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Birthdays: Dorothy Parker and Ray Bradbury 8/22/2018 6:40:14 PM
HAPPY BIRTHDAY from Owen Thomas Fiction. August 22: Dorothy Parker and Ray Bradbury Today, August 22, is a day we should give some extra thought to two writers who have left an indelible pen stroke in the annals of American literature: DOROTHY PARKER and RAYMOND BRADBURY, two spectacularly different writers born on the same day 27 years apart.
RAY BRADBURY came along in 1920, orbiting the sun ninety-one times before his death in 2012. He began nurturing his love of writing early at the tender age of eleven in the heart of the Great Depression, using whatever he could find to hold the ink, often sheets of butcher paper. Before he was done, Bradbury had written eleven novels and over 400 works of short fiction, many of which have long since found a permanent place on the shelves of great American writing. We know those titles like our own childhoods: “Fahrenheit 451;” “The Martian Chronicles;” “Something Wicked This Way Comes;” “I Sing the Body Electric;” “A Sound of Thunder;” “R is for Rocket.” We think of Bradbury as a science fiction writer, a moniker he usually rejected, once explaining:
“First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time -- because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”
If you have ever read and connected with Ray Bradbury, I would wager it was because – no matter the subject – he succeeded in connecting with you on an emotional level. Your emotions and your sentimentality, however deeply it may have been buried, was always his target. "If you're reluctant to weep,” Bradbury once said, “you won't live a full and complete life."
It should come as no surprise that Bradbury attributed his own lyrical prose to his voracious consumption of verse: “From reading so much poetry, every day of my life.” I always appreciated the lyricism, never florid but always a welcome, often understated note wafting through stories about time travel and alien planets. If I picked up Bradbury stories for the aliens, I remember them for their humanity. For, however outlandish the setting or the premise, Bradbury told stories firmly rooted in the human experience, even when all the characters were Martians. It is easier, and far more common, to write about rockets than the dreams and desperation they carry out into the void. To Bradbury’s lasting credit, he understood that human dream and desperation are not only the cargo, but also the fuel. There is no story without them.
DOROTHY PARKER was born this day in 1893. An essayist, critic, poet, and activist, Parker was celebrated in the popular culture for her written wit, a sardonic artistry that hurt as much as it entertained and, inevitably, offended. Vanity Fair, the magazine that launched her career, ultimately showed Parker the door when the powerful entertainment producers of the day misplaced their sense of humor at the receiving end of Parker’s opinion. She debuted many hundreds of poems in magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, and The New Republic, solidifying her reputation as a literary talent and spawning innumerable anthologies. In 1929 she received the O. Henry Award for what is likely her best-known short story, "Big Blonde," about a woman laboring under the consequences of an identity centered on conviviality, inoffensiveness and compliance. Although the protagonist, Hazel Morse, shares enough in common with Parker to rate the story as Parker’s most autobiographical work (a gin-soaked succession of bad marriages, followed by a succession of even worse love affairs, followed by attempted suicide), Parker is markedly unsentimental in her depiction of Hazel. Against the backdrop of an unprecedented, even if shallow, social “liberation” of women in the 1920’s, Parker was there to show the self-sacrificing trap waiting within the heart of that liberation. Here is Parker’s opening description of Hazel Morse.
“In her twenties.. she had been employed as a model in a wholesale dress establishment—it was still the day of the big woman, and she was then prettily colored and erect and high-breasted. Her job was not onerous, and she met numbers of men and spent numbers of evenings with them, laughing at their jokes and telling them she loved their neckties. Men liked her, and she took it for granted that the liking of many men was a desirable thing. Popularity seemed to her to be worth all the work that had to be put into its achievement. Men liked you because you were fun, and when they liked you they took you out, and there you were. So, and successfully, she was fun. She was a good sport. Men liked a good sport."
In the late 1920’s Parker began a commitment to social and political activism that started with protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti (for which she was arrested and made to pay a $5 fine) and carried on through the civil rights battles of the 1930’s and 1940’s and into the McCarthy era of the 1950’s which, along with some highly esteemed artistic company, earned her a place on the Hollywood blacklists as a Communist.
Activism aside, if we are to celebrate Dorothy Parker on her birthday as a writer, then what better way to do so than with a couple of quotes, just to remind us of her inimitable voice:
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
"I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money."
