That Old Feeling: Perelmania

…But is anyone else lighting candles for his memorial cake? Am I alone these days in regarding S.J. Perelman as a formative font of 20th century wit? In earlier columns on the centenaries of writers (Ogden Nash, Cornell Woolrich), performers (Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope) and filmmakers (Leni Riefenstahl), my words were part of a general acknowledgment, generous or (in Riefenstahl’s case) grudging, of the honorees’ contributions to the culture.

Perelman would have been 100 this Sunday — if he hadn’t died in 1979 — and his work was, except for the cartoons, the chief claim of humor in The New Yorker for more than 30 years. Yet summon his name on Google, and you will find only about a third as many references for him as for his brother-in-law, Nathanael West, who published only four short novels in a six-year career, compared to 20-some volumes in Perelman’s public half-century. Ransacking the Internet, I could discover no Perelman parties, no memorial readings from the canon, no revivals of the Broadway shows he worked on, no retrospectives of the films he helped write. I think of the Perelman story, “Who Stole My Golden Metaphor?” and wonder: who buried my Perelman beyond price?

But, kids, before you consign one of my favorite comedy writers to Corliss’ mausoleum of lost causes, take a moment to roll naked in some Perelman prose. I choose, almost at random, a few verses from the “Acres and Pains,” his magnum opus — or minimum opus, for it consumes fewer than 40 pages when reprinted. The book is Perelman’s account of a city boy who, in 1932, acquired and tried to run a rural property in Bucks County, Pa.:

“A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bound by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.”

“I began my career as a country squire with nothing but a high heart, a flask of citronella, and a fork for toasting marshmallows in case supplies ran low. In a scant fifteen years I have acquired a superb library of mortgages, mostly first editions, and the finest case of sacroiliac known to science…. I also learned that to lock horns with Nature, the only equipment you really need is the constitution of Paul Bunyan and the basic training of a commando.”

“When I first settled down on a heap of shale in the Delaware Valley, I too had a romantic picture of myself. For about a month I was a spare, sinewy frontiersman in fringed buckskin, with crinkly little lines about the eyes and a slow laconic drawl…. After I almost blew off a toe cleaning an air rifle, though, I decided I was more the honest rural type. I started wearing patched blue jeans [and] mopped my forehead with a red banana (I found out later it should have been a red bandanna)…. One day, while stretched out on the porch, I realized I needed only a mint julep to become a real dyed-in-the-wool, Seagram’s V.V.O. Southern planter…. I sent to New York for a broad-brimmed hat and a string tie, and at enormous expense trained the local idiot to fan me with a palmetto leaf.”

“Today, thanks to unremitting study, I can change a fuse so deftly that it plunges the entire county into darkness…. The power company has offered me as high as fifteen thousand dollars a year to stay out of my own cellar.”

If you’re not thoroughly beguiled by now, you are excused from class and may return to meditating on Janet Jackson’s steel-spangled nipple.

EL SID

Perelman’s oeuvre is a species of specious autobiography. He wrote about what he did, saw and read. He circumscribed the globe seven times, usually wringing a series of articles or a book out of the jaunt: “Westward Ha!” (illustrated by Al Hirschfeld) in the 40s, “Eastward Ha!” in the 70s. “Acres and Pains” is a searing indictment of the agricultural gentry, but he must not have hated his farm life too much; he lived there with Laura (Nathanael West’s sister, and Perelman’s occasional writing partner) until her death in 1969. A dustjacket blurb reads: “Retired today to peaceful Erwinna, Pa., Perelman raises turkeys which he occasionally displays on Broadway.”

In his 20s he was co-author of two prime Marx Brothers farces, “Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers.” Among the Broadway turkeys were a couple of plays he wrote with Laura; a hit musical, “One Touch of Venus,” written with Ogden Nash; and a so-so comic play, “The Beauty Part,” in 1962. (The Perelmans may have passed their Broadway genes two generations down: last year, Perelman’s great-niece, Marissa Jared Winokur, won a Tony as Best Actress in a Musical for “Hairspray.”) But Perelman was essentially a miniaturist, distilling into lapidary prose a mood, a mode, an ode with as much pith as could be found in a whole rainforest of dicotyledenous plant stems.

In the 50s, when he first mesmerized me, Perelman was easy to find: in the pages of The New Yorker (and Holiday and the Saturday Evening Post), on the occasional TV panel show and on the big screen, as co-writer of the Best Picture-winning “Around the World in 80 Days” (for which he also took home an Oscar). The Late Show often ran “Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers.”

Even a child of 10 could spot Perelmanic prose in Groucho quips (to Thelma Todd in “Monkey Business: “Oh, why can’t we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills — I mean, flee to my lodge in the hills”) and make the connection between Groucho’s monicker in “Horse Feathers” (Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff) and the goofy names Perelman gave his characters: Anonymous Bosch (screenwriter), Manuel Dexderides (Hollywood potentate), Dewey Naïveté (real estate agent). I purred at his blending of genres; a Raymond Chandler detective story would never appear in The New Yorker, but Perelman could parody and apotheosize Chandler in “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer.” (Actually, as with the movies that were the subjects of MAD comic book parodies at the same time, I read the parody before I caught up with the real thing.) And I reveled in his verbal style, dense as a black hole and twice as magnetic.

Long after my youth, I held on to a few Perelman relics. The “Around the World” hard-back program (cost: $1 — extortion!) remained a fond possession of mine till I misplaced it in the miasma of middle age. But I still have “The Most of S.J. Perelman,” the 1958 omnibus that gathers 96 of his short stories, plus two chapters of “Swiss Family Perelman” and all of “Acres and Pains” and “Westward Ha!” I took special pleasure in noting that the initials on the book’s cover, S.J.P., matched my Philadelphia high school, St. Joseph’s Prep. An anagram made us soulmates.

I don’t see today’s kids busting their allowance to find buy Perelman books on ebay; in fact, the name name retrieves only 12 items, and four of them are other Perelmans. I think I know why the writer’s short comic pieces, so influential in the last century, have little resonance in this one. It’s because they are written in a dead language: English.

VICTORIA AND EDWARD, GALLAGHER AND SHEAN

I should refer to it as Perelman English: a cocktail of Victorian and Edwardian sentence structure, Jazz Age slang whose sell-by date had long since expired, and a veritable Mount Meron of Yiddishisms. “Sid commands a vocabulary that is the despair (and joy) of every writing man,” proclaimed his New Yorker colleague E.B. White. “He is like a Roxy organ that has three decks, 50 stops and a pride of petals under the bench. When he wants a word it’s there…. His ears are as busy as an ant’s feelers. No word ever gets by him.” The language was, for Perelman, a gentleman’s orgy, and he was Petronius, knowing which wench to peel, which grace to savor.

His stock of references could have filled the Great Library of Alexandria, if that august edifice had housed every copy of Cap’n Billy’s Whizbang. Even those introduced to Perelman in his prime had to cram for antique references. The man was an instant anachronist, peppering his stories with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, vaudeville dialect comics like Gallagher and Shean (Al Shean was the Marx Brothers’ uncle), silent movies, and “the exact method of quarrying peat out of a bog at the time of the Irish Corn Laws.” Add 50 years to these arcana, toss them at a collegiate today and he’ll expect a translation on the recto. (Buck up, young scholar. That’s what Google’s for.)

In his time, though — and why shouldn’t that time be now, again? — Perelman was called America’s foremost humorist, a comic genius, mein Yiddishe Aristophanes, a gift from Providence (he was reared in Rhode Island), but Perelman preferred the simple designation “writer.” Even when his feuilletons don’t stir a Gorgon to chuckle, they educe awe for the Wallenda grace of his prose, his solving of sentences. Attend to the choice of verbs in this relatively simple description: “Struggling into a robe, he reeled across the room, fumbled with the chain latch, and wrenched open the door.” Action words, picture words, funny words.

Perelman’s free-associative style spun fantasias out of girdle ads, tabloid tattle, sleazy pulp fiction and recipe prose. He was a Charlie Parker on tenor Underwood, running bizarre and beautiful variations on the tritest themes. With a difference: Perelman’s prose was improv with agony. He perspired platelets to make it read cucumber-cool. “This particular kind of sludge is droned over while working so that it becomes incantatory and quite sickening,” he told William Cole and George Plimpton for a 1963 Paris Review interview, reprinted in “Conversations With S.J. Perelman.” In another interview, discussing travel glitches, he notes that “the stresses and strains [are] highly productive of the kind of situation I can write about. In other words, misery breeds copy.”

In three little words: comedy is hard. No other wordsmith is obliged to provoke the same reaction (a laugh) with different techniques (gags, puns, elegant locutions, etc.) in every line. Comic surprise — that twist of a word, situation or idea that momentarily outwits the reader and wins a smile or a spit-take — becomes, when repeated, expectation, and then impatience. And still the comic writer soldiers on, staring glumly at his typewriter, laying the narrative bricks and, once in a while, blowing them up. The crutches of sameness, of leisurely character building, of the blah blah… “Astonish me” (Cocteau’s demand of art) is a cinch compared to “Make me laugh.”

Not only does comedy have to be smart, it needs smart readers. They must know what’s being mocked, know that it’s being mocked. They must be familiar with at least some of the writer’s litany of cultural references. Perelman often wondered whether his humor was too obscure for general audiences (a suspicion his sometime collaborator Groucho Marx may have put in his mind). That’s why the writer was pleased to receive a certain kind off fan mail: “you are happily surprised to find yourself appreciated at what you thought might be your most obtuse level.”

“PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG CAT’S PAW”

Perelman’s most fertile subject of satire was himself. His verbal sketches in the mirror twist similes into Germanic compound adjectives: “button-cute, rapier-keen, cucumber-cool, and gall-bitter” or, another time, “button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor,” or “cucumber-cool and rocket-swift, canny as Sir Basil Zaharoff” (the Greek arms dealer and war-facilitator). The cucumis sativus loomed large in his arsenal: he once reported that the director Ernst Lubitsch was seen “smoking a cucumber and looking cool as a cigar.”

His self-descriptions, like much of his prose, tended to the mock-heroic, followed by the pin-prick-deflative: “In appearance he suggests the Apollo Belvedere, though his brain has the same specific gravity as that of Blaise Pascal.” At the start of “Swiss Family Perelman” (another round-the-world trip, this time with Laura and their kids, Adam and Abby), the narrator spies a solitary passenger on the promenade of the S.S. President Cleveland as it courses from San Francisco Bay into the Pacific. Who could it be…?

“Under a brow purer than that of Michelangelo’s David, capped by a handful of sparse and greasy hairs, brooded a pair of fiery orbs, glittering like zircons behind ten-cent-store spectacles. His superbly chiseled lips, ordinarily compressed in a grim line that bespoke indomitable will, at the moment hung open flaccidly, revealing row on row of pearly white teeth and a slim, patrician tongue. In the angle of the obdurate outthrust jaw, buckwheat-flecked from the morning meal, one read quenchless resolve, a nature scornful of compromise and dedicated to squeezing the last nickel out of any enterprise. The body of a Greek god, each powerful muscle the servant of his veriest whim, rippled beneath the blanket, stubbornly disputing every roll of the ship. And yet this man, who by sheer poise and magnetism had surmounted the handicap of almost ethereal beauty and whose name, whispered in any chancellery in Europe, was a talisman from Threadneedle Street to the Shanghai Bund, was prey to acute misery….”

When not comparing himself to classical statuary, he dipped into homier tropes. His country farm, as libeled in “Acres and Pains,” may have been short on amenities, but it was well stocked with simile checkers. The artist’s self-portrait includes the phrase “as lean and bronzed as a shad’s belly (I keep a shad’s belly hanging in the barn for comparison)” and, documenting a tumble down into the cellar, he notes that “I sustained a bruise roughly the size of a robin’s egg; I speak of this with certainty as there chanced to be a robin’s egg lying on a nearby shelf.”

CLOUDLAND REVISITED

When not bound between hard covers or meandering in the meadows of The New Yorker’s pages, Perelman stood five-foot-six, outfitted himself in Savile Row haberdashery and gave great company. A comic writer is supposed to be morose, but until his wife died, Sid was by all accounts a genial fellow, with a facility in conversation as exhilarating and daunting as in print. He had become was he’d planned back in Providence, all those weekends curled up with the not-so-great books: a perfect fictional gentleman named S.J. Perelman.

Smitten by adventures novels and Graustarkian romances, young Sid was also in thrall to the silent screen, its gaud and goddesses — especially Jedda Goudal, the tempestuous Dutch-born diva whose picture hung in Perelman’s studio 40 years later, and Nita Naldi, cavortress with Barrymore in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Valentino in “Blood and Sand,” and “down whom, as I once wrote, it was my boyhood ambition to coast down on a Flexible Flyer.” (In his 40s and 50s he would write a series called “Cloudland Revisited,” in which he reminisced about the books and films of his youth; a rereading or reviewing usually shook him awake rudely.)

The Marx Brothers called in 1930 and paired him with comic-strip writer Will B. Johnstone. The two devised a radio skit about four stowaways on a transatlantic cruise ship; the Marxes thought the premise could sustain their first original movie. Thus began a brief, tumultuous relationship with a long, acrid tail: Sid rueing that the films had lent him more celebrity than his “real” writing, Groucho complaining that Perelman got too much credit for a community effort.

With Johnstone, Arthur Sheekman, producer Herman Mankiewicz and the Brothers adding their salt to the scenarial stew, it’s hard to know what is Perelman. But “Monkey Business,” at least in Groucho’s dialogue, has familiar echoes. Examples: “That’s what they said to Thomas Edison, mighty inventor; Thomas Lindbergh, mighty flyer; and Thomaschewski, mighty like a rose.” … “What’s the capital of Nebraska? What’s the capital of the First National Bank?” … Thelma: “You’re very shy for a lawyer.” Groucho: “You bet I am. I’m a shyster lawyer.” … “You’re a woman who’s been getting nothing but dirty breaks. But we can clean and tighten your brakes, but you’ll have to stay in the garage all night.” … A tough guy wants Groucho and his brother Zeppo to plug a rival with the gats (guns) he gave them. Groucho: “Well, we had to drown the gats. But we saved you a little black gitten.” … Groucho to mob boss: “Your overhead is too high and your brow is too low.”

Perelman says that Groucho complained of the script’s recherché references, and was particularly vexed that one speech, parodying “The Merry Widow,” had to be trimmed to the phrase, “Come, Kapellmeister!” in fact, it’s all there (“Ah, ’tis midsummer madness, the music is my temples, the hot blood of youth! Come, Kapellmeister, let the violas throb. My regiment leaves at dawn!”). The most famous couplet in “Horse Feathers” also sounds Siddish. Secretary: “The Dean is furious. He’s waxing wroth.” Groucho: “Is Roth out there too? Tell Roth to wax the Dean for a while.”

However chaotic the Marx Brothers experience, it at least put some of Perelman’s words in movies. Few subsequent screenwriting gigs, which Perelman usually took with his wife (and always for the money) accomplished even that. Sid’s story “Did You Ever See Irving Plain” tells of one such excursion, to MGM in 1936-37, to massage a wan scenario called “Greenwich Village” into shape for Joan Crawford. Prideful Sid would have junked the assignment if not for his wife’s purse sense, “God knows it isn’t Flaubert, but it’s better than picking lettuce in the Imperial Valley.”

So they reported to the Culver City writers’ quarters, “colloquially known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,” to await an audience with his holiness Irving Thalberg, the studio’s legendary production chief. For months they dawdled, with mounting asperity, until “my wife and I seriously began to question whether Thalberg even existed, whether he might not be a solar myth or deity concocted by the front office to garner prestige.” (Thalberg’s unavailability may be explained by his death in September 1936; the Perelman adventure perhaps occurred in 1935-36.) The anecdote is capped by a materialization of the mogul: he addresses an angry posse of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights whose heels are similarly freon-cool, and by evening the Perelmans are again unemployed.

Sid and Laura weren’t in L.A. because they liked it. He quipped that studio bosses “had foreheads only by dint of electrolysis” and called Hollywood “A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.” Decades later, standing at Hollywood and Vine a year before his death, Perelman took a misanthrope’s pleasure in realizing that “The human tide flowing sluggishly by me was unchanged. If many were Hare Krishnas, a sect of loafers undreamt of in the thirties, most of the pedestrians were the same old screwballs — losers of beauty contests, Texas gigolos, nature fakers, shoe salesmen and similar voyeurs, absconding bank cashiers, unemployed flagellants, religious messiahs, and jail bait. Did there exist anywhere, I wondered, a Hogarth or a Hieronymus Bosch who could do justice to these satanic troglodyte faces preoccupied with unimaginable larcenies and Schweinerei?”

THE GROUCH AND THE PEARL

In his later comments on the Marx Brothers, Perelman vacillated between generosity and steely contempt. In 1967 he told interviewer Roy Newquist: “My particular friend was Groucho, and I’ve happily been able to remain great friends with him ever since. I have great esteem for Groucho Marx. He has a very quick and civilized mind.” A decade later he had sharpened his recollection, or his razor: “The Marxes were boorish; they were ungrateful. It was a very uneasy combination. Harpo was the nicest brother.”

Though Groucho and Perelman are sometimes seen as half of one character — the id and the brain — they are more opposites than siblings. Groucho was ever a-prowl, a predatory creature whose mission was mischief. The Perelman character, on the page, didn’t seek trouble; he stumbled into it. Skeptical but hapless, too weathered in the ways of chicanery to be gulled again, yet fated to suffer more indignities, he was typically the victim of characters like Groucho.

Groucho’s comedy was aggressive, given to breaking things. Perelman’s wit was reactive, observational, contemplative. A famous Hirschfeld sketch has the writer lounging on a divan, in the languid, Cheshire Cat mode of the young Truman Capote, or Mme. Recamier, the salon keeper immortalized in oils by Jacques Louis David. From his Manhattan couch, Bucks County porch swing or ocean-liner deck chair, he watches the world’s folly and his own. The Perelman persona is a clod who won’t admit it. The writer Perelman was a craftsman who agonized over his linguistic conceits. He knew what the millions who see a comic piece or a script or film and think they could do as well don’t know: making art look easy is hard work.

His mouthpiece on this subject was Goddard Quagmeyer, the middle-rung painter in “The Beauty Part.” Asked how aspiring artists might know “whether they really have the creative spark,” he snaps, “If it sets fire to your pants” — a definition as poetic as it is cynical. Quagmeyer lays out the Perelman theory of conspicuous presumption: “Every housewife in the country’s got a novel under her apron…. And the dentists are even worse. Do you realize there are twice as many dentists painting in their spare time as there are painters practicing dentistry?” All this amateur competition makes it rough on the professionals (like Perelman), who have these words of advice, born of painful experience: “Lay off the Muses — it’s a very tough dollar.”

On his 100th birthday week, I want to thank S.J. Perelman for being a role model in the crafting of words, the creating of a comic world. A half-century ago, and today, he set fire to my pants.