S. J. Perelman: Cloudland Revisited

Introduction

by Adam Gopnik

Big books get made when fault lines break and crevasses in consciousness spring open, through wars and plagues and occupations. A War and Peace takes war, and peace. Great comic literature sits on historical fault lines too, but usually at moments when we can just begin to feel the earth move and hear, as a very distant rumble, the trembling of the plates. Molière’s comedies, for instance, are set within a confident aristocratic society and an absolutist court with strict rules and manners about fidelity, loyalty, and courtesy—but at a time when that arrangement was just beginning to be shaken by, and slip away from, a middle-class society with its own cult of candor and sincerity. Mark Twain made the greatest American comic novel by writing backwards, so to speak, to a moment when the great earthquake of his time, the Civil War, had not yet taken place, but was already in motion. In our own era, Steve Martin drew his juice and energy from the way that all the rituals of traditional show business as they had stood since vaudeville, were disassembling and suddenly could only be imagined ironically, so that being “entertaining” was in itself a form of being ridiculous.

S. J. Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series, written in the 1940s and ‘50s as a suite of pieces for The New Yorker, and in this volume reprinted in full for the first time, though irresistible as a tour de force of American language—filled with those astonishing Perelman sentences where nineteenth century circumlocution crashes head-on into twentieth-century demotic while a crowd of rubbernecking publicity agents and advertising writers look on—sits on another fault line between shifting attitudes to pop entertainment in America. Undertaken in a purely mocking vein as a study of the pulp fiction and silent movies that had held him in thrall as an adolescent, it devolves into a fascinated and affectionate one—and ends, for readers now, as a kind of working catalogue, sparkling rather than academic, of how American consciousness gets made from the birdcage lining of pop culture in our heads. Before any post-modern critic, Perelman gave us a green baize bag with among its contents, “a copy of Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, a half-eaten jelly sandwich, and a newspaper advertisement announcing the première that afternoon at the Victory of Cecil B. DeMille’s newest epic, Male and Female.” He understood how Latin diction ran into silent movie absurdities through, so to speak, the intermediary of a jelly sandwich. As much as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up—which also began life as a suite of “casual” magazine pieces—set the pattern for the American confessional, Perelman’s “Cloudland” series set the pattern for the American pop-art memoir, of the kind where a literary life is revealed through its engagement not with the high culture of its time but in a kind of meta-tussle with its mass-market overcharge, in a tone by turns affectionate, exasperated, nostalgic, and ironic.

Perelman began the “Cloudland” series in the late ’40s, as he approached the height of his own powers and reputation and kept at it into the mid-’50s—among his most productive and, from a sentence-by-sentence vantage point, certainly his most radiant decade. It was the moment when he distanced himself from the pack of New Yorker “casual” writers to become celebrated as the best of the bunch, surpassing the increasingly long-winded Thurber, with Dorothy Parker announcing, in 1957, and in The New York Times, that he stood alone among American humorists; he would even win, in those years, what he would have called, in hard-breathing and jeering italics, the ultimate accolade, an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in that same year, 1957, for what now seems the stiffly written or, at least, stiffly played, Mike Todd spectacle Around the World in 80 Days.

Series of this kind were a feature of New Yorker comedy-writing then, as they are no more—Frank Sullivan’s “Cliché Expert,” who “testified” regularly on the bromides of countless issues is a prime instance. Ideas are the most valued currency of a humorist’s life and Perelman, looking for his own self-renewing subject, saw the potential of the cheap fiction that had engaged him as a boy and enraged him now.

The style of the pieces is set early: Sid recalls in lovingly detailed self-mockery the condition he had been in as a boy in Providence Rhode Island when he first encountered the book or film and the effect it had on him—from barricading his bedroom against the entry of the evil Dr. Fu Manchu to imitating the sneer of Eric Von Stroheim—and then revisits it in a note of self-mocking wonder that even a bright adolescent could have been so stirred by the thing, with the parallel understanding that in some odd way or another it is still stirring his older self now.

By “Cloudland” he meant the condition of semi-innocence—“semi” since it was illuminated throughout by adolescent lust—in which he first encountered the books, and then the movies, he would write about. Simply describing their plots and performances would both recapture the rococo absurdities of American pop culture in the teens and twenties, already distant and “vintage” by the late 1940s—cf. Sunset Boulevard, where a woman in her fifties, a star a mere twenty-five years before, is a long-forgotten grotesque—and serve as a kind of memoir of sensibility, then and now. The counterpoint between the hard-boiled Big Sid who’s seen it all, and the younger Little Sid, who’s seen nothing but the movies, would make the comedy.

Sid’s silent movie stuff is so memorable—having read it first around the age of thirteen, I find descriptive sentences and paragraphs still lingering firmly in mind—that it is a little startling to be reminded that the series began as one strictly devoted to the dime novels that the young Sid had read in between trips to the theater. Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu and Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks; the original Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes and some still more forgotten semi-lewd classics of the period, including Leonie of the Jungle by Joan Conquest and Cyril Hume’s Wife of the Centaur. (It’s hard to believe that both “Cyril Hume” and Wife of the Centaur are not names dreamt up by Perelman, but they’re not.)

The contemporary reader delights in the narrow-eyed scrutiny Perelman gives to the literary conventions thereby entombed, as when he writes, of one of the heroes of the Fu Manchu cycle that “The alacrity with which doctors of that epoch deserted their practice has never ceased to impress me. Holmes had only to crook his finger and Watson went bowling away in a four-wheeler, leaving his patients to fend for themselves. If the foregoing is at all indicative, the mortality rate of London in the 1900s must have been appalling; the average physician seems to have spent much less time in diagnosis than in tiptoeing around Wapping Old Stairs with a dark lantern.”

The perfection of Perelman’s memory for a specific vocabulary— “Wapping Old Stairs and with a dark lantern”—is matched only by his ability to load a long sentence with varied verbal shot and still make it go off with a single neat “Bang!”: “With puff adders, tarantulas, and highbinders blooming in every hedgerow, the hole-and-corner pursuit of Fu-Manchu drums along through the next hundred pages at about the same tempo, resolutely shying away from climaxes like Hindus from meat.”

The series is specifically keyed to that decade when Perelman was eleven to twenty-one, by far the most impressionable and important in any writer’s life, the decade that marks passage from boyhood or girlhood to some kind of precarious adulthood, with the long way lit by passion. Indeed, the erotic education of an American youngster, as it has taken place ever since—through the sublimation and titillation of sex into mass entertainment, with just enough to excite a kid and not too much to offend the censor overseeing the kid’s entertainments—turns out to be the key motif of the series. His exquisite evocation of the whole negligee and neck-kissing world of the silent film is one of the most consistently funny things he satirizes. In one of his pieces, Perelman recalls the mood that gripped him for a full month after seeing his first Theda Bara movie (Theda Bara, born in Cincinnati but presented to the Perelman generation as an Egyptian “vamp,” the first of the long line of American sex symbols with screen lives briefer than ghost moths): “I gave myself up to fantasies in which I lay with my head pillowed in the seductress’s lap, intoxicated by coal-black eyes smoldering with belladonna. At her bidding, I eschewed family, social position, my brilliant career—a rather hazy combination of African explorer and private sleuth—to follow her to the ends of the earth. I saw myself, oblivious of everything but the nectar of her lips, being cashiered for cheating at cards (I was also a major in the Horse Dragoons), descending to drugs, and ultimately winding up as a beachcomber in the South Seas, with a saintly, ascetic face like H. B. Warner’s.” (Once one begins quoting Perelman, the problem is where to stop!)

Yet note, at least in passing, as well two more essential Perelman truths in the passage above: first the credibility of the adolescent fantasy—and then the Anglophilia that illuminates it all. Perelman knew early on what the horse dragoons might be, and that they might be more susceptible to cheating scandals than another regiment, while his scenario of pained beachcomber resignation comes right out of Somerset Maugham, a key negative influence on him, i.e., someone whose affectations he respected and mocked in equal parts. Toward the end of his life he made a failed attempt at being an English gentleman in London. “I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth,” he announced memorably afterward, but the fantasy was deeply rooted in his providential past.

Delightful, and lovingly absurd, as the passages on pulp fiction are it is in the sessions devoted to silent movies that Perelman shines brightest. The reasons for this, sheer practice and increasing confidence aside, are manifold. First, it involved some unusually disciplined reporting, for a humorist; the silent-film division of the “Cloudland” project demanded a new kind of purpose. He wrote to his confidante Lela Hadley that “I’ve spent almost all the past two weeks at the Museum of Modern Art projecting ten films I plan to write about in the Cloudland Revisited series in The New Yorker, things I saw between 1915 and 1925—Foolish Wives (von Stroheim), 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Way Down East, Male and Female, Excuse My Dust, Stella Dallas, etc. The museum’s film division was extremely co-operative; I’d been trying to set up this scheme for about two years and had been at some pains to figure out where I could uncover the particular films I wanted, as they’ve large disappeared. . . . I worked with a tape recorder while the films were being shown, talking into it and describing the contents of each scene and the subtitles. I now have the secretary in the adjoining office transcribing the tape.” (Though one would give a lot to have the tapes of that mumbled Perelman narration, in truth little of an oral “sound” penetrates his sentences. Sid wrote like Sid, whatever the source of the writing.)

A still deeper reason for the superiority of the movie stuff to the wonderful book stuff is simply that the movies occupied then, as they do now, a more central and fraught place in American life than does old boudoir and adventure fiction. The Museum of Modern Art, as that letter reveals, had already begun collecting old movies, and so Perelman’s project—mocking the defunct absurdities of the movies he recalled—depended ironically on the scholarly enterprise in preserving them. Although film had been part of the MoMA collection from early on, it would have been far from self-evident to anyone in the 1930s, as the museum came together under its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., that commercial, Hollywood movies, would come to have such a significant place there as they already had by the ’50s. Though the collection had a comprehensive bent from early on, it seems to have only latterly, if presciently, recognized that Hollywood movies, of the kind usually dismissed as “kitsch” by the same people who came to see abstract painting, were a necessity.

And then the period under scrutiny was tightly sealed, by chance, by the fact that, where popular and pulp fiction had remained more or less fixed in its course from the ’20s on, with “hard boiled” private eyes taking over from the leaping libidinal centaurs, over the period of Perelman’s adolescence silent films had first fully blossomed and then entirely died—giving his recollection of them an absolute, sealed-off King Tut’s tomb quality. They were past in ways the books were not. (Literally so—almost none of Theda Bara’s movies survive at all, after nitrate fires.)

A few interlinked notes of social history inflect—perhaps unconsciously, certainly richly—Perelman’s project. First, thirty to forty years past is always the prime site of American nostalgia, and Perelman in the ’40s and ’50s was participating in a general “revival” of the popular art of the teens and ’20s. Just as the aughts in the current century saw a fascination with the style of the 1960s, as in Madmen, and the ’70s was obsessed with thirties movies and décor, from “The Sting” to “Paper Moon,” the ’40s and ’50s had a special affectionate affinity for the manners and “look” of pre-Depression America. In the 1940s—the first decade in which all the major components of mass culture were up and running, even early television—the beloved focus of nostalgia were exactly the innocent aughts and teens of the early century, a taste ranging from Meet Me in St. Louis, a film made in 1944 about a fair held in 1904, to Take Me Out to the Ball Game, a musical made in 1948 about a song written in 1908. The ’50s, in turn, brought about the revival of the jazz of the ’20, with the essentially serious music of Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton recast by middle-aged white men in straw boaters and striped jackets as something softer, called Dixieland. Perelman writing in the ’40s and ’50s about the teens and ’20s, corresponds to the forty-year rule and took advantage of a common cultural preoccupation—one which rises from the truth that we have to cross into our own forties and fifties to at last become aware that the tastes of our adolescence were specific to our adolescences, not just a permanently shared obsession. Joni Mitchell may be for all time, but she belongs to 1971, though it takes until about 2010 to feel this. For Perelman, recognizing that the erotic frissons and mind-stirring adventures of his youth were now creaky and purely “period,” had the same kind of fruitful comic shock and spoke to an audience who shared the memories.

“In so far as any writing can be said to be enjoyable—I categorically deny that it can—I find the new stuff of some slight absorbing interest while working on it,” he further confided to Hadley, and this, coming from the saturnine Sid, is as close to an announcement of rapture-in-composition as one can ever hope to find from him. He wasn’t wrong; of all the series he entertained in that period, from the end of the World War II to the arrival of rock music, The “Cloudland Revisited” pieces seem to this addicted Perelmanite to be much the best. One simple reason is that where the other ambitious projects—his Acres and Pains series about the remaking of a Bucks County farmhouse, or the many travel series that he undertook, often with the companionship of Al Hirschfeld, depend on the collision of the Perelman-of-the-page with conniving yokels or avaricious “natives,” the “Cloudland Revisited” series depends on the less predictable collision of young Sid with old Sid. Young Sid, who is evoked in his wide-eyed absorption of the old movies—we see him attempting a makeshift dive in a homemade diving suit in Narragansett Bay after viewing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—is still infatuated with the stuff, while Older & Wiser Sid shakes his head retrospectively at the sheer intuitive surrealism of the story: “It more than equaled the all-time stowage record set by D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, managing to combine in one picture three unrelated plots—Twenty Thousand Leagues, The Mysterious Island, and Five Weeks in a Balloon—and a sanguinary tale of betrayal and murder in a native Indian state that must have fallen into the developing fluid by mistake.”

And then “Cloudland” captures Perelman at his purest of heart. The facetious biographical note appended to one of the collections in which some of the “Cloudland” pieces were reprinted ends “He is twelve years old,” and though this is obviously a po-faced statement of self-mockery, still it contains an element of truth. Sid is twelve years old, or at his best when he reinhabits his twelve-year-old self—when he is still in touch with the erotic-exotic fascinations of the old books and movies, and able to recreate, however mordantly, the sensitive and misunderstood boy who responded to them as much as the older man aghast at the quality of what he had to respond to. As old Sid narrates the movies, we sense both selves—he respects the spell cheap art cast on young Sid while breaking the spell for himself. Tales of infatuation and disillusion are braided together, in a kind of ecstatic counterpoint that leaves the series without the slightly arch and acidic tone that could creep into Perelman’s parallel accounts of being swindled by Indonesian object-vendors or small-town plumbers.

Yet if the apparent object of these matchlessly entertaining pieces is the rueful memory of the seduction of a boy by false values, its real subject is the making of an American mind. That fault line on which his writing sits is a significant as any that occurs in American social history—the line between the Dave Brubeck and Ben Shahn sophistication of the late ’50s and the Day-Glo colored pop art and rock music ’60s. Perelman’s attitudes in “Cloudland” are securely rooted in a set of “sophisticated” assumptions: Hollywood movies are uniformly terrible but have a kind of grotesque charm; the elaborate circumlocutions and self-consciousness of pop fiction—he was equally acute about Raymond Chandler’s—are inherently ridiculous. Intelligence stood on the side of common sense and a stylish literate culture, and against the degradations of serious art into kitsch.

A scant ten years later, the bulwark had been broken, by Warhol and the Beatles at the higher end, and the kind of movies Perelman was mocking were not merely a source of archival responsibility, à la MoMA, but taken for granted as works of art worth placing alongside, and indeed above, Maugham or Galsworthy. The satiric tone that Perelman had mastered could suddenly seem merely supercilious—and indeed a superciliousness, barely containing the inevitable rage of the older writer at the newer world, infects his last pieces in the ’60s and ’70s.

Yet Perelman’s unashamed infatuation with his own infant joys—what Nature was to Wordsworth, silent movies and pulp novels were to him—found its way fruitfully into the manner of the next generation, rather as the intuitive, “marginalized” fascination of the proto-Pop painters like Stuart Davis and Florine Stettheimer with American iconography became declaratively avant-garde in Pop art. Perelman made it possible for the first time to write a papier collé autobiography, one made of borrowed and assembled parts taken from the pop culture of one’s time.

Though he would have been baffled—or bored—by the mechanized ironies of Pop art, Perelman was in many ways a Pop writer, given to distending the forms of old movies into new and still more hyperbolic shapes, as much as Claes Oldenburg making his monumental clothespins. It is hard to imagine the Tom Wolfe of the 1960s, for instance, with his deep dives, at once fascinated and horrified, into the mechanics of Phil Spector’s wall of sound, or into the bosom-amplified go-go girls—writing that takes pop culture seriously and kids it at the same time—without the earlier example of Perelman. (That Wolfe both strenuously admired Perelman, and strenuously lectured him, for not being more of a “realist,” i.e., more an overt moralist like Wolfe, is a sign of the Oedipal drama engendered.)

In another realm, Woody Allen’s own early New Yorker pieces are almost comically detailed homages to the master. But at a level still deeper we feel Perelman’s presence in the tension with which Allen’s best movies hold in place a contempt for contemporary Hollywood alongside a reverence for the popular entertainment of Woody’s own youth, as a reservoir of references and values. The movie Radio Days, for example, is a direct offspring of “Cloudland Revisited,” in its bemused recounting of a retrospectively absurd cultural world that nonetheless still holds its fascination, as something that once seemed wholly realized and secure and has now entirely vanished. From Nicholson Baker to Michael Chabon, we routinely make novels and memoirs now out of our infatuation with pop entertainments past, winding our own experience around their cheap but unforgettable delights, making from the mass market entertainments of a commercial culture the private chapels of our private faiths. If this practice began anywhere, it began here.

Nor has the spell that Perelman cast on the movies that cast a spell on him lessened. On an August night in 2022, a long birthday evening walk took this writer and his family to the garden of the Museum of Modern Art for dinner. There, in a slightly separate but all too visible sector of the garden, MoMA was solemnly screening von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives. The writer—this one—narrated it, almost shot by shot, to the astonished table, realizing that, never having seen it before, he recalled its sequences, and the sardonic sentences to go with them, almost perfectly from his fond recollection of Sid’s fond recollection. Exactly as Sid had been beguiled and imprinted by silent movies, this writer had been beguiled and imprinted by Sid’s sardonic ruminations on them. S. J. Perelman still can cast this secondary spell over his readers, who can no more escape his vision of how what he’d seen should be understood than he could escape the seductions of what he’d seen. “Cloudland Revisited” lives on in this way, as a palimpsest of American sensibilities, with new translucent layers added all the time: the follies of the 1920s made comic in the 1950s remain templates of our own reactions in the twenty-first century. The table laughs at long-ago vibrations of a matchless satiric mind. In this smaller way, great comic writing continues to make little earthquakes of its own.