Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   So we're doing confessions tonight. How terribly Catholic of the network. I suppose they want us to admit we've actually liked someone.
2. 00:07
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Liked is such a pedestrian word, Dorothy. One likes marmalade. One likes a well-turned ankle. What we're discussing is that exquisite agony of encountering a rival whose work makes one want to simultaneously applaud and commit arson.
3. 00:20
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You say the prettiest things. All right, I'll bite. There was a woman—Edna St. Vincent Millay. Could make a sonnet do backflips. I hated her for it.
4. 00:29
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, Miss Millay! 'My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night.' Lovely line. Though I always thought burning at both ends suggested poor candle management more than romantic tragedy.
5. 00:40
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   See, that's exactly what made me want to push her down a flight of stairs. She could be careless and still be brilliant. I had to work at it. Every bon mot polished until my fingernails bled.
6. 00:50
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Darling, spontaneity is merely careful preparation disguised as accident. Though I confess, some people do seem born with an unfair advantage. Shaw, for instance.
7. 00:59
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Bernard Shaw? You respected that windbag?
8. 01:02
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Respected, loathed, envied—the trinity of proper rivalry. The man could not write a sentence under seventy words, yet somehow made tedium sparkle. He had convictions, which I always found in rather poor taste, but he wore them like good tailoring.
9. 01:17
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I met Shaw once. He told me socialism was the future. I told him the future was overrated and ordered another drink.
10. 01:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The problem with Shaw was that he cared. Terribly earnest beneath all that wit. He actually believed art should improve people, which strikes me as asking rather too much of a good painting or a decent play.
11. 01:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Millay cared too. About love, about women's freedom, about burning her damned candle. I just wanted to write a clean sentence and make rent.
12. 01:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How charmingly American. We Europeans prefer our poverty to come with delusions of grandeur. But tell me, what was it precisely about Miss Millay that crawled under your skin? The success? The cheekbones? The way men fainted at her readings?
13. 01:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The ease. She made it look easy. Here I was, bleeding into my typewriter every night at the Algonquin, sharpening zingers like kitchen knives, and she just… exhaled poetry. Beautiful, careless, perfect poetry.
14. 02:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I knew a poet like that once. Lord Alfred Douglas. Bosie. Terrible poet, actually, but he thought himself magnificent, which amounts to the same thing in certain circles.
15. 02:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's not the same thing at all, Oscar. I'm talking about someone who was actually good.
16. 02:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Fair point. Though Bosie did have one talent: he could destroy a life with the efficiency of a guillotine. Mine, specifically. Perhaps that counts as a kind of artistry.
17. 02:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We're getting maudlin. Pour yourself another imaginary drink and tell me about Shaw. What did he write that made you want to set fire to your own work?
18. 02:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    'Pygmalion.' That damned flower girl and her phonetics professor. He took the oldest story in the world—Ovid told it better—and somehow made it sharp and new and utterly his own. I wanted to hate it. I saw it three times.
19. 02:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Three times? That's not rivalry, Oscar. That's fandom.
20. 02:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's research. Professional interest. Besides, I was dead by then, so theatrical attendance hardly counted as an endorsement. But yes, I admired the bastard. He could make social criticism entertaining, which is rather like making economics seductive.
21. 03:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Millay could make loneliness sound like a party invitation. 'I shall forget you presently, my dear.' Christ, I wished I'd written that. Instead I was stuck writing about how men are like streetcars—miss one, another comes along.
22. 03:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That's rather good, actually.
23. 03:26
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It's a joke, not a poem. There's a difference. Jokes fade. Sonnets get anthologized. She knew how to build something that lasted.
24. 03:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Dorothy, jokes are the only things that do last. Shakespeare's puns have survived four centuries of earnest academics trying to explain them to death. Your quips will outlive her candles.
25. 03:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You're being kind. I don't trust it.
26. 03:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'm being honest, which is far more dangerous. But here's the thing about rivals we respect: they show us what we might have been if we'd chosen differently. Shaw chose sincerity. I chose surfaces. Neither of us was wrong, merely incomplete.
27. 04:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Millay chose passion. I chose defense. She burned bright; I burned everyone else before they could burn me.
28. 04:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And which of you was happier?
29. 04:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Neither. But she had better press.
30. 04:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There you are. That's the real source of all literary rivalry—not talent, not even money, but the appalling suspicion that someone else is getting better reviews from posterity.
31. 04:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Shaw got sainted. You got martyred. I got turned into a cocktail anecdote. Millay got taught to freshman girls as proof that women could write like men, which would have made her throw her typewriter out a window.
32. 04:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The afterlife of reputation is the final indignity. They remember me for my trial, not my plays. They remember you for the Algonquin Round Table, not your stories. Poor Millay probably gets remembered for that candle and nothing else.
33. 04:45
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    She deserved better. That's the hell of it. She was genuinely good, and all people want is the one line that fits on a greeting card.
34. 04:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Shaw deserved better too. 'Pygmalion' became 'My Fair Lady'—which is rather like turning wine back into water. All his sharp edges sanded down into a love story with a happy ending.
35. 05:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did you ever tell him? That you admired him?
36. 05:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Good God, no. What would be the point? Admiration unexpressed maintains its dignity. Besides, he knew. Great artists always know who their real competition is.
37. 05:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I never told Millay either. We were polite at parties. Exchanged the usual compliments, all lacquered with insincerity. I think she saw right through me.
38. 05:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Of course she did. We always recognize our own level. That's what makes rivalry so exhausting—it requires us to acknowledge excellence in others, which is against human nature.
39. 05:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Against writer nature especially. We're supposed to believe we're all frauds except ourselves. Finding out someone else is legitimate is like discovering your neurosis isn't unique.
40. 05:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Exactly. And discovering they make it look effortless while we sweat blood is adding insult to injury. Shaw would dash off a preface longer than most people's novels before breakfast. It was obscene.
41. 05:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Millay wrote 'Renascence' when she was nineteen. Nineteen! I was still figuring out how to hold a pen at nineteen. Well, that's a lie. I was figuring out how to hold a martini.
42. 06:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A more useful skill in the long run, I suspect. But yes, precocity in others is particularly galling. It suggests that talent might actually be innate rather than earned, which undermines our entire mythology of suffering for art.
43. 06:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I did suffer, though. Every day at that magazine, writing copy about soap and stockings. Every night trying to write something true. She just seemed to float above it all.
44. 06:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Everyone floats when you're only watching from below, darling. She had her own hells, I'm sure. Beauty is its own prison. People expect angels to stay angelic.
45. 06:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You think I'm being unfair?
46. 06:37
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I think we're both being honest, which amounts to the same thing. Envy is just admiration with its teeth bared. We envied them because they had something we wanted—not their success, precisely, but their particular way of being brilliant.
47. 06:50
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Shaw's certainty. Millay's freedom. Things neither of us could manage.
48. 06:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. I could never believe in anything the way Shaw believed in social progress. And you could never be as reckless as Millay because you were too busy keeping yourself alive.
49. 07:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Is that what we're calling it? Respect? Because it feels more like losing a fight you didn't know you were in.
50. 07:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    All genuine respect feels like losing, Dorothy. If it doesn't hurt a little, it's just good manners. The rivals who haunt us are the ones who showed us our own limitations.
51. 07:16
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, that's cheerful. Are we done confessing now? I need a drink.
52. 07:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We're always done when you need a drink, which suggests we're never done at all. But yes, I think we've lowered our guards sufficiently for one evening. Any final words for your dear departed Miss Millay?
53. 07:29
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    She burned at both ends, and the light was beautiful. I wish I'd told her so.
54. 07:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And Shaw?
55. 07:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    What about him?
56. 07:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Your final words.
57. 07:37
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Oh. Well. He was a windbag who happened to be right about most things. The worst kind of person.
58. 07:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'll drink to that. To the rivals who made us better by making us furious.
59. 07:46
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And to the confession neither of them will ever hear. That's the real mercy, isn't it? They're gone, and we can finally admit they were good.
60. 07:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The only safe time to be generous to one's rivals is after they're safely dead and can't enjoy it. I believe that's called perspective.
61. 08:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I believe that's called being human. Same thing, really.