Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You know, Dorothy, there is nothing quite so exquisite as being eclipsed by one's own creation. It's rather like Frankenstein, except the monster has better table manners and gets invited to all the right parties.
2. 00:10
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I wouldn't know about exquisite. When Robert Benchley got funnier than me, I felt like I'd built my own gallows and handed him the rope. He even tied a better knot.
3. 00:18
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Benchley! Ah yes, your fellow Round Tabler. I had rather hoped you'd mention someone more devastating. A pupil should at least have the decency to destroy you utterly, not merely outpace you in the hundred-yard quip.
4. 00:29
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   He destroyed me just fine, thanks. You try sitting next to someone who's funnier without trying while you're bleeding on the page for every laugh.
5. 00:36
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   But that's precisely the tragedy of teaching, isn't it? One polishes a stone until it becomes a diamond, and then the diamond cuts. I gave everything to my young men—my wit, my time, my philosophy of pleasure—and what did they do? They lived.
6. 00:50
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Bosie didn't just live, Oscar. He testified.
7. 00:53
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How American of you to land the blow so cleanly. Yes, Lord Alfred Douglas, my golden boy, my ruin. Though I'm not certain 'pupil' is quite the word. He was more of a beautiful catastrophe I mistook for education.
8. 01:06
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   That's what pupils are. Catastrophes in training. You teach them everything you know, and then they use it to show you everything you're not.
9. 01:14
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Do you truly believe Benchley surpassed you? I find that difficult to credit. You have a talent for self-laceration that borders on the devotional.
10. 01:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I have eyes, Oscar. And ears. The room laughed harder when he talked. He was the sun and I was—what do you people say—the moon, reflecting.
11. 01:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The moon has a rather better press, historically speaking. And it doesn't have to work nearly so hard. But very well, I'll grant you your melancholy. Did it occur to you that perhaps Benchley succeeded because you'd taught him how? That his ease was your labor in disguise?
12. 01:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Sure it occurred to me. That's what made it worse.
13. 01:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I spent years—years, mind you—teaching young men how to pose, how to speak, how to transform life into art. And what did I learn? That they would take my poses and speak my words and be praised for their originality. All while I went to Reading Gaol for loving too visibly.
14. 02:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You went to Reading for picking the wrong boy, not the wrong pose. There's a difference.
15. 02:07
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Is there? I taught Bosie that beauty was its own justification, that we were above the moral squabbles of the middle classes. He learned the lesson flawlessly. Then he let his father's lawyers use my own philosophy as evidence of corruption.
16. 02:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So he was a lousy pupil after all. A good one would've at least lied on the stand.
17. 02:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, he lied beautifully. That was part of the problem. He'd learned too well how to perform innocence. I'd given him the script; he simply rewrote the ending.
18. 02:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did you hate him for it?
19. 02:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Hate? No. Hatred requires a kind of energy I no longer possessed by then. I was too busy discovering that martyrdom is terribly uncomfortable and offers no applause whatsoever. But I will confess to a certain bitter amusement at having created the instrument of my own destruction. There's an artistry to that.
20. 02:52
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's not artistry. That's stupidity wearing a good suit.
21. 02:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Mrs. Parker, you are determined to be provincial about this. Can you honestly tell me you harbor no fondness for the people who learned from you, even when they overtook you?
22. 03:04
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fondness, sure. I loved Bob Benchley. I loved him more than I loved most of my husbands, which admittedly isn't saying much. But love doesn't make you feel less obsolete when someone does your job better.
23. 03:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Obsolete! What a perfectly modern word for a perfectly ancient feeling. Shakespeare must have felt it when Marlowe dazzled. And yet we go on teaching, don't we? We give away our secrets like fools at a baptism, knowing full well the child will grow up to despise the font.
24. 03:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I don't know about baptism. At the Algonquin it was more like a bar mitzvah—you gave your wisdom, they gave you indigestion, and everyone pretended it meant something.
25. 03:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you kept returning to that dreadful Round Table, didn't you? Day after day, watching your pupils sharpen their knives on your wit. If you truly felt obsolete, you had only to stay home.
26. 03:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And miss the show? I'm not a saint, Oscar. I'm a masochist with a deadline.
27. 03:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    At least you're honest about it. I spent my last years pretending I'd meant it all as a lesson—the trial, the prison, the exile. As if I'd planned to teach the world about suffering through the ingenious method of suffering myself. The only pupil who learned anything was me, and the lesson was that I'd been a spectacular fool.
28. 04:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    What'd you learn, exactly?
29. 04:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That one cannot teach beauty to survive ugliness. That pleasure is not, in fact, its own justification when the magistrate asks for yours. That the young men I'd dressed in epigrams would not wear them to visit me when fashion changed. Shall I go on? I have several more years of education to report.
30. 04:28
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No, that covers it. The star pupil is always the one who doesn't visit.
31. 04:33
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Did Benchley visit? After you'd both moved on, after the Table had dispersed into Hollywood and disappointment?
32. 04:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    He did, actually. Right up until he drank himself to death in forty-five. We had that in common, at least—knowing how to make an exit.
33. 04:46
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How terribly loyal of him. Bosie, by contrast, found God and respectability and spent his later years explaining that I'd corrupted him. Which I suppose I had, though he'd been remarkably eager for corruption at the time.
34. 04:59
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They always are, until they're not. That's the thing about pupils—they want you to teach them everything except consequences.
35. 05:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And we oblige, don't we? We stand at the lectern of our own magnificence and pretend that genius is transferable, that wit is a renewable resource. Then we're shocked—shocked!—when they drain the well and leave us with the bucket.
36. 05:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I wasn't shocked. I was thirsty. That's different.
37. 05:21
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Were you, though? Truly shocked, I mean. Surely you must have known, somewhere in that admirably dark little heart of yours, that Benchley would be funnier. That the pupil always wins because they have the advantage of our mistakes and none of our scars.
38. 05:34
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I knew it the first time he made me laugh without meaning to. That's when you know you're finished—when they're funny by accident and you're funny by effort.
39. 05:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes! That's precisely it. The effortlessness. I saw it in my young aesthetes, that natural grace I'd had to cultivate like a hothouse orchid. They simply were what I'd had to become. And for that, I could have murdered them all, if murder weren't so terribly middle-class.
40. 05:57
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I settled for drinking. Same result, better press.
41. 06:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet here we are, Dorothy, decades after our respective pupils have either died or become respectable, still discussing them. Still giving them airtime, as it were. Perhaps we haven't quite been surpassed after all. Perhaps we've simply been continued.
42. 06:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's a nice thought. I'll have it engraved on my headstone: 'She Was Continued.' Right under 'Excuse My Dust.'
43. 06:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Mine will read: 'He Taught Them Everything, Including How to Forget Him.' Though I suppose that lacks the brevity one wants in marble.
44. 06:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Also the truth. They didn't forget you, Oscar. They just learned you were human. That's the real betrayal—not that they surpassed us, but that they saw through us.
45. 06:36
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How devastatingly American. To reduce tragedy to transparency. But you're quite right, of course. The pupil's greatest crime is clarity. They see us as we are, not as we've posed. And then they have the audacity to survive the disillusionment.
46. 06:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And we have the audacity to call it ingratitude.
47. 06:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Well, what else would you call it? I gave that boy everything—my time, my reputation, my liberty, ultimately. And in return, he gave me reading material for prison. The exchange rates were abysmal.
48. 07:03
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You gave him everything because you wanted to, not because he asked. That's not teaching, Oscar. That's a love affair grading its own papers.
49. 07:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And your relationship with Benchley? Purely pedagogical, I'm sure. No affection clouding your judgment, no hopes that he'd carry your torch into a future you couldn't reach. Just dispassionate instruction in the art of the devastating aside.
50. 07:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    All right, you got me. I wanted him to be better than me. I wanted someone to win that game, even if it wasn't going to be Dorothy Parker.
51. 07:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    There. You see? We're not victims of our pupils' success. We're architects of it. We built them to surpass us, then spent the rest of our lives resenting the quality of our own construction.
52. 07:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So what? We're supposed to be happy about it? Throw a parade for our own obsolescence?
53. 07:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    God, no. That would be dreadfully sincere. I'm simply suggesting that if we must be surpassed, we might at least take credit for choosing worthy successors. It's the only dignity left to the defeated.
54. 07:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Dignity. Right. I'll work on that, right after I finish being bitter.
55. 07:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Take your time. Bitterness suits you far better than dignity ever could. And besides, what else have we got to do? We're dead, darling. We might as well be honest.
56. 08:07
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fine. Honestly? I'm glad Bob Benchley was funnier than me. I'm glad someone was. The world needed the laugh more than it needed my ego.
57. 08:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I'm glad Bosie was beautiful and terrible and impossible. I'm glad I loved him, even though it killed me. Because what's the alternative? Safety? Discretion? A long, respectable life of never teaching anyone anything? How perfectly ghastly.
58. 08:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You know what, Oscar? For a dead guy, you're not half bad at this.
59. 08:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    My dear Mrs. Parker, I've had more than a century to rehearse. Unlike our pupils, I've learned the value of practice.