Arts and Letters

I was not a friend of Perelman's, therefore can't offer any of those personal reminiscences that are normally of course an enriching staple of these commemorations—except for a memory, certainly vivid enough, of the time I first met him.

I had just moved from Chicago to New York as a still relatively young man—giving the word relatively its maximum elasticity—and was not above rubbernecking when a friend took me for lunch to the Algonquin, that fabled hostelry with all its ghosts and guests. And there, sure enough, sitting at a table in the Rose Room was Perelman, possessing in profile—yes, yes, it was true—the melancholy of a carp at Fontainebleau, as he himself put it for our pleasure. But any such resemblance, deserved or not as a bit of self-lampoon, dissolved in a smile as Perelman recognized my host, who himself happened to be no less than Thurber, and waved us over. On learning that I was a fugitive from the Middle West, in particular on the lam from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, with its twenty-five dollars a week, Perelman asked a question. Why didn't we rather call it Verse: A Magazine of Poetry? Before I could protest that I had not been in at the christening, had in fact barely been in existence then, Perelman answered his own question. It had of course been a put-on. Thoughtfully stroking the lantern jaw dear to caricaturists, he told me why it was probably not called Verse: A Magazine of Poetry. "It doesn't, you see, have the same dying fall as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. It wouldn't work."

"Wit lasts no more than two centuries." This is Stendhal pontificating to Balzac. Humor has an even shorter life span, as any practitioner of that precarious trade knows, often from personal experience. I mean the statistical chances of outliving his own stuff are terrific—hardly a consoling thought, except to life insurance companies. The mortality tables are of course harsh for any line of creative work (think of all those runaway bestsellers galloping one by one into oblivion) but they are worse for comedy than for any other. Humor is a highly perishable product that seldom outlasts the whims of fashion and temperament it reflects; in its acutely topical form it can begin to rot on the way to the market. All humorists know this, and that is why they constitute a special brand of wretches at once brooding and frenetic. They know the score, they are always playing against time. Today a bright green head of cabbage; tomorrow, leaf mold. Fortunately for Perelman, the marshy distinction between wit and humor is irrelevant, as his output is a combined cataract of both. The famous polyphonic style, pyrotechnically blending high literary allusion, slang, show-biz hype, Yiddishisms, concocted proper names at once ingenious and blazingly corny, all these miraculously unite in the service of subject matter equally varied: social satire, exotic travel, even farm life, all come within his ken.

Henry Steele Commager has remarked how great cosmopolitans are often also great provincials, citing Jefferson as a case in point, Goethe another. Might we not tuck Perelman's name in with a pair already dissimilar enough in all conscience. For he was both globetrotter insatiable and New Yorker incurable. His wanderings, solitary and en famille, gave us as much hilarious prose as the Sixth and Seventh Avenue delicatessens in which he professedly forged his cast-iron digestion, along with some of the far-flung foreign restaurants he frequented as perhaps our ranking boulevardier. Or to hear him tell it, boulevardier manqué. Which brings up a provocative point.

Being so often at his comic best when engaging in self-disparagement puts him squarely on common ground with practically all his peers of the so-called New Yorker school. Why is this? Why did American humor suddenly become so preponderantly a matter of self-ridicule, much of it entailing far worse than carp at Fontainebleau, a mystery deepening with the fact that this development coincided precisely with what we have come to think of as the urbanization of American humor? How came the city slicker to be so much worse served by himself than ever he had been by the rubes and roughnecks of the frontier humor that came before? The question is only asked, no answer attempted here. But there they were and are: Thurber, Benchley, Perelman, and the rest, all running themselves down at such a rate that we would be put to it to name from among them the greatest of the self-deflators, our particular laureate of discomfiture. With the socio-psychiatric critics pullulating everywhere in the academic breeze, there must be a hundred doctoral dissertations in the subject, some no doubt already under lucubration.

Where were we? Yes, Perelman as combined cosmopolite and high provincial. The fact that he had a lover's quarrel with the Big Apple only proved his passion for it. We all remember with what fanfaronade he shook off the dust of New York as "pestilential" in 1970 and settled in London, to return two years later, as one might hurry back to a hectoring wife from an exasperating mistress. Maybe he never stayed in one place long enough to get his definitive fill of it—the secret of many an undying attachment. Perelman once said that he would rather "walk down Ice House Street in Hong Kong in a white drill suit than own a Chevrolet dealership in Sheboygan." If in addition to knowing about that snide little inversion you happen to have relatives in Sheboygan to baffle and torment by quoting it, as by the wildest chance I do, why, your cup runs over.

We have lumped Perelman in with Jefferson and Goethe. Here is an even more refreshingly outlandish conjunction. No one is ever likely to mention him in the same breath with Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet one might well say of the humorist what Robert Frost said of the poet, that his life was a revel in the felicities of language. One isn't of course thinking just of the quips and puns and outré conceits, the boggling gags and maniacal non sequiturs strewn across a spectrum ranging from the Marx Brothers to The New Yorker. With the established store of Perelmania we're all familiar. "I've got Bright's disease and he has mine." "I don't know anything about medicine but I know what I like." "To err is human, to forgive supine." One means the style itself, that way of his densely droll yet feather-light; an eclectic yet consummately personal style, early come by, swiftly mastered, and never lost. Oh, there were times when he began to sound a little too much like S. J. Perelman; times when we wanted to tell him, "You're inimitable, remember? So stop trying to write like yourself." But what so-called "serious" writer among us can lay claim to a wizardry more stunning, a grasp of the cadences and phonetics of the English language surer than his? Here is a member of whom we might most readily say that he was a painstaking perfectionist who slaved over every word, and he was a humorist—one of the tiny handful ever admitted to this choosy society.

The best of Perelman is as good as anything in our native legacy of laughter. The best—and an artist should always be judged by his best, don't we agree—the cream bids fair to outlast the century, and may even, who knows, beat Stendhal's sententious rap, even taking into account Perelman's own dictum on that score, that immortality is a chancy matter, subject to the caprice of the unborn.

Well, in any case, there's the lifetime's oeuvre, and we might take worse leave of our jester than by quoting another Sydney, the English clergyman-wit, Sydney Smith, who said in a letter to Bishop Blomfield, "You must not consider me foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave."