Parker×Twain

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on ROAST NIGHT, Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain. They take up On the thing that scares them about being remembered.
2. 00:10
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You know what's worse than being forgotten, Sam? Being remembered by people who never got the joke in the first place.
3. 00:16
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Well, I've been dead over a century now, and I can tell you the joke's still being told. Just not the way I told it. They've got me on inspirational posters next to kittens hanging from tree branches.
4. 00:28
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Kittens. Christ. At least you're not reduced to one line at cocktail parties. Men still like to tell me I'm 'not pretty enough to be that witty,' as if I didn't hear it the first thousand times when I was alive.
5. 00:39
   Mark Twainshare moment

   You got reduced to one line? Hell, Dorothy, they turned me into an adjective. 'Twainesque.' What does that even mean? Usually it means somebody wrote something folksy and put on a white suit.
6. 00:53
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   It means they didn't read you past Tom Sawyer. You're America's favorite dead uncle who told harmless stories about boys and rafts.
7. 01:00
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Harmless. Yes. The man who wrote about slavery, imperialism, and the damned human race is remembered for a whitewashed fence. The irony's so thick you could paint it on.
8. 01:12
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   At least you're remembered as likeable. I'm the bitter shrew who hated everyone, which is demonstrably untrue. I hated most people. There's a difference.
9. 01:21
   Mark Twainshare moment

   Being likeable is its own prison. They want you quotable at graduation ceremonies. They don't want the fellow who said civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. That one doesn't fit on a bookmark.
10. 01:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Nothing I said fits on a bookmark either, but that doesn't stop them. They slap 'I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy' on tea towels. I never even said that one.
11. 01:47
    Mark Twainshare moment

    You didn't?
12. 01:48
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No. But it sounds like something I'd say if I were stupider, so it's mine now. That's the thing that scares me, really. They're making me up as they go along.
13. 01:56
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Oh, they do that with a will. I've been dead since 1910 and I'm still getting quoted on the internet saying things I never said. Apparently I said a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Pretty good line, actually. Wish I'd thought of it.
14. 02:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So we're trapped in a kind of permanent vaudeville show where someone else is doing our act. Badly.
15. 02:19
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And the audience thinks it's authentic. That's the part that stings. Your reputation becomes a runaway horse, and you're just a ghost chasing after it yelling, 'That's not what I meant.'
16. 02:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Meanwhile they've decided who we were. I'm the sad drunk lady who wrote sad poems about men. Never mind the political writing, the activism, the fact that I went to Spain during the Civil War.
17. 02:43
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Spain doesn't sell. Sadness and gin, that sells. They want their literary figures bite-sized and tragic. Makes them feel sophisticated at dinner parties.
18. 02:56
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And you're the folksy humorist who loved America, when you spent half your later years calling it a Christian civilization, which you noted was like saying arsenic is a particular kind of food.
19. 03:06
    Mark Twainshare moment

    They don't teach that essay in schools. Too uncomfortable. Better to have students read about Tom and Huck and feel good about American boyhood, whatever the hell that means.
20. 03:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So what scares you, then? Really scares you about how you're remembered?
21. 03:20
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That they've made me safe. That's what scares me. I wasn't safe. I was angry and disappointed and I said so in print for decades. But they've sanded off all the edges and what's left is this... grandfatherly figure who told charming stories.
22. 03:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Safe. Yes. That's the word exactly. They've made me safe too, in a different way. The danger's all personal now, all about my love life and my drinking. Never about what I actually threatened.
23. 03:50
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Which was?
24. 03:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The same thing you did, I imagine. The pretensions of respectable society. The stupid cruelty we call civilization. But if they can make it about my being sad and drunk, then it's not about them anymore. It's just about poor Dorothy and her personal failings.
25. 04:07
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Personal failings are always safer than societal critiques. You can pity a drunk. Can't pity someone who's pointing out that you're complicit.
26. 04:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Exactly. So they remember the bon mots and forget the bile underneath. They quote me at parties and think they're being sophisticated when really they're just... decorating.
27. 04:26
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Decorating. That's good. We're furniture now. Tasteful literary furniture that makes the room look cultured.
28. 04:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And the worst part, the absolute worst part, is we can't correct them. We're dead. We have no right of reply. They can make us mean whatever serves them.
29. 04:43
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Well, we're correcting them now, for whatever that's worth. Which is probably nothing, but it's something to do on a Thursday night in the afterlife.
30. 04:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Is it Thursday? I've lost track. All the days are the same when you're dead and frequently misquoted.
31. 04:56
    Mark Twainshare moment

    I'm guessing. Could be Tuesday. Point is, here we are, two ghosts complaining that our ghosts have better publicity than we do.
32. 05:04
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Our ghosts are more popular and more palatable. They're the versions of us that people can live with. We were harder to live with.
33. 05:11
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Much harder. I was a difficult old bastard at the end. Angry, profane, half-mad with disappointment about what the human race had done with itself.
34. 05:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And I was sharp and mean and political and most of my life was spent on things nobody remembers because they'd rather focus on who I slept with and what I drank.
35. 05:31
    Mark Twainshare moment

    So we're both scared of the same thing, then.
36. 05:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Which is?
37. 05:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    That the thing that survives isn't us at all. It's a puppet with our name on it, saying things we'd never say, standing for things we'd never stand for.
38. 05:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    A puppet in a white suit.
39. 05:44
    Mark Twainshare moment

    And a cloche hat with a martini glass.
40. 05:47
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    God, even the accessories are wrong. I wore the hat ironically.
41. 05:50
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Everything's ironic until it gets remembered. Then it becomes sincere whether you meant it or not.
42. 05:56
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That should be on a bookmark. Except it shouldn't, because then we'd be doing the same thing to ourselves that they do to us.
43. 06:02
    Mark Twainshare moment

    True enough. Maybe the only thing worse than being misremembered is being remembered exactly right but by people too dull to understand it.
44. 06:10
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Now that's a terrifying thought.
45. 06:12
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Isn't it? You spend your whole life trying to tell the truth in a way people will hear it, and then you die and they hear it just fine—they just decide it doesn't apply to them.
46. 06:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So what do we do about it?
47. 06:24
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Not a damn thing. We're dead. The dead don't get to control their reputations. That's what makes death permanent.
48. 06:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Cheerful. I see you haven't lost your touch.
49. 06:34
    Mark Twainshare moment

    Neither have you. Still sharp enough to draw blood, even without a body to bleed from.
50. 06:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, if we're going to be misremembered anyway, we might as well be misremembered honestly. That's something, isn't it?
51. 06:45
    Mark Twainshare moment

    It's not much. But it's probably all we've got.