(Follow S.J.P. from New York to Scotland, France, Russia, ...)
Follow S.J.P. from New York to Scotland, France, Russia, Turkey, Bankok, Java and back to Hollywood, U.S.A. in this fond, wry mosaic of the manias of mankind around the world.
(Contents: Up the close and down the stair -- Nesselrode t...)
Contents: Up the close and down the stair -- Nesselrode to jeopardy -- The hand that cradles the rock -- Cloudland revisited: Why, Doctor, what big green eyes you have! -- Chewies the goat but flicks need hypo -- Salesman, spare that psyche -- Cloudland revisited: Antic hey-hey -- Personne ici except us chickens -- Nirvana small by a waterfall -- The song is endless, but the malady lingers on -- Cloudland revisited: Oh, sing again that song of venery -- A girl and a boy anthropoid were dancing -- Duck, for the night is coming -- Exit Pagliacci, beefing -- Watch the birdie and shield the beezer -- Cloudland revisited: Rock-a-bye, Viscount, in the treetop -- On the banks of the Old Hogwash -- A hepcat may look at a king -- Hell hath no fury and Saks no brake -- Our vines have shrewder grapes -- Swing out, sweet opiate -- Cloudland revisited: Four-and-twenty blackjacks -- Young as you feel.
Sidney Joseph Perelman was an American humorist and author.
Background
He was born on February 1, 1904 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the only child of Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph Perelman and Sophia Charra. He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father embarked on a series of unsuccessful occupations including running a dry goods store and raising chickens. Perelman later wrote, "to this day I cringe at the sight of a gizzard. "
His early ambition was to be a cartoonist and as a young boy he remembered drawing cartoons in his father's store on the long cardboard strips around the bolts of gingham. In his youth Perelman read a wide variety of books popular at that time, including Graustark, Girl of the Limberlost, Scaramouche, the Horatio Alger success stories, and the novels of Charles Dickens.
In 1917 he received a writing prize in a nationwide essay contest but his primary interest was still cartooning.
Education
While attending Classical High School, his attention turned to movies and vaudeville.
In 1921 he entered Brown University in Providence as a premedical student. He later became an English major and joined the staff of the college humor magazine, the Brown Jug, as a cartoonist. In his senior year Perelman became editor of the magazine. Years later Brown University awarded the humorist an honorary degree.
Career
He held down a number of after-school jobs, including electroplating automobile radiators, a hazardous job that exposed him to acid fumes. At the insistence of his parents, he quit but quickly found work in a department store.
Perelman left Brown in 1924, one course short of graduation because he had failed the math requirement. Perelman then moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where he was a cartoonist at Judge, a weekly humor magazine, from 1924 until 1929. He produced cartoons weekly, with such captions as "I've got Bright's disease and he's got mine. " He also wrote short humorous pieces and his characteristic writing style began to emerge.
In 1929 he moved from Judge to College Humor, where his unique style of prose became evident. In 1929 a collection of his magazine pieces, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, was published by Horace Liveright. It garnered attention from Groucho Marx who was looking for a writer for an upcoming movie. The subsequent collaboration between Perelman and the Marx Brothers resulted in Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Later Perelman recalled, "I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals until the blood spurted from his frame than ever work for those sons of bitches again. "
Over the next decade Perelman worked periodically in Hollywood. Between 1932 and 1956, Perelman contributed to eleven screenplays, some individually, some collaboratively with his wife. Perelman detested Hollywood and quickly left after each lucrative project.
Tragedy befell the Perelmans in 1940, when Nathanael West and his wife were killed in a car accident. Perelman had begun to write pieces for the New Yorker in 1931 and continued for almost half a century. His early magazine pieces were published in the collection Strictly From Hunger (1937) and Look Who's Talking! (1940). Random House continued to publish his collections, which included The Dream Department (1943), Crazy Like a Fox (1944), and Keep It Crisp (1946).
From 1940 to 1960, Perelman published no fewer than 171 short comic essays, which were published in The Road to Miltown or, Under the Spreading Atrophy (1957) and The Rising Gorge (1961). Perelman teamed up with Ogden Nash in 1943 to write a successful musical, One Touch of Venus (music by Kurt Weill). This Broadway hit freed him financially from Hollywood.
He would not return until 1955, when he wrote the script for Mike Todd's production of Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). Despite Perelman's feelings of contempt and disdain for Todd and film writing in general, he produced a script that won the Academy Award. In 1962 he wrote a theatrical comedy, The Beauty Part, which starred Bert Lahr.
After the death of his wife Perelman, unable to work, sold his farm and Laura's belongings and moved to London. He told a reporter, "I've had all the rural splendor I can use, and each time I get to New York it seems more pestilential than before. " Once in London, he immediately embarked on an eighty-day trip around the world in imitation of the Jules Verne character Phineas Fogg.
He returned to New York in May 1972, and for the next seven years he continued to write and travel. In 1975 Vinegar Puss, his twentieth book, was published; Eastward Ha! appeared in 1977 and recounted his sixth trip around the world.
Perelman died in his sleep of natural causes in his Gramercy Park apartment in New York City.
(Follow S.J.P. from New York to Scotland, France, Russia, ...)
Views
Perelman used his mastery of the English language and ingenious syntax to parody everyday subjects--books, travel, advertisements, films. His hallmark was magnifying the ordinary situations that plague humans.
Quotations:
He once described his style as "mélange, a mixture of all the sludge I read as a child, all the clichés, liberal doses of Yiddish, criminal slang, and some of what I was taught in a Providence, Rhode Island, school by impatient teachers. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist and Perelman's good friend remembered: "He used to do these one-line jokes and then they became two lines and then they became six lines and finally the editors said to him, 'Listen, Sid. Why are you bothering with the drawing? Why don't you just extend the caption?' Which is what he did and that's how he started writing. "
The writer Paul Theroux observed: "Perelman's friends liked him very much. He was generous, he was funny, he was enormously social, he didn't boast. When he talked in his croaky drawl he did so in the elaborate way he wrote, with unlikely locutions and slang and precise descriptions diverted into strings of subordinate clauses. "
Perelman was a uniquely American writer who was credited by one critic as having a "profound gift for derangement. "
Interests
Writers
James Joyce and Flann O'Brien
Connections
Perelman married Laura West on July 4, 1929. He and Laura and their two young children divided their time between their farm in Bucks County, and their home in Greenwich Village.
His son Adam (born in 1936) committed several robberies in the mid 1950s, was accused of attempted rape, and ended up in a reformatory for wayward boys.