Pickled
Benny Green
Vinegar Puss S. J. Perelman (Weiden%Id and Nicolson 23.95) The destiny of those who start out in life as a Young man's fancy is well known and nafortunate. When I was eighteen I cons.idered S. J. Perelman to be the funniest literary clown in the world, a custard pie on tWo legs, an unseen Groucho whose unspoken scripts leapt from the page and smashed you straight in the funnybone. He tlWas not easy to come by in those days; the enguin edition of Crazy Like a Fox, which Was published about twenty-five years ago, Was all we had to go by, but for a while it Was enough. To this day I bump into lniddle-aged men in the street every now and again who claim to have been teenaged I,ntimates of mine and counter the stark reisbelief in my eyes by spitting out a quote rrc" A Farewell to Omsk or The Idol's Eye. 'n those days we would walk the corridors °f reality hoping for a conversational ,u,Proortunity to drop one of Perelman's The great pearl of the Crazy Like a Fox collection was 'Somewhere a Roscoe', Perelman's riotous attack on sub-Dashiel Hammett fiction. We would walk the streets chortling endlessly over 'A Brunette jane was lying there. . . she was as dead as vaudeville', 'there was a bullet-hole through his think-tank ; he was as dead as a fried oyster', 'she was as dead as an iced catfish', 'as dead as a stuffed mongoose', our hilarity being so hysterical that it never occurred to us that Perelman himself had invented none of these similes, that he was quoting from the public prints, that the real humorist was the anonymous and long-forgotten hack who had written the stories. I don't know if we thought Perelman was a satirist, but if we did we were wrong. The satirist ridicules the bad in order to make room for the good, but Perelman, a cunning master of pastiche, ridicules the bad because it is the bad he prefers. If there were no hacks in the world, where would he be? The answers were provided, and slowly seeped into my head, in the years following my discovery of Crazy Like a Fox. Each anthology seemed marginally less readable than the last, and by around 19551 had forsworn him altogether.
But a writer has to live, and Perelman has never stopped publishing further collections of his work, the latest of which is probably no worse than any of the others. Perhaps if I were coming to him for the first time I would find Vinegar Puss as intoxicating as ever. But twenty-five years is more than enough time to familiarise oneself with Perelman's box of tricks: the literal interpretation of a figure of speech, (so that in his latest collection a clean pair of heels turns out to be a reference to a couple of laundry employees), the straight-faced setting up of the essay, usually with a quote from a newspaper or magazine, the reckless flinging about of cultural allusions meant to flatter us into believing we know what we are reading about, hence the man in one of the new pieces who turns 'Veronese green around the gills'.
There are two aspects of Vinegar Puss which give the game away rather more blatantly than some recent collections. The first is a purely geographical problem; not so long ago Perelman came to live in London, and has unwisely given us the chance to read the fruits of that abortive experiment between hard covers. The London pieces really are quite awful, a judgement I find it very difficult to make. That my one-time hero should have made the simple mistake of writing about things he knows less than nothing about is a very sad business indeed. In the old days his effect on a young Londoner was doubly potent because he was writing about places as remote as Babylon and as desirable as the isles of the Hesperides. If we were never going to stand on the corner of Hollywcod and Vine, or stroll along Broadway, at least we could read Perelman, which seemed the next best thing. But how can we take kindly to the feeble jocosities _about getting your washing done in Mayfair ?
Perelman's other problem, the artistic one, has been lying in wait for him for the last fifty years, and is to do with the fact that if you reduce every literary artifice to a joke, how is anyone to recognise the moment when you are trying to be serious ? In several of the piece § in the latest collection there is an air of the raconteur relating some item of autobiography; it is a far cry from the laboriously set-up laughs at the expense of a newspaper paragraph or an ad in a magazine, yet it is not altogether unwelcome. Perelman's wry laughter can become a bit of a trial after all this time, and it might be highly educational to read him on the subject of himself, a theme he has exercised once or twice in newspaper interviews when tempted to fling a little wellcooked bile in the direction of the Marx Brothers. But in a piece like 'Ready, Aim, Flee', where we think we are being set up for an interesting reminiscence, everything collapses into a heap of the same old jokes. I have no idea if Perelman meant to sell us a dummy in this way, or if he knows that to modulate from one impossible key to another is bad tactics. All I do know is that the realisation that 'Ready, Aim, Flee!' was not going to be any different in spirit from 'Somewhere a Roscoe' disappointed me bitterly. It must be longer than I thought since the day I first exploded over that moment in 'A Farewell to Omsk' where Afya gloomily 'dislodged a piece of horseradish from his tie and shied it at a passing Nihilist'.
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