[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1960, Wain compares the Jacobs's short fiction with the work of S. J. Perelman.]

Why the digression? Surely there is enough material in the brilliant virtuosity and long career of S. J. Perelman to satisfy the most restless analyst?

Certainly. I have always been an admirer of Perelman, and when early last year I was so fortunate as to make his acquaintance in New York, our conversation stimulated a long-nursed wish to write an essay on his work. But whenever I look round for a comparison, a contrast, something by which to take a bearing, it is always Jacobs who comes to mind. Not George Ade, not Ring Lardner, both acknowledged influences on Mr. Perelman's work; but this forgotten Edwardian English humorist, creator of “the Night-Watchman and other longshoremen.”

One reason for the mental jump is plain. The very completeness of Jacobs's disappearance is an illustration of something that bulks very large in the life of a comic writer. Fashions in humour change with bewildering speed, and the world of the comic writer is as tough as the world of the circus strong-man. Once the day comes when he cannot lift that weight, he makes way for someone who can—and there is no argument and no second chance. So perhaps it is inevitable that the comparison should be with a writer whose jokes have turned to dust. Such a comparison might help to answer the question, What makes a joke keep? And are the best jokes the ones that keep longest?

W. W. Jacobs, to begin at the beginning, was an English writer of humorous short stories whose popularity hit a peak some time before 1914 and stayed at that peak till about 1940. Some of his pieces were sentimental or morbidly horrific; one of these, “The Monkey's Paw,” seems to be the only fragment of his work that made any impression in America. But in England Jacobs was best known as a funny man; in fact his character “the Night-Watchman,” in whose quaint argot many of his stories were told, must have been one of the best-known people in English fiction. As a boy at school, I came in at the tail-end of Jacobs's popularity; my friends and I used to pass his books from hand to hand and chortle unwearyingly over the jokes. I realize, now, that we were the last generation for whom Jacobs worked. It is a taste that links us with our fathers, but will never link us with our sons. Ask any company of 21-year-olds nowadays if they have heard of Jacobs, and watch the puzzled frowns. I find it almost incredible that he has disappeared so abruptly. The formerly solid earth opened in some odd moment when one's back was turned, and Jacobs, together with his gallery of permanent characters—the Night-Watchman, Ginger Dick, Sam Small, Peter Russet, Bob Pretty and the Oldest Inhabitant—disappeared forever.

Was this inevitable? Does humour always go out of fashion? By no means. We can make a fair distinction between durable and non-durable humour. If we look at Shakespeare, for instance, we see at once that the jokes based on character and situation are still as funny as they were; it is the purely modish humour of word-play and parody that has died. Falstaff, from the moment he enters with that magnificent opening line, “Now Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” is the great comic figure he must always have been. (This is not to deny that there are some people, mostly women, who just don't think the Falstaff scenes are funny. Such jokes simply don't work with them. But these, you can be sure, existed in Shakespeare's day too. This is not a question of fashion, but of temperament.) Chaucer's jokes, except where they happen to be on subjects that have passed completely out of memory, are still supremely funny. So is a lot of the comedy of ancient Greece.

It is not, then, an immutable fate that puts comic writing out of date. But there is one heavy law, to which I can think of no exceptions. Changes of fashion, in every other art reversible, are in comic writing irreversible. The things we think funny today in older writers have been thought funny without interruption down the centuries. Once the joke is lost, it stays lost. A novelist or poet can have a period “out,” as Donne or Sterne did, and come back with a resounding bang. But a joker, once buried, is never dug up. Of course, there may be a few years here and there in which a good comic writer is buried by prudery as the Victorians buried Restoration and classical comedy. But banning a writer is a different matter from reading him with a yawn; those Victorians (and they were, whether surprisingly or not, quite numerous) who did read The Country Wife or Lysistrata didn't deny that they were funny.

Let us take the matter a little further. When a joke goes out of date it is usually because an attitude has disappeared. What a man finds funny is a sure guide to his character, and, for historical reasons, the characters of whole societies, and therefore of the people in them, can change—not, perhaps, basically, but certainly enough to drive a lot of jokes out of circulation. Jacobs went out because he wrote within the convention that the English working man is funny—I mean funny per se, funny before he does or says anything funny. With his strange accent, his inability to pronounce the letter “h,” his comical clothes, he has only to walk into the pages of a book and the reader gets his facial muscles ready for a smile. That, at any rate, was the convention. It sprang, of course, from middle-class complacency and middle-class bewilderment. Both the writer and his reader were genteel persons who had, owing to the rigidity of English life, very little contact with the working man, who consequently remained a puzzle; they could not think what sort of life went on in those rows of blackened little houses, or what it was really like to do that sort of work. The novel, and fiction generally, is (in Europe at any rate) essentially a bourgeois form. Neither the working class nor the aristocracy figure in it at all centrally. An aristocrat, in an English novel, is just as likely to be a comic figure—when he is not merely a focus for envious fantasies—as a labourer. So the lower-deck, below-stairs character was shown as funny because a laugh is the natural human reaction to something you don't understand. And also because it kept him in his place. And also because, not having been educated and therefore finding the world full of mysteries, he tended to mispronounce words, to hold on to quaint beliefs, to make laughable mistakes. And lastly because, as anyone can see, the English working class are funny, in the good sense; they have humour and gaiety, more so in many cases than the higher-ups.

Nothing in Jacobs's writing suggests that he ever questioned these conventions. Here is a specimen. (The situation: three sailormen have been asked to speak words of caution to a youngster, nephew to one of them, who is about to jump into an early marriage.)

“Twenty-one is young,” ses Ginger, shaking his head. “'Ave you known 'er long?”

“Three months,” says the nevy. “She lives in the same street as I do. 'Ow it is she ain't been snapped up before, I can't think, but she told me that she didn't care for men till she saw me.”

“They all say that,” ses Ginger.

“If I've 'ad it said to me once, I've 'ad it said twenty times,” ses Peter, nodding.

“They do it to flatter,” ses old Sam, looking as if 'e knew all about it. “You wait till you are my age, Joe; then you'll know; why, I should ha' been married dozens o' times if I 'adn't been careful.”

“P'r'aps it was a bit on both sides,” ses Joe, looking at 'is uncle. “P'r'aps they was careful too. If you could only see my young lady you wouldn't talk like that. She's got the truthfullest eyes in the world. Large grey eyes like a child's, leastways sometimes they are grey and sometimes they are blue. It seems to depend on the light somehow; I 'ave seen them when they was a brown—brownish-gold. And she smiles with 'er eyes.”

“Hasn't she got a mouth?” ses Ginger, wot was getting a bit tired of it.

“You've been crossed in love,” ses the nevy, staring at 'im. “That's wot's the matter with you. And looking at you, I don't wonder at it.”

Such passages as this are a strange mixture of genuinely good writing, polished and well timed, and inert convention which has dated badly. Jacobs has a useful gift for extracting humour out of very simple situations, without flogging them to death; on the other hand, he also expects us to be amused at the stylized lingo full of dropped h's, “wot,” and the rest of it. This kind of thing is really a form of pastoral; the characters are no more like real sailors than a Dresden figure is like a real shepherd; they are simplified figures, constructed to live in a world of utterly harmless comedy where vice is typified by one half-pint too many and trouble by a spell of nagging from the wife. It has, I surmise, gone out of fashion because no one today is interested in such innocence. And if they were, they would hardly people their pastoral landscape with working-class figures, for that convention has also gone out. In the 'thirties, the British left-wing conscience woke up uneasily to the fact that the working man simply did not appear in English literature; they set to work to remedy this, and the result was a flood of “social realism” which usually showed proletarian life as an unending round of misery and humiliation; that tide has receded in its turn, but while it lasted it did a lot to wash away the Jacobs kind of humour. P. G. Wodehouse has worn better, because the aristocracy are still a subject for jokes: besides which, he has another and quite separate readership among Americans and Continentals who interpret him, mistakenly, as the biting satirist of a decadent ruling class.

With the innocence of the Jacobs passage just quoted, compare a snatch of Perelman. (The situation: two psychoanalysts, hired to oversee detail in film scenes that concern their mystery, meet in Hollywood.)

“How do you like it out here, Randy?” Wormser inquired. “I get a slight sense of confusion. Perhaps I'm not adjusted yet.”

“You're inhibited,” said Kalbfus, signaling the waiter to repeat. “You won't let yourself go. Infantile denial of your environment.”

“I know,” said Wormser, plaintively, “but a few weeks ago I saw Jack Benny in a sleigh on Sunset Boulevard—with real reindeer. And last night an old hermit in a pillowcase stopped me and claimed the world was coming to an end. When I objected, he sold me a box of figs.”

“You'll get used to it,” the other replied. “I've been here five months, and to me it's God's country. I never eat oranges, but, hell, can you imagine three dozen for a quarter?”

“I guess you're right,” admitted Wormser. “Where are you staying?”

“At the Sunburst Auto Motel on Cahuenga,” said Kalbfus, draining his glass. “I'm sharing a room with two extra girls from Paramount.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I—I didn't know you and Mrs. Kalbfus were separated.”

“Don't be archaic. She's living there, too.” Kalbfus snapped his fingers at the waiter. “Once in a while I fall into the wrong bed, but Beryl's made her emotional adjustment; she's carrying on with a Greek in Malibu. Interesting sublimation of libido under stress, isn't it? I'm doing a paper on it.” Wormser raised his hand ineffectually to ward off the fifth Zombola, but Kalbfus would not be overborne.

“None of that,” he said sharply. “Come on, drink up. Yes, sir, it's a great town, but I'll tell you something, Sherm. We're in the wrong end of this business. Original stories—that's the caper.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “I'll let you in on a secret, if you promise not to blab. I've been collaborating with the head barber over at Fox, and we've got a ten-strike. It's about a simple, unaffected manicurist who inherits fifty million smackers.”

“A fantasy, eh?” Wormser pondered. “That's a good idea.”

“What the hell do you mean, fantasy?” demanded Kalbfus heatedly. “It happens every day. Wait till you hear the twisteroo, though. This babe, who has everything—houses, yachts, cars, three men in love with her—suddenly turns around and gives back the dough.”

“Why?” asked Wormser, sensing that he was expected to.

“Well, we haven't worked that out yet,” said Kalbfus confidentially. “Probably a subconscious wealth phobia. Anyway, Zanuck's offered us a hundred and thirty G's for it, and it isn't even on paper.”

At first sight we are tempted to say that the chief difference between this and Jacobs is the difference between the fast and the slow.

On a closer look it emerges that Perelman isn't, in fact, all that faster. Jacobs keeps the ball rolling pretty smartly; it is simply that he rolls it forward in a straight line, while Perelman, teeming with ideas and associations, keeps it bouncing to and fro unpredictably. They both depend on convention to a certain extent (the jargon of psychologists is funny now, as the dialect of working men was funny then), but Perelman also has teeth. He shows a satiric aggressiveness, not to say venom, quite foreign to Jacobs. The newly-awakened greed and intemperance of the two professional men spirited from their staid consulting-rooms to this Babylon, though presented in terms of apparently high-spirited fun, stays behind as a strongly presented idea always will. The man of learning and wisdom, pitchforked into this milieu, immediately sinks to the level of the uneducated man (in this case, a barber) and the two join forces in search of “a ten-strike.”

I gather that Perelman's importance as a satirist is recognized in America; it isn't, yet, in England, where his conventional standing is simply that of an adroit “crazy” humorist, associated in most people's minds with the Marx brothers more than with anything else. Recently, on a visit to England, Perelman was interviewed on the radio by three men at once (this technique of setting on the victim in a mob is spreading among interviewers), and their questions revealed a staggering lack of perception, especially with regard to this question of seriousness. None of the three seemed to realize that they were dealing with a satirist, a man who has selected definite targets and peppered them with something a good deal heavier than the buckshot of the orthodox feuilletoniste. Some of his targets are within the area that could be broadly described as aesthetic; offences against taste, whether literary, architectural or gastronomic, always call for at least a flick from Perelman's lash; but often (surprisingly often, when one comes to read him in bulk) he directs his satire at something bigger and more tangible. Certain figures of fun, and very venomous fun at that, appear over and over again. The employer who keeps his subordinates in a continuous state of panic and mutual suspicion, for instance, is a great theme of Perelman's,¹ all the way from Sanford Claus, head of “the biggest toy concern in the world,” in his early parody of Odets, Waiting for Santy, to Fleur Fenton Cowles, “today's editorial thunderhead and the most dynamic personality in the postwar publishing world.” The techniques differ; Santy goes into the workroom on December 24th with, “Boys, do you know what day tomorrow is?” Gnomes (crowding around expectantly): “Christmas!” Claus: “Correct. When you look in your envelopes tonight, you'll find a little present from me—a forty per cent pay cut. And the first one who opens his trap—gets this.” (As he holds up a tear-gas bomb and beams at them, the gnomes utter cries of joy, join hands, and dance around him shouting exultantly.)

Here the joke is more at the expense of the social-protest drama of the 'thirties than at anything of flesh and blood; Mrs. Cowles (“I guess I'm just professionally intolerant of stupid people. … It's one of my biggest faults, but I can't help it”) is made the subject, or perhaps we should say the peg, of a very devastating satirical piece (The Hand that Cradles the Rock). Then there is Bruce Hyssop, manager of a chain of Los Angeles drugstores, who holds court sitting at a “nonobjective desk” of his own design, strung by wires from the ceiling. When he enters, his assistants crowd forward eagerly.

Omnes: How did the sneak preview go last night, B.H.? Did we get a hand on the citrate of magnesia? How many bolts of linoleum did we sell?

Hyssop (frowning): It needs work. From the reaction cards, it looks as if my hunch were right. The average public isn't ready for phone booths in the front of the store.

Swickard: Remember my prediction, Bruce? I said it would confuse them!

Thimig: I experienced dubeity anent it, too. You've got to hide telephones in the back, among the cigarette cartons.

Miss F.: Or down a good, dark stairway, so you can use a neon arrow. Dramatize it—appeal to their sense of adventure, of the unknown.

Hyssop (nodding): Correct. Now, myself, I like the front of our stores kept severe, even a shade Spartan. Just a few airplane tires on a counter, some electric pads, money belts, facial tissues, or so. That whets people's interest and tempts them to browse. (They all vigorously echo his sentiments. Meanwhile, the desk before him sways erratically, dumping the papers and fountain pen he has placed on it on the floor. As Swickard and Thimig scramble to retrieve them, Hyssop's brow darkens). Have any of you been fiddling with these wires?

Thimig: Gosh, no, Bruce! (unthinking). You see, the damp weather causes them to expand and contract, and consequently …

Hyssop (instantly): What's that? Aren't you satisfied with our South (sic) California climate?

Thimig (anguished): Me? I'm wild about it! I'd rather be dead here than alive in Cedar Rapids—you know that, Bruce!

Hyssop: You're an Easterner, Thimig. Sooner or later, they always sell you out. (Thimig demonstrates his loyalty by producing an aerial view of Cedar Rapids, tearing it to shreds, and grinding them under his heel. Hyssop relents). All right, but better watch your step hereafter. Well, let's hear the weekly suggestions. Anything promising come in?

Miss F.: There's one from the manager of the Beverly Hills branch. They get a studio-type clientele, mostly, in their fountain, individuals with an acid condition and nervous indigestion.

Hyssop (impatiently): We went into all that last fall. It isn't feasible to spray the customers with cocaine.

Miss F.: No, this is another approach. He says why not add pepsin to some of the ready dishes and feature a line of heartburn specials.

Hyssop: There's no royal road to stomach relief. Seymour Erstwell is a real go-getter, but he doesn't grasp the basic psychology. The patron wants to feel distress coming on, so he can counteract it with the proper medication. Take that away and half the pleasure of eating is gone. You follow?

Swickard: I never thought it through before, but you've put your finger on the crux of the matter.

Thimig (sotto voce): Has that man got a gift for congealing the whole thing in a nutshell! It's spooky.

Hyssop (modestly): My mind runs that way. Ever since I'm a tad, why, I've had a restless impulse to probe beneath the surface, to constantly analyze, analyze, analyze.

Swickard: Which it's the hallmark of every industrial wizard worth a hoot.

(Pestle and Mortar)

Of course, if all Perelman's more satiric pieces were concerned with this theme of people cringing before the boss, we might deny him the status of a satirist and call him merely a writer who has worked in Hollywood and carries the inevitable scar-tissue. (It is impossible to read far in Perelman without coming across a hostile reference to Hollywood.) But there are other recurring targets. People who see a “Red” behind every move toward reform, for instance.

“I'll show those sneaking Nihilists!” she declared angrily. “Coming in here and corrupting our good American workmen with their Utopian ideas! If they don't like our country, why don't they go back where they came from? Just imagine, George, they want me to divide everything fifty-fifty with some smelly peasant! That's the trouble with those foreigners, they make all their money over here and then take it back with them to Poland. Hanging's too good for those Socialists!” Unfortunately, Avid's heated words were not lost on a Red spy lurking in the crowd. Bomb in hand, he slunk off sneering evilly and promising revenge.

(The Red Termites)

That passage can also serve as a pointer to another of the main elements in Perelman's work, the all-pervading air of parody. Outside of dialogue, almost every sentence he writes echoes the inflated style of late-Victorian and Edwardian writing. It is not so much this or that author who is suggested as the whole anonymous style of the period between 1860 and 1914. Sometimes Perelman steps up the pomposity, turning the effect from simple imitation into parody, but usually he copies faithfully the rhythms, cadences and vocabulary of his chosen period, and the joke lies in the incongruity of context. On a visit to the Sphinx, for instance, recounted in Westward Ha!,

“All I bore away from the encounter was a nose burned the colour of an eggplant and a fearsome case of bloat induced by drinking seven bottles of soda pop in quick succession. Some anonymous genius has had the inspiration to pitch a soft-drink stand a few hundred feet away, or possibly it was even part of the original statue; in any case, I never expect to recapture the gratitude I felt for that pitiful patch of shade.”

In those few lines we can see the style teetering on the edge of parody (“bore away from the encounter”) but on the whole keeping to what we might call straight Perelmanese (the rueful joke at his own expense, recounted with fanatical precision of imagery), until, in that last sentence, it plunges straight into the language of the Edwardian tale of adventure. Every intrepid traveller, every retired Colonel, every tanned, pipe-smoking man of few words who settled down, his hair greying at the temples and his joints stiffening, to write the story of his adventures in Africa or India, must at some point or other have said, “I never expect to recapture the gratitude I felt for that pitiful patch of shade.” It took Perelman to transfer the formula to a soft-drink stand by the side of the Sphinx. And by doing so, he accomplishes two things. First, he turns the already droll tale of his adventure into a parody of the retired colonel's narrative, thereby giving us, so to speak, another gift inside the same package; secondly, he shows a streak of yearning for an age which had more leisure, dignity, stateliness. There is no doubt that Perelman's compulsion to introduce Edwardian phraseology really points to an affection for it, just as his constant references to the masterpieces of literature and art represent an instinctive recoil from the shoddy and the pretentious which make up the target for his satire. Only a man steeped to the very eyebrows in the fiction of an older day would find his pen so continually reproducing its rhythms.

“If I bore myself with a certain assurance, it was because I had chosen my wardrobe with some care—a shower-of-hail suit, lilac gloves, a split-sennit boater, and a light whangee cane. Altogether, I had reason for self-satisfaction; I had dined famously off a charmburger and a sky-high malt, my cigar was drawing well, and the titles of the pictures I was about to witness, ‘Block That Kiss’ and ‘Khaki Buckaroo’, augured gales of merriment.”

What gives this prose its vertiginous quality is the lightning juxtaposition of irreconcilables. The Edwardian adventurer “dined famously” off a cold bird and a bottle of hock; the Perelman-figure dines famously off a charmburger; the effect on the reader is a rapid jolt from one world to another, and of course depends on his having some familiarity with both. When a generation arises, as it is probably arising at this moment, that has never read yarns in which the hero “chooses his wardrobe with some care” and “dines famously,” half of Perelman's magic will be lost. Only half, because he has wisely not invested his whole comic capital in this parody; there will still be the quickfire dialogue, the rubbery vocabulary that twists itself out of shape, the metaphors that suddenly leap into grotesque life, and so on. “With a blow I sent him grovelling. In ten minutes he was back with a basket of appetizing fresh-picked grovels.” “The homeward-bound Americans on the boat-train platform at Waterloo Station, London, were as merry as grigs (the Southern Railway had considerately furnished a box of grigs for purposes of comparison).” “Before Nature made him, she broke the mould.” “… if you're basking before the hearth with a siphon handy and Rosey Fahrleit playing over your face. …”

Still, the element of parody and re-creation, the constant echo from a past that was fading before Perelman wrote a line, is what claims one's attention; it is, after all, the thing that distinguishes Perelman from other humorists. Edwardian prose, the gloomy magnificence of a lost age of dignity, flavours everything he writes. He is like a living man wandering in a world of ghosts, uttering spells which call them up and then finding himself unable to talk to them. And in this he joins hands with many of the most characteristic writers of our century. It is instructive to compare a piece by Perelman with, say, Mr. Eliot's The Waste Land. In each case, the building is sharply contemporary, but the bricks have been taken from the ruins of an older building, and the impact depends on the reader's awareness that this is so. Eliot's quotations from the classics, woven into the structure of his poem in the same spirit of ironic juxtaposition as the musical quotations that occur in a jazz-man's improvisations, are—for all their different intention—the exact counterpart of Perelman's dizzy rain of parodied fragments. In each case, the impression left by the writing is one of sharp-witted mockery tinged with deep pessimism.

The technique of The Waste Land is primarily cinematic. Images jammed together, fading and melting landscapes, became a familiarity to the Western mind only after the cinema had got into its stride. And perhaps it is not irrevelant (sic) to point out that Perelman, with his years of work in Hollywood, is more directly a child of the cinema than Eliot, just as his relationship with jazz is more direct. (His friendship with Goodman has, I suspect, been formative—quite possibly in either direction.) In the last analysis, what all these jazz and cinematic techniques are doing is something quite easy to describe, though not easy to do. The aim is always to create an art which will hold dissimilar elements in some kind of unity, however precarious. That is the search of the characteristic modern intelligence as applied to art. Thomas Mann once remarked that in our time the traditional categories of comedy and tragedy had crumbled, leaving the grotesque as the dominant mode. Certainly a work like his Felix Krull, Confidence Man is a gigantic piece of grotesque art. The modern man lives in a world of shattered structures; artistically and intellectually, the bombs have already gone off, and we are trying to pick up the pieces and fit them together in a new way. And this applies not only to the fragments we find outside ourselves but also to the ones within. Perelman's art, like that of Eliot, is an art stretched to cover moods and attitudes that sometimes lie a long way apart. Perelman's joking does not exclude melancholy; it includes it, as everyone can feel.

This is where we circle back to Jacobs. His comic art was simple, unlinear, exclusive. Like most comic writers, Jacobs had considerable streaks both of sentimentality and brutality. Unable to bring this material under the umbrella of his comic idiom, he occasionally gave it a ride on its own, the result being some of the most unpalatable stories ever written. When he was not being funny, he was either dripping with sentimentality or devising stories that show a very ugly sadism, such as “The Monkey's Paw” or “The Brown Man's Servant.”

In purely stylistic terms, the split is even more marked. When speaking in his own person, Jacobs writes exactly the kind of prose from which Perelman's burlesque manner takes off, as we see if we compare two passages.

(i) Of all classes of men, those who follow the sea are probably the most prone to superstition. Afloat upon the black waste of waters, at the mercy of wind and sea, with vast depths and strange creatures below them, a belief in the supernatural is easier than ashore, under the cheerful gaslamps.

(ii) Silhouetted against the afterglow of the fiery red sun which had vanished a moment before over the Mid-Atlantic horizon, the chief officer of the Queen Mary paced the bridge, frowning into the gathering darkness. From the deck beneath his feet came the even measured throb of the ship's pulse as she cleft the trackless deep, driven ever onward towards the shores of the New World. It had been a halcyon day; wind and water were favoring the voyage, passengers and crew alike were in a frame of high good humor, and all indications pointed to a smooth, uneventful run to Ambrose Channel sixty hours distant. And yet this vigilant watcher of the skies, on whose shoulders rested the responsibility for the leviathan and her cargo of four thousand souls, was oppressed by a vague disquiet.

Number (ii), of course, is the Perelman; but a second glance, however rapid, is needed before one can be quite sure. “Afloat upon the black waste of waters” is so much the kind of phrase Perelman loves to sport with, while to Jacobs it is a sign to be hung out, meaning “this story is going to be serious—it isn't one of my funny ones.”

It seems to me, then, that there is something to be learnt from a comparison between the forgotten Jacobs and the reigning Perelman. The ingredients are strangely similar; only Perelman mixes them as they are mixed in the twentieth century, Jacobs as in the nineteenth. Jacobs can be innocently funny or solemnly straight-faced, and finds it natural to switch from one to the other and employ a style that gives due warning to the reader. In his world, people still knew where they were. Hence the strong adverse reaction to a book like Ulysses on its first appearance. Joyce's opponents made a big case over the book's alleged obscenity, but I suspect that the real outrage it offered to them was in its scrambling of categories, its blend of farce and pathos, grandeur and littleness. Everyone is more or less accustomed to obscenity, but a real attack on one's mental habits nearly always causes shocked resentment. “Modern” art and literature made this attack from about 1914 onwards, and Perelman, who began writing in the mid-'twenties, was one of the first comic writers to begin from the premises on which “serious” modern literature was based. If we compare him with E. E. Cummings, for example, we see that there are many things in common, the chief difference being that Perelman is on the whole the more interesting.

As an American writer, working steadily from the mid-'twenties to the late 'fifties, Perelman has lived through a series of social and intellectual earthquakes, which are faithfully recorded in his work. One feels that he devised his strange, kaleidoscopic style because he felt the need of a new way of writing, one that would mirror the restless dance of incongruities that so disturbs the European visitor to America. The whole modern world suffers from this disease; once industrialism has put an end to the world of hand industries and local materials, there is no reason why cities, for instance, should grow up in a homogeneous style; but for obvious reasons America, and particularly the West, suffers most. Perelman is clearly very sensitive to this continual jangling and discontinuity. Sometimes he rounds on it with a blast of pure satire (as in the wonderful piece Second-Class Matter), but at others he seems to be trying, as most artists have tried in the last thirty years, to devise an idiom that will come to terms with it.

Naturally this effort has been most strenuous in America. The characteristic British artist still feels, for all the uprooting and acceleration that have been and will be, a sense that he is, in the words of Yeats, “Rooted in one dear perpetual place.” This, as well as economic reasons, might well be behind the British failure to develop a major cinema industry, for the film, with its constant melting and changing, is the art of the uprooted; Hollywood's predominance is usually explained away by saying that the money is there, but in fact poor countries like Japan and Italy—and, lately, India—have produced great films, and the reason is probably connected with this sense of the flowing away of foundations. England, in spite of its exposed military and economic position, still has an atmosphere of solid predictability which does not confront the artist with a perpetual challenge to experiment, to find new combinations and fusions, to strike out a fire-new idiom every few years.

S. J. Perelman could never be anything but an American writer. He has the restlessness, the unflagging zest of novelty, which gives American art, as well as life, so much of its glitter. And he is also American in his haunted awareness of Europe. In some American literary and artistic circles, it is the fashion to pretend that European culture was a passing fad of the American people, the product of mere self-consciousness and insecurity, and can now safely be dismissed. In Beatnik society, for example, it is better not to admit that you have ever heard of Shakespeare or Mozart, assuming that you have heard of them. Perelman has no such illusion. He knows, and every page that he writes shows it, that America has been a vast consumer-market for the European artist for three solid centuries, much too long to start pretending overnight that it never happened. His work reveals a mind deeply imbued with, and appreciative of, a traditional and therefore European-tilted culture; an American mind, wrestling with the problem of creating a new world, buoyant, energetic, and yet often dubious of the materials that are to hand and looking round for assurance that the old timbers, should they be needed, are still there. In a time like ours, such a mind will probably seek expression either in poetry or in a wild, imaginative humour. For they, after all, are the two kinds of writing that most nearly meet.

Note

1. (cf.). Edmund Wilson's notes on Henry Ford, written about 1930 and reprinted in The American Earthquake, 1955. “(Ford) is ready, on occasion, to dismiss his oldest and closest associates without a word of explanation or warning. People innocently come back to their offices to discover that their departments have been abolished and that they themselves are no longer supposed to exist; they have found, in certain cases, their desks smashed to pieces with an axe. … The result of all this is that Ford todayday is surrounded by professional yes-men who live in terror of differing from him.” Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake (New York: Doubleday), 1955.