Perelman Tonight: Our author in L.A. -- the conclusion of "Strictly from Hunger"

Groucho Marx cracks up S. J. Perelman and their interviewer, critic Kenneth Tynan, in London, 1964. Perelman worked on the screenplays for Monkey Business (1931) and my favorite Marx Brothers picture, Horse Feathers (1932).

"In the distance a glow of huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide."

-- from Part 2 of "Strictly from Hunger"

by Ken

Last night in Part 1 of "Strictly from Hunger" we left our author chugging into Los Angeles after a most picturesque train ride to begin his new life as "a scenario writer," as his Mamma put it while weeping "into a small pillowcase she had brought along for the purpose." ("Tenderly she pinned to my lapel the green tag reading "To Plushnick Productions, Hollywood, California.'") By coincidence, S. J. Perelman himself had, as he explained in the Introduction to Part I of The Most of S. J. Perelman (1958), "gained my livelihood writing for the silver screen, an occupation which, like herding swine, makes the vocabulary pungent but contributes little to one's prose style."

I think even newcomers to Perelman will already have gleaned two basic characteristics of his writing: the breathless, even dizzying word play, and the ultimate parodist's impulse to push everywhere, with the utmost casualness, into the absurd and on into the preposterous. I'm not sure these are even different things, at least in Perelman's hands, and I offer as a brief sample the above extract from the opening paragraph of section II of "Strictly from Hunger." I might note that he follows this glorious representation of his first image of L.A. (c1930, remember) with this: "Suddenly our powerful Gatti-Cazazza slid to a stop in the traffic." Giulio Gatti-Casazza had been manager of La Scala before coming to New York and serving as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1935.

Or there's the description of the author's hostess, Violet Hush, and her magnificent home (of beaver-board -- recently remodeled by a family of wrens):

Violet was good to the touch, with a firm fleshy texture like a winesap or pippin. It seemed but a moment before we were sliding under the porte-cochère of her home, a magnificent rambling structure of beaver-board patterned after an Italian ropewalk of the sixteenth century. It had recently been remodeled by a family of wrens who had introduced chewing gum into the left wing, and only three or four obscure Saxon words could do it justice.

FOR THE CONCLUSION OF "STRICTLY
FROM HUNGER," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW IN PERELMAN TONIGHT: I'm thinking the Introduction to Part II (1944-50) of The Most of S. J. Perelman and maybe the opening of Acres and Pains


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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