GUINEVERE OF THE ROUND TABLE

Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

FEW people under 30 know who wrote these lines, but the perceptive will readily date them from the 1920s. They have that slightly posed air of gay gallantry and tender toughness that marked the era of "But Jesus we had fun." After four decades, its heroes and heroines look as comically self-conscious as silent-movie characters, trying to gather their rosebuds in vigorous deadpan. What comes through most clearly is the sentimentality lurking beneath. Hemingway, hard as nails on the outside but soft as a baby impala on the inside, was an archetypical son of the era. And Dorothy Parker, who died last week of a heart attack at 73, was one of its most representative daughters.

If one wonders today what so captivated her contemporaries, the answer is probably that she viewed the period as it liked to picture itself: a time of grace and intelligence, when irony could conquer sentimentality and laughter would always overwhelm tears. Her chief reputation was as a quipster, the Guinevere of the Algonquin Round Table. Hers was the tongue heard round the world. Her famed couplet, "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses," not only set a style for lonely movie heroines but may well have spurred the development of contact lenses. During the long Victorian era, wit had hardly been considered a feminine attribute. Dorothy Parker proved again that bitchiness could be the soul of wit. When she heard the news that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked: "How can they tell?" Of Katharine Hepburn she said: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." After a Broadway evening, she reported: "The House Beautiful is the play lousy."

One Perfect Rose. In The New Yorker, she signed her book reviews, "Constant Reader." As a critic, she was really a constant housekeeper, tidying up after messy writers, but humming impudently as she went about her business. She could tweak A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner in one line:

"At this point Tonstant Weader fwowed up." She was never merely a lady wiseacre: she was a hard-working writer with serious literary aspirations. But she became one of those writers who are not so much read as heard.

Her creative output was meager by most standards: she published only seven trim collections of poetry and short stories. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay," she said, "unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damned good." In fact, her verse was carefully shod, precise, often dazzling. It was shot through with self-pity and brittle melancholy. Her frequent approach was to make herself the fall girl in the battle of the sexes, and her favorite method was the abrupt change of pace. She might gush sentimentally and then suddenly clamp on her cynic's mask:

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet-- One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's always just my luck to get One perfect rose.

The chief characters of her short stories were usually women, beset by the discontents of emancipation. If they had lovers, they were bored with them; if they had no lovers, they were frustrated without them; and it was always the dream, not the reality, that mattered most. Her best story is Big Blonde, about a woman who falls apart because she has no dream of her own at all.

"Perhaps what gives her writing its peculiar tang," wrote Somerset Maugham, "is her gift for seeing something to laugh at in the bitterest tragedies of the human animal." Her own life started in bitter circumstances. She was born Dorothy Rothschild in 1893 in West End, N.J., of a Scotch mother who died during her infancy and a Jewish father who died, leaving her penniless, when she was in her teens.

A couple of years later, she got her first job, writing captions for Vogue. At 24, she married Edwin Parker II, a businessman from whom she was later divorced but whose name she kept. In 1917 she moved up in the magazine world, joining the staff of Vanity Fair, where she shared an office with Humorist Robert Benchley and the incipient Playwright Robert Sherwood.

She would also join them for lunch down the block at the Hotel Algonquin's fabled conversational Klatsch, the Round Table; among its other members were such quotables as Alexander Woollcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman. She was pert, provocative, blinking her hazelgreen eyes or raising her pencil-arched eyebrows until they touched the line of her dark bangs as she delivered her acerbic ripostes.

Snows of Yesteryear. Dorothy Parker spent the next few decades mostly living up to, down, or off her legend. In 1933, when she was 40, she married her second husband, Actor-Scenarist Alan Campbell, 28, and toiled with him writing movies. But Hollywood money, she discovered, wasn't real: "It's congealed snow; it melts in your hand." In the '40s, the snow melted even faster as she constantly supported left-wing causes. In 1953, she collaborated on an unsuccessful play, The Ladies of the Corridor, about lonely women living in a hotel. Campbell died in 1963 (they had divorced in 1947 but remarried in 1950), and Dorothy Parker, her health failing, returned to Manhattan. She took up residence in a hotel, spending her final years in solitary.

For her epitaph, she once wryly suggested "Excuse my dust." But she also wrote, in her "Epitaph for a Darling Lady," the sentimental last stanza:

Leave for her a red young rose, go your way, and save your pity; She is happy, for she knows That her dust is very pretty.

Both tributes seem mannered, calculated, polished for technical effect. But then, Dorothy Parker accepted whole the two-faced myth of her time: at her most maudlin, she always tried to speak through her head rather than directly from her heart. That accounts for both her limitation and her fascination.

Humor was, after all, her basic form of dress and address. And humor passes through the most ephemeral of fashions. The concept of wit, the very word, today suggests a dated elegance. Gone is the vintage innocence, masquerading as chic, that Miss Dorothy Parker symbolized. Things are now laughed about that she would have found vulgar, if not downright indiscreet. Humor today is broad and black. Perhaps it is more human; it is certainly less artificial. Yet the suspicion mounts that behind the laughter of "alienation," there is a wide streak of sentimentality, too, just as there was behind the "cynicism" of Dorothy Parker's era.

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