Books: Surgical Instruments

LOOK WHO’S TALKING—S. 7. Perelman—Random House ($2).

Peculiar to this century is a form of wit inadequately known as screwball. Its method is free association; its state of mind is somewhere between a power dive and a tail spin. It has close affinity with hot jazz, surrealist painting and the deranged poetry of Rimbaud. It calls for an exquisite sense of cliche and mimicry, and a nihilism which delights in knocking over-crystallized words, objects and gestures into glassy pieces that cut each other. Most advanced living practitioner of this form of wit is James Joyce. Perhaps quite as richly gifted in it, if far more inhibited in using it, are Groucho Marx and Sidney Joseph Perelman.

Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929) was written, much of it, while S. J. Perelman, who had graduated from Brown University in 1925, was working for the now Judge. It had an abundant, frenzied incandescence that promised either 1) to burn out, or 2) to become as brilliant and sure and destructive as anything in U. S. satire. Perelman did not burn out, but he has cooled off. Having become a money-earning professional, he collaborated on a novel (Parlor, Bedlam & Bath) and a play (All Good Americans); gagged the best of the Marx Brothers’ films; with his wife wrote the script for Ambush, a Grade-B production which was one of the best shows of 1939; and settled down on a farm in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County which he bought from Michael Gold. More recently he has run a radio show (Author, Author); and for seven years he has been writing pieces for The New Yorker. Look Who’s Talking, like Strictly From Hunger (1937), is a collection of these pieces and several from other periodicals.

Nearly all of them are frank, formularized potboilers, a virtuoso’s improvisations on minor themes. Tempered to the genteel tastes of The New Yorker, these pieces seldom hold a Roman candle to real Ginsbergh fireworks. Yet they are also as hard, sharp, bright and cold as a display of surgical instruments; and sometimes they do genuinely surgical work.

Sample: a playlet which takes place in “the combination cellar and playroom of the Bradley home in Pelham Manor. Mr. and Mrs. Bradley and their two children, Bobby and Susie, are grouped about their new automatic oil burner. They are all in faultless evening dress, including Rover, the family Airedale.” After a sufficiently shattering amount of balloon dialogue (“Oh, Moms, I’m so glad you and Dads decided to install a Genfeedco automatic oil burner and air conditioner with the new self-ventilating screen flaps plus finger control!”), Bobby answers the door and “admits Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher and their three children, attired in long balbriggan underwear. General greetings.” Then Mrs. Fletcher delivers the line which should stop U. S. advertising copywriters in their tracks for a long time:

“Don’t mind us, Velma, we just dropped in to sneer at your towels.”

At Brown, in the early ‘aos, Perelman was one of three friends who appeared to have, between them, an exceedingly strong hold on the shorthair of the immediate future of U. S. letters. Israel James Kapstein stayed at Brown to teach English, and writes, now & then, uncommonly good stories. Pep Weinstein (pen name: Nathanael West) wrote a brilliant and Grosz-like novel called Miss Lonelyhearts, a black-bile Horatio Alger satire (A Cool Million) and The Day of the Locust, which is by far the ugliest and best book to date about Hollywood. Next to Poe (and not excepting Henry Miller), West is the most proficient U. S. surrealist. As for Friend Perelman, if he continues at the level of his last two books he will have to be spoken of as one more greatly endowed U. S. author (Twain, Lardner, Crane, Melville, Wolfe, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway) who never quite became what seemed to be in him to become. But like all of those he will have delivered enough.