The Details

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

  When we come up with these ways to describe our experience we become more cheerful. One of these friends has recently been through a difficult confrontation with upper management. The three of us talked about the next administrative hurdle he had to leap and my friend said, ‘I’m not getting involved. I’m powering down.’ He made a sound like a building whose power has just been shut off, dropping his head and letting his arms go slack. The three of us began to laugh, as we always do when we’re together, and soon we were wiping away rueful tears. For a moment there, we were in charge. Language is power, and when we find the right way to frame our experience, we’re not being crushed by it.

  This is what I want for my students. First, I want them to read a book all the way through. I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a powerful tool literature is, to understand that it helps us to know ourselves and the society we live in. I want them to discover that if they learn to handle language they might not feel as though they’re worth nothing, have nothing to say. Finally, I want them to see that reading breeds thinking, and thinking breeds resistance, and surely, especially right now, that is a good thing.

  Just anguish

  A TV show I love is Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It’s a kind of comedians’ Paris Review – a series of short interviews, conducted just as the title suggests, in cars and then in coffee shops. Seinfeld shows himself to be a gifted interviewer – recklessly personal, totally uninterested in self-promotion or in his interviewees’ PR schtick, and, more than anything else, fascinated by craft, by words. I can’t vouch for his sexual politics – I’ve seen too many interviews in which he and another male comedian compare ways of keeping the wife happy, and I nearly cringed myself out of the room when he asked queer comedic genius Kate McKinnon what she did when men were attracted to her. But this doesn’t make me hate him, or doubt him when I know he’s saying something smart.

  There’s a moment in his first interview with the British comedian Ricky Gervais that I’ve watched a number of times. Like anyone else, I take pleasure in the sight of people laughing, of people uninhibitedly enjoying themselves – and these two certainly find each other funny. They’re sitting in a cafe, and Gervais tells this joke about Hitler in his bunker:

  On the last day of the war, the Russians were advancing, they were two hundred yards down the road. He married Eva Braun, right, they had a cake and some champagne. They retired to bed early. In the morning he poisoned her, shot himself, and the gardener burnt the bodies. Now say what you will about Hitler, but that’s a terrible honeymoon.

  The two of them shake silently with laughter, unable to speak, and then Seinfeld, recovering himself, says, ‘The funniest part of that joke is Say what you will about Hitler,’ and they’re off again, laughing uncontrollably.

  What’s significant to me about this exchange is not the joke, but Seinfeld reading the joke – understanding exactly what its pivot is, what’s funny, how important the words are. Say what you will about Hitler – it’s like a magician’s suitcase, flipping open and open and open again. What do you mean, say what you will about Hitler? Is there more than one thing to say about Hitler?

  These days, if you’re getting any attention as a writer, you’re getting most of it for your subject matter. I’ve sat on many, many writers’ festival panels as an apparent expert on teenagehood or motherhood or teaching. I’ve had many kind people tell me I’ve changed their life by writing so openly about my vagina and my children. Of course I understand this. We all know the feeling of coming to a book and thinking, That’s it! That’s what I wanted to say – at last, someone has said it for me.

  But I’ve recently realised that I don’t go to Jane Austen or Helen Garner or James Wood to learn about life. I don’t think, Elizabeth Bennet, you are my teacher, henceforth I will stand up to rude men. Although I am as religious as any other book lover about the books I love, it isn’t what Austen writes about that really moves me, it’s how she writes about it. In one of her superb early fragments, ‘Love and Freindship’, the brilliant fourteen-year-old Austen makes fun of the contemporary fashion for passionate friendship. This is a trope of Austen’s: her books warn us to suspect any character who offers friendship before it has been able to properly and naturally take root. But look how she does it. Here is the first meeting of the two soon-to-be friends Laura and Sophia (from Laura’s letter describing it):

  We flew into each other’s arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts. – We were interrupted in the delightfull Employment by the entrance of Augustus (Edward’s freind), who was just returned from a solitary ramble.

  Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus.

  ‘My Life! my Soul!’ (exclaimed the former) ‘My Adorable Angel!’ (replied the latter), as they flew into each other’s arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself – We fainted alternately on a sopha.

  I’ve had this image in my head my whole reading life. It’s ‘fainting’ and ‘alternately’ that do the work here: they’re timed so that the words flop forward one after another, just like the girls themselves: one, two, onto the sopha.

  This is why I began writing: not just to unfold the inward secrets of my Heart, but to describe them accurately. To find the right words for them. When a writer finds the right words; when I can feel that they are interested in the pivot of a sentence, the seesaw of syntax, the right adjective; when they know to omit the adjective, and which verb will best illustrate movement on a reader’s mental screen – well, that’s when I’m happy. And there are few who do this better than the American writer S.J. Perelman.

  * * *

  Sidney Joseph Perelman, son of Sophie Charen and Joseph Perelman, both born in the 1880s in Russia, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1904. He was their only surviving child. His father’s life did not embody the American dream – the businesses he opened, including a dry-goods store and a chicken farm, failed. Sophie and Joseph were socialists, they were readers, and they spoke both Yiddish and English at home. Sid did not speak fluent Yiddish but grew up amongst it, shall we say, just as all the American Jews of his generation did. He went to Classical High School in Providence and then Brown University, from which he failed to graduate because of being unable to pass trigonometry, despite three attempts. He began his publishing life as a cartoonist and moved on to short comic pieces. He wrote plays, screenplays and a novel. He was one of several screenwriters on two Marx Brothers films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, and won an Academy Award for his work on the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days. He comes from a line of great writers: Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White and James Thurber; he is a literary relative of Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Nancy Mitford, Max Beerbohm, Saki, and of course P.G. Wodehouse. His influence can be read directly in the work of Woody Allen, who was said to have once fallen on his knees in front of him in a New York restaurant; and the writer Donald Barthelme called him ‘the first true American surrealist’. But he is remembered most fondly for his essays, what he called the feuilletons, or little leaves, which were published between the 1920s and the 1960s, predominantly in The New Yorker, but also in Judge, Vanity Fair, College Humor and Life.

  At my grandparents’ place in South Coogee – long since emptied of my family – my grandmother kept the bedrooms of my father and his sister in what I always imagined was a kind of still life of their occupation, which ended with their marriages in the early 1960s. My father’s bedroom had dark green carpet. It smelt of books and of my grandparents and the sea, and it was where I always slept, annexing it as my own, when I stayed the night at the house. The room had a very simple wooden bookshelf, a single bed with a chenille bedspread, and a view due east from high up on the Coogee cliffs – the sea, the open sea, unfolding, unfolding, beyond eyesight. On the bookshelf were rows of old
hardbacks and Penguins – and amongst these, or in fact making these up, were the humorists. S.J. Perelman and the Irish writer Patrick Campbell were the two I read most often, and S.J. Perelman is the one I’ve continued to read my whole life, throughout my apprenticeship as a writer, whenever I feel unhappy, whenever I need to relax. Some of these books stayed where they were, at my grandparents’ house, but some lived with us. (I love to think of my parents’ first proper date. They went to see the French film La Belle Américaine, and my mother laughed so much that she fell off her seat. And later worried that my father might think less of her for being so immoderate. Their marriage – not unlike my own, in fact – was forged in laughter. I suppose it is no wonder that humorists and comedians are the people I cleave to.)

  There isn’t anything I can say that will illustrate Perelman’s brilliance so fluently as the work itself. And so, while planning this essay, I’ve been a bit like a monkey with a jar of peanuts – my hand is so full I can’t get it out.

  Perelman wrote several types of short comic essay. There were essays inspired by the absurdity of American advertising, which are, apart from anything else, an invaluable record of the explosion of stupidity that marks advertising’s great boom years. You don’t need Mad Men once you’ve read these. There are essays about his time as a scenario writer in Hollywood. There is a series, called Acres and Pains, which exaggerates and then documents the failures of his life with his wife and children on a farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. There’s Cloudland Revisited – possibly my most treasured series – in which Perelman rereads the popular novels and rewatches the silent movies of his youth, which was smack in the middle of the Jazz Age. Here’s a taste of his prose, from his essay about E.M. Hull’s book The Sheik (a sort of Middle Eastern rape fantasy, which was also made into a movie starring Rudolph Valentino).

  [W]hen, after a lapse of twenty-five years, I sat down recently to renew my acquaintance, I was heavy with nostalgia. A goodish amount of water had gone over the dam in the interim and I was not at all sure Miss Hull’s febrile tale would pack its original wallop. I found that, contrariwise, the flavour had improved, like that of fine old port… Any connoisseur knows that a passage like ‘She hated him with all the strength of her proud passionate nature’ or ‘I didn’t love you when I took you, I only wanted you to satisfy the beast in me’ acquires a matchless bouquet from lying around the cellar of a secondhand bookshop. No slapdash artificial ageing process can quite duplicate the tang. It must steep.

  How beautifully the metaphor finds its apogee in that final, three-syllable sentence, which in turn balances out the complex syntax of the sentences that precede it. Perelman knows this: it must steep.

  There are also the travel writings: Westward Ha!, about his travels around the world with the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, and Swiss Family Perelman, a trip through Asia, Australia and New Guinea with his family, which I must say was not a happy one. Then there are the essays inspired by popular magazines of the era – magazines with names like Spicy Detective. There are the parodies of writers such as Raymond Chandler, who treasured his, and Dostoevsky. And then there are the weird surrealist pieces, inspired by single lines or ideas – ‘Entered as Second Class Matter’ or ‘Scenario’, in which Perelman stitches together clichés and lines from imaginary advertising campaigns and movies, creating peerless montages of mid-twentieth-century American culture.

  Here is an extract from the essay of Perelman’s that I’ve reread the most times, and which has made me cry with laughter every time I do. It’s from Acres and Pains, chapter thirteen, and it’s about Perelman spending a night on his own at the farm.

  Look friends, I’m just an ordinary country boy. I’m slow, and sort of quizzical, and as plain as an old board fence. I prize the quiet, homely things – applejack out of a charred keg, a bundle of faded securities, the rustle of old greenbacks. I love the scent of fresh-mown clover and the giggles that escape from it on a warm summer afternoon. But what I value most is solitude…

  If rural life has done anything, it has taught me to be self-sufficient. I pity a man who can’t be alone. There is nothing like a solitary evening in an old house, cooped up with one’s dogs and books, to sharpen the senses and shorten the wind. One night recently, for instance, I suddenly felt I had to think things out and packed my family off to the seashore. It was ten above zero and building to a blizzard, but when I have to think things out I have no time for sentimental considerations. Breathing a sigh of relief, I double-locked the doors, barricaded them with bureaus and chairs, and set about preparing supper. I had some difficulty getting the beans out of the can, but I shortly contrived a serviceable bandage for my wrist and snuggled down in front of a crackling fire with the diaries of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. I had read little more than three pages when I realised I was holding the diaries upside down and listening intently to a noise in the kitchen.

  Loosely speaking, the sound combined a creak and a sigh suggestive of a musical saw. Now and again, it was smothered by a soft, mirthless laugh ending in a sharp click. My dogs, quick to guard their master, formed into a hollow square and withdrew under the couch. I dried my palms, which seemed to have accumulated a slight film of oil, and picked up the fire tongs. ‘Who’s there?’ I inquired in a crisp falsetto. (After all, I thought, why waste a trip to the kitchen if nobody was there?) There was no answer; whoever it was didn’t even have the common decency to reply. Angered, I strode toward the kitchen, whistling to warn of my approach, and flung open the door. Everything was in apple-pie order, including the apple pie, except that the rocking chair was bobbing slowly back and forth.

  ‘That’s odd – very odd,’ I murmured, re-entering the living room and tripping over a chair. ‘Probably caused by a draft from an open window or something.’

  ‘Or something,’ agreed one of the dogs from under the couch.

  ‘Who said that?’ I demanded sharply. The craven cur was frightened back into silence. I yawned casually, an effort that almost resulted in lockjaw, and consulted my watch. ‘Well, guess I’ll turn in,’ I observed to nobody in particular. Hearing no objection, I started for the stairs, the dogs clustered about my ankles. A brisk, affable voice cut me short.

  ‘The three homicidal maniacs who fled the county home for the insane are still at large tonight,’ it said chattily. ‘If you see a burly man of fifty with an ice pick –’ I cannot abide petty gossip; switching off the radio, I went up the steps, taking them four at a time. It was a trifle close under the covers, especially as the dogs persisted in huddling in with me, but it made for a warm, gemütlich feeling.

  It’s hard for me to say just how much I’ve learned from Perelman, but even more importantly, it’s hard to express just how much pleasure a piece of writing of this precision gives me. Perhaps the first thing to talk about is the way in which Perelman is absolutely prepared to leave you behind. You don’t have to be a stranger to Perelman’s era, his culture, or his home town of New York to need help keeping up with his cultural references and his astounding vocabulary. Perelman himself read everything; and he didn’t just read everything, he remembered everything. Thus his work is salted with references to literature, dance, theatre, politics, France, Russia, England, the Middle East, South-East Asia, not to mention the harvest of popular culture delivered every day by the newspapers and magazines he read.

  When I first started reading his work at fifteen or so, the kind of challenge he flung at me was exactly what I was looking for. I gloried in how hard he was to understand, and because of this I felt a private relationship between him and me. I can safely guarantee it was exclusive; I didn’t meet another person at Hunters Hill High who was reading him.

  In this piece, Perelman hasn’t paused to explain what gemütlich means, or who Wilfrid Scawen Blunt is, or even what the balconade is. (Perelman said of his use of Yiddish, ‘There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All o
f them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.’ This gives you a sense of the writer at work, interested not just in the almost right word, but the exactly right word – the one he picked from these ‘gradations’.)

  Nor, in this piece, does Perelman stop to say, ‘I tried to open a can of beans and cut my wrist.’ He bridges that small abyss between the opening of the can and the injury with ‘I shortly contrived a serviceable bandage for my wrist’, and dares us to cross it and follow him. Nor does he bother to explain why freshly mown clover might have giggles escaping from it.

  Perelman himself said:

  People who like my work have to understand words and their juxtaposition as well as the images they create. It’s very hard to make a person laugh who doesn’t have inside him the words I use. My humor is of the free association kind, and in order to enjoy it, you have to have a good background in reading. It’s a heavy strain for people who haven’t read much.

  But he was forgetting, when saying this, that his writing could teach reading, as it did for me. I had a good vocabulary for a fifteen-year-old – but a much better one once I’d read Perelman.

  So, if I am so heavily influenced by Perelman, and such a lover of comedy, why not write comic feuilletons myself? Well, the truth is that a writer does not choose their form – it chooses them. I’m not suggesting total helplessness; Perelman himself is testament to the fact that comedy comes in many shapes – the script, the essay, and even the novel were forms he mastered. But when asked why he didn’t use his astounding talents to write more novels, he said: