Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (review)

The “smart” American literary women of the early twentieth century, characterized to the point of stereotype by their wit, fashion, independence, and celebrity status, are perhaps best known through the lives and work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos. In retrieving these successful white women authors from modernism’s cellar, feminist literary scholars have long debated the seriousness and quality of their work, their use of humor and satire as either critical of or complicit with dominant culture, and their place in the canon. These “smart” women make us laugh and feel; do they make us think?

In Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture, a book that is part literary analysis, part cultural analysis, and part reception study, Catherine Keyser raises additional questions. What did it mean for these women to be “smart”? What did it mean for “smartness” to cross the color line, or cross ideological or political lines? Keyser begins by exploring how “smart” was defined in the advertising copy and prose of popular publications during the 1920s—Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker—that published the work of these women. To be female and “smart” had less to do with intelligence (a high-modernist, artistic trait) and more to do with image (in the mass media, rather than literary, sense of the word); “flapper” is the functioning stereotype here. Urban and urbane, witty and sophisticated, stylish and desirable, and definitely middlebrow, this identity and its attendant celebrity status, Keyser argues persuasively, also became a literary strategy for exploring a range of modern anxieties: mass media and acquisitive culture, celebrity status, gender expectations (in particular, mind/body divisions for women), class and race distinctions, and literary reputations. “Smartness” itself as an aspect of female identity associated with both success and triviality also falls under scrutiny by the authors she examines.

Because Keyser’s study cuts a broad path—eight women writers using humor between the two world wars—the number of texts per author and extent of analysis varies but seems adequate. In addition to Millay, Parker, and Loos, Keyser includes Lois Long, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Dawn Powell, and Mary McCarthy. The book’s organization is linear; Millay’s light verse and prose satires collected in Distressing Dialogues (1924) serve as the precursor to the work by Parker, Long, and Loos. The lesser-known Long, who wrote restaurant and nightclub reviews for the New Yorker using a flapper persona named “Lipstick” is an interesting inclusion, suggesting how pervasive the “smart” style of writing was for women. It generated both income and independence, as well as anxiety about the quality of their work—a theme that appears repeatedly. Writers from the 1930s and 1940s, more political in scope, are then examined.

One of the strengths of this book is Keyser’s analysis of Harlem Renaissance magazines and writers and their varied responses to white “smart” culture. From title to ad copy to article, Keyser points out the extent to which magazines such as the Crisis and Opportunity were concerned about substantive development of black women, in contrast to the white magazines’ emphasis on the style, leisure, and image of white women. Two well-known passing novels, Fauset’s novel Plum Bun (1928), examined in light of her essay “The Gift of Laughter” (1925), and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), offer opposing critiques of “smartness” as it relates to the black community. Keyser then compares Plum Bun to Parker’s New Yorker story “Arrangement in Black and White” (1927) but falsely reads Parker’s female protagonist as a “southern matron” (p. 107). Parker’s “woman with the pink velvet poppies twined around the assisted gold of her hair” is married to Burton—“he comes from Virginia, and you know how they are”—but there is no evidence in the story to suggest that she, too, is from the south.¹

Keyser closes...