Cloudland Revisited, page 2
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.
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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.
CLOUDLAND REVISITED
Into Your Tent I’ll Creep
I first read The Sheik, by E. M. Hull, during the winter of 1922–23, standing up behind the counter of a curious cigar store of which I was the night clerk, though I preferred the loftier designation of relief manager. I was, at the time, a sophomore at Brown University and had no real need of the job, as I was wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. I had taken it solely because my rooms were a rallying point for the jeunesse dorée and were so full of turmoil and inconsequential babble that I was driven to distraction. Like Stevenson’s Prince Florizel of Bohemia, who retired into Soho to conduct his cigar divan under the pseudonym of Theophilus Godall, I wanted anonymity and a quiet nook for study and speculation. I got enough of all these to last a lifetime, and, by discreet pilfering, sufficient cigarettes to impair the wind of the entire student body. Five months after I joined the enterprise, it was stricken with bankruptcy, the medical name for mercantile atrophy. To claim that I was wholly responsible would be immodest. I did what I could, but the lion’s share of the credit belonged to Mr. Saidy, who owned the store.
Mr. Saidy was a hyperthyroid Syrian leprechaun, and a man of extraordinarily diversified talents. He was an accomplished portrait painter in the academic tradition, and his bold, flashy canvases, some of which were stored in our stockroom, impressed me as being masterly. John Singer Sargent and Zuloaga, whom he plagiarized freely, might have felt otherwise, but since neither was in the habit of frequenting our stockroom, Mr. Saidy was pretty safe from recrimination. In addition to the painting, playing the zither, and carving peach pits into monkeys to grace his watch chain, he was an inventor. He had patented a pipe for feminine smokers that held cigarettes in a vertical position and a machine for extracting pebbles from gravel roofs. Saidy’s entry into the tobacco business had been motivated by a romantic conviction that he could buck the United Cigar Store combine, using its own methods. We issued coupons with all purchases, redeemable, according to their guarantee, for hundreds of valuable premiums. I saw only four of them in my tenure—an electric iron, a catcher’s mitt, a Scout knife, and one of those mechanical blackamoors of the period that operated on victrola turntables and danced a clog to “Bambalina” or “The Japanese Sandman.” At first, I was uneasy lest some patron present a stack of coupons he had hoarded and demand one of the other premiums listed. There was no basis for my anxiety. Mr. Saidy’s prices were higher than our competitors’, so the customers stayed away by the thousands, and the infrequent few who blundered in spurned the certificates as if they were infected.
At any rate, it was in this pungent milieu that I made the acquaintance of the immortal Lady Diana Mayo and the Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, and when, after a lapse of twenty-five years, I sat down recently to renew it, 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 flavor had improved, like that of fine old port. There is nothing dated about the book; the bromides, in fact, have a creaminess, a velvet texture, I am certain they lacked a quarter of a century ago. 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 second-hand bookshop. No slapdash artificial aging process can quite duplicate the tang. It must steep.
The opening paragraph of The Sheik is, possibly, the most superb example of direct plot exposition in the language. Instead of fussing over the table decorations and place cards, like so many novelists, the author whisks open the door of the range and serves the soufflé piping hot. In the very first line of the book, a disembodied voice asks someone named Lady Conway whether she is coming in to watch the dancing, and gets a tart reply: “I most decidedly am not. I thoroughly disapprove of the expedition of which this dance is the inauguration. I consider that even by contemplating such a tour alone into the desert with no chaperon or attendant of her own sex, with only native camel drivers and servants, Diana Mayo is behaving with a recklessness and impropriety that is calculated to cast a slur not only on her own reputation, but also on the prestige of her country. . . . It is the maddest piece of unprincipled folly I have ever heard of.”
That, I submit, is literary honesty of a high order, to say nothing of a forensic style Cicero would have envied. It does not abuse the reader’s patience with a complex psychological probe of Diana’s youth, her awakening womanhood, her revolt against narrow social conventions. It tells him with a minimum of flubdub that a madcap miss is going to be loused up by Arabs and that there will be no exchanges or refunds. After making this speech, Lady Conway storms off. It transpires that she has been addressing two gentlemen on the veranda of the Biskra Hotel, an Englishman named Arbuthnot and an unnamed American, who take an equally dim view of Diana’s temerity. Though both adore her, they are dismayed by her imprudence and heartlessness. “The coldest little fish in the world, without an idea in her head beyond sport and travel,” as Arbuthnot subsequently describes her, has been reared by her brother, Sir Aubrey, a typical Du Maurier baronet, and obeys no bidding but her own whim. When Arbuthnot leaves to beg a dance of the minx, his rival speeds him with characteristic Yankee jocosity: “Run along, foolish moth, and get your poor little wings singed. When the cruel fair has done trampling on you I’ll come right along and mop up the remains.” I presume he punctuated this metaphoric nosegay with a jet of tobacco juice, slapped his thigh, and blew his nose into a capacious bandanna, but the text delicately makes no mention of it.
The singe, more of a second-degree burn, is administered in the garden, where Arbuthnot offers his hand to Diana, along with two memorable chestnuts to the effect that beauty like hers drives a man mad and that he won’t always be a penniless subaltern. His avowals, however, go for nought, as does his plea that she abandon her foolhardy undertaking. She exhibits the same intransigence toward her brother the next evening, at the oasis to which he has escorted her. “I will do what I choose when and how I choose,” she declares, turning up an already snub nose at his dark predictions, and, blithely promising to join him in New York, plunges into the trackless Sahara, accompanied only by a guide and several bodyguards. Had you or I written the story, our heroine would have cantered into Oran in due course with her nose peeling and a slight case of saddle gall. But sunburn alone does not create best-sellers, as Miss Hull well knew, and she has a bhoyo concealed in the dunes who is destined to put a crimp in Diana’s plans, to phrase it very tactfully indeed.
For brevity’s sake, we need not linger over the actual abduction of Diana by the Sheik; how her party is waylaid, how she is tempestuously swept onto his steed and spirited to his lair, must be tolerably familiar even to those too youthful to have seen it enacted on the screen by Agnes Ayres and Rudolph Valentino. The description of the desert corsair, though, as he takes inventory of his booty, attains a lyrical pitch current fiction has not surpassed: “It was the handsomest and cruelest face that she had ever seen. Her gaze was drawn instinctively to his. He was looking at her with fierce, burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her, leaving the beautiful white body bare under his passionate stare.” Under the circumstances, one cannot help feeling that her question, “Why have you brought me here?,” betrays a hint of naïveté. The average man, faced with such a query, might have been taken unawares and replied weakly, “I forget,” or “I guess I was overwhelmed by the sight of a pretty foot,” but Ahmed’s is no milksop answer: “Bon Dieu! Are you not woman enough to know?” This riposte so affected one spark I knew back in the early twenties that he used it exclusively thereafter in couch hammocks and canoes, but with what success is immaterial here. In the novel, at all events, the Arab chief, without further ado, works his sweet will of Diana, which explains in some measure why the book went into thirteen printings in eight months. I could be mistaken, of course; maybe it was only the sensuous lilt of the prose.
It may be asked, and reasonably, what the rest of the book deals with if such a ringing climax is reached on page 59. The story, simply, is one of adjustment; Ahmed Ben Hassan goes on working his sweet will of Diana with monotonous regularity, and she, in time, becomes reconciled to the idea. To be sure, she does not accept her martyrdom slavishly. She rages, threatens, implores, all to no purpose. Anguished, she demands why the Sheik has done this to her. “Because I wanted you,” he returns coolly. “Because, one day in Biskra, four weeks ago, I saw you for a few moments, long enough to know that I wanted you. And what I want I take.” All the scene needs to achieve perfection is a sardonic smile and a thin thread of smoke curling away from a monogrammed Turkish cigarette. These make their appearance in short order. Diana quaveringly asks when he will let her go. When he is tired of her, returns Ahmed with a sardonic smile, watching a thin thread of smoke curl away from a monogrammed Turkish cigarette. Small wonder every fiber of Diana’s being cries out in protest.
“He is like a tiger,” she murmurs deep into the cushions, with a shiver, “a graceful, cruel, merciless beast.” She, in turn, reminds the Sheik of still another quadruped: “The easy swing of her boyish figure and the defiant carriage of her head reminded him of one of his own thoroughbred horses. . . . And as he broke them so would he break her.” The connubial relationship between horse and tiger, while a trifle perplexing from the biological point of view, settles into a surprisingly domestic pattern. Yet instead of rolling with the punches, so to speak, Diana willfully upsets the applecart by running away. Ahmed overtakes her, and it is when she is being toted home, slung across his pommel like a sack of oats, that she experiences the great awakening: “Why did she not shrink from the pressure of his arm and the contact of his warm, strong body? . . . Quite suddenly she knew—knew that she loved him, that she had loved him for a long time, even when she thought she hated him and when she had fled from him. . . . He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength.”
Naturally, it would be infra dig for any woman, especially a member of the British peerage, to bluntly confess a béguin for an obscure tribesman. Hence, there ensues an interval in which Diana plays cat-and-mouse with the chieftain, instead of horse-and-tiger, and arouses his wrath by her ladylike reserve. “Bon Dieu! . . . Has the vile climate of your detestable country frozen you so thoroughly that nothing can melt you?” he mutters thickly, contemning even the weather in his scorn. “I am tired of holding an icicle in my arms.” Eventually, though, his dear nearness, scorching kisses, and equally fiery rhetoric produce a thaw, and Diana favors him with a few caresses of signal puissance. Strange to say, their effect is not precisely what one would imagine: “ ‘You go to my head, Diane,’ he said with a laugh that was half anger, and shrugging his shoulders moved across the tent to the chest where the spare arms were kept, and unlocking it took out a revolver and began to clean it.” Perhaps I was unduly stimulated, but after that torrid buildup, dilettantism with a pistol seemed no substitute for a volcano.
For all practical purposes, nevertheless, and halfway through her narrative, the author has proved to everyone’s ennui that pride crumbles before primitive passion. Given another setting, the boy and girl could now trot around to the license bureau and legalize their union, but here, in addition to the lack of such facilities, there is still the embarrassing racial barrier confronting Diana. Bewitched as she is by her swain, she cannot quite blink at the fact that he is an Arab, a grubby little native by her social standards. To nullify this obstacle, the author puts some fairly ponderous machinery in motion. She introduces a lifelong chum of the Sheik, a novelist named the Vicomte Raoul de Saint Hubert, who also happens to be a crackajack surgeon. Then she causes Diana to be kidnaped by a rival sachem, from whom Ahmed rescues her, sustaining a grievous wound. As he hovers between life and death, watched over by the Vicomte and Diana, the gimmick is unveiled:
