This volume of short essays – originally written for the New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s but never before assembled – provides ample evidence that the great S.J. Perelman could misspend his youth with the best of them. It’s also the closest thing to an autobiography he ever completed: a series of comic reflections on the awful, absorbing books and movies which entertained him when he should have been attending his classes at Brown University (from which he eventually dropped out), or keeping a steady job.
Recollected in the tranquillity (or complacency) of being a well-established, middle-aged family man, these guilty pleasures prove less absorbing to him the second time round, and often hilariously so – perhaps because vanishing into the ‘cloudland’ of books and films is a lot harder when there’s a wife, two demanding children and a taxman eager to pull you straight back out again.
In a far away, more carefree time, there was only the teenage-to-twentysomething Perelman who mattered: a young man who enjoyed fleeing late shifts in a cigar store, or electroplating automobile radiators, to disappear into afternoon cinemas with the likes of Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino. Or he might go gloriously swinging off into library adventures with Tarzan of the Apes or the lesser known Leonie of the Jungle.
Even better were tales of worldly, passionate men and women chasing one another across landscapes far more exotic than Perelman’s native Rhode Island, such as the 1916 silent movie adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, featuring an early film version of Captain Nemo wearing ‘a Santa Claus suit and a turban made out of a huck towel’, or E.M.
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