A few weeks ago, in New York, I decided to spend two days in a hotel near Times Square that I had long wanted to know better – The Algonquin, founded in 1902. Not for the hotel itself, but for what it represented for journalism and United States literature.
In his restaurant for eleven years – from 1919 to 1930 – the group of intellectuals nicknamed the Vicious Circle, or also the Round Table, used to have lunch. Her real engine was the foul-mouthed writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967).
I remembered the pleasant experience (which I have already related here) that I had in Cartagena, Colombia, when I stayed at the Sofitel Santa Clara, I read “Of Love and Other Demons”, by Gabriel García Márquez —whose fictional story takes place, centuries ago, in the old and somber Santa Clara Convent, where the beautifully restored hotel now stands.
I then stayed at Algonquin to read Dorothy Parker and her companions in loco. But the hotel let me down. The Pergola restaurant had become a jazz club, the Oak Room, which also no longer exists, nor the Blue Bar that succeeded it.
In the unfurnished space, there are now paintings in what is now the hotel’s pathetic art gallery.
The lobby was sad. In the old images, it has copper columns and crown molding and colorful furniture giving the place a vibrancy. Now renovated during the pandemic, columns and ceiling are hospital white. Still, I sat there reading, trying to capture something of the atmosphere that fed those restless minds of the so-called Crazy Twenties.
But how could it be possible if not even the bar (whose counter was transferred to the lobby) is not working? How to get into the atmosphere of the Round Table, scene of memorable libations (in the middle of Prohibition!), without a glass in hand?
Just to remind you, the poetic quote by Dorothy Parker is: “I like to have a martini / Two at the very most. / After three I’m under the table, / after four I’m under my host”. (I like a martini, at most two; in the third I’m under the table, in the fourth, under the host.)
The group was born when three journalists from Vanity Fair magazine, then next door to the hotel, started having lunch there: Parker, theater critic, Robert Sherwood, film, and editor Robert Benchley. Soon others were approaching (including Harold Ross, who would found The New Yorker, and the comedian Harpo Marx, among several writers and artists).
It was a fierce-speaking and self-referential group, combining wit and sarcasm, adept at internal games and often irresponsible. His spirit spilled out of the circle in his writings, even influencing new writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the effervescent post-war jazz era.
To the public, Dorothy Parker seemed like a merry party girl—always drinking, spewing witticisms, writing award-winning books and screenplays.
But she was a suffering person, a victim of depression and suicide attempts, excess alcohol and lost loves, apart from political persecution – she was a target of McCarthyism for her progressive positions (in fact, when she died she left her assets to the anti-racist entity of Martin Luther King).
However, his personal mishaps never took the shine out of his works, and were even incorporated into them. In Brazil, the short story book “Big Loira e Outros Histórias de Nova York” was published by Companhia das Letras, unfortunately out of print. A pity, because the Round Table ended, the Algonguin withered, but Parker’s work is still alive and vibrant.
Epilogue: of the author’s dozens of great phrases, to show her biting I leave this one: “Tell him I’m fucking busy. Or vice versa.” (Something like: tell him I’m fucking busy. Or vice versa.)
