ONE MAN'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH TWO DOROTHYS.

Peter Kurth

09/25/95

By THE TIME YOU READ THIS, ladies and gentlemen, I'll be standing at the podium before the Rotary Club of Essex Junction, Vermont, lecturing a couple of hundred bankers and insurance salesmen on the subject of "Why I Write About Women." It isn't my usual venue, of course. I can't say for certain that I even know what Rotarians are, much less why the local chapter might be interested in my work. Women's biography ranks pretty low on the list of topics for conversation in the boardroom, and my own prior experience with "bidniz," limited though it is, leads me to expect an outbreak of sniffing and coughing when I get up to do my number: "Why do you write about women, Mr. Kurth? It is Mr. Kurth, isn't it?" My sister, who got me into this, assures me that a lot of Rotarians are actually women, but I think she's confusing them with Rosicrucians, and, anyhow, women aren't a lot of use when it comes to explaining the biographer's art.

Before I get slammed for that sexist remark let me tell you a story. Not long ago, filled with curiosity and professional good will, I turned up at a lecture in New York City given under the auspices of the Lesbian Alternative Something-or-Other -- I'm sorry to be so vague, but my mind clouds over at even the memory. The topic was Eleanor Roosevelt, and the speaker was Blanche Wiesen Cook, whose best-selling biography of Mrs. R. made the not-very-astonishing claim that she had enjoyed the company of women, and that she might even -- hold on to your hats! -- have fallen in love with a few of her friends. The fact that there is no evidence to confirm that Mrs. Roosevelt's distaff attachments ever blossomed into "lesbian" passion did not prevent three raging gorgons, the snakes unaccountably shaved from their heads, from blocking my path to Dr. Cook's talk.

"Women only," they snarled as I mounted the stairs (and, I swear, they pronounced the word exactly as they spell it: wimmin).

"I'm a Lesbian Alternative myself," I answered stoutly, pulling myself up to my full height and feeling as though I could snap a pencil in half with my bare hands.

My tormentors were unmoved.

"Don't you think lesbianism is an inside job?" I asked weakly.

They didn’t. Since no one was laughing, I wandered home, stupefied to think that my complete humiliation as a scholar and a man had been kindled by the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt, of all people, our first ambassadress to the United Nations, toleration in the flesh, a woman whose reputation for fair-mindedness will live in the nation's pride for as long as Honest Abe's and whose highly developed sense of community service, I dare to suggest, would not have allowed her to endorse the carping, harping, whining, whingeing, dreary “rights-of-victims” thing that currently passes for a social agenda in America.

Nor was this the first time I'd run afoul of lesbian lit-crit. The same sort of person who kept me from hearing Dr. Cook took me roundly to task a few years ago when I published a biography of Dorothy Thompson, the American journalist and commentator, whose open romance in the early 1930s with the German writer Christa Winsloe, author of Mädchen In Uniform, has found its way permanently into gay and lesbian almanacs and stuck poor Dorothy onto the "They Were Really Homosexual" list. Never mind that Dorothy Thompson had three husbands and a couple of dozen male lovers before she died; I, her biographer -- and "a man" -- had "abandoned the issue of her lesbianism" midway through the book. I was tried and condemned, not for something I'd said, but for something Dorothy had said, plain as day, when she finally turned her back on "Sapphic love."

"It doesn't suit me," she wrote. "All this petting is nothing without the deep thrust to the heart of one." It may be, as some of my friends insist, that Dorothy was "in denial," that she "didn't know much about lesbian sex" and hated herself in the morning. All I know is she got the hell out and never went Sapphic again.

You have to understand something about Dorothy Thompson: any sex would be proud to have her. She was one of the greatest journalists the world has ever seen -- "a molder of opinion," her contemporaries said, "a power in the land," "combining the seeing-eye of Cassandra and the appearance of Brünnhilde with the gusto of General Patton and the holy fire of a crusading apostle." In the 1920s, as chief correspondent for the Curtis-Martin newspapers in Vienna and Berlin, Dorothy Thompson was America's preeminent expert on Middle Europe and later the loudest and most impassioned voice raised in this country against the menace of the Nazis. In 1934 she was expelled from the Third Reich on the personal order of Adolf Hitler; a " Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" was actually established at the German Foreign Office in order to monitor her writings against the Hitler regime. Her thrice-weekly opinion column, "On The Record," was syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in the United States. She was the highest-paid lecturer in the country, fielding up to 700 requests a week to appear at rallies, dinners, club meetings and business roasts, delivering commencement addresses at colleges and universities across the nation and broadcasting every Sunday night over the NBC radio network in kind of topical swing session that allowed her to comment on any subject she chose, from the fate of nations to the shape of hats.

"She has shown what one valiant woman can do with the power of a pen," said her friend Winston Churchill. "Freedom and humanity are her grateful debtors." In I939 she appeared on the cover of Time, where she was described as "undoubtedly the most influential" woman in the United States after Eleanor Roosevelt. And I -- silly me! -- had "abandoned the issue of her lesbianism."

To be frank, I don't give a damn about Dorothy Thompson 's lesbianism, except insofar as her willingness to experiment was a signal of her open mind, courage and determination not to go through life as a robot. I don't hesitate to declare that I fell in love with this woman on the day we met -- more than ten years ago now, between the covers of her long-forgotten books and in the yellowing clips of her syndicated column. I’m certain, in fact, that my biography of Dorothy Thompson succeeds precisely to the point that I was in love with her. I did not regard it as my job, as so many biographers do, to knock my subject on the head, poke the corpse with a stick and snicker when the bugs crawled out. I am adamantly against the "psychological" school and not inclined to look at the past as a mirror of my own neuroses: I'm in the business of celebrating lives. It's become fashionable among biographers to moan a great deal about the nature of their art, about its "falseness," its lack of "objectivity, and its essentially prurient nature. You won't hear men beating this drum nearly so hard as women, however. The word pathography, if I'm not mistaken, sprang from the nightmare mind of Joyce Carol Oates and found its ultimate definition (I certainly hope) in Janet Malcolm's Silent Woman, her broody meditation on the myth of Sylvia Plath and a book that is guaranteed to bring on a headache. So pained is Ms. Malcolm by the self-serving goals of contemporary biographers, herself among them, that she can barely keep her own head out of the oven, let alone remember the first requirement of a good book: that it tell a good story. This requires discrimination, of course, along with a definite point of view, a willingness to pick and choose material and an assumption of responsibility for the finished product. I may be the last of a breed, but I never imagined that biography was supposed to be objective. I wrote the life of Dorothy Thompson because I admired her example and worshipped her spirit. I had no other agenda and never needed to look further than Dorothy's own words for a justification of my position.

"Women," she once wrote -- she was given to blanket statements like this -- "Women, conscious of themselves as 'the sex,' are a bore. Large bodies of women aggressively being women, without the alleviating comic spirit, which, as Meredith pointed out, men introduce into the society of women and women into the society of men, are infinitely wearisome when not somberly terrifying." As a veteran of the campaign for woman suffrage in America, Dorothy Thompson 's feminist credentials were unassailable. After World War II she became president of the World Organization of Mothers of All Nations -- W.O.M.A.N. -- and issued a call for universal disarmament that got her in a heap of trouble with the anti-communist crowd.

"People have confidence in women to get them out of trouble," Dorothy explained. “Otherwise the people (not the Church) would never have elevated the Virgin Mother to the role they did; quite dearly confident that they could count on Mary more hopefully than on the Holy Ghost .... A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph." But she had no use for "the specious feminism of the women's magazines, which persist in finding cause for jubilation every time a woman becomes, for the first time, an iceman, a road surveyor or a senator." She abhorred the American habit of regarding women as "news," of dividing subjects of interest into "male" and "female" categories and looking at "the inevitable development of women as something quite apart from the general evolution of civilization."

"Parenthetically, may I say, that this `women's stuff would be vastly more amusing were it written by men," Dorothy went on. "The editor of an American newspaper with a Paris edition once told me that, losing a woman fashion reporter, he put a bright boy on the job and that the boy was the best fashion editor he ever had .... The moral of this is not the hasty one of the anti-feminists that any man can do a woman's job better than she can herself, but that despite the American effort to separate the interests of men and women, women are still interested in men and men in women."

Hear, hear. If more men wrote books about women, we might be in line for a biographical renaissance. We'd see some fine biographies of Catherine the Great, for example, and nothing at all about Anaïs Nin. (My personal vision of hell is to be locked in a room with Robin Williams and nothing to read but Nin's Diaries.) We might even get a good biography -- finally -- of the "other" Dorothy, Mrs. Parker, who, through some bizarre, late-century twist in cultural values, has emerged as the front-runner in the race for the title of Most Downtrodden Woman in History. Anyone who saw Jennifer Jason Leigh's deeply grieved performance as Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph's recent film, Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle, will know just how unhappy Mrs. Parker was; they will know nothing, unfortunately, about how funny she was, why so many people liked to be around her and why no one in her own time even thought of cracking her over the head with a lamp in order to shut her up. In 1993, to mark her centenary, I was asked by one of America's shinier magazines to write a tribute to Mrs. Parker, only to be told, as the anniversary came and went, that the editors wanted "to wait for the movie." Personally I'm convinced that they never ran the story because it skipped so lightly over Mrs. Parker's pain. She "wore [her] heart like a wet, red stain/ On the breast of a velvet gown" -- these are Dorothy Parker's own words to describe her situation. I was wondering what she might say if she knew that her face had been put on a postage stamp -- something about being licked, I suppose, or sold in sheets or swapped by collectors. She was a woman of whom it was said, correctly, that "the men were in and out of her apartment like the mail."

"I'm a feminist," Mrs. Parker protested, "and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when [America] was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women." Until recently she was the only woman in America to whom a whole volume of the Viking Portable Library was devoted, in fact, and she sells like hotcakes -- in the top ten by their recent count, next to Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Jung, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Joyce.

So why have women all concluded that her life was a disaster, a tragedy pure and simple? The most recent biography, Marion Meade's Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1989), takes its hilarious title from Mrs. Parker's habitual response when the doorbell rang ("It wasn't funny," said her friend Vincent Sheean; "she meant it"), but Meade is squarely in the line of the psychic deconstructionists, portraying Dorothy Parker as a weepy, raunchy, disconsolate pain in the ass, her humor born of shame and self-loathing, her internalized anti-Semitism ... oh, never mind: it's a terrible time to be a literary legend in America. A man writing her story might run the risk of minimizing Mrs. Parker's suffering, but he wouldn't reduce her to a cipher. He would never deprive her of her ultimate weapon and shield: humor.

"There must be courage; there must be no awe," Mrs. Parker herself observed when she talked about her work. "There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard for your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it." Alcoholism? Lousy love affairs? Suicide attempts? There were four in Mrs. Parker's life, and after one of them, in 1925, she tied huge black ribbons to her bandaged wrists and asked if she could have a flag for her oxygen tent. The various epitaphs she composed for herself -- "Excuse My Dust," "This Is On Me," and "If You Can Read This, You've Come Too Close" -- are as famous now as her legendary couplet, "Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses." But how many people also know that Dorothy Parker wanted to be buried 'in a shroud made of unpaid bills from Valentina?" And why is humor regarded as a minor achievement in the arts? In this era of cheap psychology, when "dysfunction" is the explanation of the hour and all emotional experience has been equalized, democratized and flattened to banality, we might want to remember that different ages had different standards, and that one woman's "denial" is another's intense relief.

"You know how you ought to be with men?" Mrs. Parker once asked. You should always be aloof, you should never let them know you like them, you must on no account let them feel they are of any importance to you, you must be wrapped up in your own concerns, you may never let them lose sight of the fact that you are superior, you must be, in short, a regular stuffed chemise. And if you could see what I've been doing!"

Why do I write about women? Because I like them. I honor them. And I want the sexes to lighten up. It's a goal that even Rotarians ought to appreciate.