Parting Kicker

DEATH AND TAXES--Dorothy Parker--Viking ($1.75).

A racily conversational prose-puncher, a "critic" who makes you stop, look & listen by the amusing mock-violence of her own irrelevant reactions, Mrs. Parker has written, in Laments for the Living, some first-rate dialogs. But when her climate curdles her to rhyme, her curtness often turns to slightly acidulous whey. Poetess Parker's ideas can usually be contained in a quatrain though she often lets them wander farther. Death and Taxes has a few neat quatrains:

SANCTUARY
My Land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds arc low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.

Dorothy Parker patented (though she did not invent) the trick, O. Henryish finale: the sudden, exasperated curse of a woman who simply cannot stand things any longer. But it is some years since she began popping out these oaths; you expect them now, and feel a little cheated when she fails you. She fails often in Death and Taxes, is sometimes reminiscent of minor-but-masculine Poet A. E. Housman, more often of Any Sentimentalist. A Parthian poetess, her chief claim to attention still resides in her parting kick:

THE FLAW IN PAGANISM
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

The Author-- Dorothy Rothschild Parker, 37, divorced wife of one Edwin Pond Parker II, is half Jewish, half Scottish. She has worked on Vogue, Vanity Fair, is now the New Yorker's "Constant Reader." During the Sacco-Vanzetti disturbances she was arrested in Boston for "loitering and sauntering," paid a $5 fine.

Short, dark, tired-looking, she is superstitious, pessimistic, hates to be alone. She is fond of her dachshund, Robinson. She lives in sociable isolation at Manhattan's literary Hotel Algonquin. Other books: Laments for the Living (TIME, June 16, 1930); Enough Rope, Sunset Gun (verse).

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