"Rug-making—there’s a fascinating pursuit!"
Dorothy Parker's letter from the 'bin is exactly as good as you'd expect
One aspect of Western mental health care system since, oh, the last two centuries, is that when the experience of being an inmate in a hospital setting wasn’t actively unpleasant, it has been known to be ruthlessly dull.
We see this in so many different depictions of institutionalization. From Nellie Bly’s descriptions of Blackwell Island (“People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.”) to the uncomfortably long shots of aimless, greasy-haired girls slowly pinballing in the hallways in Thin, boredom is in heavy supply in these places of promised wellness. And maybe that’s by design— I assume it is—because not having much to do is one way to force people to rest and recuperate.
But some people don’t fare well under these conditions and it seems that Dorothy Parker might have been one of them.
“…It seems that there is some narrow-minded prejudice against bringing dogs into hospitals.”
Dorothy Parker—the one who wrote that she’d “rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” and also that she wasn’t “a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem”—was, unsurprisingly, no stranger to the inside of a mental hospital. And while I’ve seen some accounts that she self-institutionalized in order to stop drinking (honestly, though, I kind of feel like anyone who lived through Prohibition should’ve gotten a pass?), the only letter I can find that she, herself, wrote from an institution, is from 1927 when she was hospitalized for “exhaustion,” which is subject to ample interpretation.
Parker wrote about mental illness a lot, both directly and indirectly. From her most-known story, “Big Blonde,” which actively depicts a suicide attempt (spoiler alert for a 100 year old story!) and her poem that is just about methods of dying, to the characters she sketches our who are clearly going through it (“Just a Little One” comes to mind), she often expressed the inner thoughts of people who were having a rough mental time. And she did so while still being funny and a little glib and deeply clever.
So, again unsurprisingly, her hospital letter, wherein she is very much the subject of the material (which happened in some of her short stories, too, but not to this degree of candor), is truly top-notch loony bin stuff.
And I just wanted to share part of it because I think about it all the time now.
“I should love to hear how you are and whatever”
My favorite parts are when she gossips about one of the nurses who annoys her:
…there is the nurse who tells me she is afraid she is an incorrigible flirt, but somehow she just can’t help it. She also pronounces “picturesque” picture-skew, and “unique” un-i-kew, and it is amazing how often she manages to introduce these words into her conversation, leading the laughter herself. Also, when she leaves the room, she says “see you anon.” I have not shot her yet. Maybe Monday.
And when she kind of cheers for a child who injures himself:
I could tell you about the cunning little tot of four who ran up and down the corridor all day long; and I think, from the way he sounded, he had his little horse-shoes on—some well-wisher had given him a bunch of keys to play with, and he jingled them as he ran, and just as he came to my door, the manly little fellow would drop them and when I got so I knew just when to expect the crash, he’d fool me and run by two or even three times without letting them go. Well, they took him up and operated on his shoulder, and they don’t think he will ever be able to use his right arm again. So that will stop that god damn nonsense.
And when she includes this very moving (ahem) poem:
And here is a poem of a literary nature. It is called Despair in Chelsea.
Osbert Sitwell
Is unable to have a satisfactory evacuation.
His brother, Sacheverel,
Doubts if he ever’ll.
This letter is great because, while she complains about having nothing to write about—she can’t gather any really good gossip because doctors are constantly “sticking thermometers into you or turning lights on you”—and still manages to capture the entirety of hospital life. Chiefly, the boredom and the ways that one finds something to hold onto wherever they can.
We often hear hand-wringing about all of our modern distractions and what they do to our mental health. And I do think there’s something to that—I’m reasonably sure having to remember passwords has done more damage to my brain than any of the drugs I’ve taken. The thing about boredom is that it can be kind of liberating if you let it be.
But if you’ve got any kind of faulty wiring upstairs, it lack of things to distract you can leave you much too much time to, say, hyper focus on how your toenail is a little too long or how the overhead fan squeals or how most human pursuits are truly meaningless and, well, I think a little distraction is maybe a good thing.
Author’s note: This platform is an absolute tragedy and one whose ownership seems perfectly happy to platform literal Nazis which I do not fuck with. But it’s already the second place I’ve attempted to host a newsletter and honestly the idea of moving over to a different platform makes me want to go lay down in the road, especially since so many of you have financially supported me in my little pursuits.
So while I do not know what’s next for it, I do very much appreciate your support the last few years that I’ve been doing this little newsletter. This is my 53rd Crazy/Old!
So thank you. I’m trying to decide on my next move. If you have any input, I would be very open to hearing it.