Dorothy Parker was challenged by one of her peers at the Algonquin Round Table (aka the Vicious Circle) to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. She replied:
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
The Round Table is the indirect subject of this spring's
HBC film series, and the wonderfully depressed Mrs Parker was the magnetic focus of its activity. Her story as told with befitting melodrama by this 1994 biopic is that of a married woman strung between two married men: The dashing Charles MacArthur and her true love, Robert Benchley. The dynamics of this triangle (the three spouses are kept conveniently elsewhere) are tuned to perfect Dorothy's agony, tightening and stressing the coil that seems to power her creative ability. She and Benchley carry out a chaste and unspoken love affair, confronted in this one-time private exchange:
I have a question to ask. A serious one.
Anything.
Why do you think that we...
Yes?
...you and I...
That would be we.
...have never misbehaved? I'm referring to what we don't do in spite of everything.
What we don't do...Mrs Parker, really.
Tell me. Now.
Well, I suppose we respect each other too much.
You don't respect anyone.
Oh, Mrs Parker, suppose it didn't work.
Suppose it did.
The endless boozy gatherings of the Algonquinites fostered countless anecdotes and works of sparkling wit, but the film's dramatic inspiration is to reveal the suffering within that circle of hell. Here is a tribe of savage intellectuals who need desperately to be together in order to be judgmentally aloof.
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