Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on ROAST NIGHT, Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker. They take up On what they would change about how they spent their twenties.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   My dear Dorothy, I must confess that the very premise of tonight's discussion fills me with a peculiar dread. To consider one's twenties as a thing that might have been improved—it rather suggests they were imperfect to begin with, and mine were exquisite.
3. 00:22
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Of course they were. You spent them being adored at Oxford and saying witty things at dinner parties. The rest of us had to work for a living.
4. 00:29
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I worked! I attended lectures on Greats, I rowed—badly, I admit—and I filled notebooks with the most beautiful epigrams that a grateful world would later memorize. Is that not labor?
5. 00:40
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   It's embroidery. I was writing captions for Vogue at twenty-three, sharing a bathroom with six girls who hated me. You had servants.
6. 00:48
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Well, yes. But they rather hated me too, I suspect. The point is that one's twenties are meant to be ornamental, not useful. Usefulness can wait until one has nothing better to offer.
7. 00:58
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   See, that's the exact kind of thinking that got you into trouble later. All frosting, no foundation.
8. 01:04
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   I adore frosting. And if we're to discuss what got me into trouble, madam, I hardly think my Oxford aestheticism was the culprit. My trouble had more to do with being entirely too honest about my affections.
9. 01:14
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You weren't honest. You were reckless. There's a difference.
10. 01:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How American. To confuse honesty with recklessness simply because one lacks the courage for either.
11. 01:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I had plenty of courage. I just also had rent. Look, if we're really doing this—if we're really supposed to say what we'd change—I'd have told myself to stop falling for every bastard with a nice jawline and a cruel streak.
12. 01:35
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, but the cruel ones are so much more interesting than the kind ones. The kind ones send you flowers. The cruel ones send you to your diary.
13. 01:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And to the pharmacy for gin. Eddie Parker married me when I was twenty-four and then left me alone for two years while he recovered from the war. I spent my twenties waiting for men who weren't worth the wait.
14. 01:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I spent mine waiting for nothing at all, which is infinitely more pleasant. Waiting implies hope, and hope is simply a failure of imagination. One should arrive fully formed and demand admiration.
15. 02:05
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You didn't arrive fully formed. Nobody does. You were trying on poses like hats.
16. 02:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I looked marvelous in every single one! My dear girl, you mistake experimentation for indecision. I was not searching for myself—I was inventing myself, which is a far superior occupation.
17. 02:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fine. Then I'd invent myself sooner and stop letting magazine editors tell me what to write. I could do smart from the beginning, but they wanted me sweet. I wasted three years being sweet.
18. 02:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Three years! A tragedy. I wasted three months being sweet at Trinity before I realized it was an impossible bore and decamped for Oxford. Sweetness is for confections, not for persons of intellect.
19. 02:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Easy to say when you had an allowance. Some of us needed the work.
20. 02:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And some of us needed beauty, which costs nothing and is worth everything. But very well, I shall concede one regret, if only to keep you company in your misery. I should have listened less to my mother.
21. 02:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your mother? Speranza? She was the one telling you to be brilliant and Irish and revolutionary.
22. 03:04
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Precisely. She was always performing tragedy at the breakfast table. I absorbed her sense of doom along with my toast. One should learn drama from the theatre, not from one's relatives.
23. 03:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    At least she was interesting. My mother thought I should marry a nice boy from the garment district and stop embarrassing the family. I spent my twenties trying to prove I was worth embarrassing them for.
24. 03:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And did you succeed?
25. 03:26
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They fired me from Vanity Fair when I was twenty-six for being too sharp in my theater reviews. So yes, I'd say I succeeded beautifully.
26. 03:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Splendid! You see, we were neither of us wasted in our twenties. We were merely ripening.
27. 03:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You ripened into bankruptcy and prison, Oscar. Let's not get too romantic about it.
28. 03:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That was my thirties, darling, and entirely a different vintage. We are discussing the flower of youth, not its inevitable wilting. My twenties were all sunshine and Magdalen College and long afternoons of perfect uselessness.
29. 03:55
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Which prepared you for exactly nothing.
30. 03:57
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    On the contrary, it prepared me for everything. I learned how to talk, how to listen, how to notice the way light falls on a particular kind of face at a particular hour. One cannot write plays without first learning to watch people betray themselves at dinner.
31. 04:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I learned that at the Algonquin, and I was getting paid for it. Barely, but still.
32. 04:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The Algonquin Round Table! Yes, I've heard of it. A collection of wits sitting in a circle, complimenting each other on their savagery. Rather like a mutual admiration society for assassins.
33. 04:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It beat sitting in your rooms at Oxford writing love letters to boys who'd pretend not to know you in daylight.
34. 04:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I wrote no such letters in my twenties! I was far too busy being adored collectively. It was only later that I made the error of adoring specifically.
35. 04:40
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Bosie.
36. 04:41
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We are not discussing my thirties, I said. Though I will note that you spent your own twenties composing verses about men who disappointed you, so we are perhaps more alike than you wish to admit.
37. 04:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    My verses were published and paid for. Yours were for an audience of one.
38. 04:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    An audience of one is all literature requires, provided that one is sufficiently discriminating. But if we are tallying regrets—and apparently we are, though I find the exercise vulgar—I might have traveled more. I should have gone to Greece, to Italy, to all the places I spent my twenties reading about instead of seeing.
39. 05:11
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I should have traveled less. I followed Eddie to Connecticut, to Hartford, to every dreary place the army sent him. I should have stayed in New York and let him come to me.
40. 05:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ah, but would you have written the same poems if you had?
41. 05:23
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'd have written better ones. Happiness doesn't make you stupid, Oscar. Misery just makes you feel deep.
42. 05:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How wonderfully heretical. I quite approve. Though I cannot agree—suffering purifies art in ways that contentment never could. My best work came from my worst years.
43. 05:38
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Your best work came from your imagination. The suffering just gave you an ending.
44. 05:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    A rather important element, I should think. But you've made your point. Perhaps if I had been less concerned with courting disaster and more concerned with avoiding it, I might have had a longer career and a shorter biography.
45. 05:53
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And if I'd been less concerned with being loved and more concerned with being paid properly, I'd have retired rich instead of angry.
46. 06:00
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Would you truly change it, though? Truly? All those men and all that gin and all those perfect little murders you committed in print?
47. 06:07
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No. But I'd like to think I would.
48. 06:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Which is precisely why our twenties were perfect exactly as they were—wasted just enough to be interesting, and foolish just enough to be forgivable.
49. 06:17
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Speak for yourself. I'm not sure I've forgiven mine yet.
50. 06:20
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Then let me do it for you. I forgive you your Eddie, your cheap apartments, your cruel editors, and every morning you woke up wishing you were someone else. You were becoming Dorothy Parker. That requires a certain amount of trial and error.
51. 06:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And I forgive you your velvet jackets and your sunflowers and your absolute certainty that being charming was the same as being right. You were becoming Oscar Wilde, which apparently requires believing your own publicity.
52. 06:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I never believed my own publicity. I wrote it.
53. 06:46
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's even worse.
54. 06:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Or infinitely better. I can never decide which.