The Sad Side of Perelman
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Writers&Writing THE SAD SIDE OF PERELMAN by hope hale davis The characters and events in a work of literary art, I've been told—and sternly—exist only on the printed page. Ours is not to question...
...At Brown University Perelman and Pep had been dazzled by French Literature, and they sat for hours around my kitchen table talking about authors who were barely names to me: Lautreamont, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard...
...Jitters, Benson's man, was preparing our whiskies and soda, the kettle was steaming on the hob, and hobstairs and houtside the wind was whistling...
...Ours is not to question why, how come, or what happened afterward...
...It is partly hisobvious effort to be humorous about such matters as greed, malice and treachery that gives The Hindsight Saga its effect of gloom...
...That is what made it difficult for me to read S.J...
...And he did not know what else to do with it...
...I felt privileged, but it never occurred to me that Sid's humor had any other source than natural high spirits...
...I think some of his wildest outside loops spring from the hysteria of a prisoner gone berserk...
...Sid was welcome there, as elsewhere, for his wit...
...This had not been true in his early 20s...
...He had lost the ability to take anything seriously...
...Pep was often morose, lamenting his dishonest school career, his laziness, his sense of failure...
...At the end, "Mozart, streaked with tears, tottered out into the snow...
...I wish I could show Sid the diary 1 kept for a few months in 1931...
...Puce character, a flea who lived in the armpit of Jesus Christ, showed their troubled feelings about their inescapable Jewishness...
...Anyone would be tempted to try to sort out the fancy from the fact in the four frequently incredible reminiscences that comprise a 45-page postscript—all Perelman was able to finish of his long-promised autobiography to be called The Hindsight Saga...
...I think it was the Brahms Fourth that finally turned him on...
...I should have answered, "It's your story, Sid...
...then, putting his finger on the problem unaware: "and would not settle for 'sad' if he could use 'chopfallen.'" Once during the '30s, meeting Sid at a fundraising party for the Spanish Republicans, I was struck by his air of being at a loss...
...He had to think twice in those days, I remember, before buying a cup of coffee...
...In "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat's-Paw" Perelman tells of looking, in the spring of 1927, for a summer retreat...
...But if one chances to know...
...This was not the uneasiness caused by a legitimate suspicion that he was being used by the Communists, but rather a real sense of inadequacy...
...Reynolds, a flamboyant type with a cane hooked over his arm, did the bargaining for our sublet—I think we charged them only $5 more than the $65 per month we paid ?but the young man in the background caught my attention...
...Perelman's posthumous collection, TheLastLaugh (Simon and Schuster, 160 pp.,$11.95), as purely a comic omnium gatherum...
...Unlike West, who with Miss Lonelyhearts was able to express the ultimate in compassion, Perelman had let surrealism limit his view of life...
...He worked hard for a kind of insane exactitude in his prose," says Theroux...
...un-Jewish try at scraping a living from the soil...
...To add to his discontent his college friend Pep, in a vain quest for acceptance on Fraternity Row, had set standards in English tweeds and leather from which Sid, despite his mockery, would never free himself...
...Suppose he had...
...Principle prevented him from making fun of this occasion...
...At a time of general worry and fear, Perelman provided relief and ever-renewable joy to millions, in more countries than were raced through in his film Around the World in Eighty Days...
...The entry for June21 reads: "Lunch with Pep proved to be a red-letter occasion, a celebration of his notice of resignation from his job to start writing Miss Lonely Hearts...
...His memoir offers hints of the price he paid, albeit disguised as comedy...
...After recoiling from Martha's Vineyard and Fire Island he sails, it seems, for Europe...
...Perelman calls Elizabeth Taylor a " renowned vedette," which in English means, according to the ever-needed dictionary, "a small naval launch used for scouting...
...You saw it, you feel it, you must write it...
...Even the way the two of them joked about Pep's then unpublished book, The Dream Life ofBalsoSnell, with its St...
...Wisecracks were in demand, but with Sid they were simply a takeoff point (" Put an egg in your shoe and beat it") for his flights of strange, anarchic comedy...
...Florence invited him to visit us at the cottage she and her husband, Clarence Britten, owned on a remote stretch of ocean shore now part of Atlantic Beach...
...Not so," I protest, remembering the March day he and Quentin Reynolds arrived at the apartment on 11 th Street in Greenwich Village that I shared with Florence Haxton, editor of Snappy Stories...
...I sensed lurking beneath his shyness an oblique charm, exotic, outside my experience, and was glad when he and Florence discovered common interest...
...When at last he sighted the glint of Hollywood gold he had not only his family responsibilities but the demands of the roller-coaster life of a screenwriter to hold him in his groove...
...That is what originally attracted Pep's discipleship...
...And he had no taste for being poor, having grown up on a Rhode Island farm where his father was making an unlikely...
...Write it...
...But it is the only inspired moment in the story...
...But with Clarence, who when literary editor of the Dial had accepted Eliot's Wasteland, the 23-year-old Sid was quitely deferential, eager to learn...
...It was when I dipped into the supposed fictions making up the rest of the book that I began to break the rules...
...There is a wistfulness beneath this parody, a longing for the inaccessible life of a gentleman, but it isn't enough for ballast...
...In town, among our own age group, the great goal in those Menckenian, pre-Depression years was fun...
...There is no evidence that they do...
...Included in The Last Laugh is "Wanted: Short or Long Respite by Former Cineaste," which describes a movie scene that is supposed to be priceless in its implausibiliiy...
...I remember once catching through a crack in the door a glimpse of his rolling eye, and in my sudden wild giggles I lost forever the words to which he had added this irresistible mummery...
...23), the builder of an apartment house called Toplitz Towers in Ilium, New Jersey...
...In Old Chinatown" (published under "Nonsense" in The Sub-Treasury of American Humor) begins: "The dinner dishes had been cleared away, and Benson and I were comfortably ensconced before a glowing can of Sterno...
...One day he arrived at my apartment from the Bronx, where he had just had a tooth treated, clearly oppressed...
...By means of Prohibition cocktails and a wind-up Victrola Clarence taught him a taste for classical music for which he was touchingly grateful...
...He had locked himself into his style—or rather, his hodge-podge of others' styles—almost inadvertently, as he suggests in the segment ofThe Hindsight Saga describing his struggles before making contact with the Marx Brothers...
...She was subjected to such humiliation that Sid had been shattered by a new consciousness of the plight of most women...
...It might be less distressing to read popular literature if young writers studied Perelman now...
...I should have been more perceptive—if not then, at least after Sid began bringing his friend "Pep" Weinstein (later known as Nathanael West) to my basement on East 58th Street...
...why did he try so persistently...
...It might make Sid a little sad...
...What might it have led to...
...For Sid these would give rise to marvelous inventions such as Max Toplitz, Barney Bienstock's landlord (Chicken Inspector No...
...Let us go and compose The Magic Flute...
...He tries to make Groucho's real-life outrages as funny as his imagined Monkey Business...
...My husband used to read Perelman to his writing students at Harvard and Smith to make them conscious of cliches and keep them from using metaphors without regard to the literal meaning...
...While he was in thechair the young wife of the dentist had come in to make a simple request of her husband...
...I did wonder, seeing their mood sometimes, if this was what people meant by Jewish melancholy...
...This is the kind of story you ought to write," he told me...
...They were both living on checks painfully extracted from the same publisher, in whose humor magazine Judge Perelman's pseudo-woodcuts parodied the melodrama and sentiment of the 1890s...
...He was what my aunt would call "dish-faced," with thick dark brows arching high over very round, bright eyes...
...Why after writing 21 books, had he still not told us what he really felt about his own experience, about family life, politics, art, religion, poverty, injustice...
...And perhaps in Heaven he is able to use the word...
...Waiting on the corner his confidant, BillEugenspiel, tries tocheer him...
...Courage, Wolfgang," hesays...
...Perhaps the outmoded novels he mimics are too remote, and the obsolete words like "firkin," "shagreen" and "nainsook" (which Paul Theroux, in his Introduction, says cause "mounting hilarity") are incomprehensible to this generation...
...In college he had shown sensitivity and talent in a wide range of writing...
...Surrealism—combined with the inner desperation I never detected—gave Perelman's prose an explosive force that sent sense flying like the papers Harpo scatters from the executive desk...
...When the company numbered more than two—and sometimes only two—he put on a continuous performance...
Vol. 64 • July 1981 • No. 15
