Dorothy Parker insisted that there be no funeral service after her death.
“Listen,” she told her friend Fred Shroyer, “ Don’t feel badly when I die, because I’ve been dead for long time.”
I remember first reading this quote 20 years ago, on the eve of entering a six-week stay at the Rutland Centre, for drug and alcohol treatment. The year was 1995 and I was ready to throw in the towel from my bacchanalian days in London which, like Mrs Parker’s, found rich beginnings under the roof of Conde Nast, but ended 15 years later, without a roof worth remembering. At the age of 32, I was on my way to a divorce, losing another job as a journalist, virtually friendless and worst of all, carrying broken dreams of being a writer.
I don’t think anyone can accurately pinpoint what drives their vision, plan or life with any certainty (we just like to think that we do), but in as much as it is possible to connect the dots of my life and its trajectory since I left the Rutland and found a way back to my love of language and words and to produce the book I wanted to write – SoulBurgers, a 10-year odyssey in verse from broken to whole – I’d say Parker’s life and more relevantly, her death as an artist, alongside a canon of self- destructive writers, inspired my installation at Smock Alley Theatre.
The epiphany for this work and Parker’s as my subject to platform questions of soul, arrived soon after I stood on the top floor of the Boys School in Smock Alley Theatre.
The first and obvious name as a subject was Dante Alighieri, whose opening lines of The Divine Comedy inspire all my work: “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost” – thus starts his recovery story from the three addictions of lust, power and ambition that almost destroyed his life. However, the Boys School’s amphitheatre space, shaped in a cube with walkways to the centre made of steel, demanded a more contemporary subject and out of nowhere, Parker’s aforementioned line floated back: “Don’t feel badly when I die, because I’ve been dead for a long time.”
Because while Parker’s spark lit up the world around her in her bold verse and dazzling short stories, ultimately it failed her, “I’m lower than worms, I don’t like my state of mind, I hate to go to sleep, my soul is crushed” she said and reiterated this in her work despite her accolades, awards and publishers’ demand for more. Parker’s desire was to be considered a serious artist and the author of the book she never completed to stand alongside or, I’d argue, above the literary stature of her contemporaries.
Aged 73, long past the height of her creative powers and collapsed in thwarted desire, one of the world’s greatest literary humorists was found dead of a heart attack at the Volney Hotel on East 74th Street in a cliche of alcoholism with Troy, her beloved poodle dog, by her side. Discovered by a chambermaid, Dorothy was found in a mess of dog faeces, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles and torn pages of the writing she never wanted seen.
As she had requested and planned in great detail, she was dressed in a china red silk dress when she was cremated in the company of a small gathering of friends, most of whom she’d alienated in her last years, including fellow writer, Lillian Hellman, whom she appointed as the executor of her will.
But her ashes, the stories of which are almost as famous as she was, were never claimed by Hellman, who was furious with Parker for leaving the proceeds of her estate – $20,000 and the much sought after copyright to her work – to Dr Martin Luther King , whom Parker had never met.
In her fury, Hellman not only declined to claim Ms Parker’s ashes, she refused to pay the storage fee for five years until the cemetery, frustrated, agreed to Hellman’s request that Parker’s remains be turned over to Hellman’s lawyer who placed the ashes in a filing cabinet for the next 15 years.
The facts of this story provide the opening premise to my work Wit’s End, which resurrects Parker’s well-documented defiance to deliver a response from the grave to Hellman’s insult. But critically and more earnestly in my narrative, Parker returns to fulfil her desire to complete Sonnets in Suicide, the novel she desperately wanted to write. When a friend asked her what stopped her, she replied, “I can’t, I don’t know how.”
Working with words, images, props and sound to awaken all the senses, Wit’s End remembers the unpredictable brilliance of Parker in an alchemist’s flare of imagination and leads Parker to her best self on a spiritual Everyman journey based on my map guided by Dante.
My map offers the American poet a path to face her demons and inhabit the life she failed to live. Just as Virgil was Dante's first guide to meet his deepest desire – to know love – my work guides Parker through the hell of her past to meet herself squarely and compassionately, burning false ego identities along the way, to inhabit the life she rejected and sit down and write the book her heart desired.
Wit's End Installation by Christina Reihill at Smock Alley Theatre (Boys Room) will be opened by RHA Director Patrick Murphy on March 13th and run till March 18th, 10am -6pm. Admission free
