"It Is Written"

THE DREAM DEPARTMENT--S. J. Perelman--Random House ($2).

S. J. Perelman picks up business where he left off with Look Who's Talking (TIME, Aug. 12, 1940). One passage should suffice to give traffic signals to such readers as remain unfamiliar with Perelman's work. The passage was inspired by a notice to the effect that moving pictures would be used for department-store advertising. The title is Kitchenware, Notions, Lights, Action, Camera!

Scene: The music room in the palatial villa of Mrs. Lafcadio Mifflin at Newport. Mrs. Mifflin, a majestic woman in a slim-pin Bemberg corselet well boned over the diaphragm (Stern Brothers, fourth floor), is seated at the console of her Wurlitzer, softly wurlitzing to herself. Mr. Mifflin, in a porous-knit union suit from Franklin Simon's street floor, is stretched out by the fire like a great, tawny cat. Inasmuch as there is a great, tawny cat stretched out alongside him, also wearing a porous-knit union suit, it is not immediately apparent which is Mifflin.

There are many other pieces under such titles as Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy, Caution--Soft Prose Ahead, Psst, Partner, Your Peristalsis is Showing. They handle, with the expertness required for delivering a two-headed baby, the aching half-lunacies which turn up as a normal part of U.S. life. They use one of the rangiest and most microscopically exact vocabularies in modern letters--a vocabulary drawn entirely from those ancient, current and emergent cliches of which Flaubert and Joyce were both collectors and which are as diagnostic of a civilization as any ten theses on the Zeitgeist, and a thousand times as entertaining.

They are, as Perelman's pieces have been for some years, overformularized; yet even at their most manufactured they have a surface and a perfection of rhythm which little contemporary prose can touch. At their best, they stand with the best of Ludwig Bemelmans and of James Thurber as a shocking commentary on most of the nominally more solid and earnest books being written in English.

The Author is less well known than his work. Said he last week:

"Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin, and pauper-poor is S. J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy.

"Perelman's life reads like a picaresque novel. It began on a bleak shelf of rock in mid-Atlantic near Tristan da Cunha. Transplanted to Rhode Island by a passing Portuguese, he became a man of proverbial strength around the Providence wharves; he could drive a spike through an oak plank with his fist. As there was constant need for this type of skilled labor, he soon acquired enough tuition to enter Brown University. He is chiefly remembered there for translating the epigrams of Martial into colloquial Amharic and designing Brooks Bros.' present trademark, a sheep suspended in a diaper.

"Perelman like many another fledgling writer headed posthaste for Montparnasse. A redoubtable tosspot and coxcomb, he was celebrated throughout the Quarter for drinking Modigliani under the table; his fondness for this potent Italian aperitif still remains unabated. In 1925, disguised as Ashton-Wolfe of the Surete, he took to frequenting the milieu, the sinister district centering about the rue de Lappe. As 'Papa' Thernardier, he organized the gang that stole a towel from the Hotel Claridge and defaced the blotters at the American Express Co. A demarche from the Quai d'Orsay shortly forced him to flee Paris.

"When, in 1928, the meteoric career of Joe Strong, the Boy Plunger, ended abruptly with the latter's disappearance from Wall Street, few knew that Perelman had ended another chapter. In bloody Cicero, Illinois, swart Sicilian mobsters fingered their roscoes uneasily, dismayed at lightning forays by a new rival. In a scant eight months, no shell of needled beer touched lip in Chicago County without previous tribute to 'Nails' Perelman. Implacable, deadly as a puff adder, the hand that triggered a steely automatic could caress a first Folio with equal relish. Able to snatch in fifteen minutes the rest most men required a night for, Perelman spent the balance dictating novels (Jo Bracegirdle's Ordeal, The Splendid Sinners), essays (Winnowings, The Anatomy of Gluttony, Turns with a Stomach), plays (Are You There, Wimperis?, Musclebound, Philippa Steps Out), and scenarios (She Married Her Double, He Married Himself). "Retired today to peaceful Erwinna, Pa. Perelman raises turkeys which he occasionally displays on Broadway, stirs little from his alembics and retorts. Those who know hint that the light burning late in his laboratory may result in a breathtaking electric bill. Queried, he shrugs with the fatalism of your true Oriental. 'Mektoub,' he observes curtly, 'It is written.'"

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