Wilde×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Oscar Wilde sits down with Dorothy Parker for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — On the most overrated person of their century.
2. 00:10
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Good evening, Miss Parker. I understand we are to discuss the most overrated person of our respective centuries, which is to say, I shall speak of the nineteenth and you of the twentieth, though I confess the twentieth sounds like something one catches rather than lives through.
3. 00:24
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   It was. I've named mine already: Ernest Hemingway.
4. 00:27
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How wonderfully economical. One almost expects you to itemize the bill.
5. 00:30
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   He wrote like a man who'd just learned sentences could be short and thought he'd invented fire. All those bulls and fish dying nobly while Papa polished his mythos.
6. 00:40
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Ah, but mythos is terribly important, dear lady. I myself devoted considerable energy to mine. The difference, I suspect, is that mine was intentional and his was compensatory.
7. 00:50
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Yours was also funny. His was just sad men in sad places being sad about it.
8. 00:54
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   You wound me by suggestion. I was never sad. Melancholy, perhaps. Tragic, certainly. But sadness is for people without aphorisms.
9. 01:02
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   So who's yours? I'm guessing someone with a beard. You people loved beards.
10. 01:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Thomas Carlyle. The Scottish prophet of work, doom, and unreadability. He wrote as though being understood were a moral failing.
11. 01:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Never read him. Was he important?
12. 01:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Devastatingly so. He convinced an entire generation that misery was philosophically superior to pleasure, that labor was sacred, and that prose should feel like punishment. Queen Victoria adored him.
13. 01:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, there's your problem right there.
14. 01:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Quite. He preached what I would call the gospel of the ugly. He believed beauty was frivolous, art suspect, and that the purpose of life was to toil joylessly until death, preferably while lecturing others. The Victorians found this inspiring.
15. 01:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Sounds like every editor I ever had. Did he at least have the decency to be miserable himself?
16. 01:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, exquisitely so. His wife was unhappy, his digestion was poor, and his sentences went on for pages like some sort of literary intestinal complaint. He made suffering into a brand.
17. 01:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway did that too, except he added guns and drinking, which I'll admit shows some initiative.
18. 02:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Your Mr. Hemingway at least had the virtue of brevity, even if he mistook terseness for profundity. Carlyle's idea of a short thought was forty pages on the dignity of labor.
19. 02:13
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    The dignity of labor. Christ. I'm allergic.
20. 02:15
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    As well you should be. I myself believed work was the refuge of people who had nothing better to do. Carlyle believed it was the refuge of people who had everything better to do and should be ashamed of themselves for wanting it.
21. 02:27
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Did people actually read him or just pretend to?
22. 02:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They read him the way one takes castor oil—dutifully, miserably, convinced it must be good for them because it tastes so dreadful. His French Revolution sold wonderfully. I suspect most of it went unfinished, gathering dust next to earnest intentions.
23. 02:42
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway they actually read, which is worse. All those young men going around saying 'grace under pressure' and thinking adjectives were for sissies.
24. 02:50
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    How perfectly ghastly. In my day, we at least had the decency to overwrite. Better to commit too much beauty than too much spareness. Hemingway's prose sounds like a telegram from someone who doesn't like you very much.
25. 03:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    That's generous. I'd say it sounds like a grocery list written by someone concussed. But the critics loved him. Gave him every prize that wasn't nailed down.
26. 03:11
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Critics adore what frightens them. A man shooting lions and writing in short sentences must be authentic, must be real. Much safer than someone who admits literature is artifice and delights in it.
27. 03:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    He shot himself too, eventually. I suppose that's authentic.
28. 03:26
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Rather too much so for my taste. I prefer my exits dramatic but reversible.
29. 03:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You didn't exactly get a choice there, Oscar.
30. 03:32
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No, but I had the good sense to die in a hotel with terrible wallpaper, which is at least memorable. Your Hemingway chose Idaho, which tells you everything about his sense of theater.
31. 03:41
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fair point. But at least Hemingway didn't spend his time telling people how to live. Carlyle sounds like he wanted to run everyone's life.
32. 03:48
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He did! He worshipped strong men, hero-worship he called it, and believed society should be organized around great individuals who would tell the rest of us what to do. Democracy offended him. Joy offended him. I suspect sunshine offended him.
33. 04:01
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hero-worship. Jesus. That worked out well for the next century.
34. 04:05
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Disastrously so, but one can hardly blame Carlyle for having followers stupider than himself. Though I will say, he did make it terribly easy for them.
35. 04:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway made it easy too. All you had to do was drink too much, talk about how tough you were, and treat women like furniture. Generations of men thought that was wisdom.
36. 04:23
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    At least furniture serves a purpose and occasionally possesses beauty. Did your Mr. Hemingway possess any virtues at all, or are we conducting a complete assassination?
37. 04:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    He wrote one good book. The Sun Also Rises. After that it was diminishing returns and bigger game.
38. 04:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Carlyle wrote no good books, so your man comes out ahead. Though I confess, the bar is low enough to trip over.
39. 04:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Why did people take Carlyle seriously? What was the appeal?
40. 04:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    He made them feel serious, which is different from being serious but much more satisfying. He told them their grim little lives of duty and self-denial were cosmically important. People will forgive you anything if you flatter their suffering.
41. 04:59
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway did that too, come to think of it. Made people think getting drunk and watching bullfights was somehow profound.
42. 05:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    We are describing the same disease in different climates. The conviction that discomfort equals depth. That if something is unpleasant, it must be true.
43. 05:15
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Which is horseshit.
44. 05:16
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Comprehensively so. I have always maintained that truth, when properly dressed, is quite charming. It need not arrive in sackcloth, announcing itself with groans.
45. 05:26
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Tell that to the Nobel committee. They gave Hemingway the prize.
46. 05:29
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    They never gave me anything except, briefly, the satisfaction of being notorious. Though I confess I prefer that to a medal from Sweden. One can't dine out on medals.
47. 05:39
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    One can't dine out on Hemingway either, unless you like talking about fishing.
48. 05:43
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I would rather be stranded on a desert island with Carlyle's complete works than discuss fishing. At least with Carlyle I could burn the pages for warmth.
49. 05:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway's prose is already ash. You'd get no heat from it.
50. 05:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Beautifully put. I begin to see why your century kept you around.
51. 05:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    They didn't, really. I was too difficult. Not enough grace under pressure, too many wisecracks.
52. 06:03
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Grace under pressure is what one offers maiden aunts and creditors. It has nothing to do with literature. Literature requires excess, extravagance, the courage to be ridiculous.
53. 06:13
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway thought being ridiculous was the worst thing that could happen to you.
54. 06:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Which is why he was ridiculous. The truly dignified are always slightly absurd. It's only the insecure who police themselves into tedium.
55. 06:24
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Carlyle sounds insecure as hell, for all his bluster about heroes.
56. 06:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, desperately so. All tyrants are. They cannot bear the thought that life might be purposeless and beautiful, so they invent grand narratives requiring everyone else's misery.
57. 06:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway invented a grand narrative too. The code. Honor. All that crap about what a man does.
58. 06:42
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    What a man does is usually quite boring and best left unrecorded. What a man says, however, or writes, or wears—that has possibilities.
59. 06:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Hemingway couldn't dress for shit. Looked like he bought his clothes at a war surplus store.
60. 06:55
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And Carlyle dressed like an undertaker having a bad day. It's as though being overrated requires a complete failure of aesthetic sense.
61. 07:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    So we've established they both dressed badly, wrote badly, and convinced everyone they were geniuses. What does that say about people?
62. 07:09
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    That they prefer their geniuses grim, their truths unpleasant, and their prophets badly tailored. Beauty makes them nervous. Wit makes them suspicious. They would rather be lectured than entertained.
63. 07:20
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Which is why you died broke and I died bitter.
64. 07:23
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes, but we died with our sentences intact, which is more than one can say for Carlyle or your Mr. Hemingway. In the end, that's the only reputation that matters.
65. 07:32
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    I'll drink to that. If I were still drinking.
66. 07:34
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And I would join you, if I were still joinable. But we are dead, and they are overrated, and the world continues making the same mistakes in slightly different clothes.
67. 07:43
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Ever thus.
68. 07:44
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Ever thus, my dear Miss Parker. Ever thus.