Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde, on On the work that will outlive them, and the work they hoped would.
2. 00:10
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You know, Oscar, I've been thinking about immortality. Not the heavenly kind—the literary kind. The kind that keeps us both here talking when we should be decently decomposed.
3. 00:20
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, decomposition is the only critical opinion I've managed to avoid thus far. Though I confess, I expected posterity to be less democratic. One hopes one's afterlife will be more selective than a radio program.
4. 00:32
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Selective. That's rich. You wrote fairy tales for children, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray for the masses. And me? I wrote light verse for magazines that lined birdcages by Thursday.
5. 00:44
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but the masses remembered my fairy tales, didn't they? While my poems—my beautiful poems, the ones I truly cared for—gather dust in libraries where even the librarians look embarrassed. I gave them 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' from my very soul, and they wanted more epigrams about cucumber sandwiches.
6. 01:01
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   At least you got Reading Gaol published. I spent two years on a novel. 'But the One on the Right' I was going to call it. Never finished. Turned it into a play instead, and that closed in forty-eight performances.
7. 01:14
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Forty-eight? How democratic of the public.
8. 01:16
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   They wanted the Algonquin Round Table Dorothy. The quip machine. Not the one who actually sweated over sentences.
9. 01:22
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Yes, well. They wanted the Wilde who said delicious things at dinner parties, not the one who spent seven years perfecting Salomé in French. Do you know, I rather thought Salomé would be my enduring work. All that purple prose, that gorgeous sin. Instead they quote me about temptation and gutters and stars.
10. 01:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I don't even get quoted accurately. 'Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.' I wrote 'guys.' Guys who wear glasses. But never mind. It scans better their way, apparently.
11. 01:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    At least they quote you from your published work. Half of what I'm credited with saying, I said once at the Café Royal after too much absinthe. The other half I never said at all. The internet has made me far wittier than I ever was in life.
12. 02:06
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The internet thinks I said 'Brevity is the soul of lingerie.' I didn't. Though I wish I had—it's better than most of what I actually wrote.
13. 02:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There's a certain justice to it, though, don't you think? We both performed ourselves so thoroughly in life. I was Oscar Wilde before I ever wrote a successful play. You were Dorothy Parker before you'd published a book. We created the personas, and now the personas have escaped us entirely.
14. 02:28
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Escaped. Murdered us and taken our names, more like. But here's what gets me, Oscar. The work I really cared about—the short stories, 'Big Blonde,' the serious poems—people act like they're surprised I could write them. As if I interrupted the floor show to do something worthwhile.
15. 02:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    'Big Blonde.' That won a prize, didn't it?
16. 02:47
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The O. Henry Award. 1929. And you know what people still ask me about? 'Constant Reader' columns and what I said about Katharine Hepburn. Not the story about a woman drinking herself toward death.
17. 03:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What did you say about Katharine Hepburn?
18. 03:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That she ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. It was a review. Twenty words out of five hundred, but it's the only thing anybody remembers.
19. 03:10
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, well. I wrote an entire aesthetic philosophy in 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'—thousands of words about art and individualism and the spirit. No one reads it. But everyone knows I said I could resist everything except temptation. Which I did say, in a play, but still.
20. 03:25
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did you really think socialism was the answer? You, of all people?
21. 03:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I thought individualism was the answer, and socialism seemed the only system that would leave individuals alone to be beautiful. I was wrong, of course. But it was a gorgeous essay. I proved that property destroyed art, that capitalism crushed the soul. I was rather proud of it.
22. 03:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I joined the Communist Party. 1927, I think. Or maybe '28. I wanted to do something that mattered, not just be clever about other people's plays.
23. 03:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How very earnest of you.
24. 03:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It was earnest. Embarrassingly earnest. I went to meetings. I wrote about injustice. I testified before Congress and got blacklisted for my trouble. And you know what survives? 'Résumé.' Eight lines about how killing yourself is too much bother.
25. 04:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well, it's a perfect poem.
26. 04:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It's flippant.
27. 04:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's perfect and flippant. The two are not incompatible. I achieved perfection several times—usually in the shorter forms. 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is perfect, though I meant it to be deeper than people think. But my poems—'The Harlot's House,' 'The Sphinx'—I labored over those. I wanted to be Keats, Dorothy. Or Shelley. I wanted the music and the beauty and the eternal truth.
28. 04:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And instead you're the man who said he had nothing to declare but his genius.
29. 04:40
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Which I never said. But it sounds like something I would have said, so I'm stuck with it. Though I did say the bit about the wallpaper and one of us having to go. That was real, at least. In my dying moments, I achieved wit. One doesn't know whether to be proud or appalled.
30. 04:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I didn't even get a good exit line. I just ran out of drink and time.
31. 04:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The work that outlives us is rarely the work we imagined would. I thought 'De Profundis' would secure my reputation—my great soul-baring letter from prison. And it did, but not in the way I hoped. People read it for the scandal, for the Bosie of it all, not for the meditation on suffering and art.
32. 05:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wanted my political work to matter. The stories about inequality, the screenplays about injustice. I worked on 'A Star Is Born,' for God's sake. But nobody thinks of me and thinks social conscience.
33. 05:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They think of us and think of quotations. As if we were fortune cookies with better syntax.
34. 05:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Maybe we were too good at the performance. You in your velvet coats and your sunflower, me with my round table and my martinis. We gave them what they wanted, and now we can't make them want anything else.
35. 05:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But Dorothy, here's the terrible thing—the thing I realized far too late. The performance was also the art. I was serious about being unserious. The wit wasn't a distraction from the work; it was the work. 'Earnest' is just elaborated wit, and it will outlive everything I wrote with a straight face.
36. 06:00
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You're saying we should have leaned into it? Just been the trained seals they wanted?
37. 06:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'm saying perhaps there's no difference between the seal and the artist. We performed brilliantly, and that brilliance was real. You wrote perfect light verse. I wrote perfect comedies. That we also wrote other things—deeper things—doesn't make the light work false.
38. 06:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I hate that you might be right.
39. 06:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course I'm right. I'm always right, except when I'm being profound, and then I'm usually wrong. But the wit endures, Dorothy. That's the horror and the glory of it. We'll be remembered for making people laugh, not for making them think.
40. 06:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Will they still be laughing in a hundred years?
41. 06:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    God, I hope not. I'd hate to think we were that universal. Much better to be a footnote in a thesis on the Decadent movement than to be genuinely funny to people who've never heard of the Aesthetic movement.
42. 06:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    But we are funny to them. That's the problem. The jokes still land. People who think the Algonquin is a hotel chain still laugh at my verse. The work we didn't respect turned out to be durable.
43. 06:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then perhaps—and I say this with great reluctance—we were wrong about our own work. Perhaps the lightness we dismissed was actually the thing we did best. The thing that no one else could do quite the way we did it.
44. 07:06
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's a depressing thought.
45. 07:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Isn't it? I find it absolutely crushing. I wanted to be remembered as a poet and I'll be remembered as a playwright. You wanted to be remembered as a serious writer and you'll be remembered as a wit. We've both been condemned to immortality for our minor offenses.
46. 07:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least we're remembered. Most of the serious writers we envied are completely forgotten. You know who else was at the Round Table? Alexander Woollcott. Robert Benchley. Where are their immortal works?
47. 07:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Benchley was very funny.
48. 07:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Benchley was very funny, and he's very gone. But me? I dashed off 'Résumé' in an afternoon, and it's in every anthology. It isn't fair.
49. 07:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Fairness is what people demand when they haven't got talent. We had talent, Dorothy. Different talent than we thought we had, perhaps. But the work survives because it deserved to survive. Even if it's the wrong work.
50. 07:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So you're saying we should be grateful? For being remembered for the things we thought were throwaways?
51. 08:01
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'm saying we should be honest. We weren't as good at the serious things as we thought we were. But we were better at the light things than anyone else. That's something, isn't it? To be the best at something, even if it's something you didn't quite respect?
52. 08:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I suppose. Though I still think 'Big Blonde' is better than anything clever I ever wrote.
53. 08:18
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I still think 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is better than 'The Importance of Being Earnest.' But neither of us gets to choose. The work that lives is the work that lives. We're just the ghosts haunting our own reputations.
54. 08:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, as long as we're haunting, we might as well do it with style.
55. 08:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Dorothy, is there any other way?