Books: Feather Complex S.J. Perelman: a Life

“Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman . . . that he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies . . . that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy.”

This was about as much personal information as Humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman ever intended to disclose. But his natural reticence went with him when he died at the age of 75 in 1979. Dorothy Herrmann, author of a previous book about American wits, With Malice Toward All, begins by calling her subject “brilliant” and ends by labeling his work “sublime.” Between these terminals she presents a clothbound gossip column featuring a morose and promiscuous figure who never came to terms with his beginnings.

Perelman’s parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who raised poultry on a small Rhode Island farm. In one of many psychobiographical pole vaults, Herrmann says, “As soon as he could afford it, he began buying only the most expensive custom-made English clothes. They were so beautifully tailored they gave the impression their wearer had never suffered poverty, hardship and the terrible smell of thousands of chickens dying.” That Perelman’s similarly attired literary colleagues were not all fleeing from the aroma of guano is irrelevant; once the feather complex has been formulated, all facts must bend to fit it.

Like many youths of his generation, Perelman absorbed himself in pulp literature and vaudeville. When he became a cartoonist and writer at Brown University, the melodramatic phrase coupled with the antic gesture were indispensable parts of his technique. Another campus satirist derived from the same origins: Nathan Weinstein, soon to be better known as Nathanael West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts. The two men were close friends, then relatives when Perelman married West’s sister Laura. It was not, Herrmann reports, a conventional union. Early on, the Perelmans went to Hollywood, where a fellow scenarist, Dashiell Hammett, once noted, “Last night I ran into Sid . . . and wound up by doing a little pimping for him.” Soon afterward, Hammett and Laura had a brief fling. It was, Herrmann speculates, “perhaps her way of punishing Sid for his numerous infidelities.”

In fact, the great sorrow of the Perelmans’ lives did not have a sexual cause. In December 1940, West and his new wife Eileen (the title character of My Sister Eileen) were killed in an automobile accident. Laura slowly descended into alcoholism. Perelman mourned privately and rarely discussed his brother-in-law. He went on to write film scripts and plays that failed too often, and he turned out the pieces, mostly for The New Yorker, for which he is remembered: the collisions of Britishisms and Yiddishisms, the classic parodies of James Joyce and Raymond Chandler, the explosive lampoons of popular culture.

There were more than a few moments of contentment. Despite their difficulties, the Perelmans remained married for 40 years, until Laura’s death in 1970. During that period, S.J. contributed to two of the wildest Marx Brothers films, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business, and he became lionized in Britain and the U.S. as the reigning master of the comic essay.

But Herrmann’s thesis is a stubborn one, and her subject must play Pagliacci to the end. Editors and women friends are brought on to recall a “contained,” “testy, easily depressed man,” “cranky to be considered this ‘national treasure’ and not sell.” Herrmann adds that after the failure of his last play, The Beauty Part, in 1963, “(Perelman) began to lose the comic writer’s most precious gift — a sense of humor.” This will come as a great surprise to readers who enjoyed Perelmania in five later collections of essays as well as a number of saline interviews and commentaries. It is true that personally Perelman was never Mr. Sunshine and that he always craved more recognition and rewards than he received. So did Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Ring Lardner and many other American humorists.

For future scholars, Herrmann provides a number of valuable interviews. But her prying litany of misery displays few insights about her subject and little analysis of his unique combination of spontaneity and polish. The famous collection The Most of S.J. Perelman offers a series of works that are far more revealing — and one title that is unfortunately prescient. “De Gustibus,” it says, “Ain’t What Dey Used to Be.”