Penelope

Penelope and the Suitors, by John William Waterhouse

Most women lacked first-hand experience of the battlefront, but it’s impossible to deny that women had first-hand experience of the Great War.  While trench poets wrote of the physical realities of the front lines, women who wrote of the war were more likely to describe its psychological effects.  In her examination of French, English, and German poetry of the First World War, Marsland notes that English criticism has privileged “realism as a protest device” so that “poems that do not present the ‘observable realities’ of the Front” have been dismissed and ignored.*

Dorothy and Eddie Parker

The writings of American author Dorothy Parker are rarely discussed in the context of the First World War.  Dorothy Rothschild married Edwin Pond Parker II in the spring of 1917, and shortly after the wedding, her husband joined the American Expeditionary Force, enlisting with the 33^rdAmbulance Company. Eddie Parker, a heavy drinker before the war, returned home addicted to morphine. After a four-year separation, Dorothy Parker was granted a divorce in 1928 on the grounds of “intolerable cruelty.”** Eddie Parker remarried within months, but died five years later of what was deemed an accidental drug overdose.

Dorothy Parker’s poem “Penelope” explores the psychological scars of war, the wounds it inflicts on marriages, and the unrecognized sacrifices it demands of women, using the story of Odysseus—the Greek king and warrior—and his faithful wife Penelope, who waited twenty years for her husband’s return while being harassed by men who wished to marry her and gain control of Odysseus’s lands.

 

Penelope, by Thomas Seddon

Penelope

In the pathway of the sun,
In the footsteps of the breeze,
Where the world and sky are one,
He shall ride the silver seas,
He shall cut the glittering wave.
I shall sit at home, and rock;
Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;
Brew my tea, and snip my thread;
Bleach the linen for my bed.
They will call him brave. 

            — Dorothy Parker

The poem breaks into two halves: the action-driven world of men and the confined, solitary world of the waiting wife.  Gill Plain has argued that “The single most characteristic feature of these women’s experience of the war was isolation.” ^***

As the Second World War drew to a close, Dorothy Parker published a short story about another waiting wife. “The Lovely Leave” tells of a woman’s desperate attempts to bridge the impassable gulf that war has erected between the couple:

Dorothy Parker

To keep something, you must take care of it.  More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them.  She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him.  There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier.†

It’s fascinating to speculate and impossible to determine how much of the fictional story is drawn from Parker’s own experiences as a twenty-three year-old abandoned bride during the First World War. She died in 1967, and her ashes are buried in Baltimore, where a memorial plaque reads, “Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker, 1893-1957, humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, ‘Excuse my dust.’”

In an interview, Dorothy Parker once commented that she “was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”††  Ironically, Edna St. Vincent Millay seems to have followed in the footsteps of Dorothy Parker with her poem “An Ancient Gesture.” Just over 20 years after Parker published “Penelope,” Millay published her poem using the same Greek story to recognize the courage of war-time wives who wait. 

An Ancient Gesture

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.       
He learned it from Penelope…
Penelope, who really cried.

            —Edna St. Vincent Millay

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* Elizabeth A. Marsland, The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War, Routledge, 1991, p. 177.

** “Dorothy Parker Granted Divorce,” Boston Globe, 9 April 1928, p. 5.

*** Gill Plain, “‘Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets,” Feminist Review, 1995, p. 41.

† Dorothy Parker, “The Lovely Leave” Portable Dorothy Parker, Viking 1944, p. 24.

†† Dorothy Parker, quoted in The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker, Rhonda S. Pettit (ed.), p. 17

Sweethearts of the A.E.F.

Elsie Janis was a comedian who sang, danced, and cartwheeled her way into the hearts of American soldiers. The “Sweetheart of the A.E.F.” was also one of the most popular American entertainers of the early twentieth century.  Janis visited First World War hospitals and military camps, sharing laughter and music with thousands of doughboys, and by March of 1918 she had already given over 400 performances.*

Elsie Janis entertains the troops

From her impersonations of Charlie Chaplin to her frequently repeated shout to the troops, ““Do I come from Ohio? By damn yes!” Janis touched her audiences with “an American performance, by an American girl, done in an American way, the first of its kind to be seen by most of the audience in many months.”**

Whether it was Elsie Janis, the women of Belgium, or sweethearts back home, women often gave soldiers the motivation to fight.  The American military newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, championed Janis as “an oasis of color and vivacity in the midst of a dreary desert” proclaiming, “Elsie Janis is as essential to the success of this Army as charge of powder is essential to the success of a shell. More entertainment by her and ‘the likes of her’ and less instruction by people who take themselves seriously—that’s one formula for winning the war!”†

Letters from women back home were equally important to the troops.  One soldier wrote to his sweetheart, “I get a lot of peace thinking about you.  I like to think of the good times we used to have and dream of the good times to come when I get home again.”††

Idealized views of women powerfully influenced the morale of soldiers; Harry L. Parker was a young American lieutenant who saw humor in the situation.

Popular song, 1917

Left Behind

I got a letter from

My girl. She said,

“I love you.

When the mud is

Thick, and

You have a large pack on

Your back

And you are hungry

And tired

Think of me.

I love you.”

And one day we were

On the march.

The mud was

Thick. And

I had a large

Pack

On my back

And I was

Hungry

And tired, when

I fell to thinking

Of her.

And

A lieutenant

Gave me

A swift kick

And set me to

Double timing

To

Catch up.

            —Harry L. Parker

The poem’s title evokes the left-right-left of the soldier’s marching cadence, the girl he left behind, and his own lagging pace.  As well, the poem’s uneven line lengths suggest the faltering pace of the man’s attempts to march in step with his company, as they echo his exhaustion and disjointed thoughts. But the awkward line breaks are also what give the poem its whimsical humor. They highlight his sweetheart’s romantic words –“Think of me” and “I love you” – and then contrast these with the grueling realities of war: “Pack” and “Hungry.” 

What bridges the gap between the tensions of war and the soldier’s dreams of his girl? An officer’s swift kick to the man’s “left behind” recalls him to his place and sends him double timing to catch up with his unit.  With gently ironic humor, the poem states that individual soldiers are ordered to discard their personal motivations and instead to surrender themselves to the army and its agenda.  

Clemson year book, 1914

Lieutenant H.L Parker (later promoted to Captain) was a doughboy from South Carolina who attended Clemson College, where he was voted “Wittiest” and “Most Original” in his graduating class.  Joining the American Expeditionary Force, he served in the supply department of the Stars and Stripes.  Harry Parker survived the war. In 1924, he earned a doctorate from the University of Paris and began a long and distinguished career as an entomologist and expert in the control of biological pests.

He died in Cannes in 1979, and colleagues remembered his intelligence, quick wit, and “joie de vivre” – as well as noting an intriguing detail from his personal life.  Harry Parker did not return home to a sweetheart in South Carolina, but rather in 1923, he married Henriette Charraire, a young French girl. Their marriage lasted for over fifty-five years, until Henriette was left behind at his death.

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*”Elsie One of Us While War Lasts.” Stars and Stripes, 29 March 1918, p. 7.  

**“Elsie Janis Here to Delight AEF: Musical Comedy Star Has Already Set New Handspring Record.” Stars and Stripes, 8 March 1918, p. 6.

†”Elsie.” Stars and Stripes, 15 March, 1918, p. 4.

††Elmer Lewis to Goldie Little, personal letter quoted in Richard, S. Faulkner, Pershing’s Crusaders: The American Soldier in World War I, University Press of Kansas, 2017, p. 536.