BOOKS
473
BLOSSOM OF THE NETTLE
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CRAzv L>KE
A
Fox.
By s.
J.
Pwlman. Randam Hau".
$2.50
n
S.
J.
PERELMAN
is an astute, genial and pitiless operative, whose quarry
is
the hugely comic potential in written matter at large. From crot–
chety trade journals, bleak slicks and pulps, the Victorian set piece or
nasty bits of washing directive, he ferrets out the hapless fools and crimi–
nals of style and drags them to justice-that is, to their
Reductios ad
absurdum.
Perelman has two methods of exposing his victims: he lets them
talk, gives them enough rope (but their speech is at the mercy of his
supra-logical, Groucho Marx asides) ; or he dogs them, re-enacts their
prose with a bouncing agility, caricaturing its meanest, most flagrant or
most anonymous points. Either way the result is total.
He
Cill!__
coax out the absurd eyen frQm Dostoevsky. In "A Farewell
to msk," aTter affecting the traditional, matter-of-fact, down-at-heels
opening ("Late one afternoon in January, 18-, passersby in
L.
Street
in the town of Omsk might have seen a curious sight."), he closes' in on
those orthodox unorthodoxies of psychological insight, those homely but
distinctive phrases that gave to the Russian novel its tone of sardonic
naturalism:
.
-
'FlC'
was the son of a former notary public attached to the house–
hold of Prince GrashKin and gave himself no few airs in consequence.
Whilst speaking it was his habit to extract a greasy barometer from his
waistcoat and consult it importantly, a trick he had learned from the
Prince's barber. On seeing Afya Afyakievitch he skipped about nimbly,
dusted off the counter, gave one of his numerous offspring a box on the
ear, drank a cup of tea, and on the whole behaved like a man of the
world who has affairs of moment occupying him.
Percy Hammond, a first-rate humorist in his own right, once asked
H,arold Lloyd what he did to make people laugh. "Act natural," Lloyd
said, "in an unnatural situation."
There are plenty of unnatural situations in Perelman's pieces. But
they are reduced to the commonplace by the author's offhand acceptance
of the very macabre conditions he himself has devised. At the close of
a dissertation on mushrooms that deals with the fungus to the exclusion
of human characters, Perelman nonchalantly launches a conventional
novelistic coda:
Little else remains to be told. Fred Patton, the former Erie train
boy, still continues to rise in Mr. Proskauer's mercantile establishment
on Ann Street, and Gloria Proskauer blushes prettily whenever Fred's
name is uttered.... And so we leave the little snitch right smack up
behind the eight-ball, and a good end for the mealy-mouthed, psalm–
singing petty thief, if you ask me.
Perelman is a past-master of such nonsense, of the effortless non
sequitur that manages "perspective through incongruity." It is this talent
for what Coleridge termed "impropriety" and referred to as the positive
