Full text of "Best of S. J. Perelman" THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE W O R L D'S BEST BOOKS THE BEST OF S.J. PERELMAN The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of THE MODERN LIBRARY, and listing each volume in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has been looking for, handsomely printed, in definitive editions, and at an unusually low price. OTHER BOOKS BY S. J. PERELMAN Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge Parlor, Bedlam and Bath (With Quentin Reynolds) Strictly from Hunger Look Who's Talking! The Dream Department Crazy Like a Fox Keep It Crisp THE BEST OF S.J. PERELMAN With a Critical Introduction by SIDNEY NAMLEREP THE MODERN LIBRARY NEW YORK * copyright, 1931, i93 2 > *933> 1 934> 1 91$> *93 6 > 1 937^ *93 8 > 1939, 1940, 1941, i94 2 > x 943> *944> x 94 6 > x 947> BY S. J . PERELMAN Renewed, 1959, i960, 1962 Acknowledgments are due The New Yorker, in which most of these stories first appeared, and College Humor, Judge, Life, Contact and Stage Magazine for permission to reprint material which was first published in their pages. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. THE MODERN LIBRARY is published by Random House, inc. BENNETT CERF • DONALD S. KLOPFER Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff 3 TO ROBERT C.BENCHLEY TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction by Sidney Namlerep ix Kitchen Bouquet 3 somewheee a roscoe ... 9 Waiting for Santy i 5 The Idol's Eye 19 Beauty and the Bee 2 5 Is there an Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House? 31 Abby, This Is Your Father 35 buffalos of the world, unite! 42 Sauce for the Gander 46 Frou-Frou, or Vertigo Revisited 53 Scenario 57 A Farewell to Omsk 64 Nothing but the Tooth 68 Woodman, Don't Spare that Tree! 73 Strictly from Hunger 79 P-s-s-t, Partner, Your Peristalsis Is Showing 92 A Pox on You, Mine Goodly Host 98 Slow— Dangerous Foibles Ahead! 103 Footnote on the Yellow Peril Midwinter Facial Trends Counter-Revolution 118 vii 109 113 Contents PAGF The Love Decoy 124 To Sleep, Perchance to Steam 1 30 Down with the Restoration! 1 35 The Body Beautiful 140 Poisonous Mushrooms 145 Button, Button, Whos Got the Blend? 149 Boy Meets Girl Meets Foot 155 What Am I Doing Away from Home? 161 Hold that Christmas Tiger! 166 Smugglers in the Dust 171 Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy 178 Tomorrow— Fairly Cloudy 185 Sweet and Hot 192 Seedlings of Desire 198 kltchenware, notions, llghts, action, camera! 205 Captain Future, Block that Kick! 210 Adorable, Taxable You 218 A Couple of Quick Ones 223 1. Arthur Kober 2. VlNCENTE MlNNELLI Avocado, or the Future of Eating 238 You Should Live So, Walden Pond 242 Swing Out, Sweet Chariot 246 Second-Class Matter 252 Wholly Cleaning and Dyeing 2 59 Well, Roll Me in a Turkish Towel! 264 Physician, Steel Thyself 270 Pale Hands I Loathe 279 Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away 285 Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer 291 viii INTRODUCTION In any consideration of S. J. Perelman— and S. J. Perelman certainly deserves the same consideration one accords old ladies on street cars, babies traveling unescort- ed on planes, and the feeble-minded generally— it is impor- tant to remember the crushing, the well-nigh intolerable odds under which the man has struggled to produce what may well be, in the verdict of history, the most picayune prose ever produced in America. Denied every advantage, beset and plagued by ill fortune and a disposition so crabbed as to make Alexander Pope and Dr. Johnson seem sunny by contrast, he has nevertheless managed to belt out a series of books each less distinguished than its predeces- sor, each a milestone of bombast, conceit, pedantry, and strutting pomposity. In his pages proliferate all the weird grammatical flora tabulated by H. W. Fowler in his Mod- em English Usage— the Elegant Variation, the Facetious Zeugma, the Cast-iron Idiom, the Battered Ornament, the BowerVBird Phrase, the Sturdy Indefensible, the Side-Slip, and the Unequal Yokefellow. His work is a museum of mediocrity, a monument to the truly banal. What Flaubert did to the French bourgeois in Bouvard and Pecuchet, what Pizarro did to the Incas, what Jack Dempsey did to Paolino Uzcudun, S. J. Perelman has done to American belles-lettres. It is customary to palliate the shortcomings of certain eminent men by pleading their physical drawbacks. Dos- toievsky's epilepsy, Beethoven's deafness and Milton's far blindness have all been served up on occasion to explain their vagaries. The same must be done for S. J. Perelman, except that he has labored under a far greater handicap. Extraordinary though it may seem, his entire output over the past two decades has been achieved without benefit of brain. The plain medical fact which cannot be blinked (and if we are to blink it, we must accept the conse- quences ) is that his skull is little more than a hollow gourd, a mere bony knob on which reposes a battered Herbert Johnson hat. How he contrives to fulfil the ordinary obli- gations of everyday life— to get to his office, philander with his secretary, bedevil his wife, and terrorize his chil- dren—is one of those mysteries of science like the common cold or mixed bathing. The rest of his physique is even less prepossessing. Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and con- cupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflic- ted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet. He has a good figure, if not a spectacular one; above the hips, a barrel chest and a barrel belly form a single plastic unit which bobbles uncertainly on a pair of skinny shanks. In motion, the man's body may best be likened to a New Bedford whaler in the teeth of an equi- noctial gale; in repose, it is strongly reminiscent of a giant sloth. In point of fact, from what small exterior evidence we possess, it would appear that he has modeled himself closely on that luckless animal. A monstrous Indolence, cheek by jowl with the kind of irascibility displayed by a Vermont postmaster while sorting the morning mail, is perhaps his chief characteristic. Small wonder that he should have chosen for his book-plate that significant Revolutionary emblem, a crouched rattlesnake above the terse injunction, "Don't Tread on Me/' But these idiosyncrasies, however striking, bear no more reference to Perelman's work than Landru's social graces did to his. Really to comprehend his writing (a project on a par with understanding Chichen-itza), one should ex- amine random passages. Let us select a few instances and explore, without rancor, their sources and implications. Take, for example, the two sentences in the essay called "Kitchen Bouquet" which opens this volume. The au- thor is speaking of a servant he employed briefly one sum- mer: "For some reason I never could fathom, unless it was that I occasionally wore a Tattersall vest, William persisted in regarding me as a racing man. He could recall every entry in the Cesarewitch Sweepstakes since 1899 and did, but faced with a pot roast, he assumed a wooden incomprehension that would have done credit to a Digger Indian." Now, although Perelman deliberately disavows any knowledge of racing, the references to the Tattersall vest and the Cesarewitch Sweepstakes mark him as an habitue of the tracks. Yet it can be stated with absolute authority that his closest contact with horse-hair was a short snooze on a Victorian sofa in 1916. The actual ori- gin of these allusions was as follows. Some twenty-four years ago, he borrowed and wore to a junior tea-dance xi jit his university a Tattersall vest, a circumstance which apparently impressed itself on the snobbish adolescent mind. Ten years later, in the English Bar at Chantilly, he overheard two elderly jockeys heatedly discussing the Cesarewitch. It was therefore inevitable that, since Perel- man suffers from what psychologists euphemistically term total recall, he should have dredged up these references when the opportunity arose. Anyone with a primitive sense of decency would have hesitated to exhume them, but this scavenger, this literary ghoul whose exploits would horrify a Scottish medical school, sticks at nothing. With fiendish nonchalance and a complete lack of reverence for good form, he plucks words out of context, ravishes them, and makes off whistling as his victims sob brokenly into the bolster. But it is when the reader comes face to face with a gigantic kitchen midden like "Scenario/' the eleventh ar- ticle in this collection, that his imagination reels. What is one to say of such deplorable lapses of logic and de- corum as "Gentlemen, I give you Martha Custis, hetman of the Don Cossacks, her features etched with the fragile beauty of a cameo" or "It's midsummer madness, Fia- metta! You mustn't! I must! I want you! You want me? But I— I'm just a poor little slavey, and you— why, all life's ahead of you! Fame, the love of a good woman, children! And your music, Raoul! Excuse me, miss, are you Fiametta Desplains? I am Yankel Patchouli, a solicitor.