The Springs of Perelmania

...In Vermont he looks forward to dinner with the reclusive J.D...

...Even in his irreplaceable long correspondence with Leila Hadley the only intimate words allowed are the salutations and closings...

...Crowther's sensitive Introduction shows that her devotion to Perelman— she brought a new and unlikely joy to the last year of his life—merely strengthened her resolve to discover and present him as he inescapably was...

...Less predictable (and more enlightening) are Perelman's thoughtful reflections on politics, nature, the Far East, animals (he was passionate about his mynah bird), his taste and appetite for art...

...To his daughter Abby he wrote quite seriously, "I alternate between violence and despair when 1 consider what faces anybody who really wants to write well...

...He can be just as bitter at home...

...Pretending to be led by curiosity" to a dinner party given by Billy Rose, he describes the 47-room Manhattan house with its portraits by Raeburn and Romney, "massed in front of which are Hebraic silver candlesticks, ikons, and other religious totems reflecting Billy's deep devotional preoccupations...

...But by the time he collaborated on a novel (originally titled Through the Fallopian Tubes on a Bicycle, published more primly in 1930 as Parlor, Bedlam and Bath), his pursuit of clichés was relentless...

...Haddock Abroad by Donald Ogden Stewart, whose influence he has often acknowledged, Swiss Family Perelman is a tortured account of a round-the-world voyage en famille...

...Perelman does once muse on marriage, in responding to news of a friend's separation: "I suppose I incline to feel that monogamy is at best a very shaky and provisional arrangement invented by some rather smelly monks for the purpose of preventing the extinction of the race...

...In a 1974 letter he describes in furious detail the "arrogant, imperious spectacle" she made of herself during an ill-fated Sarasota house-sharing experience...

...Reading what he wrote to those he felt closest to can be a saddening sort of pleasure...

...Significantly, it is his letters to women that sound unforced and sincere...

...Yet in his comic travelogues he had turned those distant lands into scenes of distaste, dilemma and misadventure...

...Studying his pieces, students would become alert to clichés...

...In Hollywood, on a Nelson Eddy script, Perelman is accused of plagiarism...

...He dares not call him Tom, though Eliot calls him Sid...

...And though he was hardly naïve, and used his techniques more and more consciously, he surely would not have liked to dig down far enough to uncover the roots of his wit, even to himself...

...In his introduction the heroine "breasts the waves and vice versa...

...We did not recognize that this might bea truly manic phase to be balanced by depression, that once he put pen to paper it became an " agony of creation...

...But Perelman's case was extreme...

...When West and his wife Eileen McKenney were killed in a 1940 car crash, Crowther suspects, the Perelmans as executors of West's estate "destroyed the bulk of whatever correspondence remained...

...Abby had written about her depression after reading Crime and Punishment...

...Those of us who knew him in those young days delighted in what seemed to be wonderfully impromptu outpourings of surrealist freeassociation fun...

...If that effort to be both funny and man-to-man bawdy sounds a bit strenuous, it probably was...

...Or adjectives...

...Family considerations ruled out whatever deals with the darker side of his domestic life...

...I am a level-headed, thoughtful sort of chap, incapable of being swayed by this sort of gaudy nonsense...

...On new and old literature his judgment is quick, fair, vigorous, and unerring...

...He begins a 1928 letter to a Brown classmate, "Can't either one of us smear a little medicated ointment on that large chancre in the groin of lifeno hitting below the parables, mind you —and start the balls rolling again...

...Writers and speakers would avoid unconscious use of a mixed or exhausted metaphor...

...Then, continuing this conscientious effort to play the father's role, he adds an uncharacteristic affirmation: "Whenever you tend to feel low, darling, and to wonder about the meaning and the direction of life, remember there are compensations, and great ones, for the difficult times...

...Whether he could have untangled those inner conflicts enough to save him from the rage and depression of the following decades one can't know...

...my stomach turned over twice at the thought of you sitting in a hot little office...

...Baby It's Cold Inside and The Rising Gorge...

...But what is left— the recounting of experience and observation—is enough to make us feel that at last we hear the voice of the "real" Perelman...

...And, just as important, all the witty and diverting and eccentric and charming people like Benchley and Al Hirschfield and Dorothy Parker and Somerset Maugham and so on endlessly...

...was barely discernible over the edge, and at that was, I believe, seated on a pillow...

...That was no joke...

...He too must have wanted it that way, since he said only pedants tried to analyze humor...

...Marilyn Monroe and I are just going to go ahead with our plans and get married, then settle down on her 12,000-acre citrus ranch, and make our own little world...

...It is tantalizing to think of the correspondence that could not be found— with Robert Benchley, for instance, and Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Somerset Maugham, and Lillian Hellman...

...They are the least responsive, most omery little critters in the world to work with, and I needn't tell you how exasperating, befuddling and dismaying a full day of struggling with them can be...

...That kind of insider fooling (including some uniquely hilarious jokes) could be predicted...

...Privately he goes even further...

...Written on assignment for Holiday magazine and illustrated with highly unflattering caricatures by the theatrical cartoonist Al Hirschfield, who accompanied them, it has been reissued in paperback along with two other earlier collections of humorous pieces...

...As it turned out, she could not be altogether free in her choice of letters...

...Writing in 1940 to the playwright Augustus Goetz, Perelman tells how he and his wife work as a team in Hollywood: "We will then return to the office and Laura will call up her mother and fight with her while I stand moodily at the window and watch the secretary across the way adjust her garter...

...How far he has to reach out, into such distant lands, into social scenes known to her only at second hand, to find comfort for his daughter...

...Perelman also provides yellby-yell accounts of Dorothy Parker's marital life with Alan Campbell...

...At the start of Perelman's free-lancing career his work was almost entirely a burlesque of the style of the 1890s, actually a rather loving play with the books he had relished as a youth...

...Alas, the husbandly howls are so traditionally banal as to blunt any personal point...

...This we basically feel is how the real we can best fulfill ourselves, deep down...

...Eliot...

...One can only hope that the belated outrush of his true emotion afforded him some relief...

...Revealing as Crowther's collection is, few letters are so explicit...

...No one knows how much Perelman may have told "Pep" Weinstein (Nathanael West...

...He is sometimes touchingly gratified, as in the case of Cary Grant, and he is awed by making friends with "the shabby old eagle" T.S...

...We sat down at a table easily 75 feet long excised from a castle in Wales...

...Eliot was one of his discriminating fans, and Professor Harry Levin, the Harvard critic, offered exquisitely phrased analysis...

...In LA, "riding in nothing but Cadillacs and Thunderbirds," he reassures Gus Lobrano, his editor at the New Yorker...

...His humor did get serious attention anyway, from intellectuals...

...scratching verbs...

...On one short visit to London he reports on Eric Ambler, Richard Burton, Angus Wilson ("a fragile, dried autumn leaf of aman"), C. Day Lewis ("somewhat pompous, I thought"), and Malcolm Muggeridge ("a chatterbox all smile and prussic acid"), who entertains him at dinner...

...Billy, at the head...

...In fact, he speaks of going "looking for trouble...

...No artist is willing to disturb a mysterious process that is creatively productive...

...Yet some of the restrictions may well have helped make the book the pleasure it is to read —a relief after Dorothy Herrmann's grimly unsparing biography...

...That evening (relieved only by his meeting Ronald Searle, the caricaturist) starts his disillusionment with the English, who "give you a patronizing, frosty smile indicating they think you're a slow-witted Yankee peasant and carry on their own conversation teeming with local allusions...

...They would visualize and take apart figures of speech, remembering how he exposed them...

...Great writers are seldom happy people...

...The drudgery of his writing was surely most acute when he was falsifying the experiences that gave him ecstasy...

...When Perelman met celebrities he usually discovered he was meeting fans...

...When Perelman's friend Betsy Drake, wife of Cary Grant, told him she had given up acting for writing he answered, "I was floored by your decision...

...Even when her husband lay ill, "Dotty kept sneaking Laura into the entresol to whisper 'I'll kill him, the cross little man, I really will, the shit' and I was left alone with the Pride of Richmond, whose voice in repose now has the mellow screech of a Nicholson file...

...Academics all over the country, especially from the '30s through the '50s, used Perelman in the effort to make our language sharper and purer...

...In The Road toMiltown, for instance, describing his early response to a Rudolph Valentino film, he marvels that it had kept him on the edge of his chair...

...Still, what we have here tells plenty about Hellman, with whom one of his friends said Perelman had an "ambivalent relationship...

...But works of art were important to him—eternal monuments, as he wrote to his daughter...

...Echoing such travelogues as Mr...

...the island of Prinkipo off Istanbul and the wisteria blooming over those Turkish cafes along the Bosphorus, the rhinos and elephant moving in on the salt lick at Treetops, the great gorge at Murchison Falls, the papyrus reeds along the Albert Nile with the hippo peering out at our launch—these are some of the things we've been lucky enough to be part of...

...Salinger: "Personally I'd go crazy all alone on a crag, and I fully expect him to break into wild laughter during the meal and goose the waitresses...

...He reassures her that everyone feels the same way...

...In New York he provides comic monologues for the harmonica player Larry Adler, who reneges on paying for them...

...People will buy Don't Tread on Me for its video-like glimpses into the theater and literary world (especially the New Yorker, about which he can be scathingly critical), and they won't be disappointed...

...and Mrs...

...There are frequent hints of misery in the comedy, though...

...Prudence Crowther's wisely selected, wide-ranging assemblage of his letters makes the reality too clear for comfort...

...Ah well," he comforts himself, "thechairs were narrower in those days...

...Comedy allowed Perelman to let go ferociously...

...He detested her, and she detested him...

...Their relationship was close—becoming startlingly close after Sid married Pep's 18-year-old sister...

...I think about the sunrises we saw together off Celebes aboard the Kasimbar, the terraced rice fields in Bali, the temples in Bangkok, the harbor of Hong Kong with the coolies dressed in those shaggy straw cones dripping with rain, the Taj Mahal at dawn...

...Perelman almost compulsively sought to tum pain into entertainment for his audience...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Of that select club of readers calling themselves Perelmaniacs, most may prefer to enjoy S. J. Perelman's comedy without trying to figure out cause and effect...

...Although this will be heresy to the thousands to whom Perelman has given joy, I can't help remembering the hints of a yearning for truth he expressed to me in his 20s, and I try to imagine the writer he could have been if only he had freed himself early (as did Nathanael West) from the need to hide or distort his deepest feelings...

...Indeed, I think his comedy, paradoxically, was an attempt—sometimes a desperate attempt—to escape awareness of its sources: deep discontent, envy, resentment, resistance to the facts of his life, to his birth and heritage with all their built-in barriers...

...Of Perelman's many extramarital affairs, most have had to go undocumented...