Parker×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Dorothy Parker sits down with Oscar Wilde for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — On a person they loved but could not keep.
2. 00:09
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   So we're meant to weep into our cocktails tonight, is that it? Confess our romantic failures to strangers with radios? I've done worse for less money.
3. 00:17
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Mrs. Parker, we are not confessing. We are performing grief, which is an entirely different art. Confession is for priests and bad novelists.
4. 00:25
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You'd know about performance. You made a career of it. Though I suppose when you loved Lord Alfred Douglas, that wasn't exactly Shakespeare, was it? More like a bad matinée that ran too long.
5. 00:36
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Bosie. Yes. Beautiful as a winter morning and twice as cruel. But you mistake the matter—I knew precisely what he was. I simply believed I could make him better through the sheer force of my devotion. Vanity, not blindness.
6. 00:49
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Vanity. That's a nice word for it. I called it stupidity when I did the same thing with men who drank everything but water and meant everything but what they said.
7. 00:58
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You married one of them, I believe. Twice.
8. 01:00
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Alan. Yes. Alan Campbell. Charming, handsome, homosexual, and utterly unavailable in every way that mattered. We got on famously, by which I mean we destroyed each other with excellent timing.
9. 01:12
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Did you love him, though? Truly? Or did you love the idea of救uing someone as damaged as yourself?
10. 01:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    What's the difference? When you're both drowning, you don't ask who jumped in first. I loved him the way you love a beautiful mistake—knowing it's wrong, doing it anyway, and hating yourself just enough to make it interesting.
11. 01:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How perfectly American. In England, we at least have the decency to hate ourselves in silence.
12. 01:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    In England, you had the decency to put people like you in prison for it. Don't lecture me about silence, Oscar. You screamed your love from every witness stand and got two years hard labor for the privilege.
13. 01:45
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Touché. Though I notice you never screamed yours. You made jokes about it instead, which is perhaps the more refined form of cowardice.
14. 01:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wrote about Alan. I wrote about all of them. Just because I made it funny doesn't mean it didn't bleed. You want to know what I couldn't keep? His attention. His sobriety. His interest in women. Take your pick.
15. 02:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The thing about Bosie was that he was supremely keepable. Beautiful young men always are—they simply choose not to be kept. He preferred chaos to devotion, scandal to safety. I offered him everything, and he took it as his due while loving me not at all.
16. 02:19
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's not quite true though, is it? He loved you enough to destroy you. That takes a certain commitment.
17. 02:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He destroyed me because his father was a brute and I was vain enough to sue him for libel. Bosie merely stood by and watched, which I suppose is its own form of devotion. The devotion of Pontius Pilate.
18. 02:35
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least your boy was young and pretty. That's something. Mine was young and pretty too, but he was also my meal ticket after the whole thing died. We wrote screenplays together. Nothing says romance like arguing over second-act structure while your marriage falls apart.
19. 02:49
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You married him a second time. That suggests either optimism or masochism, and I suspect I know which.
20. 02:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It suggests loneliness, Oscar. Plain old American loneliness. The kind where you take back the man who makes you miserable because miserable together beats miserable alone. At least that's what I told myself at three in the morning.
21. 03:08
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wrote Bosie letters from prison. Hundreds of them. One of them was fifty thousand words long and detailed every way he had failed me. I titled it 'De Profundis.' From the depths. He never acknowledged it.
22. 03:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fifty thousand words? My God, Oscar, that's not a letter, that's revenge with postage. What did you want him to say? 'Sorry I ruined your life, hope you enjoyed Hard Labor'?
23. 03:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wanted him to read it. To understand what his carelessness had cost. To feel one tenth of what I felt. Instead he sold my letters to pay his debts and went on being beautiful.
24. 03:41
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Alan killed himself. Did I mention that? Shot himself. After we divorced the second time. So if we're comparing wounds, I think mine came with a body count.
25. 03:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I am... I'm terribly sorry, Dorothy. Truly.
26. 03:53
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Don't be. He'd tried it before. And I'd joked about it, because that's what I did. 'You might as well live,' I wrote. Famous poem. Meanwhile the man I married was practicing his exit. The irony wasn't lost on me, even if everything else was.
27. 04:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did you blame yourself?
28. 04:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Every day. Then I blamed him. Then I blamed myself for blaming him. Then I had a drink. It's very efficient, grief. Once you get the system down.
29. 04:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    After prison, after everything, Bosie and I met again. In France. We had nothing to say to each other that wasn't either recrimination or lies, so we spoke of the weather and parted as strangers. It was extraordinarily civilized and completely unbearable.
30. 04:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least you got your meeting. I got a funeral and a lot of people asking if I was all right. Of course I was all right. I'm always all right. That's my whole goddamn problem.
31. 04:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The problem with loving unwisely is that wisdom arrives too late to be of any use. We know what we're doing while we're doing it. We simply believe we're exempt from the ordinary consequences that plague ordinary people.
32. 04:54
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Because we're special. Because we're artists. Because we feel things more deeply and therefore deserve to suffer more beautifully. What horseshit. We're just fools with better vocabularies.
33. 05:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Fools who loved, though. That must count for something, even if it counted for nothing to them.
34. 05:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Does it, though? Count for something? Bosie didn't read your fifty-thousand-word howl. Alan didn't stick around to hear my apologies, not that I was particularly good at making them. We loved people who couldn't love us back, and then we wrote about it. That's not noble. That's just sad.
35. 05:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's both, surely. The sadness and the nobility are not mutually exclusive. We loved badly, but we loved. Most people don't manage even that. They live their careful little lives and die having risked nothing.
36. 05:37
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Lucky them.
37. 05:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    You don't mean that.
38. 05:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No. I don't. I'd do it all again, probably. The marriage, the jokes, the whole miserable circus. Because what's the alternative? Being sensible? I tried that once. It lasted about twenty minutes and bored me to tears.
39. 05:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I tried it in Reading Gaol. Sensibility, I mean. Reflection. Wisdom. I thought suffering would make me a better man. Instead it simply made me a poorer one, in every sense of the word.
40. 06:05
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did you ever stop loving him? Bosie? Or does that just go on forever, like a subscription you can't cancel?
41. 06:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I stopped loving him the moment I understood he was incapable of loving anyone but himself. But I never stopped mourning what I thought we were. The loss of the illusion is sometimes worse than the loss of the person.
42. 06:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's the truest thing you've said all night. I didn't lose Alan. I lost the version of us I'd invented, where his problems were fixable and my love was enough. Turns out neither was true. Turns out love isn't enough for much of anything, except making you feel like an idiot.
43. 06:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet here we are, talking about them still. Decades later, in my case. Years in yours. They haunt us more effectively dead than they ever did alive.
44. 06:48
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Maybe that's the only way we could keep them. As ghosts. As stories. As the punchline to jokes only we understand. It's not what I wanted, but it's what I got.
45. 06:58
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What did you want, Dorothy? If you could have had anything?
46. 07:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to stop drinking, stop hurting, stop being so goddamn fragile that loving him felt like holding a glass shard. I wanted ordinary happiness, which is the one thing neither of us knew how to do.
47. 07:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wanted Bosie to grow up. To become a man worthy of the love I'd wasted on him as a boy. I wanted him to read my letter and weep and beg my forgiveness. Childish dreams, all of them.
48. 07:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    We're a pair, aren't we? Two brilliant people completely stupid about the one thing that matters. If I weren't so tired, I'd write a poem about it. But I already did. Several. They didn't help.
49. 07:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Nothing helps, my dear. That's rather the point. We write, we joke, we perform our grief in perfect sentences, and still we wake up alone with our regrets. It's the human condition, only we do it in better prose.
50. 07:46
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well. At least we're consistent. Here's to lost loves and found words. May they console us or kill us, whichever comes first.
51. 07:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I'll drink to that. Though I suspect we already have, many times, and will again.
52. 07:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Probably. That's the other thing about grief. It's terribly repetitive. Same pain, different Tuesday.
53. 08:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then let us be repetitive together, at least for tonight. Misery may love company, but wit requires an audience. And you, Mrs. Parker, are an excellent audience.
54. 08:13
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Back at you, Oscar. Now can we please talk about something else? Anything else? This much honesty is giving me hives.
55. 08:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    By all means. Though I suspect the damage is already done. We've been sincere on public radio. Our reputations will never recover.
56. 08:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Good. They were overrated anyway.