After Such Pleasures.
INSCRIBED TO ROBERT BENCHLEY
Parker, Dorothy. After Such Pleasures. New York: The Viking Press, 1933.
8vo.; discrete book tickets to rear pastedown; beige cloth stamped in red; browned; heavy wear to extremities.
First edition of Parker’s second volume of fiction. After Such Pleasures contains 11 short stories, including acclaimed and oft-quoted favorites “The Waltz” and “The Little Hours,” the bleak tales of faltering relationships “Here We Are” and “Dusk Before Fireworks,” and the acerbic society parody “From the Diary of a New York Lady.” While Parker’s incisive prose won her praise—a contemporary review from the Saturday Review of Literature raved “Mrs. Parker can cut away detail with a ruthlessness not to be equaled elsewhere in this Hemmingway-Held, [sic] brevity-or-burst generation”—her witty, modernist style was considered especially notable for a woman writer, and she was often praised for having a “masculine” intelligence. As of a review of Here Lies in New Statesman and Nation put it: “She stands in a class by herself, both as a master of the satirical short story and as a woman writer who is not self-conscious about her sex. She is one of the first literary fruits of female emancipation.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: To Robert Benchley-/ Pardon the word/ “Robert”-/ from/ Dorothy Parker. Benchley, a writer, critic, and film actor, was Parker’s closest friend, and along with her and Robert Sherwood, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Parker and Benchley met while working at Vanity Fair, and after Parker was fired for upsetting Broadway producers with her caustic, negative reviews, Benchley resigned in protest, which Parker called “the greatest act of friendship I'd ever seen.” The two went on to set up a freelance office together, sharing a space so cramped that Parker said “an inch smaller and it would have been adultery”— ironically, as all evidence suggests their relationship remained one of intellectual soul mates rather than lovers. Their extraordinary closeness is reflected throughout Parker’s published work: in the poem “For R.C.B.” from her second collection of verse, Sunset Gun, and in the dedication of her following volume, Death and Taxes to “Mr. Benchley.” The inscription here is a reference to the fact that throughout their long friendship, they referred to each other exclusively as “Mr. Benchley” and “Mrs. Parker;” as Parker’s joking apology for the informality of “Robert” suggests, it was very unusual for her to use his first name.
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