by Paul Theroux
When I first began reading him in the 1950's—I was in junior high school—I was excited by his malicious humor, his huge vocabulary and what I took to be his lunatic fantasy. I sensed a spirit of rebellion in him that stirred the anarchy in my schoolboy soul. After I started to travel, it struck me that much of what he wrote was true: Perelman's Africa was the Africa no one else had noticed. His stories were bizarre because he sought out the bizarre. He cherished oddity and, being truly adventurous, was willing to put himself to a lot of trouble to find it (he strolled around Shanghai, in 1947, looking for it). Then I met him. He was button-cute, and also a bit of a roué, and accident-prone. If he had been writing fantasies, we would think of him as a humorist, a writer of gags, whose object was merely to entertain. But he wrote about the world, and his intensity and his anger made him into a satirist.
A satirist seems a sour and forbidding figure—a mocker, a pessimist, a grudge-bearer, a smirker, something of a curmudgeon, perhaps with a streak of cruelty who, in inviting the reader to jeer at his victim, never misses a trick or withholds a nudge. How does one suggest that such a man may also have a great deal of charm? Perelman's friends liked him very much. He was generous, he was funny, he was enormously social, he didn't boast. Travel has the effect of turning most people into monologuists; it made Perelman an accomplished watcher and an appreciative listener. When he talked in his croaky drawl he did so in the elaborate way he wrote, with unlikely locutions and slang and precise descriptions diverted into strings of subordinate clauses. He was small and neatly made; he wore very handsome clothes, usually of an English cut, and in his pockets he carried clippings he tore from the newspapers—one he showed me was about the movie The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, which he eventually worked into a story. He read the London Times every day (he had an air-mail subscription)—more, I think, for the unusual names than for anything else. In today's Times, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes has just reached the South Pole; Captain Sir Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys has just died; and both Miss C. Inch and Miss E. L. F. I. Lunkenheimer have just got married. Perelman welcomed news of this kind.
In his way, he was a man of the world. A man of the world, almost by definition, is never content anywhere. Perelman was a bit like that. He had a great capacity for pleasure, but he was restless, always active, game for anything; he fed himself on change. He began writing at Brown University, where a fellow classmate was Nathanael West (Perelman married West's sister Laura in 1929), and at the age of twenty-five, with the success of his first book, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, he was invited to Hollywood to write jokes for the Marx Brothers. He went, and he liked to say that Hollywood reminded him of a novel he had read in Providence as a boy, In The Sargasso Sea, by Thomas Janvier (anyone who has the luck to find this 1899 story of marooning and murder in the nightmare swamp will immediately see the connection). From time to time throughout his life, Perelman returned to Hollywood, struggled with scripts and then fought free. At the age of seventy-four, fresh from the travels he recounted in Eastward Ha!, he tried to drive his vintage 1949 MG from Paris to Peking, commemorating the trip of Count Something-or-other. It was not such a crazy scheme. He had been around the world a dozen times. He was in good health, his car had recently had a tune-up, he had a generous sponsor and many well-wishers, and he liked to say (though joshing himself with his chain-smoker's chuckle) that he knew Malaysia and Hong Kong like the back of his hand.
In a Thai restaurant, in London, on Christmas Eve, he told me about his drive to Peking. He had just flown in from China. The trip, he said, was a total disaster. The glamor girl he had chosen for navigator had been fired at the outset for selling her story to a magazine. He had quarreled with his fellow drivers all the way through India. There had been kerfuffles with customs men in Turkey. The car was not allowed through Burma and, as there was no room on a ship to Malaysia, the car had been air-freighted to Hong Kong. There were more scenes in Hong Kong. "The others freaked out," Perelman said, but with the old car now parked in Kowloon, he flew to Peking and spent two weeks in a Chinese hospital with a severe case of bronchitis, aggravated by double pneumonia.
"Now I have to write about it," he said. "It'll be horrible."
Frankly, I thought the subject was made for him. Nothing is more Perelmanesque than a marathon drive across the world, interlarded with set-backs, blown gaskets, howling Turks and long delays in flea-ridden Indian hotels. And pneumonia in Peking was the perfect ending for someone who always racked his brain for grand finales. (His editor at the New Yorker, William Shawn, told me, "He always had trouble with endings.") But the last collection of Perelman pieces contains nothing about that Paris to Peking trip. This is odd, because he had made his reputation by describing the complicated orchestration of fiascos.
A month before he died, he wrote me a letter in which he said, "I myself have spent altogether too much time this year breaking my nails on the account of the Paris—Peking trip I made › ... and after a lot of bleeding cuticle, I decided to abandon it. I guess there are certain subjects—or maybe one's subjective reactions to them—that in spite of the most manful attempts are totally unproductive. The one I picked certainly was, and it took a lot of Sturm und Drang to make me realize that my Sisyphean labors were getting me nowhere."
This was the only gloomy paragraph in an otherwise chirpy letter. His letters were long, frequent, and sensationally funny—indeed, so funny that, after receiving a few, Raymond Chandler (always a hoarder and procrastinator where writing was concerned) replied worriedly warning Perelman against squandering his wit: "You shouldn't give the stuff away like that when you can sell it, unless of course your letters are just rough notes for articles."
But they weren't "just rough notes for articles." They were generous and intelligent expressions of friendship and most of them far too scandalous to be retailed. Here is the opening paragraph of a letter Perelman wrote me on Christmas Eve, 1976:
"Between the constant repetition of 'White Christmas' and 'Jingle Bells' on Station WPAT and the increasing frenzy of Saks' and Gimbel's newspaper ads as these fucking holidays draw near, I have been in a zombie-like state for weeks, totally incapable of rational thought or action. I must have arrived at near-paralysis yesterday afternoon when I was in the 4th-floor lingerie section ('Intimate Apparel') in Saks 5th Avenue. I had just purchased two such intimate garments for gifties to a couple of ladies of my acquaintance, a tall blonde and a somewhat shorter brunette. For the former, I had chosen a black lace chemise in the style known as a teddy back in the 'twenties (familiar to you as the scanty garment worn by Rita Hay worth in the war-time pin-up). For the shorter brunette, a similar peach-colored job. Both of these real silk, parenthetically, and as I signed the charge slip, I knew that when the bill comes in after January 1st, I would kick myself for my prodigality. Anyway, while the hard-featured saleslady was wrapping them up with appropriate mash-notes to each bimbo, I went upstairs to the men's dept. to buy myself a cheap tie-tack. When I returned for the feminine frillies, I found (a) that the saleslady had forgotten to identify which box was which, and (b) that she had switched the notes. In other words, the blonde Amazon would find herself with the brunette's undershirt and some steamy sentiment addressed to the latter, and vice-versa. I broke out into a perspiration—it's tropically hot in those department stores anyway—and insisted on the saleslady clawing open the boxes, which meant destroying all the fake holly berries, silver cord, and mish-mash they were entwined in. This of course put her in a foul temper, and meanwhile a waiting queue of customers became incensed. The upshot was a group shot of seven or eight people leering and cackling obscenely as I stood there holding the two chemises and the notes appropriate to the recipients. Given the savoir-faire of Cary Grant I might have risen above it, but the only savoir-faire I possess is Oliver Hardy's, and little enough of that..."
When Perelman's letters are collected, as they surely deserve to be, they will comprise the autobiography he promised and began, but never got around to fini
shing. The three chapters printed here are all we have of The Hindsight Saga —anyway, with a title that good you hardly need a book; or did its promise of disclosures intimidate him? He was always more personal and ruminative and risqué in his letters than he was in his stories, and he heartily disliked people Who boasted by reminiscing about the past. "I see Scott Fitzgerald's gossip-columnist mistress has been cleaning out the contents of a thimble," he wrote me when Sheilah Graham's The Real Scott Fitzgerald appeared.
Perelman knew Fitzgerald as a sober, hard-working script-writer, who had gone to Hollywood for the money, much as today's writers accept tenure at universities. Fitzgerald believed himself a failure, but Perelman was one man (Faulkner was another) who used Hollywood to fuel his other projects; his script-writing career coincided with his first appearance in the pages of the New Yorker. It seems extraordinary that he was able to keep his enthusiasms separate, but to California and New York he added the world. From the 'thirties onward he traveled widely, first in the Pacific and then in Africa, Europe and Asia. I cannot think of another writer who was so adept as Perelman in prevailing over such vast cultural incongruities and whose appreciations included B-movies, pulp magazines, Joyce's Ulysses, Hollywood dives, the societal norms in Bucks County, Manhattan and Nairobi, detective fiction, English country-house weekends, vintage cars, dogs (he once, on a whim, bought a bloodhound), cantankerous producers and pretty women. He talked with passionate energy about Fellini's Satyricon and Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago. He knew Dorothy Parker well and had a close friendship with Eric Ambler. He was the only person I have ever known who dropped in on J. D. Salinger, whom he called "Jerry."
His greatest passion was language. In "Listen to the Mockingbird" he wrote, "As recently as 1918, it was possible for a housewife in Providence, where I grew up, to march into a store with a five cent piece, purchase a firkin of cocoa butter, a good second-hand copy of Bowditch, a hundredweight of quahogs, a shagreen spectacle case and sufficient nainsook for a corset cover and emerge with enough left over to buy a balcony admission to 'The Masquerader' with Guy Bates Post, and a box of maxixe cherries." He was parodying inflation, but it is impossible to read "cocoa butter," "Bowditch," "quahogs," "shagreen," "nainsook," and the rest without a sense of mounting hilarity. He worked hard for a kind of insane exactitude in his prose and would not settle for "sad" if he could use "chopfallen." I think his travels were bound up for his quest to find odd words or possible puns. They were more than mere souvenirs of travel: they were the object of his arduous jaunts. The uniqueness of his writing depends for its effects on linguistic virtuosity, finding room for "oppidan" or the verb "swan" or the weirder lingo he abstracted in India and Africa. E. B. White once wrote about how Perelman, after crashing his car in Florida, savored the phrase, "We totalled it!" and his pleasure in being able to use it took the sting out of the accident.
His interests and his travels swelled his vocabulary and gave him his style. But none of this would have been accessible without his memory, which was faultless. That too is a distinguishing feature in his fiction. A good memory is one of the most valuable assets a writer has, and Perelman's memory amounted to genius. One day, years ago, he was passing through Shropshire, and a glimpse of that green countryside stayed with him. He plotted to return to Shropshire and rent a house and live there like a squire; but, though he visited England often, he always became restive. Apart from the precincts of Punch, where he was feted, he found England tight and dry and a little dull. And the house rents in Shropshire were too high. He was too much of an Anglophile to like England greatly.
He died on October 17, 1979, in New York City, where he was born.
Graham Greene's Traveling Companion
[1981]
"I hadn't even realized that she was making notes," Graham Greene wrote in his 1978 Introduction to Journey Without Maps, "I was so busy on my own." And the reader looks in vain for a portrait of Barbara Greene in that book. She is named once, and mentioned ("My cousin ...") eleven times in three hundred pages. She is not important to his narrative; she hardly exists. Once, on the way to Bamakama, the cousins are separated. In Graham Greene's telling this is an incidental anxiety in a couple of paragraphs; in Barbara's it is six pages, something approaching adventure, before—in what is a sheer coincidence—the cousins bump into each other in the thick bush. We never see Barbara Greene's face in Journey Without Maps, we never hear her voice. This was deliberate. Graham Greene wanted to avoid "the triviality of a personal travel diary" by making it profoundly personal, filling it with "memories, dreams, word-associations", and so allowing it to become metaphorical and akin to fiction. "We share our dreams," he wrote, and it is true that our most powerful dreams are of wild places; the land of dreams—or nightmares—is pretty much unmapped.
It was for both a brave trip. They were young enough not to be intimidated by the risk they were taking. Graham was thirty-one, Barbara was twenty-three. The year was 1935, but the most detailed book on Liberia—Sir Harry Johnston's—had appeared thirty years earlier. The map of Liberia was blank—some rivers indicated, a few coastal towns, and the interior marked Cannibals. What was the appeal, then, of an exhausting journey along jungle tracks? Graham listed the attractions in his own book: it was a black republic, pledged to liberty and progress, which was brutal, disease-ridden and almost unknown to Europe; it was dark; it was the past. The lingo of Liberian politics was grandiose, but the political facts were of massacres and plagues. There was something seedy about the place: "seediness has a very deep appeal ... It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back."
Graham went because of the risks and discomforts. He was not seeking self-destruction—that would have been pure folly—but self-discovery. In the 'thirties, English writers "were inclined to make uncomfortable journeys in search of bizarre material," but Graham rejected Brazil, Europe, the mapped parts of Africa, and he turned his back on an Intourist ticket into "a plausible future." He wrote, "My journey represented a distrust of any future based on what we are." But it would be wrong to see his motives as especially high-minded and inspired by the possibility of allegory. He clearly liked the idea of utter awfulness, or perhaps getting lost, of being out of touch (at a time when so many writers wanted to be in touch). He was physically strong and had a growing reputation; he was confident; throughout the early parts of Journey Without Maps one senses that the author is seeking adventure, and to hell with the comforts of literary London.
So far, so good. But he did not go alone.
Barbara Greene is Graham's first cousin (Christopher Isherwood is also a cousin). While Graham is elusive and even somewhat fictionalized in his own account of the journey through Liberia—as if glimpsed from between the dense overhang of tropical jungle—Barbara is completely straightforward. She is modest and a bit self-mocking; Graham led, she followed—sometimes miles behind. She left all decisions to her cousin. This was an age when men were expected to take command. Graham dealt with the carriers, the cook, the immigration formalities, the bad tempers, the disputes. It must have been a great strain—the strain certainly shows. What started as something of a lark turned out to be an obsession; and, a critical moment, it was Graham who fell ill and was near to dying of an obscure fever. To give him his due, Graham did not make much of this near-fatal illness—"A Touch of Fever" that chapter is called—and there is no self-pity and little self-regard in Journey Without Maps.
Land Benighted is quite a different pair of shoes. It is the book that Graham wanted to avoid writing, and at the time he admitted to being "disappointed" that Barbara wrote it. After Graham's almost Conradian push through the African darkness, how deflating it must have seemed when his companion in this trek revealed herself as a pretty young thing, not really a hiker ("I love my creature comforts"), who agreed to walk across Liberia ("wherever it was") because she was a bit tipsy on champagne. She is almost at pains to portray herself as the "Oh, de
ar!", "What a muddle!" and "Mustn't grumble!" sort of traveling companion, though this could hardly have been the case. When her book appeared in 1938, reviewers remarked on Barbara's pluck. It seemed to be full of the sort of details which, if concerned with another place or time or companion, might have been regarded as trivial. Unlike Graham's, there were no flashbacks to Riga or Nottingham, no quotes from Baudelaire or Eliot. Graham had Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy in his luggage; Barbara had Maugham and the stories of Saki. It is a wonderfully telling fact, and as the trip wore on Graham became more melancholy, and Barbara began to sparkle like a light-hearted deb in a Saki story. After weeks in the bush, they came upon a small black schoolmaster, one Victor Prosser who wears "short artificial taffeta trousers in a delicate shade of mauve." Mr Prosser asks Barbara to describe London. She tells him about the underground railway and then is sorry she has done so:
It all sounded horrible, and I almost felt that I did not want to go back—til, of course, I remembered Elizabeth Arden, my flat, and the Savoy Grill.
Notice that Saki-ish "of course".
What might have seemed trivial or unimportant about Land Benighted in the 'thirites, now—over forty years later—is like treasure. What if Waugh had had such a companion in Abyssinia, or Peter Fleming's cousin had accompanied him to Manchuria? What if Kinglake, or Doughty, or Waterton had had a reliable witness to their miseries and splendors? We would not have thought less of these men, but we would have known much more of them.