despite squally weather, there was only a slight roll to the sea. Dorothy slept late, then played bridge in the afternoons with Hemingway and Benchley. They all took their meals together at the officers’ table, where Hemingway made a serious production out of consuming saltpeter. He told them it was necessary to control sexual appetites. While Dorothy refrained from showing her amusement to his face, she did continue to giggle about it to friends for months afterward. Benchley wrote to Gertrude that Dorothy was “quite all right now that she is relieved of the strain, and there hasn’t been a fight yet.” She arrived in Cherbourg in fine spirits.
In Paris it felt like spring. The weather was unseasonably warm, all in all a perfect introduction to the city Dorothy had been daydreaming about. Everything enchanted her. It made no difference that nothing much seemed to be happening there and that the few people she knew were about to depart. Hemingway had spoken incessantly about his eagerness to return to Austria, where he had left his wife and son, but then, as though he were in no rush to leave, he offered to show Dorothy and Benchley the sights. The reason for his lingering was actually a Vogue editor with whom he was having an affair. The girlfriend, Pauline Pfeiffer, did not join them, nor was she ever mentioned. There were a couple of convivial meals at the Closerie des Lilas with Scott and Zelda, who, having spent the winter in the Pyrenees so that Zelda could take a cure for colitis, were now stopping briefly in Paris before heading south to the Riviera where they had rented a villa. Benchley too, after ridding himself of crabs and buying presents for his family, soon left. By this time, Seward Collins had arrived.
Sewie rapidly took charge of arranging a journey to southern France and Spain. Invited to join them were Collins’s good friend Gilbert Seldes, a critic who had been managing editor of The Dial, and his wife Alice. The couple had arrived there some weeks earlier. Collins announced that the Seldeses and Dorothy should consider themselves his guests because he planned to foot the bill for a deluxe tour. Dorothy made no objection. Her unspoken understanding with the rich was that it was part of God’s foreordained plan for them to give and her to receive, with no obligation on her part to feel guilt or gratitude. Before she settled down to work, she wanted to see Europe. With Collins paying the bills, she could save money. Shortly before their departure, the false spring suddenly ended with snow, and she was happy to head South.
During the previous weeks, Hemingway’s enthusiasm had helped to form her ideas about Spain. The realization that his sensibilities might be quite different from her own and that she was going to hate Spain began soon after they reached Barcelona. So thoroughly had his tales of the corrida mesmerized her, that she had somehow managed to overlook the fact that animals were involved. From expensive seats in the shade, she watched with interest at first. When the first bull came rushing out, the matador moved in and began to work the bull with his cape. Then the bull charged the picadors and the crowd was noisy around her when suddenly the bull’s horns disappeared into the belly of a picador’s horse. Horrified to see the horse’s intestines spurting into the sand, Dorothy rose and stalked toward the nearest exit with a bewildered Collins coming after her.
Revolted, sick to her stomach, she cursed Collins, whom she seemed to hold responsible for the Spanish national sport and refused to return to her seat. She could not understand why he had brought her to witness the killing of defenseless animals when he knew she could not bear their slightest mistreatment. It made no difference that bulls sometimes killed matadors, and for that matter she hoped they did because she found matadors disgusting.
The rest of Spain proved to be equally unpleasant. On the train to Madrid, a guard patrolling past their compartment noticed Gilbert Seldes kissing his pregnant wife on the forehead and reproached him in Spanish for vulgar behavior. Collins, the only one of them who understood anything of the language, warned the guard to mind his own business, then copied down his badge number and threatened to lodge a complaint once they reached their destination. At the Madrid railroad station, in a bizarre reversal, the guard reported Collins and had him hauled down the platform and taken to a police station. Dorothy and the Seldeses trooped helplessly behind. By the time Collins had been released, with a warning to behave himself in the future, they all were furious and marched straight to the American consulate, where they were advised to forget the incident and continue their sightseeing.
By this time, Dorothy was convinced that Spain was a dreadful country. She was appalled by its poverty and backwardness; she hated its narrowmindedness and believed its treatment of animals barbarous. The only way she could express her disgust was to ridicule the Spanish. She said that their national anthem seemed to be “Tea for Two,” a popular international hit that year, being played ad nauseam in hotel lounges. There was now additional tension among the group because Dorothy had grown to dislike Gilbert Seldes, who was dominating their itinerary. At Hendaye, before they crossed the frontier, Seldes “did not have a stitch of Spanish to his name,” but by the time they had reached Aragon “he was helping the natives along with their subjunctives. It was enough to make me, in a word, sick.”
They spent Easter in Seville, where the solemnity of Holy Week was thoroughly spoiled for Dorothy by chilly temperatures and the repulsive habit of Spanish men of pinching women’s bottoms. It got so bad that she hated to walk on the streets. To make matters worse, she discovered that Sewie was not a lover who improved with extended contact.
They returned to Paris, to a round of expatriate-colony parties, invitations to which arrived by pneumatique, and to a city that spring seemed to have bypassed, despite its budding horse chestnut trees. Dorothy mockingly described Paris as “la belle, la brave, laraw, la rainy.” The place was “as cold as a son-of-a-gun,” as gray and cheerless as Hartford. She and Collins moved into the Lutetia, a large hotel on the Boulevard Raspail near the Luxembourg Gardens. Sewie and his mania for dirty postcards got on her nerves and she was no good at controlling her tongue. They continuously argued. In the midst of a quarrel one day, she pulled off the diamond watch he had given her and flung it out the window, whereupon he ran down five flights to the street to rescue it. Her disdain was complete when he returned the watch to her. He decided to go home. Dorothy did not care.
It rained every day for three weeks. Ordinarily, she enjoyed rain, but not every day. The dark weather made the city sad and dingy and depressed her. Once or twice Hemingway came to visit her. Sitting in the Lutetia, they watched the passage of a funeral procession moving quietly down the rain-swept boulevard. For Dorothy, rain and death entwined were events so awful that she had to make jokes, and she did so. Hemingway lifted his eyebrows at her seeming callousness, but she did not bother to explain herself and merely remarked that the funerals of strangers left her unmoved. When Hemingway, who was leaving shortly for Spain, asked her impression of the country he loved so greatly, Dorothy unthinkingly launched into a massive attack on the place. Her comments deeply insulted him. Furthermore, he was offended by her choice of traveling companions. He did not care for Collins, to whom he facetiously referred as the man who had shot Abraham Lincoln, and he had a long-standing feud with Gilbert Seldes, who had once turned down a story of his and supposedly written a rejection letter advising him to stick to journalism. Hemingway concealed his hurt feelings but privately added Dorothy’s name to his catalogue of people he disliked.
During the two months she had been abroad, she had written nothing except two poems for The New Yorker, and now it was time to work on her book. She assembled a rough draft of an eighty-eight-page manuscript at breakneck speed. Nearly all the verse had been published in Life and The Conning Tower and their subjects ranged from dogs to domestic crises with Eddie when she still had hopes for their marriage, from her mother to popular Broadway actress Marilyn Miller. Critical examination of the poems dissatisfied her. Too many struck her as undistinguished or self-consciously cute, there was no unifying theme, and even the title Sobbing in the Conning Tower displeased her. Once she had omitted everything she disliked, very little remained, certainly not enough for a book. She began to write substitutions.
During the summer she worked hard and finished a bundle of new poems, including “Indian Summer,” “Men,” and “Inventory,” and sent them in batches to Harold Ross and Bob Sherwood. These new verses were punchy, cynical, and invited laughter. There was a biting candor about them, a combination of fragility and toughness almost bordering on vulgarity, that was highly distinctive compared to those written by other women poets. Slowly Dorothy could see a central theme of death emerging—the death of loved ones, but more frequently the end of love or the death of dreams. All the verses were by no means successful in her opinion, but she had built up the percentage considerably and now felt far happier about the project.
Among those she had retained from the original batch was one called “News Item,” which had appeared in The Conning Tower. It was the sort of poem she did so well and so effortlessly:
Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.
Those nine words seemed quite innocuous to her at the time. Later, to her utter amazement, it would be “News Item” that people remembered while they forgot or ignored or never knew any of her other work, and she cursed the impulse that ever led her to republish it.
Since the French economy suffered a depression at the time and the official rate of exchange had fallen to thirty-six francs to the dollar, Dorothy lived comfortably on very little. She did potboiler articles for Life and three short stories for The New Yorker, but the only one of particular interest is “Oh, He’s Charming!” The story depicts a tea-party encounter between a celebrity novelist and an admiring female reader who is thrilled to meet him socially. Dorothy’s novelist character, with his swollen head, his arrogant manner, and insulting dismissal of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner, strongly suggests Ernest Hemingway. As much as she admired him as a writer and experienced the pull of his personal charm, she must have felt a spurt of dislike for him. While Dorothy counted Hemingway and James Joyce as two of her favorite authors, she was never sufficiently impressed by either to forgo mockery. Joyce, whom she passed on the streets or glimpsed in restaurants, was known to be excessively taciturn. “I guess,” Dorothy later remarked to Elmer Rice, “he’s afraid he might drop a pearl.”
That summer several of her closest friends visited Europe. Aleck Woollcott and Charles MacArthur passed through Paris on their way to the Riviera. Don Stewart and his new wife, a Santa Barbara debutante named Beatrice Ames, turned up en route to Cap d’Antibes on their honeymoon. For a while, the Fitzgeralds were in town so that Zelda could have her appendix removed, but they too returned to the south of France. All of Dorothy’s friends seemed to be either just going to, or just returning from, Antibes. They all raved about the Murphys, a wealthy American couple with three young children who lived in Paris and in Antibes, where they were renovating an elegant house they called Villa America. Shortly after her return to Paris in May, Dorothy had met them and liked them very much. Gerald Murphy, who graduated from Yale in the class of 1911, was a tall, redheaded man whose wealth came from the New York leather goods store, Mark Cross. The family business held no attraction for Murphy, who studied landscape architecture and later painting and once called the Mark Cross store a monument to the useless. In 1921, he had married Sara Wiborg, the daughter of a millionaire manufacturer of printing ink, and brought her to Europe, where they were drawn to artistic people such as Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and Scott Fitzgerald. Their many friends considered the Murphys to be an ideal couple who knew how to live with exceptional style and grace. Dorothy did not know them well, but they impressed her as fine people, even if they were extremely rich.
Although reluctant to admit it, she was beginning to feel lonely. There were few people to converse with because her grasp of French remained poor. She was able to understand the language only if the speaker was “reasonably adept at pantomime” and could read it “at glacier speed, muffing only the key-word of every sentence.” As the months passed there were too many meals alone and too many drinks, so that she had put on weight. In need of fun, she made a brief excursion southwards via Carcassonne and wound up in Monte Carlo, where the casino refused to admit her because she was not wearing stockings. “So I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.” On this trip she bought herself a Scottish terrier whom a previous owner had named Daisy. It wasn’t the name Dorothy would have selected, but she soon realized it made no difference, for Daisy couldn’t be bothered answering no matter what anybody called her. On the other hand, Daisy was unusually smart. “Why, that dog is practically a Phi Beta Kappa. She can sit up and beg, and she can give her paw—I don’t say she will, but she can.” Having a dog again cheered her greatly and made Paris more bearable.
Still, it was a relief when autumn came. One day, when she went to the Guaranty Trust Company to collect her mail, she realized that the American tourists had gone home. Now some of her friends began drifting back to the city. Road-weary Don and Bea Stewart arrived from Munich and moved into a nearby hotel with their new schnauzer, continuing their honeymoon while Don wrote articles for the Chicago Tribune. Dorothy got on well with Bea, who had a nice sense of humor and was fond of having a good time.
While it was pleasant to have company, she continued to invest most of her energies in her writing. She overhauled the autobiographical story about a mother and her adopted child that she had begun the previous summer as part of her novel. Having plundered a partial manuscript again, the novel no longer amounted to much. The adopted child, quite likely a little girl in her original drafts, became a boy named Curtis. The story reverberates with Eleanor Rothschild’s admonitions to Dorothy about counting her blessings. Dorothy titled this story “Lucky Little Curtis” and mailed it to Pictorial Review, the same magazine that had published “The Wonderful Old Gentleman.” She did not submit either of these stories to The New Yorker because she did not regard the magazine as an appropriate market for serious fiction. She further dismissed it because Harold Ross paid writers so little.
Early in October, Dorothy went to a birthday party that Don gave for Bea at Prunier’s restaurant. Hemingway showed up alone. He effectively wrecked the party mood by announcing that his marriage had broken up and he was now living by himself in a studio lent by Gerald Murphy. He supposed that he would be getting a divorce to marry Pauline Pfeiffer. This news considerably upset Don Stewart, who admired Hadley Hemingway as one of the finest women he knew, nor could he hide his disapproval that the breakup had occurred over another woman.
Shortly after this, the poet Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada, hosted an evening party at a sumptuous flat on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne that some wealthy friends had loaned them. Among the guests was Hemingway, so depressed over his temporary separation from Pauline that he was seriously considering suicide. The Stewarts were also present but not Dorothy, who did not know the MacLeishes at that time. Hemingway had brought a poem with him he’d written about Dorothy and insisted upon reading it, although nobody encouraged him once he had read the title: “To a Tragic Poetess—Nothing in her life became her like her almost leaving of it.” The poem opened with an extremely harsh attack that accused Dorothy of cowardice. Apparently its author had no sympathy for those who want to kill themselves but lack the nerve to carry through. There were further ridiculing references to her affair with MacArthur and the subsequent abortion, and her scorn for Spain and bullfighting were not passed over either:
Spaniards pinched
the Jewish cheeks of your plump ass
in holy week in Seville
forgetful of our Lord and His passion.
Returned, your ass intact, to Paris
to write more poems for the New Yorker....
Then, offering a contrast to Dorothy, he went on reverentially to present several supposedly genuine tragedies that had been suffered by various Spaniards whose courage he deeply appreciated. The poem was in exceptionally bad taste, racist as well as sexist in that it contained anti-Semitic slurs against both Dorothy and Gilbert Seldes.
At the MacLeishes’, Hemingway’s audience was not amused. Don Stewart, who thought it was “viciously unfair and unfunny,” immediately jumped up and protested. “I told him what I thought of his poem”; that turned out to be the end of their friendship. As might be expected, Stewart and his wife took pains to shield Dorothy from all knowledge of what had taken place at the MacLeish party, and apparently none of the others present spoke of the incident either. The poem was eventually published, but not until after her death. If Dorothy found the sudden estrangement between the two men peculiar, she asked no questions. Unaware of Hemingway’s cruelty toward her, she continued to regard him as an innovative writer and a person with many estimable qualities.
She was beginning to change her mind about living abroad. She had spent nearly half a year on her own and proved to herself that she could still labor with discipline. She had a good deal to show for those nunnish months, but accomplishments were not enough. In early November, when the Stewarts booked their sailing, she knew that she could not face the prospect of being alone. Taking her Scottie with her, she went home with Don and Bea.
Her first week in New York she was merry as could be. The transatlantic crossing, she joked, was “so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the first mate.” Frank Adams wanted to hear all about Ernest Hemingway. How old was this fellow anyway?
“Well, I don’t know,” she told him. “You know, all writers are either twenty-nine or Thomas Hardy.”
Back in her old suite at the Algonquin, at her favorite table at Tony’s with Benchley, she trundled her new Scottie all over town and told stories about life in Paris. When the New York Telegram offered her a job as drama critic, she pretended to debate whether or not to accept. “What would Lincoln have done?” she wondered. It was obvious Lincoln would have refused and so did she. One night Thornton Wilder took her to hear a concert of old English ballads. The singers sang without accompaniment and then thoroughly mystified her by sitting down at a table as if they were going to play cards. She kept “expecting them to deal.” It was an intensely boring evening. She went to a Saturday night party at Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun’s house where she reminisced at length with Elinor Wylie and congratulated an elated Frank Adams, whose first child had been born that evening.
Next morning she woke unusually early for her. West Forty-fourth Street was Sunday silent. She dressed and went down to the lobby. By eleven o’clock, she was ringing the bell at Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét’s house on East Eighteenth Street. When a surprised Elinor opened the door, Dorothy said that something really bad was happening to her, if Elinor knew what she meant, which she did. “She spent the day with us from eleven AM till five PM, saying she was going to kill herself that night & as she’d already made two attempts—wrists and veronal—it was not very soothing to [the] nerves.” For several hours Elinor talked to her, then she was joined by her husband and both of them “begged, reasoned, kidded, scolded & did all we could.”
Wylie and Benét somehow got through to her. Relenting, she promised Elinor not to do anything “for the present.” The next day Elinor wrote to her mother that “we were queer ones for her to come to, in a way. I supposed she thinks we are experts on the subject!”
The bad time passed away fairly quickly, but it shook her confidence. She had imagined herself strong again, since she had been able to write so much that year. She worried that her periods of creativity were going to be nothing more than intervals between suicide attempts. It was a chastening thought.
After her brief treatment with Dr. Barach, she did not continue psychotherapy. Many years later, she mentioned to Oscar Levant that once she had told Barach about hating her father, she could think of nothing further to say and wondered how other patients managed to fill up the time, a problem the garrulous Levant found impossible to comprehend. Citing the eleven-year analysis of Lillian Hellman and the case of Heywood Broun, who went in and out of treatment “like a revolving door,” she expressed doubt about therapy because, she said, “I’ve never seen a cure.”
Instead, she continued to place her faith in Scotch. Any substance that made her feel good was as velvet to her—and Scotch had the further advantage of being portable.
About this time, Edmund Wilson ran into her on the street. He was surprised to see her looking fat, bloated, puffy-eyed, and he thought her hairstyle, cut into a ragged bob, was unbecoming.
“Why dontcha ever come to see me, yuh damn fool?” she said to him.
One evening they went out together. Dorothy insisted on going to Tony’s because “Mr. Benchley is sunk tonight, and I promised I’d go up there and see him.” Wilson felt annoyed but not surprised because the Round Tablers, in his opinion, did not know how to get along with anybody but one another and only felt safe in their regular hangouts. His account of this boozy evening is a sad update on Benchley’s life: “... He was getting worse and worse in debt (his syndicate stuff began to show it—overdrafts on Scarsdale bank), he would rush out to Chicago, where the mistress was playing, to lecture....” Benchley had taken great pains to help the young woman. Robert Sherwood later told Nathaniel Benchley that the elder Benchley had taught her how to behave, to enter a room, and even tutored her in French. As it happened, Benchley’s youthful protégée was able to profit quite nicely from his coaching in speech and deportment. She went on to become a dramatic actress whose distinguished career spanned forty-five years on American and British stages.
Arriving at Tony’s, Dorothy and Wilson found Benchley leaning against a wall in the hall. They ordered the first of many rounds of Tom Collinses and settled down for an evening of serious drinking. Wilson did not find the reunion enjoyable. Dorothy flattered him excessively, “which always inspired me with misgivings,” and Benchley nervously drummed his fingers on the table until the people opposite requested him to stop. Wilson found their clowning to be embarrassing and their jokes about children “cruel and disgusting.” Suddenly he remembered that Dorothy always referred to his infant daughter Rosalind as an “it.” Wilson was further upset by Benchley’s heavy drinking and “his red grossening face,” perhaps because he himself was in the process of developing a serious problem with alcohol. Writing in his diary about the evening at Tony’s, Wilson noted disapprovingly that Benchley “had got to a point where he no longer went at all to plays he reviewed for Life, ” as opposed to previous years when he at least showed up at some of them. Although Wilson allowed that Benchley had “some admirable qualities,” he would never agree with E. B. White or James Thurber, who idolized him as one of America’s finest humorists, surpassing even Mark Twain, and he also failed to understand why Dorothy regarded him as “a kind of saint.”
It took only a short time for her to slump back into the old nocturnal rituals: smoky cocktail parties in her suite with Ivy passing drinks, a few hours at some revolting play, then on to Tony’s to drink and argue about “life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman, and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan’s club when the place closes.”
In December, Boni and Liveright published her book of poems under the title Enough Rope, which she had adapted from Rabelais’s “you shall never want rope enough.” The handsome volume bore a gray-and-yellow dust jacket and a price tag of two dollars. It was dedicated to Elinor Wylie, whose personal copy Dorothy inscribed with the words With love, gratitude, and everything. After the publication of Enough Rope, everything would be different.