What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman, the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter. There’s a crowded field in the sweepstakes for the best writer you’ve never heard of, but the form book suggests that Perelman would place, at the very least. He wrote for Hollywood and the New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century, when smart, wisecracking American humour was the laughter heard across the globe. He collaborated with the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and received his Academy Award for Around the World in 80 Days. There was an SJP bossing Manhattan when Sex and the City was just a bubble in a cosmopolitan.
Now some of Perelman’s work has been republished. Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film brings together essays in which the mature Perelman returns to the dime store novels and schlocky movies that he enjoyed in his teens. It’s been many years since I first read and loved him: would Cloudland Revisited take me back to cloud nine?
“Sid” Perelman’s writing is a lip-smacking combo of the vernacular and the fancy, with a little Yiddish and arcane literary folderol thrown in. It’s a deli sandwich prepared at the Russian Tea Room. You can picture Groucho removing his stogie and delivering a Perelman line like this one from a New Yorker piece: “With a blow, I sent him grovelling. In 10 minutes, he was back with a basket of appetising, freshly picked grovels.” In this collection, the writer demonstrates a close reading of late Victorian detective fiction. “The alacrity with which doctors of that epoch deserted their practice has never ceased to impress me. Holmes had only to crook his finger and Watson went bowling away in a four-wheeler… the average physician seems to have spent much less time in diagnosis than in tiptoeing around Wapping Old Stairs with a dark lantern.”
He reviews forgotten bodice-rippers such as Maxwell Bodenheim’s 1925 novel Replenishing Jessica, about a dim-witted beau who fails to tumble that his lover has had work done and is considerably older than she lets on. Going back for a second helping of his old favourites invariably leaves Perelman suffering from disillusion, not to mention dyspepsia, though he’s playing it for laughs, of course. “To call the pattern of Mr Bodenheim’s story simple would be like referring to St Peter’s as roomy or Lake Huron as moist,” he writes.
So a neglected wordsmith is no longer amused by the long-lost diversions of his youth? So what? Well, because this collection could hardly be more apropos or on point. As Adam Gopnik, one of today’s marquee names at Perelman’s old magazine, says in an introduction, his reflections on B-pictures and pulp fiction show us “how American consciousness gets made from the birdcage lining of pop culture in our heads”. Garlanded authors including Tom Wolfe, Nicholson Baker and Michael Chabon take their cue from Perelman in his highfalutin reading of supposedly low art.
More than this, his recycling of popular entertainment for the sake of lols is absolutely everywhere. An entire generation of film-makers has done little else but produce homages to the beloved movies of their teens – the Batmans, the Ghostbusters – half-mocking, half-sentimental, like sweet and salty popcorn. The imperishable Viz is a cockeyed retelling of comics. And we may never reach the end of all the podcasts devoted to waxing fond and foolish about old books and films.
The most noticeable absentee from the scene compared with Perelman’s day is the professional humorist. With the honourable exception of the unflagging Craig Brown, Sid’s old racket has gone the way of Dr Watson’s four-wheeler. You strain to catch his elegant, unsparing cadences in the ether today. Some writers can match him for zingers, the putdowns that no one gets up from. Perhaps one or two share Perelman’s tireless and quixotic pursuit of the mot juste (he even invented a pedantic grammarian called Moe Juste). He was prepared to go the extra mile to avoid a phrase such as to go the extra mile.
Cloudland Revisited is worth the trip, whether you’ve passed this way before, like me, or you’re a rookie Perelman reader. He has his successors, but the full package only came around once. As he said of himself: “Before they made SJ Perelman, they broke the mould.”
