Rapiers, not bludgeons.
4
"as progressives’ blind spots, like those that kept Woodrow Wilson from endorsing a woman’s right to vote during his first term"
Is/Was Wilson considered "progressive" ?
He was a virulent racist.Trump is a dilettante compared to him.
He was a narcissist, too, but Trump beats him in that department.
9
For those who enjoy reading about early literary clubs mixed with drinking and raucous behavior, look at: "The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age." This is by Leo Damrosh.
There is nice review by Michael Dirda here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-club-spotlights-the-stars-of-18th-century-british-culture--and-invites-some-new-members/2019/04/17/ac2d617c-5f8a-11e9-9412-daf3d2e67c6d_story.html?utm_term=.7efd30de999a . I hope the link works.
5
A link to the article by Parker in which the famous quote about ridicule not being a weapon but a shield appears at the end of the first paragraph.
But note also the closing paragraph in which she attributes the human suffering of the Spanish Civil War she is writing about to the fact that "...two men - two men - want more power."
The more things change....
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/parker/true.htm
6
Thank you for your fascinating portrayal. Well done.
5
While quite enjoyed Prof. Ratner’s musings, I do take issue with implication that the only life worth living is one suffused with political action. A great many American (and English) intellectuals in the ‘20s and ‘30s were quite outspoken in their support for, and idealization of, the Soviet Union. In many quarters, this support was unwavering even in the face of dozens of high profile “show trials” and substantial evidence of mass enslavement and extermination. Indeed, the Times’ own correspondent, Walter Duranty, was effusive in his praise for Stalin and the USSR, even after touring the Ukraine in the 1930s, where the death toll would ultimately top seven million. All of which is to say, “stick to what you know”.
6
"The Algonquinites’ exhilaration in verbal exchange as blood sport hides a darker truth they knew all too well: the kind of culture their cosmopolitan liberalism was up against, and what it would take to turn their creative expression into trenchant social criticism."
So here we are 90 years later waiting for the same ignorant slabs of American xenophobes and religious absurdists to die off so we can move forward again!
The 'Squad" may be illiterate and intellectually limited compared to the Algonquin Group - BUT they're on the right track.
6
This is a really good piece. Now I want to know more.
7
I cannot believe that there is only ONE "Nina" in that drawing!
4
The word play in sophisticated displays of wit requires a good education to grasp. It’s also often accompanied by snideness and arrogance. The Algonquin crowd, for all their noble intentions, probably contributed to the distain so many less erudite Americans have towards those they term the “elite.” The Algonquin group’s hearts were in the right place, but there was a smart-alecky attitude behind their drive for literary cleverness that turns Ordinary Joe off. Look what’s happened in America as a backlash.
5
No-longer-young Hollywood actress: I insured my face for a million dollars.
Dorothy Parker: What did you do with the money?
9
Alas, Dorothy Parker did not create the witticism about drinking and the host, though she well might have.
Has anybody found NINA in the Hirschfeld drawing?
1
My wife just reminded me of another quote attributed to Dorothy Parker, "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
4
Unfortunately I think the gang would feel right at home today. We could use some of their wit.
5
After this insufferable, never-ending, business-and-money-are-all right-wing era from Nixon-to-Reagan-to Trump, we are long overdue for another delightful era of intelligence, truth, social criticism, and wit. Remember wit?
Dorothy Parker: “There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
3
I walked by the Algonquin hotel many times because it’s just down the block from where the Cornell Campus to Campus bus stop is located. I told my husband that I wanted to have dinner there with hopes of seeing the famous round table. While the bar is in the front, the round table is way in the back. It’s bare wood makes it look like an altar. We had a fine meal at a nearby table, and before we left, I sat at the round table for several seconds. What a delicious memory. Is the table a shrine or can you still reserve it? Surely, there are bright young minds that could gather there, say once a month, put away cell phones, and converse. Come on, all of you journalism, English, and art history majors. Let the table sing again!
11
Humor is a useful tool/in dividing sage from fool/At that board where wits convened/and from innocence were weaned/laughter came of age at last/breaking with the gilded past/And to thank those jesters gone/let's keep grinning at the dawn.
11
Other attendees at the Algonquin included Harpo and occasionally Groucho Mars, Alexander Woollcott, and a pretty hefty poker-playing contingent. The Algonquin was a place to relax, much more than a place to fight moral or literary wars. Read Harpo Speaks for a very much less murderously serious view of those people and the times. Also please note that the extreme respect for Dorothy Parker and Alice Duer Miller, (one of the few people of whom Harpo was ever in awe) were held. The politics wasn't the big issue, and these people were also good friends.
Where do today's socially conscious literary warriors hang out? Clue - Not at Writer's Festivals, nor anywhere else where everyone sitting around in a coma fearlessly agreeing with each other on every single issue, however mindlessly regurgitated, is considered an achievement. That's what made the Algonquin so unique, in my opinion.
8
As a young out-of-towner from flyover country, I booked a room at
The Algonquin and had a few drinks at the bar, hoping to inhale some of the long ago vapors of its storied past.
It worked!
Nice article, thanks.
11
Loved the piece but, even more, the comments. What a great review of the time.
8
With respect to the author, this take on a peerless 20s group makes its members appear as socially humorless as today's squared circles decidedly are. Today we're in for a lunchtime (if any time can be spared for it) of disconnected persons staring at their phones in hope of finding something, anything there to brighten the leaden pall now fallen over our dour and oh so correct world.
1
Dr. Ratner-Rosenhagen,
I have really enjoyed your article and have learned a great deal from it and all the wonderful comments.
As I read it, I couldn't help but think what that luncheon would have been like in the latter twenties with Ogden Nash as a young man. His magical logic and upside down reasoning would have been an impetus to all kinds of iconoclastic social and political fireworks.
How great if would be if we had chapters of the Round Table all over the country.
The first half of the 20th century really produced some great thinkers. I am still reading them. ...If I could just conquer James Joyce! ...Ulysses has sat on my shelf, crisp and new, for 40 years but it is still on my mind.
7
This is an amusing article by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen about the dining denizens of The Algonquin in a bygone age. It brings to mind details which some of us older readers may have forgotten, since we first read about the group 50 years ago and took time to visit the hotel.
The article also reminds us how heavily the shadow of The Great War hung over many Americans in the 1920s, although there never was the sad effect felt in Great Britain.
Two lighter things seem worth mentioning. Dr. Ratner-Rosenhagen, fittingly displays the modern solution to the married-name issue with which Ruth Hale and Jane Grant struggled. And, in the famous drawing of the Round Table celebrities by Al Hirschfeld, NINA can be seen in three tablecloth overhangs, including the one which is front and center.
2
Re: Harold Ross
I've read enough about Harold Ross to know that he was, to put it gently, a social conservative, a man quite uncomfortable with African Americans gays and Lord knows who else. Yet I find that I still have deep respect for a man who, despite these views, hired, supported, and publish the work of men and women (Janet Flanner, et al) whose social and political views he did not in any way share. His deep respect for talent overshadowed his many weak spots and character flaws; his respect and affection for E.B. White was such that he gave White more or less a free hand in publishing, week after week,
his columns, offering thoughts to the readers that Ross often deeply disagreed with and could never written himself. When will we ever see that again?
16
I always remember this quote of Dorothy Parker when told of the death of Calvin Coolidge. She simply asked "how could they tell?"
16
The fundamental contradiction of American conservatism is finally being laid open to rigorous intellectual scrutiny. In 1775 Samuel Johnson was the voice of conservatism and his chief antagonist was the voice of what we call liberalism Edmund Burke.
When William F Buckley introduced his concept of Freedom into "conservatism" the vocabulary of the right wing had little understanding that the liberalism extolled by Edmund Burke had no room in the the conservative ethos.
Today's salons are the men and women who understand the complexity of the human mind and understand that conservatism requires the same understanding that Samuel Johnson showed when he penned his letter to the American Congress called Taxation No Tyranny in 1775. Freedom is not just a word.
i cannot explain my joy reading today's Haaretz op-ed actually defining the confusion on America's right of self styled intellectuals as they named their new found insight by naming their society after the father of American Liberalism the Whig Parliamentarian Edmund Burke.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-racism-nationalism-conservative-conference-1.7539197
Burke championed female suffrage. Indian and American independence and all the diffusion of power that defines a philosophy that extols freedom even as conservatism is about a social contract that extols the virtue of servitude. It is a discussion that that must be aired.
New York's salons were special but modern technology opens wonderful new doors.
8
@Montreal Moe
Forgive me I was compelled by forces far stronger than my own free will.
It is of little wonder that the ultra liberal Freedom Caucus is the domain of congress' stark raving loonies.
3
@Montreal Moe
Before I forget. It was London's literary society of the 1770s that gave us Dr Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke.
America is dying because it does not understand that Burke was a liberal philosopher and Whig parliamentarian who believed in Freedom, ending slavery, women's suffrage and American Independence and Dr Johnson who explained conservatism and why Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
4
wonderful article.
(& now I know where Heywood Hale Broun came from)
4
Missing from this wonderful article is a caption for the picture, so here you go:
As depicted in Al Hirschfeld's famous caricature: Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Round Table (lower left) surrounded by Robert Benchley, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Case, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert E. Sherwood. It's a little dicey, but that's clockwise, in a somewhat meandering line. Benchley, then Lunt whispering into Fontanne's ear, then standing man and on clockwise.
57
@Tony
Got it. Had Parker, but none of the others. Thanks!
12
I’m puzzling over the meaning of: “the two women would lament losing the lack of formal recognition of their maiden names.” Is the triple negative intentional or is it a misprint.
If (as I suspect) the latter, it raises the further puzzle of why a woman should feel less respected as an individual with the name of the husband whom she chose, than with that of the father whom she did not choose.
8
@PL
I'd rather have chosen my own name. Including the first and middle. Be "Child of So-and-So" until I'm old enough to speak. I'm serious; though I realize it needs work.
4
I would like to know who each of the people are in the Hirschfeld caricature.
2
@sdavidc9 From Hirschfeld website: THE ALGONQUIN ROUND TABLE (CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT) ROBERT SHERWOOD, DOROTHY PARKER, ROBERT BENCHLEY, LYNN FONTANNE, ALFRED LUNT, FRANK CRONINSHIELD, ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, HEYWOOD BROUN, MARC CONNELLY, FRANK CASE, FRANKLIN P. ADAMS, EDNA FERBER, AND GEORGE S. KAUFMAN , 1962
6
@sdavidc9 I'm only sure of a few. woman on the left of the round is Dorothy Parker, then Robert Benchley and Alexander Woolcott. I believe the woman on the right is Edna Ferber, and the frizzy headed guy is either George S. Kaufman or Harold Ross.
Wild guess, the guy in the back with the bow tie is Heywood Bruin. I think someone mentioned Taluleh Bankhead is part of it, which I didn't know, but if so that might be her in the back.
Id' like to know who the guy lighting the cigarette is.
2
No mention of Estelle Winwood or Tallulah Bankhead?
2
Tallulah Bankhead lived at the Hotel Elysée, a somewhat louche establishment that she dubbed the Hotel Easy-Lay. I feel sure she held her own at the Algonquin sessions.
3
Brendan Gill (a prominent theater critic of The New Yorker) and my father's families used to have Sunday dinners in New Haven, and after attending college, the young men came to New York and were lifelong friends.
My parents divorced; my father went off to Ireland to begin a new family, and Gill popped up at the same time I was visiting. At age fourteen, I found him irritating and conceited, but remained polite.
On my return to New York five years later, Gill invited a friend and me to The Algonguin for dinner, and down the corridor came our host, with arms outstretched, and a loud, 'I remember you! You were such a little witch!'. It was the end of our brief 'affair'.
When my father died suddenly in 1981, I had a small gathering of his friends at my apartment and Brendan Gill showed up. 'With affectionate salutations', he inscribed on his 'Here at The New Yorker', which I keep for a rainy day and might place for sale on E-Bay.
When mentioning his name to The Red Queen a few years later, she sailed off with 'I always thought he was a little bit of a bore'.
An award-winning biographer, Ruth Franklin, in 'A Bit of a Haunted Life', profiling Shirley Jackson, places a sharp edge on Gill, and some of these literary entertainers could be quite effective in smashing the careers of popular authors. Frank O'Hara for one, did not fare well under scrutiny and Herman Wouk who died recently was another casualty.
I bet Stephen King of Cujo would like to join this vicious fun.
15
@Miss Ley Who is the Red Queen?
6
@Miss Ley Brendan Gill had a wonderful fight with JOHN O'Hara in his book -- not FRANK....
4
@Jim Cricket,
'The Red Queen' is finely described by a Canadian journalist, turned author who spent most of her life in Paris. Mavis Gallant is her name.
6
In later life, Parker:"These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them....There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth."
Oh well...
36
@stilldana
Parker may have said but it didn't make it right.
Kaufman and Sherwood were considered and probably still today are considered the equals of the writers she named.
And the writer of the article is incorrect to portray Heywood Broun as a "sportswriter." Yes, he began writing about sports but then advanced into writing about many other things. To say he was simply a sportswriter would be to say the same about Jimmy Breslin who also began in sports and then become famous for writing about much more serious topics.
Broun was also very active in forming a union for reporters.
9
@stilldana the cynicism of late middle age is indeed a sad fate only exceeded by the vicious trap of nostalgia.
7
@stilldana and you were THERE, among them???
2
you forgot RING LARDNER!! he was one of the founding members!!
7
Imagine if they had had twitter...
32
Sadly, I haven't had a "literary hangout" since I left Manchester, VT and the "Northshire Bookstore" in 2010. Friends, all displaced or misplaced New Yorkers, who moved to that remarkable area. One of my favorites, who I have sadly lost contact with, did this "rag's" crossword on the 5th Avenue bus every day. He also lamented that we have "no sense of occasion" anymore with our dress when going out for a nice lunch, the theatre and more. Thanks for a wonderful article.
I end with one famous line from Dorothy Parker who, in reality, had a sad life. Here goes. "“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most. After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my ....". I left out the last word for fear of censorship.
9
Thanks for the tone and content of this piece.
“Ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.” I think I’ll put that one in my quiver. Oh, wait. Well, it’s at least worthy of becoming a saying. Maybe a few colleges could inscribe it in stone over an entrance to the building housing the English Department.
4
I made note of that quip as well.
My favorite Parkerism: when asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence:
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
23
@Bruce Mine is something along the lines of, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!"
8
@Bruce
Mine are two. The one about the women who get laid end to end and the apology to the hostess for being late to her gathering. Look them up.
@Bruce And, also from Parker,
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy."
1
I've read about these writers. I would say the library in my town is where the intellectuals hang out. Either there or a bar down the road that features live Irish music and the meetings of interesting minds from all corners.
5
I have had great fun with my copy of "The Algonquin Wits" and find Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's piece to be greatly amusing and informative. Good for Jane Grant and Ruth Hale in their fight for the right of a married woman to keep her maiden name. My current fight is for the acceptance of a woman's "birth name". The implications of a "maiden name" are outdated and not worthy of today's woman. We need to look closely at some words and phrases that are taken for granted because of habit.
7
@Jean Chamberlin: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. A remedial class is still a remedial class no matter how much you call it developmental. And community college is just a euphemism for junior college. And
Please, please Mr or Ms postal carrier,
Look and see, if there’s a letter, a letter for me
just doesn’t work.
Socially conscious witty writer here. Author of five books and many humorous personal essays, most recently "Disco Sally" in the Washington Post. If I could go back in time to anywhere it would be to visit the Algonquin Round Table. If I was in New York today I'd hang out with liberal writer friends, but now that i've moved to Florida wit is a precious and rare commodity and liberals here are on the defensive. Too many Trumpsters abound. I do have a couple of writer buddies but mostly I hang out on Facebook, which is where writers reside today. Twitter and Instagram might be good for platform-building but real writers like to--well--write, which is what Facebook is for. I save my best bon mots for my Facebook friends. Feel free to friend me.
11
@Erica Manfred I live in Florida and long for witty conversation. I have 3 authors who are Facebook friends and would love to friend you. Sandra Didner
3
WOW NYC was a wow for me like the round table members. The best quote to me is from Dorothy Parker, "After 2 martinis I am under the table and after 3 I am under the host."
7
No American has produced humor of such lasting import as Robert Benchley. His works - also those of George S. Kaufman -are Supremely important because they help us laugh.
16
@Jazzmandel, I haven't read Benchley, but I'll take your word for it. Kaufman was very funny and brilliant, or, maybe, brilliant and very funny.
4
@Jazzmandel
Mentioned by others, but I will echo:
Of course, Kaufman wrote works of "lasting vision and import"! (yes, mostly with collaborators, in particular Moss Hart, who was definitely not in the Algonquin Circle. Still...).
And let us not forget that Harpo Marx was part of the crowd!
2
@Jazzmandel Not even S.J. Perelman?
1
The Algonquin was so famous that, as late as the 1970s, my mother insisted on having lunch there. Of course the humor was long departed.
4
@Michael Livingston’s
If only to IMAGINE that we were a part of that famous Algonquin Table, my husband and I frequented it in the 70's for lunch/coffee break/or dinner. Always having a GREAT time, because we IMAGINED ourselves as two invited participants by one of the 'famous' ones.
9
I'm so glad we decided not to dismiss them altogether.
6
I think a lot of the Algonquin circle’s ability to thrive had to do with regular face-to-face/personal interaction. Eventually with the improvement in communications (e.g. radio, film) and transportation, the Algonquin gang dispersed going to on varying successes (and failures).
The camaraderie that inspired the bon mots of their day would almost be impossible to duplicate the way people live their lives today. Seemingly personal, but really impersonal, outlets such as Twitter seem to be the thing today. Now everyone can join the ‘circle’.
8
You omitted the most beloved member of the Round Table, known for being the one who LISTENED while the rest of them talked. He was Alexander Woolcott's dearest friend (and sometimes frenemy), even named one of his children for him.
He was described as the one saving grace in Woolcott's DREADFUL play, "Yellow Jacket" and was the inspiration for the character, "Banjo" in "The Man Who Came to Dinner".
His body of work was immense and to this day is enjoyed by millions. He was the gentlest and the funniest of the greatest comedy team, ever. He was Harpo Marx, mime, comedian, musician, and painter.
And he was the Listener at the Round Table.
56
I first became aware of the Round Table when I read Harpo’s autobiography, “Harpo Speaks” in eighth grade, about 1963. Through that my literary curiosity was peaked and I began reading Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and as much as I could find of other members of “The Table”. The era has become one of great interest to me. I give Harpo credit for widening my reading world.
22
@Andie DeLuca a peek at your comment helped me deduce that in fact your literary curiosity was piqued, by the mute Marx’s literary peak.
7
My grandmother was 21 in 1920. She was a flapper and a feminist in her time. She became as many would describe her later a strong, confident, often strident woman with a dry wit. She raised her two daughters that way. She spied my interest in science and for my 10th birthday (shortly before her death) gave me her original copy of Arrowsmith and would discuss it with me as my young brain attempted to absorb it. Fortunately Sinclair Lewis's writing style appealed to me. I haven't read it for quite a while. Time to dust it off, read her inscription to me and give it a reread.
33
I worked as a gardener for William Auerbach-Levy in the summer of 1957. He did caricatures for the New Yorker, often Round Table people. He published a book showing them called "Is that me?". He frequented the upstairs, less expensive, round table for the purpose of playing poker. He was very bright. One year he cleaned them out and sent them post-cards from a summer painting trip to Nova Scotia thanking them for their money.
24
". . . the false pieties of a hawkish patriotism." Are you speaking of John Bolton, eh, perhaps?
28
@Cody McCall All hawkishness invokes false pieties. Actual piety demands peaceful solutions.
4
I can’t be the only one who smiles when a Hirschfeld drawing appears in the Times, can I?
70
@Edward Garland .. and start counting Ninas ...
10
Alas, no Ninas in this particular one.
2
I count one "NINA" in the Hirschfeld drawing over the left shoulder of the fellow with round glasses in the center. Anyone see any more?
4
@jonathan
Yes I also see Nina on the tablecloth drape of both tables.
8
@Barbara
Is that including the one on the far left table, just under Tallulah? I see three in total, all in tablecloths...
2
@jonathan On all the nearest knives.
The "fellow" is Woolcott.
4
Individually, some of them produced work of lasting vision and import: Ferber’s “So Big,” Parker’s “Enough Rope,” Connelly’s “The Green Pastures,” Mankiewicz’s “Citizen Kane.”
That's all the import you could find?
12
Ah, yes, feminism and social consciousness. But still, “You can take a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”—Dorothy Parker.
12
@Anonymous And never forget, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."
9
@Jim Cricket: Good one. I read that before, but forgot it. Long ago, I was at lunch with a girl from grad school, and we were discussing her MA thesis on Parker. Some guy overheard us and paid for our lunch. So there is a free lunch after all.
8
That is an amazing story!
1
Intellectuals, bards and hedons, all those artistic types of sorts, have no more shops, from the likes of mom's and pops,
and are at a Starbucks of course...
8
In the late ‘90s, I worked at The Atlantic, which used to host Algonquin talks a few times a year. I had the pleasure of attending once, but I’m sure it was nothing like the originals.
3
While attending an all boys-Catholic-military school in NYC in the late 60's, we formed up outside the Algonquin for the St. Patrick's Day parade. It was understood that seniors - and seniors only - could walk into the bar and get one small shot of Irish whiskey. When my year came around, it was a cold and snowy St Patrick's Day, and my first and most memorable glass of the stuff.
10
" I like to have a martini,
two at the very most,
after two I'm under the table
after three I'm under the host".
Love this quote by Dorothy Parker
28
@PKoo,
Here is another one that you might enjoy. When a Hollywood starlet opened the door and stepped back with 'Age Before Beauty', Parker responded 'And, Pearls Before Swine'.
37
@Miss Ley
In eighth grade we had to memorize a poem. Not content with Wordsworth and daffodils I memorized a Dorothy Parker.
Razors pain you
Rivers are damp
Acid pains you
Drugs cause cramps
Gas smells awful
Nooses give
Guns aren't lawful
You might as well live.
I don't think eight grade English teachers would put up with that now.
22
@Miss Ley
It was Tallulah Bankhead who stepped aside and gestured for Dorothy Parker to enter a door ahead of her while saying, "Age before beauty".
As she stepped through the doorway, over her shoulder, Dorothy Parker replied, "Pearls before swine".
2
@Mary Hooper
My mother helped to found the Chicago chapter of the newspaper guild and was a fervent leftie who left her native California to study at U. Wisconsin Madison because of its leftist tradition. She spoke reverently of Heywood Broun, and had some of that Algonquin cutting wit, though she never lived in New York. At a cocktail party in the Fifties, when someone said something anti-Semitic and then softened it with the classic boilerplate, "But don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are Jewish," she glared at him and replied drily, "That's what you think."
77
What fun to search for the Nina's in this marvelous Hirschfeld drawing - thank you NYTimes art department!
8
@Mary S. i took a magnifying glass and scoured the wonderful hirschfeld drawing for the "nina". after about 15 minutes, i finally found it, in the background. what fun, and what a menagerie of geniuses.
2
@buskat
In fact, there are two Nina's -- written as words and two on the table cloths .... what....FOUR! - enlarge the image!
1
I loved Hirschfeld's drawings. As a child the game was to find the "Nina" which was the name of his daughter. I found one in this drawing too.
10
Marvelous piece by Dr Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen on The Algonquin Round Table from 1919 through the early 1930s. We haven't forgotten the "10 year lunch' of America's most brilliant socially-conscious literary lights. Written Word Bling.
Fascism besieged America in the 1930s as it does today. Our society is sick of Trump's nationalistic white supremacy on the way to fascism. And with the advent of the Internet, social media and governing by Tweet and ignorance, are there any socially-conscious readers around to read what today's brilliant literary stars write?
Al Hirschfeld's seminal caricature from the NYTimes Arts & Leisure section in 1962 -- "The Algonquin Round Table" -- is a delight to study and enjoy again. Did anyone else get more than eight NINAS in his gorgeous cartoon?
20
For 50 years, I heard about Dorothy Parker, FPA, George Kaufman, Benchley and the others in the literary circle.
My mother-in-law and her sisters were peripheral attachments to the Algonquin luncheon crowd.
One of the women married John Wharton and produced Broadway plays. The oldest married Hanns Heinz Ewers and moved to Nazi Germany. My MIL went to Malabar Farm with Louis Bromfield and his circle of friends.
It was a sparkling era that promoted personal independence and growth, artistic development and voracious cultural absorption.
How different from today.
42
In the 196Os, fresh out of college at age 20, I got my first job in book publishing at Fawcett Publications, a paperback publisher housed in an office building on the same block as the Algonquin Hotel. As I walked past the hotel every day to get to my office, where I was a lowly copy editor of paperback novels earning $65 a week, I would think that, well, at least I am in the vicinity where noted writers used to discuss the issues of the day. This thought did not pay the bills but it made me feel that writing and publishing are important, and that conferred dignity on my work. I still think that grammar, spelling, and correct usage of the English language are standards we should maintain, even in the age of twitter.
88
@Barbara
A former copy editor myself I remember getting up the courage in my early twenties to have tea at the Algonquin. Everyone was very nice--a wonderful experience to feel surrounded by such delightful ghosts.
23
It's unfortunate that Ezra Pound is mentioned among the distinguished literarians, since he was ant-Semitic.
4
@Michael Radowitz
If you are going to eliminate everyone from the canon because of their personal failings and prejudices, you are going to be left with a very mediocre world.
17
@Michael Radowitz: People of earlier eras, where things we now consider completely unacceptable, were not in a milieu where that was so.
I'm not defending anti-semitism, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find society anywhere near to unaccepting of anti-semitic attitudes the further back you go. People are products of the eras in which they lived, and judging them by contemporary standards, rather than those prevailing in their own lifetimes, really serves no one.
"It was a different time," is not just a platitude, but a fact. And knowing the prevailing folkways and mores of a given time is essential to judging those who lived during them.
10
@Michael Radowitz with that criterion, we’d be hard pressed to keep a literary canon intact. I’m a Jew and G-d knows I hate Pound, Hergé, Wagner, Céline, Heidegger, et al, but I won’t deny them their genius.
8
A century later U.S. culture embraces patriotic militarism, Stockholm syndrome women vote for a misogynist politician, and a lemming economy scurries towards a cliff. At best we can enjoy lunch
44
The Algonquin circle could not exist today. Or, if it did, it would be the subject of derision, threats and hectoring by the "president" and his rabid supporters, who denounce all of us who are educated as "elitists".
The Algonquiners of today would be targets of a "president" who urges his base to "rough up" journalists and who regularly threatens to strip journalists and writers of their citizenship.
Strange to think, but the journalistic and literary giants who comprised the Algonquin circle were living in a much safer America. Today, these men and women would be the targets of death threats by Trump voters, to the glee of Trump himself.
No doubt many have noticed, as I have, since 2016, but the nation has become strangely silent. Anyone who opposes Trump and lives in a Red state looks around before giving his or her opinion. Private citizens have seen how Jim Acosta and other high profile journalists been treated, and if those of their stature have been targeted, certainly they themselves would have a similar fate.
Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood and Dorothy Parker would experience a degree of wrath from this "president" and his supporters that would shock them. And I question whether, in this current environment, such a "10-year" lunch would even be possible now. We are only three years into this "presidency", and the targeting is becoming dangerous. And we are beginning to understand that an Algonquin circle is simply not possible now, in this America.
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@Noah Drummer: I can't entirely agree with you. Trump takes up an undeservedly large portion of the public discourse, but there are more people today expressing more opinions in more ways than ever before. Quite a few of these opinions are opposed to persons, organizations, and institutions with political and economic power. And while Trump opponents in Red states may have to look around before speaking freely, don't forget that the Algonquin Round Table was located in New York, in one of the bluest of Blue states.
17
@Stan Sutton: Indeed.
One has to judge the actions of historic personages based on the milieu in which they lived, whether by having been born into it or having chosen it.
New York City has never been representative of the rest of the country in any meaningful way (and that's not a slap at either NYC or the rest of the country). It is, like so many historically and culturally important cities, a milieu unto itself.
10
@Noah Drummer I understand the anxiety, but I don't think calling all of these people "journalists" and ones that Trump would attack either does them justice, or quite understands their position in the world.
Above all else they were literary and excelled in their craft of words. My personal opinion is that Dr Ratner-R belittles them rather than embellishes them by citing all of their social and political concerns. I have no doubt that some of them would be writing satirical pieces about him in the New Yorker. But IMHO politics wasn't the focus of their work.
But look at all the literary people that Trump ignores today. Has he ever made criticism of Adam Gopnik or David Remnick in today's New Yorker? (Or for that matter Susan Glasser, or John Cassidy, or David Frum of The Atlantic, and so many others.) No. If he is aware of them at all, he wouldn't dare bring attention to them. They are too articulate, and probably too obscure to bother with. He's only after the mass media people that the mass of people would most easily be noticing.
14
I can't help but think back to the early days of television and how the CBC brought into intellectual discussions with leading writers and thinkers and how lo and behold we can go to these discussions almost 24/7 and be amused and enlightened.
I think of shows like Fighting Words with Nathan Cohen and the treasures of the CBC archives where a lifetime wit and wisdom awaits our rubbing the lamp and men and women like Irving Layton, Malcolm Muggeridge, Arthur Miller and George Orwell await our eyes and ears.
At 71 there is nothing more enjoyable than sitting back with friends and having Stephen Fry, Stephen Pinker, John Ralston Saul, Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky lead my friends and I on journeys where few have gone before. Ot is a good time to be alive when everywhere and at any time a Samuel Johnson , Mark Twain or other intellectual giant can be called upon to lead a discussion. How about Tony Atkinson, Chrystia Freeland and Paul Krugman talking real economics and politics and inequality in all its complexity.
Yes, there is a lot of stupid everywhere and the wealthiest most powerful nation on Earth is by popular demand becoming a Kakistocracy but this is a great time to be alive, these care the most interesting of times. Even as mediocrity becomes the watchword of the US Supreme Court we can still watch Patrick Leahy tell us what the courts should be in a world aspiring for better.
25
Enjoyed your column. I have loved reading about this group and in your writing found some things I didn't know and an interesting perspective.
14
In the early 80s I worked in the Bar Building across W44th Street from the Algonquin. It's hard to remember now, but in those days, pre Mayor Giuliani, the city was unpleasant, dirty and dangerous and I occasionally thought of those round table ghosts enjoying their camaraderie in that faded, yet elegant setting. Thank you for a good memory and also of Al Hirschfeld's line drawings.
18
I'm imagining a 2019 version of the Round Table where everyone sits looking down at the cell phone screen in their lap, fingers anxiously texting and tweeting. Silence reigns. Suddenly someone looks up and asks a question. Without looking up another replies: "Google it deary."
68
A good deed—reminding us of that remarkable cohort. Even allowing for its feminist focus, it seems curious that any piece on the Algonquin circle should fail to mention H.L. Mencken. Oh, just imagine what he would do with today’s political circus!
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@Ollie
Mencken was never really a member of the round table.
He knew most of those who were and was friendly with many of them except when during WWII his love of Germany put his career on hold and cost him many friendship. Although he worked in NYC when editing the "Smart Set" and then "American Mercury," he disliked the city and headed back to his hometown of Baltimore as soon as business was concluded.
8
I would give nearly anything to find a group of intelligent, witty creatives to gather with regularly. But it can be difficult these days to find even one person who prefers to engage face to face rather than via their precious phones and laptops, much less a whole group.
Another issue is that people are just so busy now. Almost everyone, even writers and other creative sorts, it seems, also have day jobs, and that doesn't leave a lot of time to actually nourish other parts of our beings.
I have one dear friend that I meet with once or twice a month. He, like myself, likes nothing better than a great conversation, and in one get-together we are likely to cover everything from spirituality to politics to social criticism to philosophy to physics.
Those get togethers are, quite honestly, right up at the top of my list of favority things about my life, partially just because he is such a good friend and we get along so well, but also because the conversations nourish a part of me that isn't getting nearly enough of what it needs. I'm just not made for world where people keep themselves separated from others behind screens, nor one where most folks' idea of an interesting conversation is talking about what's coming to Netflix or who just unfollowed who on Twitter.
106
@Kristin there is a book by Francoise Gilot, Not sure of the spelling of the last name. She was the lover of Picasso and mother of Paloma and Claude Picasso. She got involved with Picasso when she was a young art student he was much older and she and Picasso often visited Henri Matisse in his Paris studio and in the South of France too I think. Picasso would sometimes give or loan one of his works to Matisse and it would inspire his work and I am not sure if Matisse loaned his work to Picasso though. I think Picasso had purchased some. And they fed Picasso. They competed and also inspired each others' work. There was an exhibit by MOMA? I think showing both their works and how they fed each other. Anyway Francoise said Picasso who could be a pain, was always on his best behavior with Matisse and she was present when they had intense conversations about art and life, and Picasso said to her after one of their visits to Matisse that when one of them died the remaining one would have no one to talk about certain things only they could talk about. That always smote my heart. I am glad you have at least one person you can have a wonderful and fulfilling conversations with. And I have someone as well, that.. well we can just go of on the most satisfying tangents and share things which excite us in a way I can find with no one else. I do not know yet how to multiply that experience.
25
There was a terrific documentary narrated by Heywood Hale Broun called “The Ten Year Lunch” (1987).
I think the writer underestimates the impact of the their ventures on our culture. There is little doubt that the New Yorker would not have developed as it did without this group.
38
Your comment begs the question, “What is the impact of The New Yorker?” over the years and now? Its current paid and newsstand circulation is about 1.2 million. Perhaps those of us who read it have an outsized and somewhat sentimental impression of its cultural importance.
9
@Julie Zuckman’s
I believe a simple answer is that the New Yorker's impact is what all other good things in the world have - nourishment and maybe a life raft to a place of ideas. ....things that may be small but in their collective make a better world.
...And as an aside, I also go to the NY for what I know are usually well researched and detailed pieces by serious journalists.
13
In my days when I lived on 10th st and avenue B in ground floor apt for $35 a month, I hung out at the Cedar Bar and mingled with the writers and artists. Also around the corner on avenue B was the Stanley Bar not as cool as the Cedar but still a good crowd. I met two women there and late even Jill Johnson, the dance critic and journalist for the Voice. Didn't end well.
5
My favorite Dorothy Parker line: she was playing bridge and having problems with her partner's bidding. He asked to be excused to go to the rest room, and she said, "Good we'll finally know what's in your hand."
59
Ah, the eminently quotable Dottie Parker.
One of my favorites is, "One drink and I'm under the table, two drinks and I'm under the host."
9
Heywood Broun was far more than a sportswriter. He was one of the founders of the American Newspaper Guild, later The Newspaper Guild because it came to include numerous Canadian locals. Broun recognized that newspaper reporters, editors, photographers, artists, clerks and copyboys deserved decent wages and benefits, and worked to establish a union to enable them to achieve those basic goals. Today it's the NewsGuild-CWA. As a proud former member of The Guild (Local No. 1, Cleveland), I remember Heywood Broun with gratitude.
43
It is striking, as I go through this article with its forgotten and half-forgotten names, how the Algonquin group became famous without producing a major writer.
No Eliot or Joyce, no Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster or John Maynard Keynes, no Langston Hughes or W. E. B. Du Bois (to say nothing of the Harlem Renaissance's unsurpassed musical achievement), no Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, no John Ashbery or Frank O'Hara.
The most famous, Dorothy Parker, is a justly celebrated epigrammist with no major extended literary work.
So it's more than the sum of its parts? Or just a group that dominated middle-brow New York culture during the 1920s and got famous for it, when the real action was elsewhere?
11
Kaufman wrote some pretty great comic plays.
15
@Jim
As someone who reads The New Yorker and participates in a discussion group on Tuesday mornings of selected articles from the magazine, may I suggest that while Harold Ross was not a "major writer," he did found The New Yorker magazine, which has given many writers an opportunity to be published and to reach an audience which has appreciated and promoted their work. The tradition continues to this day. Writers may write but they need publishers and promotion to acquire a readership.
37
I disagree, think your comparison (& harsh judgement!) somewhat slanted and unfair: Benchley, White, Thurber, Parker et al were sort of the literary and inspirational equivalents of some of the seminal punk bands: they might’ve only ‘sold a few thousand albums’, but most of those ‘buyers’ went on to ‘start bands of their own’...
I’ve read all the authors in your list over the years, both Roundtable/New Yorker and ‘more officially estimable’ (!), but between my own sense of life and humor, and quite possibly my lifelong love of NYC, I still quite regularly remember a Thurber cartoon about social pretensions, or a sharp Dorothy Parker retort, or something about White’s gentle way of addressing human darkness and frailty, while many, if not most, of the supposedly more esteemed authors in your list remain safely and quietly on high shelves, where they rarely cross my mind. The genius of the Roundtable group was the gusto and determination with which they approached, and depicted, Life As Most Of Us Actually Live It. Especially in NYC.
29
Interesting read. But I take exception to the assertion that these meetings were intellectually insignificant. On the contrary, living in an age distinctly anti elitist and where a broad swath of the American public appearing disinterested in well educated leaders, we would do well to celebrate the meetings of consensual minds and the words which flow from them. The past may not be the future, but it should be.
60
I have been told that at one of the luncheons, Dorothy Parker, holding a martini in her hand, gave my favorite toast and certainly the most accurate. " I love a martini, or two at the most ; three, I'm under the table, four I'm under the host !"
35
What, no Ninas?
3
@Bob There may possibly be two, on the knife handles to the left of Kaufman and the right of Sherwood. Hirschfeld usually did give the number of Ninas next to his name, but perhaps because this was not a Broadway caricature, he did not do so.
2
@Bob When there is no number next to Hirschfeld's signature...there should be at least one Nina. This one is at the table's edge front and center in the pleats.
2
@Bob The knife handle, front and center.
1
I am 69 and as a teenager was introduced by my parents to the comic work of Robert Benchley, which was already dated. I highly recommend him.
29
One of my great pleasures is to take one of my Franklin Library books down from the shelf and tune in to the attitudes and perceptions of some of these great writers.
On the novel "Atlas Shrugged" Dorothy Parker was said to say: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
What these great minds might of thought were they living and gathering in today's madness.
For that we have Colbert and Noah, I guess.
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@Bob Laughlin
Please, you must also include Oliver, mustn’t you?
7
@Bob Laughlin: I said something along those lines recently while arguing to preserve the English language. I said not to “reach out to” people but to contact them. Stuff like that. But then I noted that I never disrespect people. I insult them!
2
@William W. Billy Not until he comes back from vacation. (Waiting impatiently.) Nor must we exclude Samantha Bee.
6
Thanks for that - I enjoyed it. Though many of these writers might not seem like literary heavyweights, I'd go out of a limb to say Parker's "Big Blonde" is an excellent short story. I used to teach it to high school students: without being didactic, it's a cautionary tale for young women, warning them about making decisions based on their first experience with passion. A haunting story on many fronts.
37
@Mark "The Standard of Living" was the one assigned to me in high school, and six or so years later (and 35 years ago now) walking home from my job on Park Avenue to Eighth and Fifteenth (no payday days), it was the story that always came to mind.
2
@Mark--"on many fronts" ! Well done.
Thank you for writing this. I have been familiar with this group for many years but had no idea until I read your piece how many smart, literate and socially minded people where involved. It is an important piece on several levels, not the least of which is to remind all of us (who care about such things) that the struggle for equality is old and hard fought. If only people today could gather in small groups, without their cell phones, and engage with one tenth of the passion, intellect and verbal skill as this group. Thank you for keeping the knowledge of these folks alive. I look forward to reading some of the works you have cited.
42
@WHS
I think it is cell phones and iPads and computers that make much interesting conversation possible today. That was a very small group of people. Today thousands of people are writing comments for articles, posting on Facebook and Twitter, etc. Of course much of what is posted many people will dislike. But that's okay. We're a free society and this ability to comment for a whole society to see is what I think will finally keep us free.
12
@Mary Leonhardt
Yeah but they miss out on lunch!
2
@WHS
"If only people today could gather in small groups, without their cell phones, and engage with one tenth of the passion, intellect and verbal skill as this group." Yes! This is what we are trying to do at People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos (peopleandstories.org). Join us!
1
One of my favorite quotes attributed to Dorothy Parker was when she did a critique of Katherine Hepburn when Hepburn appeared in a Broadway play - "She (Hepburn) ran the whole gamut of emotions - from A to B."
38
So much more could be written about this amazing group of iconoclasts, both their personal and professional lives. Brilliant and often not admirable, they were a point of literature and politics which will never be replicated. Thank you for this remembrance of a time when words were valued.
66
I have wanted to tell someone this for forty years. If stuck at a long red light or the waiting room of a dentist, I would fantasize how Dorthy Parker would write a review of Bridges of Madison County.
100
Probably the way she eviscerated Winne the Pooh.
3
@K Yates
I see what you mean... in case anyone else wonders...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1928/10/20/far-from-well
2
@pmom1, many thanks for the scholarship.
2
My favorite Dorothy Parker one liner:
"Married men make lousy husbands."
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@r mackinnon
Mine is:
Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker
5
Dorothy Parker supposedly said "What fresh Hell is this?" whenever someone rang her doorbell.
I’ve taken to appropriating this line whenever I see Trump and his acolytes and supporters on TV.
165
I grew up on Robert Benchley (whose "Isn't It Remarkable?" is still worth reading), but even so, Dr. Ratner-Rosenhagen sanitizes the Algonquin Round Table considerably. Their peers from the Harlem Renaissance never would have been admitted to the Algonquin; so why aren't we speaking of the Hotel Olga Round Table, where everyone might have come together? There's a lot more that could be said on such matters.
9
One lasting influence, which may be invisible, is the effect that their writings have had on up-and-coming writers, even today.
9
I would have loved to have been invited to lunch with them for just one month...
7
@Monica
"appetite comes with eating"...
"Gargantua and Pantagruel" by François Rabelais
9