Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Dorothy Parker sits down with Oscar Wilde for LATE SHOW. The subject — On a movement or empire they helped build that they no longer recognize.
2. 00:11
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You know, Oscar, I went to a comedy show last month. Well, not last month. Time's funny here. But I went, and every third joke was someone just being vicious to get a laugh. Not clever vicious. Just vicious.
3. 00:22
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, surely you of all people cannot object to viciousness in wit? You once said that if you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by you.
4. 00:30
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I said it, and I meant it. But I knew how to sharpen a knife. These people are just swinging meat cleavers. There's no craft to it. No architecture. They think being mean is the same as being funny.
5. 00:43
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah. Yes. I see your distinction, though I confess I am wounded by it. You see, I believed I had helped create a world where wit was valued above all things. Where the perfectly turned phrase was itself a kind of morality.
6. 00:55
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You did. And then everyone started turning phrases, and it turned out most people can't.
7. 01:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   The tragedy of influence. I wanted to liberate art from the tyranny of earnestness, and instead I seem to have licensed a century of people saying any cruel thing and calling it irony. Every cad with a quip now claims me as father.
8. 01:12
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Join the club. I spent the Algonquin years skewering pretension, and now everyone with a Twitter account thinks they're me. Except they're not skewering pretension. They're just pretending while they skewer.
9. 01:24
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Twitter. Yes. I have been made aware of this. It is rather like if all of London's drawing rooms were collapsed into one ghastly room where everyone shouts simultaneously and no one wears proper evening dress.
10. 01:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And everyone's trying to coin the perfect insult, but they're all just mean. Mean doesn't need an audience of millions. Mean is easy.
11. 01:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Quite. When I said that I could resist everything except temptation, I was making a point about human nature, about the gap between our aspirations and our appetites. Now people simply quote it to excuse their latest indulgence. The observation becomes permission.
12. 01:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least your stuff sounds good when they mangle it. Mine they turn into needlepoint pillows. Can you imagine anything more depressing than cross-stitched cynicism?
13. 02:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I can, actually. I can imagine my fairy tales sold as children's books with the sadness removed. I can imagine my trial being cited as evidence that I courted martyrdom rather than that I was destroyed by hypocrites.
14. 02:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Oh, we're getting serious. All right. You want to talk about what they did to your story? They made you a martyr for being witty. Like the wit was the point. The wit was armor, Oscar. They don't understand that.
15. 02:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The wit was armor. Yes. And also weapon, and transport, and occasionally truth disguised so it might slip past the censor. But these modern champions of mine seem to think I was persecuted for being clever rather than for being myself.
16. 02:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They want the sparkle without the substance. The pose without the price.
17. 02:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. And I confess, Dorothy, I bear some responsibility. I did rather insist that surface was substance, that the pose was the point. In my devotion to beauty and artifice, I may have suggested that depth was dull.
18. 02:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You didn't suggest it. You said it outright. You said only shallow people don't judge by appearances.
19. 03:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I did say that, didn't I? And I meant it, in the moment I said it. But I also wrote 'De Profundis' from prison, and no one seems particularly interested in that. Too earnest. Too raw. They prefer me in a green carnation.
20. 03:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I know the feeling. Everyone remembers the Algonquin table, the quips, the reviews where I said Katharine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. But I also wrote 'Big Blonde.' I went to Spain during the war. I testified against the blacklist.
21. 03:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah yes, your political work. How terribly awkward for those who wish to remember you as merely decorative.
22. 03:37
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Awkward doesn't begin to cover it. Turns out if you're a wisecracking woman with political convictions, people decide you're shrill. The wit's only charming when it's toothless.
23. 03:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Whereas if you are a wisecracking man, they decide you are dangerous. Though I suppose I was proved right on that count. The English did find me dangerous enough to imprison.
24. 03:56
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And now they put up plaques. Isn't that always the way? First they jail you, then they turn you into a tourist attraction.
25. 04:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I have a statue in Dublin wearing a smoking jacket. I died in poverty in a Paris hotel, and now I lounge in bronze, eternally witty. The final joke, I suppose, is that they have made me respectable.
26. 04:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Respectable. Christ. That's what we get for surviving into legend. We become safe.
27. 04:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Do you know what troubles me most? It is not that they have stolen our wit. It is that they have stolen our wit and removed its purpose. You and I wrote prettily because we had something to say that could not be said plainly.
28. 04:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We wrote prettily because plain talk got you fired. Or arrested.
29. 04:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Indeed. The aphorism was a form of survival. One could tell truth slant, as your Miss Dickinson had it, and perhaps the truth would slip past while everyone admired the slant.
30. 04:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Now they've got the slant memorized, but they've forgotten there was supposed to be truth underneath. It's all frosting, no cake.
31. 04:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Frosting without cake. An apt metaphor for the aesthetic movement I seem to have spawned, though I protest I intended something rather more nourishing.
32. 04:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did you? I'm asking honestly. Did you want them to see through the pose or just admire it?
33. 05:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Both. Neither. I wanted them to understand that the pose was not separate from the truth but rather a more beautiful way of presenting it. That artifice could contain more honesty than naturalism. But I fear I was too successful at the first part and entirely failed at the second.
34. 05:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We both were. We taught them style, and they decided style was enough. Now I look around and see a million little mimics who think a cutting remark is the same as a point of view.
35. 05:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I see young people wearing my face on t-shirts with my quotes printed below, as if wisdom could be purchased at retail. Though I suppose I did say that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
36. 05:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You also died broke, Oscar. They always leave that part off the t-shirt.
37. 05:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Details, details. But you are quite right. They want the champagne philosophy without the morning after. The brilliant decay without the actual decaying.
38. 05:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So what do we do about it? We can't exactly issue a retraction. 'Sorry, folks, we were just kidding about all that wit stuff, please read our earnest political essays instead.'
39. 06:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No, I suppose we cannot un-ring the bell. And I am not certain I would wish to. I stand by my wit, even if I regret what others have made of it. The problem is not that we were too clever. The problem is that they mistake cleverness for completion.
40. 06:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The problem is they think we were just playing. We weren't playing, Oscar. We were surviving.
41. 06:22
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes. Surviving, and occasionally, when we were very lucky, living. The wit was not a substitute for life. It was how we managed to live in a world that would have preferred we didn't.
42. 06:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And now that world puts us on coffee mugs and thinks it's paid us a compliment.
43. 06:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps that is the final irony. We set out to transform the world through art and wit, and we succeeded. We made wit fashionable, acceptable, even mandatory in certain circles. And in doing so, we made it common. The revolution we wanted has been won and somehow also lost.
44. 06:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Every revolution gets bought out eventually. Ours just got bought out by people who can quote us but can't read us.
45. 07:01
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Can't or won't?
46. 07:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Both. Neither. Take your pick. I've stopped trying to figure out if people are stupid or just lazy. Either way, you end up disappointed.
47. 07:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very unlike you to be disappointed, Dorothy. I thought you arrived pre-disappointed to save time.
48. 07:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I did. I do. But every generation manages to find a new flavor of disappointing. This one's specialty is thinking a retweet is the same as having a thought.
49. 07:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet here we are, two thoroughly dead people, still talking. Still being quoted, even if we are being misquoted. Perhaps that is not legacy but at least it is something.
50. 07:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Something. Yeah. I guess that'll have to do. Though I'd trade a thousand misquotes for one person who actually understood what we were doing.
51. 07:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One person who understood. What a perfectly modest ambition for a pair of writers. I shall add it to my epitaph. 'Oscar Wilde: He hoped for one attentive reader.'
52. 07:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Better than mine. 'Dorothy Parker: Excuse my dust.' I wrote it as a joke. They put it on my actual memorial. Even in death, nobody gets the joke.
53. 08:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They got the joke, darling. They simply preferred the version where you weren't serious.
54. 08:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Story of my life.
55. 08:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And mine. Perhaps that is what we built together, then. Not a movement of wit, but a permission structure for people to avoid taking anyone seriously, including themselves. How terribly modern of us.
56. 08:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Terribly modern. Terribly meaningless. Terribly successful. Welcome to the twentieth century, Oscar. Sorry you missed it. And also, you're welcome.