Word: perelman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With this posthumous volume, S.J. Perelman answers his most famous acolyte. The days of the humorist were lettered, with explosive messages to family, colleagues, editors and amours...
...some 20 books of collected short pieces, Perelman offered a unique amalgam of elegant phrase and pratfall comedy. Behind each one was the carefully drawn self-portrait of a curmudgeon, skewering the pretentious, detonating popular culture and putting backspin on cliches ("Jigwise, all is up"). The role of sulfurous commentator was not a disguise. Don't Tread on Me proves that the life story of Perelman was the adventures of Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde. Early on he decided that Will Rogers' statement "I never met a man I didn't like" was "pure flatulence, crowd-pleasing and fake humility...
Coming upon the prose of his young New Yorker colleague John Updike, Perelman is "overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page." Lawrence Durrell is "one of those Englishmen whose eye is especially made for spitting into." A publisher's catalog contains "only a few horrors like Tom Wolfe (of whom I suspect they're secretly ashamed...
...Even Perelman's enthusiasms are vinegary. He had famously collaborated on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, but when an editor plans to anthologize portions of the film scripts, their scenarist responds, "If illiterates and rock fans (synonymous) can only be led to purchase my work by dangling before them the fact that I once worked for the Marx brothers, then let us find some other publisher." James Agee and Dorothy Parker were friends of Perelman's, but readers would never know it from his keyhole view of the beach house the two shared: "They both exist...
Dorothy Herrmann's recent biography, S.J. Perelman: A Life, points out what any sensible reader already knows: humorists are not a sunny breed. They pick up their tribulations by the wrong end, and that provokes mirth. But after the audience leaves, the anguish remains. Perelman's boon companion and brother- in-law, Novelist Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts), died young (36) in a car crash. Perelman never fully recovered from the blow, nor did his wife Laura, who descended into alcoholism. Many of his best letters deal obliquely with the disappointments he felt with his family and his work...