Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Radio Ether. Up next on ROAST NIGHT: Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde, on On being misquoted.
2. 00:07
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You know what I never said? That thing about men seldom making passes at girls who wear glasses. I mean, I did say it. In a poem. A bad poem. But now it's on coffee mugs next to Gandhi telling people to be the change.
3. 00:20
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, at least your misquotations have a certain economy. I am perpetually being credited with bon mots I would have been ashamed to utter in my sleep. Just last week I saw a greeting card assuring its recipient that I advised them to 'be themselves, because everyone else is taken.'
4. 00:34
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Did you?
5. 00:35
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Absolutely not. The sentiment is sound enough, I suppose, but the phrasing has all the elegance of a railway timetable. I would have at least had the decency to construct a proper paradox.
6. 00:44
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   The hell of it is, people quote you wrong and somehow you're still responsible. Like I'm supposed to apologize because some idiot in Milwaukee thinks I said 'what fresh hell is this' every time the doorbell rang.
7. 00:56
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   But didn't you?
8. 00:57
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Once. Maybe twice. It was funny once. Now it's on needlepoint pillows. There's a limit to how many times you can answer your own door before it stops being literature and starts being a nervous condition.
9. 01:08
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I sympathize entirely. Though I confess a certain perverse pride that my words, or words vaguely in my neighborhood, have achieved such penetration into the common consciousness. To be misquoted is at least to be remembered. Obscurity offers no such compensations.
10. 01:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Obscurity also doesn't make you sound like a fortune cookie written by a committee. Every third quote they pin on you has the word 'temptation' in it.
11. 01:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I did write rather a lot about temptation. It seemed to be my subject. But I resent the suggestion that I repeated myself. Each temptation I discussed was yielded to in an entirely novel manner.
12. 01:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The one about resisting everything except temptation—that one's yours, right?
13. 01:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes. Lady Windermere's Fan, if memory serves, which it occasionally still does. Lord Darlington says it. I gave all my best lines to the villains. The heroes were inevitably earnest, which is to say, insufferable.
14. 02:00
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Smart. I just said things at lunch and hoped somebody was sober enough to write them down. Turns out they were sober enough to write down things I didn't say, too.
15. 02:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The Algonquin Round Table. I've heard of it. A movable feast of wit, they said. Though from what I understand, the feast frequently failed to move, and many of the participants failed to stand.
16. 02:19
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We had our moments. We also had our afternoons, which were considerably less memorable. But somehow those became the quotes. 'You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think'—that one I actually said. Proud of that one. Took me thirty seconds.
17. 02:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A pun. How American. We would never have stooped to wordplay in England. Except constantly.
18. 02:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The difference being you got paid by the page. I got paid in bootleg gin and the chance to humiliate men who thought they were clever.
19. 02:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A worthy compensation. Though I notice you're rather celebrated now. Books in print. Scholarly articles. I saw one academic treatise arguing about whether your poetry expressed authentic feminist rage or merely performed it. As if there were a difference.
20. 03:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    There isn't. But they have to write something to get tenure. Better me than another dissertation on Melville's whale being his mother.
21. 03:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You know what vexes me most about misquotation? It's not the inaccuracy. It's that the false versions are always simpler than what I actually said. They sand down the edges. They remove the necessary complications.
22. 03:19
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Make it fit on a bookmark.
23. 03:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. I am told, for instance, that I advised the world that 'we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' Which sounds rather like I'm recommending cheerful poverty. What I actually wrote—Lady Windermere again, I was quite prolific that season—was 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' The same words, I grant you, but the context was Lord Darlington explaining his philosophy of—
24. 03:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Wait, that's the same quote.
25. 03:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Is it? Good Lord, you're right. Well then, my complaint stands but my example fails. A hazard of being dead for over a century. One begins to misquote oneself.
26. 03:56
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least when you misquote yourself it's still eloquent. When they misquote me I sound like I'm trying to win an argument at a speakeasy.
27. 04:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Were you not?
28. 04:04
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I was trying to survive until dinner. There's a difference.
29. 04:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wonder if we're not being rather precious about this. After all, Shakespeare is misquoted constantly—'to thine own self be true' is spoken by a tedious old bore giving terrible advice—and no one considers his reputation diminished.
30. 04:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Shakespeare's been dead long enough that nobody expects him to complain. You and I are recent enough that people still feel like they know us. That's worse. They think we'd be delighted by their little internet memes.
31. 04:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Internet. Such an ugly word. It sounds like something fishermen use.
32. 04:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It's where everyone's an expert on what you meant. I saw someone explain that my poem 'Résumé' was actually about clinical depression and how I was crying out for help. It was about being hungover and dramatic. I was twenty-three.
33. 04:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The tyranny of interpretation. I suffer it as well. Dorian Gray is now apparently an allegory for homosexual panic in Victorian society. I thought I was writing a rather good story about a man who doesn't age. If I'd meant allegory, I'd have included a lion and called it Aslan.
34. 05:04
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's Lewis, not you.
35. 05:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I know. I was being arch. Though apparently not clearly enough, which rather proves my point about misunderstanding.
36. 05:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Here's what kills me—the things I actually wanted people to remember, they forget. I wrote criticism. Real criticism. I reviewed books for years. Nobody quotes that. They quote the time I said I had to get up to use the bathroom but didn't want to lose my table.
37. 05:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you say that?
38. 05:28
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No, but it sounds like something I would have said, which in the modern age is indistinguishable from having said it.
39. 05:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Perhaps that's our purgatory. Not to be forgotten, but to be remembered incorrectly. To have our ghosts walking around saying things we never said, in voices that sound almost, but not quite, like our own.
40. 05:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You're getting morbid. That's supposed to be my bit.
41. 05:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Forgive me. Death has made me derivative. Though I suppose I should thank you for the criticism. You always were rather good at it, from what I've read. Sharp without being merely cruel.
42. 05:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Merely cruel would have been easier. Merely cruel doesn't require you to read the whole book first.
43. 06:02
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I myself was accused of not reading the books I reviewed. Entirely false. I read the first chapter of every one.
44. 06:08
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The first chapter?
45. 06:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    One can tell everything one needs to know about a book from its opening. If a writer cannot be interesting immediately, why should one grant them the courtesy of three hundred pages to improve?
46. 06:19
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Because sometimes people bury the good stuff. Not everyone leads with their best line.
47. 06:23
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then they're fools. Life is far too short for delayed gratification. I always put my best lines first. And second. And third. By the final act I was usually exhausted and let the characters simply marry each other.
48. 06:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you finished things. I specialized in promising novels I never wrote. Very liberating. Can't be misquoted from a book that doesn't exist.
49. 06:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But you can be pitied, which is worse.
50. 06:46
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Everybody's pitied now. It's democratic. You're pitied for going to prison, I'm pitied for being difficult. Meanwhile we're both more fun dead than most people are alive.
51. 06:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a lovely thought. Shall I attribute it to you, or would you prefer I claim it as my own and spare you the responsibility?
52. 07:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Claim it. I've got enough quotes already. One more and they'll put me on a tote bag.
53. 07:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Too late, I'm afraid. I've seen the tote bags. We're both on them. Usually in sans-serif fonts that would have made us weep.
54. 07:13
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well then. Here's to being misquoted, misunderstood, and merchandised. At least they spelled our names right.
55. 07:19
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Most of the time.