Arts and Letters

I do not wish to speak of virtues or analyze the great talent or describe the brilliance and the gaiety. Dorothy Parker has been standing close to me for many years but, since Wednesday afternoon, she has been so close that it has been hard to breathe. The death of a beloved friend is, in part, one's own death. But the death of a remarkable human being forces you to push aside the daily innocent deceits and come upon old truths. Dottie and I never spoke of our first meeting, but she knew that I was in revolt against her generation and that my revolt made me rude and ill-tempered: simply, I was frightened: frightened of the successful world of which I thought she was a part. I was wrong. She was part of nothing and nobody except herself: it was this independence of mind and spirit that was her true distinction. The mind and spirit were, until the very end, young and sparkling. She never spoke of old glories, never repeated old defeats, never rested on times long gone.

I cannot sum up thirty-two years of two women facing each other in two chairs. I know only that when she spoke of a book I listened with the attention I don't always give; or when, late at night, gulping what we called a watered extract of scotch, she would put aside the gentle manner and let fly. Then I would roar with laughter that always ended in a sober recognition that the joke hid a brilliant diagnosis of people or places or customs or life. The remarkable quality of her wit was that it stayed in no place, and was of no time. Certain sides of her nature, of course, remained the same. I knew always, for example, what she would complain about. But, like many people who complain about odd, small matters, she was, in all important ways, a brave woman. She was brave in deprivation, in the chivvying she took during the McCarthy days, in the isolation of the last, bad, sick years.

She was frail, but her frailty was made of iron, because the pride behind it was made of plain cloth that had no weak places in the weave. Somebody had taught her early that it was feminine and charming to bat your eyelashes in certain situations, but she had taught herself to write and to speak and to live without fear. The core of such a person is very much to be admired, maybe because it is seen so seldom upon this earth.

The death of most people is sad, but every once in a while somebody dies who cannot be replaced because the times will not come again that formed them. Those are very special people and deserve our love and respect. If Miss Parker will now move away a little from my shoulder—she didn't like to be present when her jokes were repeated—I will tell you that she once told me she wanted written on her gravestone, "If you can read this, you've come too close." I have chosen to break that implied command so that we could come together today to say a kind of goodbye to a great lady.