Constant Reader: 2

by Dorothy Parker

"A column about books signed 'Constant Reader' ran in The New Yorker almost every week from October 1927 through May 1928, and intermittently thereafter until 1933. It was an open secret that 'Constant Reader' was Dorothy Parker, though her name never appeared. Her original books of poems and short stories were being published in those same years, but no one collected the Constant Reader pieces - partly, perhaps, because of the convention of pseudonymity, which would have prevented the use of her name. Yet these light-hearted essays about reading and writing played as much part in creating the Parker legend, and were as much a part of the times, as her stories and poems. They were a new and very personal kind of book reviewing. Without pretending to the Higher Criticism, they were still far from being merely fun. In the more close-knit literary world of the late twenties and early thirties, they often made or unmade reputations. And time has confirmed most of her judgments.

Of the forty-six Constant Reader pieces that appeared, thirty-one have been reprinted here in whole or in part."

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Humor, Books About Books, Classics

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Dorothy Parker was an American writer, poet and critic best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.

Reviews

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

'YOU DON'T GET 'GREAT' OUT OF ME FOR RED APPLES'

If you read any short stories by Dorothy Parker, you already know what to expect. If it is going to be your first endeavour, get ready for sipping a fizzy cocktail consisting of her razor-sharp intelligence, sly wit, elegance, exquisite prose and a pinch of melancholy.

Constant Reader is a collection of book reviews Dorothy Parker published in The New Yorker from 1927 to 1933. The term review does not give these texts justice: they are an intriguing blend of a review, an essay and a feuilleton. Discussed books serve as a catapult for springy digressions on writers, literature, current events and culture in general.

We already know from the title of the collection that Dorothy Parker was a constant reader. Apparently, she was also...

✪ a critical reader
You don’t get ‘great’ out of me for red apples.

✪ a well-traveled reader
The Swiss are a neat and an industrious people, none of whom is under seventy-five years of age. They make cheeses, milk chocolate, and watches, all of which, when you come right down to it, are pretty fairly unnecessary. It is all true about yodelling and cowbells. It is, however, not true about St. Bernard dogs rescuing those lost in the snow.

✪ a creative reader
I loved the parody of six types of book beginnings Dorothy Parker finds repelling in The Short Story Through a Couple of the Ages! Both hilarious and inspiring for future writers.

✪ a playful reader
Dashiel Hammett is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

✪ a slightly narcissistic reader
…which irritated me a little sometimes.

✪ a fair reader
On the one hand, there are a few waspish remarks on Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, Parker appreciates the quality of his short stories and admits: The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.

✪ an anti-spring reader
I hate the filthy season. Summer makes me drowsy. Autumn makes me sing. Winter's pretty lousy, but I hate Spring. They know how I feel. They know what Spring makes out of me. Just a Thing That Was Once a Woman, that's all I am in the Springtime.

✪ a compassionate reader
Do not let Dorothy Parker's sarcasm deceive you: the review of Journal by Katherine Mansfield, the saddest book she has ever read, reveals her sensitivity and tact.

Oh, this reader is a handful! So many guises, shades and dimensions.

According to the editor, these articles now have a nostalgic patina that gives them added interest. Sadly, in a few places, the layer of patina grew so thick that I could not get through: there are some names and book titles that do not ring a bell unless you are an expert in American cultural history of the 20s and 30s. It still does not change the fact that I was smitten with bitingly funny, insightful and meandrous divagations of Constant Reader.


Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).

[Flo]

I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is this record of six lonely and tormented years, the life’s end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it.
Her journal was her dear companion. “Come, my unseen, my unknown, let us walk together,” she says to it. Only in its pages could she show her tragically sensitive mind, her lovely, quivering soul. She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied. Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written. With a sort of fierce austerity, she strove for the crystal clearness, the hard, bright purity from which streams perfect truth. She never felt that she had attained them. [...]
October 8, 1927
—Dorothy Parker, from The Private Papers of the Dead

A column about books signed “Constant Reader” ran in The New Yorker almost every week from October 1927 through May 1928, and intermittently thereafter until 1933. It was an open secret that “Constant Reader”was Dorothy Parker, though her name never appeared.

March 26, 21

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bottom Line First:
Originally published anonymously in the New Yorker Magazine under the name Constant Reader, this is a collection of chatty book reviews with a added observations on related cultural events. Ms Parker has a very fine, acid dipped pen and more. She is writing at a time when entire generations of American writers were new and not yet too admired to be criticized. Her opinions are usually very clear but rarely explained in any depth. Her preference seems to be the writer who write the best sentences and gives us the most complex characters. This is a surmise because for all her skill with the literary put down, she is rarely clear about what she expects. Constant Reader is highly recommended- if you are looking for sharp wit but not if you are looking for statements of esthetic standards.

Imagine being able to judge emerging writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck, as each new title is coming to the public. Never needing to be careful in the handling of a literary giant and being free to pick and choose from all titles not just those that make onto the required High School reading list. The 1930' was a time when America was experiencing the first productions of the great expatriate writers, the lost generation, realism and the beginnings of newer, more experimental novel and short story forms.

Dorothy Parker was one of the writers of her generation. This means her column is not just the opinion of a trained reader, but of a person who has fought the battles to get published. Besides her standing as a poet, writer, and literary critic she was a member of the Algonquin Round table. This was a collection of hard drinking, eating and creative people. Talent and regular attendance at this New York restaurant were among the prime membership requirements. Dinners at the round table were expected to trade well-crafted and intelligent insults and to represent high levels of literary and acting talent. Ms Parker was so at home with this group that when invited to join with an inner-inner group for a several weeks long vacation at Alexander Woollcott's remote country home, she famously spent her time there wearing a hat and shoes and nothing else.

Constant reader is a fairly slender volume containing about 31 columns. She might begin by writing about her mood , the weather or one newly published work, swoop down on something not too her liking and end with a third topic. The result is more like a conversation with an opinionated, very intelligent and wickedly witty person. Some writers are championed with such regularity that I find myself looking for them having previously low rated them as too obscure. . Her praise for Ring Lardner short stories means I have added his name to my must reads. Neither Ms Parker nor I am fans of all Hemingway novels, but her belief in his short stories has me rethinking his body of work. She seems to think that Sinclair Lewis is less worthy for a variety of reason, but especially because of his over productivity.

Other selections include her famous dislike of the Winnie the Pooh Stories (famous but I am not amused), a terrible novel by Benito Mussolini (from his years before politics) the occasional how to book (The art of successful Bidding about playing bridge) and even one about how doctors should deal with appendicitis (as a way into more literary discussions of new releases by George Nathan and James Stephens. If this suggests a wide range of interests, Ms Parker is wide ranging. If it cause you to worry about uneven columns, some are better than others. Ms Parker is fond of humor based on a long set up ending with an abrupt slam dunk put down. It usually works

Constant reader usually works. It will give you cause to smile, to feel superior and names and titles from 80 years ago that will be new to you. Her recommendations will be worth your time to investigate.

[Jon]

Parker is best known for her poetry, short stories and having been one of the Algonquin Hotel circle of wits (who, according to Edmund Wilson, weren't really all that witty: he offered as a sample "Hiawatha nice girl until I met you.") Some of her best writing, though, was in these reviews, which are always entertaining and provide intriguing glimpses of the 20s. She's good on books by celebrities, especially women, who were not writers first & foremost (Aimee McPherson, Isadora Duncan), less strong when facing major work by "real" writers (of Gide's COUNTERFEITERS she essentially says only, "It's great.") She gets in a few good kicks at famous writers of the day, as when she points out that Sinclair Lewis' use of the term Babbitt, which he invented in the novel of that name, to describe the main character in his later novel DODSWORTH is in poor taste. Too bad that aside from a few stories, Parker never wrote an imaginative work as good as the Winnie-the-Pooh books she hated.

[Lindsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Dorothy Parker book is a collection of her literary criticism. It seems to me she was the Maureen Dowd of her day. Though she was somewhat more limited in subject matter (it was the 1920s and 30s, after all) she manages to comment on wide-ranging social issues through her review of literature. She is scathingly witty, a great writer, and generous with praise when it's well deserved.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

ROTFL

[Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) · Rating 4 out of 5]

After I read The Portable Dorothy Parker - and this time finished the whole thing - I really wanted more of Parker's book reviews. Although the Portable Parker edition I had said it contained all of them, I somehow couldn't help but hope I'd missed some. So when I saw the (now out of print) Constant Reader on Amazon I couldn't resist.

This is a collection of 31 of Parker's columns reviewing books in The New Yorker, from 1927 through 1933. The book's introduction says there are 46 in total, so I must recheck how many the Portable Parker contains.

From the introduction/Publisher's Note:

p. v "...It was an open secret that "Constant Reader" was Dorothy Parker, though her name never appeared. Her original books of poems and short stories were being published in those same years, but no one collected the Constant Reader pieces - partly, perhaps, because of the convention of pseudonymity, which would have prevented the use of her name.

A now few quotes from the reviews, to give you a taste of why I wish there were more.

From a review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps, words in parentheses are also Parker's. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927:

p. 19-20 "..."Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."

[I am now doomed to think of all of those authors as Happiness Boys forever after, and giggle over it.]


Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927. All you need to know about this is that it's a romance novel (sort of):

p. 23-24 "...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?

But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," she says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out."

[Ok, I have to go on and add these bits on the vibrating, because I laughed to the point of making an unattractive snorting noise:]

p. 26-27 "...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ...
...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."

Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928. Again, that's Parker within the parenthesis too:

p. 103 "...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself."

I loved her even more for poking fun at herself for not using the first person. She'd been using third person for several paragraphs before - and it's hard to transition from that gracefully.

I should assure you at this point that Parker does review some good books, it's just that to give you the best idea of the fun it's too tempting to pull out the ones she mocks or was bored with. She seems to enjoy those quite a bit herself - which probably has something to do with why I like reading these so much..

[Michael Llewellyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Parker’s wit is the stuff of legend, and nowhere is it more deliciously evident than these 31 articles from the New Yorker, circa 1927-33. Her column was called Constant Reader, and although it never bore her name, there was no doubt who wrote these acerbic, cogent, brittle, smart, whimsical, often hilarious articles. Most are book reviews, in which praise was heaped where deserved and something malodorous when it was not, but Ms. Parker also turned her penetrating spotlight on the manners and mores of the day with topics ranging from wallflowers to Benito Mussolini. Whether referring to Sinclair Lewis as “fecund rate” or warning that Elinor Glyn’s appearance on the literary scene made Sherman’s Atlanta arrival look like “a sneaking, tiptoe performance,” Ms. Parker is at her bedazzling, beguiling best. The collection is, for me anyway, much too rich for a single sitting and should be consumed with care, like an exquisitely arranged antipasto platter. I can’t recall when a book made me laugh out loud, but this one scored in spades. Clubs, hearts and diamonds too.

[NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is the best thing about Dorothy Parker? Her spot on skewing of pomposity. I just found this book last week-had never even heard of it and let me tell you, I'd like to think that I know most everything on Mrs. Parker nee Rothschild.

These are the reviews often quoted when people use her wit to show that they have some too. Done under the name Constant Reader (which seems like a great bookstore name to me), she never signed them but everyone knew who was writing them, with her quill pen dipped in poison.
my favorite review was of "House on Pooh Corner". At the end she says:
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Says it all.

[Jana Eichhorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

You wouldn't think that a book of 90 year old book reviews would be the highlight of a 24 hour readathon. You probably would also not think that a book of 90 year old book reviews would make you cackle out loud, sometimes to the point of tears, every other page.

You probably would only think those things if you'd never read any Dorothy Parker though. That woman was a goddamned national treasure.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful romp through some of the good and the bad books that were released during Dorothy Parker's years a book reviewer for several New York magazines, including, of course, The New Yorker. Parker's self-mocking style is very amusing, and she certainly doesn't take herself too seriously, that's for sure. Witty and intelligent, Parker's reviews are delightful reads.

[Herb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a funny collection of the best book review quips of Dorothy Parker, that darling of the Algonquin Round Table. I've never seen any writer savage another writer's work so humorously.
These book reviews are circa 1927-1931. Worth a look.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it... Dorothy Parker is a funny, engaging, and very smart reviewer of books. It's amazing to realize that I can enjoy reading book reviews of books I've never heard of that were published about a century ago. Parker's witty and caustic voice is a joy to experience.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

If your pal, Dorothy Parker, invites you out to hobnob with her illustrious friends, yes, you go. Even so, you may be tempted to skip out when the conversation turns to people or subjects with which you are unfamiliar but my advice to you then is: Don't.

[Sunil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Criticism a la ad hominem but it's never felt so good. "The Professor Goes In For Sweetness & Light" is worth the price alone if you're buying.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parker's writing hits the spot.

[Marg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dorothy Parker knew how to have fun and be a quirky gal full time!!! many times I found myself shook by how eccentric her humor was and how this was written a hundred years ago- what the heck!

Honorable mentions of things to look up:
- savage messiah by h.s. ede
- women have been kind by Lou tellegen
- in the service of the king by Aimee semple mcpherson

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite articles and reviews from her in this collection!

The Private Papers of the Dead
A Book of Great Short Stories
The Socialist Looks at Literature
Poor, Immortal Isadora
Ethereal Mildness
Two Lives and Some Letters
Not Even Funny

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

If these book reviews by Dorothy Parker don't make you smile, you probably don't have a pulse. Her panning of the A.A. Milne Pooh books is hilarious.

[Regine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wickedly tart. A range of skewering, from delicious to forced.

[Cynthia Sprout · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely delightful.

[Logan Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know most of the books that Parker is reviewing in this collection but it doesn't matter because her wit is so sharp & delightful, it's a pleasure to read regardless; but also I feel just a little bad about the author's whose work she's critiquing because, as I said, it seems that the world has, for the most part, forgotten their work but Dorothy Parker's snappy burns, they are forever. On behalf of Dorothy Parker, my apologies, ghosts of those (almost certainly) long dead authors. No hard feeling, I hope.

[Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

Witty and biting essays about books and authors.