S. J. Perelman Read online

  S. J. PERELMAN

  WRITINGS

  Adam Gopnik, editor

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

  S. J. PERELMAN: WRITINGS

  Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2021 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

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  Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge copyright © 1929 by Horace Liveright, Inc., renewed 1956 by S. J. Perelman. Strictly From Hunger copyright © 1937 by Random House, Inc. Look Who’s Talking text copyright © 1946, 1948, 1949 by S. J. Perelman. The Dream Department copyright © 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1970 by S. J. Perelman. Crazy Like a Fox copyright © 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1971 by S. J. Perelman. Keep It Crisp copyright © 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1973 by S. J. Perelman. Acres and Pains copyright © 1943, 1944, 1947 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1974 by S. J. Perelman. Listen to the Mockingbird copyright © 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1977 by S. J. Perelman. Swiss Family Perelman text copyright © 1949, 1950 by S. J Perelman, renewed 1978 by S. J. Perelman. Ill-Tempered Clavichord copyright © 1950, 1951, 1952 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1980 by Abby Perelman and Adam Perelman. The Road to Miltown copyright © 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957 by S. J. Perelman. The Rising Gorge copyright © 1942, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958 1959, 1960, 1961 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1989 by Abby Perelman and Adam Perelman. Chicken Inspector No. 23 copyright © 1952, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966 by S. J. Perelman, renewed 1994 by Abby Perelman and Adam Perelman. Baby, It’s Cold Inside copyright © 1961, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by S. J. Perelman. The Last Laugh copyright © 1981 by James H. Mathias, as Executor of the Estate of S. J. Perelman. Don’t Tread on Me: Selected Letters copyright © 1987 by Abby Perelman and Adam Perelman. The Beauty Part copyright © 1963 by S. J. Perelman. All texts reprinted by arrangement with Harold Ober Associates.

  Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

  ISBN 978–1–59853–692–8

  eISBN 978–1–59853–693–5

  Contents

  Introduction: Perelman, the Pearl of Providence

  by Adam Gopnik

  SKETCHES AND SATIRES

  Puppets of Passion: A Throbbing Story of Youth’s Hot Revolt Against the Conventions

  Those Charming People: The Latest Report on the Weinbloom Reptile Expedition

  Scenario

  Strictly from Hunger

  The Love Decoy: A Story of Youth in College Today—Awake, Fearless, Unashamed

  Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet

  Frou-Frou, or the Future of Vertigo

  Captain Future, Block That Kick!

  Midwinter Facial Trends

  Counter-Revolution

  Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy

  A Pox on You, Mine Goodly Host

  Bend Down, Sister

  Beauty and the Bee

  Button, Button, Who’s Got the Blend?

  Swing Out, Sweet Chariot

  A Couple of Quick Ones: Two Portraits

  Hell in the Gabardines

  Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer

  Hit Him Again, He’s Sober

  Physician, Steel Thyself

  Take Two Parts Sand, One Part Girl, and Stir

  Sleepy-Time Extra

  Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough!

  Send No Money, Honey

  Acres and Pains: Chapter One

  Acres and Pains: Chapter Twelve

  Don’t Bring Me Oscars (When It’s Shoesies That I Need)

  Rancors Aweigh

  Mama Don’t Want No Rice

  Columbia, the Crumb of the Ocean

  Whenas in Sulks My Julia Goes

  Cloudland Revisited: Why, Doctor, What Big Green Eyes You Have!

  Chewies the Goat but Flicks Need Hypo

  Salesman, Spare that Psyche

  The Song Is Endless, but the Malady Lingers On

  A Girl and a Boy Anthropoid Were Dancing

  Cloudland Revisited: Rock-a-Bye, Viscount, in the Treetop

  Cloudland Revisited: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films . . .

  No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plaît

  Cloudland Revisited: The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont

  Swindle Sheet with Blueblood Engrailed, Arrant Fibs Rampant

  Cloudland Revisited: I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry

  Sorry—No Phone or Mail Orders

  Next Week at the Prado: Frankie Goya Plus Monster Cast

  You’re My Everything, Plus City Sales Tax

  Eine Kleine Mothmusik

  Where Do You Work-a, John?

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mime

  This Is the Forest Primeval?

  Impresario on the Lam

  Revulsion in the Desert

  Are You Decent, Memsahib?

  Tell Me Clear, Parachutist Dear, Are You Man or Mouse?

  Sex and the Single Boy

  A Soft Answer Turneth Away Royalties

  Hello, Central, Give Me That Jolly Old Pelf

  The Sweet Chick Gone

  Nobody Knows the Rubble I’ve Seen/Nobody Knows but Croesus

  Three Loves Had I, in Assorted Flavors

  Be a Cat’s-Paw! Lose Big Money!

  Moonstruck at Sunset

  THE BEAUTY PART: A COMEDY IN TWO ACTS

  THE HINDSIGHT SAGA: THREE FRAGMENTS FROM AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Marx Brothers

  Nathanael West

  Dorothy Parker

  SELECTED LETTERS

  To Edmund Wilson (September 2, 1929)

  To I. J. Kapstein (October 9, 1930)

  To Groucho Marx (April 7, 1943)

  To Frances and Albert Hackett (August 14, 1949)

  To Abby Perelman (April 15, 1954)

  To Leila Hadley (August 21, 1955)

  To Leila Hadley (September 16, 1955)

  To Betsy Drake (September 28, 1955)

  To Leila Hadley (August 25, 1956)

  To Leila Hadley (November 22, 1956)

  To Paul Theroux (October 18, 1976)

  To Paul Theroux (December 24, 1976)

  Chronology

  Note on the Texts

  Notes

  Introduction:

  Perelman, the Pearl of Providence

  ADAM GOPNIK

  S. J. Perelman’s reputation rose first in the 1930s, when he became famous as a comedy writer in New York and then in Hollywood, and rose still higher in the forties and fifties, when he became the most admired of New Yorker satirists. Perelman (whom everyone called “Sid”) then reached a kind of surprising apex of late fame in the 1970s, when the combination of the glamour newly associated with his thirties work as a scriptwriter for the Marx Brothers—not a word he would have used to describe the connection—got coupled with a larger rush of general reverence: Woody Allen’s early written work was as straight an homage to Perelman as one writer can offer another. Those offering encomiums to his preeminence—as he might have said, the ill-turned cliché being one of his fascinations—included
Dorothy Parker, Wilfrid Sheed, and many out beyond. The British critic Clive James recalls having lunch with the famously shy New Yorker editor William Shawn and alleviating the awkwardness by exchanging Perelmanisms at length. When Sid moved to London in the 1970s—he soon came back to New York, complaining of “too much couth”—it was hard news in the Times.

  Fifty-some years later—well, who knows where anyone’s reputation rests now. “Everything is niche,” a wise Gen Zer, tells her father, which means both that no writer has a secure shared reputation, but also that in an English-speaking world of perhaps a billion readers, any readers at all are enough to create a critical mass. For every niche there is a nosh, and for every nosh a niche, as Sid might have had Groucho say: the smallest bite of writing finds somebody to chew on it. An audience of less than 1 percent of all potential American readers alone is larger than the entire audience in London who saw all of Shakespeare’s plays. (I sourced this statistic just now from my imagination, in Perelman’s honor, but the general take is surely right: mass audiences make even minor readerships massive.) Certainly, his sentences dazzle a contemporary reader as much as they did Shawn and James. Not sentences alone, but entire paragraphs as beautifully and intricately constructed as a Rube Goldberg machine, with cliché backing into argot flirting with Broadway slang, Yiddish and British pretension side by side. He was one of the best pure writers in American English. He still is.

  No, what has shifted is not so much the scale of his reputation as the persistence of a tradition in which he can still be seen as a master. The kind of extended rococo, satiric riff that he helped invent, and then perfected, is no longer an entirely living genre, as it was even in the eighties when Allen mastered it. Even in—especially in—the pages of The New Yorker, the casual comic piece has become more compressed and less consciously literary. A typical Shouts and Murmurs in the magazine now is scarcely longer than the prefatory quotations that Perelman would use as the straight-man setup of one of his pieces, those eyebrow-raising citations from advertising copy or fashion magazines—or even an instruction manual for an electric blanket—whose inanities or fatuities Perelman would then satirize in a comic sketch. This is, to be sure, a reflection of changing mores as much as changing editors; extended anythings are rare enough these days, so why should comic riffs be different?

  If that means that Perelman’s voice now flows less naturally into the next literary thing, it also means that we can see it more clearly as a thing—not something meant to be quoted and recycled but as a finished form of American literature in itself. Two essential truths about Perelman, as a satirist and stylist revealed themselves, somewhat surprisingly, even to this lifelong Perelman lover in the course of assembling this anthology. First, that Perelman’s great subject is singular and simply defined: his subject, as Wilfrid Sheed first intimated, is American vulgarity, flowing up and down like waves of electricity through a cat in a cartoon, exposing its innards even as it shocks our sensibilities. (He said as much himself, simply: “I’ve sought material . . . in the novels I read in my youth, the movies I saw, my Hollywood years, and in advertising,” i.e., the three prime sources of American vulgarity.)

  The way that high art on its way down to the many met acquisitive popular energies on their way back up to the prestigious top, both together working to make the astonishing, absurd and yet in many ways still-appealing middlebrow magazine and movie culture of the mid-part of the American century—that was what he saw and registered. Biopics about the life of John Singer Sargent, abstract expressionists caught in mid-cult as their style became décor, hard-boiled pulp detective fiction extending its metaphoric reach into metaphysical dimensions—“she was as dead as vaudeville”—these collisions of sensibility, going on all around him, were his subject. (Of the Hollywood tycoons he despised, the only ones he despised more than the cheap cynics were the aspiring highbrows who knew “that Joseph Conrad was a Polack.”)

  A second essential truth that revealed itself is that Perelman is a writers’ writer in the literal sense that his rhetoric—his style—always emerges from his reading. Every sentence written references some earlier, once-read sentence. The matchless Perelman tone is taken over from the pulp literature of his childhood: he is always a Kipling adventurer, a Conan Doyle detective, a Maupassant boulevardier, dressed British and thinking in Yiddish. From childhood on, his experience was almost entirely shaped by reading books and magazines (and secondarily by watching movies and shows) and then comparing the thing imagined with the world he met. Reading left so deep an impress on him as to become not an additive to experience but a kind of substitute for experience; his life forever after is modeled after the thing read more than the thing known. His biographers record a relatively melancholic and mostly parched life of stiff relationships on all sides; his real life lay within the books he fled life to get to. In particular, he was looking at mid-century American vulgarity through the lens of the popular, mostly British, fiction he had read as a boy—seeing Mike Todd through the lens of Kipling—and the overlay is what gives his work its density and heft.

  One only has to compare him to the top comic writer who preceded him in The New Yorker’s estimation—or in the world’s estimation of New Yorker writers—to see this clearly. James Thurber, a wonderful minimal stylist, is writing about plain American manners in the plain American manner. He offers us the nightmarish underside of the desperate, pained, austere respectability of WASP Ohio life—the buried craziness, recycled as eccentricity, the cruelties and alcoholism recast as comedy. He shows us life. Some of Thurber’s best things do involve reading other people’s things, as with his great comparison of Salvador Dalí’s memoir with his own, “The Secret Life of James Thurber.” But it is the marked, impassable space between Spanish surrealism and Ohio truths that registers. Thurber is, in the old-fashioned phrase, true to life. We read him for his relatives.

  With Perelman, parents and relations, his entire childhood in Providence, Rhode Island—where his ne’er-do-well father passed from failure as a grocer to failure as a chicken farmer, both classic Jewish occupations of the period—scarcely register at all, or only as phantoms, passing obstacles to the boy’s determination to get safely away to read. But each book he reads haunts his imagination and his writing forever after. He reads junk and good things interchangeably, and never forgets a single turn: Sax Rohmer’s absurd Fu Manchu stories, Elinor Glyn’s sensual overexcitements, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ornate Tarzan tales are his reading, along with Twain and Conrad, and of course behind them hover the club and detective literature of London. (He rarely directly parodies the Sherlock Holmes stories, but often implicitly alludes to them.) To those one might add, as essential mulch, the silent movies. He once listed his movie loves as “Corinne Griffith, Priscilla Dean, Aileen Pringle, and Nita Naldi”—hardly names to conjure with now, they were hardly names to conjure with then. But the melodramatic movies provided other strata of imaginative support. Thurber’s best stuff is “observational”; Perelman’s best stuff is critical, a study of reading and viewing habits.

  Like many good writers, he was a startlingly long time finding his best voice—he was famous before he was great. Though his contribution to the Marx Brothers became an important part of his legend, what he wrote for the two best of their movies—Monkey Business and the even better Horse Feathers—is unsettled. Perelman’s contributions are hard to define amid the uncertainties of studio-system group-grope writing, but when Groucho says, “Come lodge with me and my fleas in the hills . . . I mean fly with me to my lodge in the hills,” or when the college secretary informs him in Horse Feathers that the waiting dean is waxing wroth, and Groucho replies, “Is Roth out there, too? Tell Roth to wax the dean for a while,” we are surely hearing Perelman at work. In the thirties, as an efflorescence of his unhappy Hollywood years, he did write the single piece that comes closest to being the kind of literary “masterpiece” that would find its way into anthologies, the long, amazing, “Joycean
” piece called “Scenario,” a surreal representation of what’s now called a pitch meeting, in which we find every imaginable cliché of the period’s movies, and even of its movie reviewing (James Agee makes a brief appearance). And he never outgrew the appetite for writing a movie or, better, a stage hit. He did win an Oscar eventually for the not-very-stirring 1956 spectacular Around the World in Eighty Days and did write one good play, The Beauty Part of 1962, doomed to a short run by, of all things, a New York newspaper strike, but sporadically revived ever since.

  To this reader, though, it is after World War II, with the growth both of American abundance and of the American analytic culture that went with it—it is no accident that Perelman’s single best collection, The Road to Miltown, is named after a psychiatrist’s pet tranquilizer—that Perelman gets great. And here an odd point arises: though the subject of his satire, American vulgarity, is evergreen, the objects of his satire may seem to have been transient, and now long passed. The manners of the art-house movie theater; the prose style of Diana Vreeland in Harper’s Bazaar; the decorum of Hathaway shirt ads; the behavior of Greenwich Village dry cleaners; or the imagined behavior of Pandit Nehru . . . all of these things seem long faded as targets. And yet the pieces have not faded at all.

  It is the myth of satire that satire is diminished as its objects lose luster. Who now, the argument goes, can even recall the names, much less the styles, of the poets Pope is mocking at such laborious length in The Dunciad? In truth, just the opposite is the case for even minimally attentive readers. Great poetic satire brings its field of mockery with it; the objects of satire are more evident in the satire than the mockery is, more evident than they were to the time supposedly satirized. We enjoy satire more when we don’t know the things being satirized—and so cannot protest their portrayal—and depend on the satirist for all our information, both for the ground and for the graffiti he scrawls upon it. The satirist acts as a delighted stylist of other people’s affectations, with the manners being mocked evident in the mockery. So, we get the affectations and manners as they come at us, presorted through the sieve of the satirist’s imagination. Like fossils—or, to use a Popeian metaphor, like ancient flies caught in amber—Hollywood producers or the advertising copy from the 1940s survive because they still exist in Perelman. It is not his disgust but his defensive reaction, his spinning webs of silk to weave around the caught objects of his pursuit, that still delights. The particular Hollywood producers whom Perelman hated are long gone—the Mike Todds (who employed him on Around the World in Eighty Days, and drove him crazy while getting him an Oscar), the Hunt Strombergs—just as the particular poets whom Pope mocked are gone, too. But the evocation of a show-business world marked by hearty hyperbole, mindless energy, empty promises, and limitless dissembling remains. Knock on any producer’s door, and meet a Perelman character. Though we love his stories for their period nature, we know the period best through Perelman, which means, since Perelman is permanent, that they transcend the period.