The Pritchett Century (97 page)

The President turns to his dominoes and when he sees the double five turn up, he guesses that the traitor behind the rebellion is his old
friend of a lifetime, the Minister. He is invited to a banquet and, at the stroke of twelve, “the distinguished Mayor General Roderigo de Aguilar entered on a silver tray, stretched out, garnished with cauliflower and laurel, steeped with spices and oven brown—and, in all his medals, is served up roast.” The guests are forced to eat him.

García Márquez is the master of a spoken prose that passes unmoved from scenes of animal disgust and horror to the lyrical evocation, opening up vistas of imagined or real sights which may be gentle or barbarous. The portrait of the mother who eventually dies of a terrible cancer is extraordinary. He has tried to get the Papal Nuncio to canonise her and, when Rome refuses, the President makes her a civil saint and has her embalmed body carried round the country. Avidly the people make up miracles for her. Once more, in his extreme old age and feeble, there is another insurrection, plotted by a smooth aristocratic adviser. The President survives. In his last night alive he wanders round the ruined house, counting his cows, searching for lost ones in rooms and closets; and he has learned that because of his incapacity for love he has tried to “compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power” which is a fiction. “We (the multiple narrator concludes less tritely) knew who we were while he was left never knowing it for ever …” The “All” is not an extent, it is a depth.

(1979)

Humorists have a hard life. As a matter of habit the reader comes round to saying, “I don’t think he’s funny any more,” the point being that life is so unfunny that the pace gets hotter with every joke. There is the inborn feeling that the humorist is a temporary fellow. A jester must not be allowed to approach the norm. He has to divert you from the intolerable or make you digest it. The difficulty is that while stomach-ache becomes funnier the worse it gets, the stomach-ache genre becomes standardised. In her introduction to
The Most of S. J. Perelman
Dorothy Parker says of humorists in general that they find a little formula and “milk it till it moos with pain.” Her list is rather more American than European: “the tyrannical offspring, the illiterate business associate (American), the whooping devil-may-care spinster, the man trying to do a bit of carpentry and the virtuous criticisms of the little wife, mainly European.” The virtuous wife in America is outsize: she arrives home grandiose, in mink, to take hell out of the husband who has burned the dinner. As S. J. Perelman, or rather his stand-in Prebbleman, remarks of his Xanthippe, she has the classical, martyred look of someone who would be “a wow as St Joan at a Little Theatre.”

The one or two English humorists I have met have been sad men, anxious of eye, hag-ridden by efficiency of mind, mechanically ulcerated and teetering on the edge of religious conversion or the hospital. Their writings have usually contradicted this impression. The English thin man has a fat man inside him, a creature dilatory, sedentary and nourishing his joke, often over-nourishing it. Our humorists have mostly been juicy men dwelling in the belly of society; or, if this was not possible for them, have become mad cherubs like Carroll or Lear. The one general characteristic of the English humorists, good or bad, is that they are at home, dreaming private follies or shut up under lock and key in the attic, but still in the family. There is a profound satisfaction in the perils of the public face. Even if the family rejects, the pubs and clubs accept. The clubs, alas, in the older generation, have been a disaster for English humour; there it falls into persiflage. The best Americans escape this. Homelessness and the nomadic—as Miss Constance Rourke instructed us in her classic work on
American Humour
—are basic to the American tradition. So is overstatement, that Elizabethan gift which we carelessly exported lock, stock and barrel to America. So is the monologue which has been left, by us, to the Irish—see Beckett and Joyce. Our humorists—even Saki and Anstey—have had good digestions, the joke with them being that they knew that they bloody well
had
to digest what was given to them and put a peculiar face on it. Less subjected to the pressures of a dense society, Americans have had the freedom to send up howls of enjoyable pain at the raw muck set before them and instead of being digressive they have put a poker face on their duodenums. The elongated joke has been important to both traditions, but this has worked to the advantage of the American humorist who relies so much on monologue; the European cult of conversation may inspire refinement in comedy but is likely to comb all the nits out of the hair. The American monologue leaves the nits in. It can also dip into myth and, to be endurable, this has to be enlivened by image and pungency of language. In England, since the decline of the joke of middle-class periphrasis, we are only just beginning to explore exaggeration again; and at the very moment when American humour shows some signs of becoming middle-class, the sick joke being fundamentally suburban.

The huge advantage of American humour, as one sees it in S. J.
Perelman, is in the punishment of character and the use of language. Unlike Thurber who has been much admired by us, Perelman is not an understater who suddenly throws out an almost spiritual blossom. He drops ash into the dessert. Perelman either grew up with burlesque or soon got caught up in it. Immediate action is his need. An idea has to seize him. His very best things have come out of grotesque experiences in Hollywood; or when, not having enough time to read Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
, he has had to feed on the advertising columns of glossy papers. One gets the impression that English humorists snub the commercials, whereas an American like Perelman regards them as part of the general awful meal that makes us what we don’t want other people to be. Having acquired a stomach of zinc, he knows it’s his duty to swallow the poison, like someone who feels it a duty to see what cyanide does to the system. As a character, he is a harassed detective, stuck in some lobby, chain-smoking, pedantic, always in disguise, with the air of one about to follow footprints and tracking something down. He is Groucho Marx’s more sensitive alter ego, the con-man’s shadow. What one owes to the other, apart from cigars, may be conjectured from Groucho’s letters—especially those to Kurnitz—which are very funny about Hollywood. The T. S. Eliot letters suffer, on both sides, from the paralysis which occurs when a highest common factor meets a lowest common denominator and both are awed. On the evidence, Perelman’s life has been passed in film studios, dressing rooms, cigar stores, hotels, tailor’s, barber’s, steak grottoes and in bad journeys on inferior shipping lines to the phoney Orient. He will be caught—trying to hide behind
Time
or
Harper’s Bazaar
—by acquaintances with names like Spontoon, Henbane, Follansbee and Crump who, spotting his lonely but springy figure, have treated him like flypaper and have buzzed in an ear made for higher things. He has been the sort of man who having, for the moment, to identify himself with a No. 1 Stripteaseuse who has married a young Maharajah, can say that “although she had little need of paper work in her line of business,” she is obliged to be “the only ecdysiast on record with a Zoroastrian amanuensis.” The phrase is her agent’s. She breaks it down into the following:

Flustered by the pass he makes at her after this aesthetic impression, she asks what about his family in Cawnpore. “Don’t you,” she asks, “have any wives?” It is at the centre of this tradition of American humour to build up a rococo fantasy and then slap its face with a wet towel. Mr Perelman has that art. Many a gorgeous balloon goes “pop” at the touch of his cigar tip. Occasionally, under the name of Prebbleman, he is at home, usually minding something in the oven and waiting for his Joan of Arc to come back, rather late, in something new and blinding, and full of complaint. He defends himself: “I haven’t the faintest clue to what you’re foompheting about.” Wherever else he may fail it is not in adding a valuable word to the gag book. And he is soon off to a sentimental reunion of the old alumni of Dropsical High. There the old folk are “acquiring a skinful” wearing paper hats, clutching phials of adrenalin, nitroglycerin and other restoratives.

Again the puncturing anticlimax: “I give them a wide berth because they may topple on to me during a seizure and wrinkle my suit.” The noise is deafening. In it one hears “the clash of bridge work and the drum fire crackle of arteries snapping like pipe stems”; the chief speaker, recovering from his third stroke, has a voice that “ripples from his tongue as if strained across an entire creek of gravel.”

Perelman’s speciality, like O. Henry’s and Mark Twain’s, is Fraud. He looks at the landscape and it is gashed and bill-boarded with the poetic news that here someone made a killing and cleared out quickly. The inner life of a grey Puritan culture is dramatic, gaudy and violent; fraud, in the sense of the double-think, double appearance or fact and the image that palms them off, is basic. The tall story, wearisome in Europe, so that a Münchausen is a bore and a meaningless liar who wastes your time, has a more nourishing role in the American tradition. Fantasy—in English comics—has a different part to play. The distinction is suggested by comparing the extravagances of, say, Dickens with those of the O. Henry, Twain and Perelman
school. The speeches of Mrs Gamp or Mr Pecksniff are, in essence, soliloquies that fountain out of their inner lives. They tell us less about the scene in which they live than about the privacies of their minds and of their history. The flights of a Carroll, a Lear, a Beerbohm, an Anstey or a Wodehouse reject the oppressive scene around them and assert the rights of private vision in a culture which has generally been obsessed—as John Stuart Mill said—with the necessity of a social discipline. The exaggerations of the American humorists have a different impulse. If you look at their greedy use of the grotesque, you see that they are guzzling impedimenta and nameable products. You hardly see the people there but you see American paraphernalia; their metaphors take you on to the joints or to what is happening semi-legally on the sidewalk. Chicken Inspector No. 23 Perelman of the Fraud Squad surveys the field of conspicuous waste, the biggest fraud of the lot, with a buyer’s hypnotised eye. He is the un-innocent abroad; at his best in the subjects of showbiz, he is a tangy raconteur, though I find him less speedy when he turns his idea into a script with dialogue. This is odd since he has been one of the finest script writers in the funny business; indeed, remembering the Marx Brothers, a genius. He is above all a voice, a brisk and cigary voice, that keeps up with his feet as he scampers, head-down, upon the trail; in his own words “button-cute, rapier-keen and pauper poor” and having “one of those rare mouths in which butter has never melted.” He has a nose for non-news. For a long time the English humorists have suffered from having achieved the funny man’s dream; they have either gone straight for the information or have succumbed to the prosaic beauty of their own utterance. They are “facetious” without being Boswell. Mr Perelman is not entirely free of the English vice. I have caught him adding an unnecessary “I said with hauteur” or “I said with dignity.” This weakness he may have picked up on his annual visits to those fake cathedral closes of ours in Savile Row. (The metaphor is his.) But he does not wear thin. There are four or five narky things in the present book which are as good as anything in
Crazy Like a Fox
.

(1985)

Saul Bellow has the most effusive intelligence of living American novelists. Even when he is only clever he has a kind of spirited intellectual vanity that enables him to take on all the facts and theories about the pathetic and comically exposed condition of civilised man and distribute them like high-class corn so that the chickens come running to them. That is the art of the novelist who can’t resist an idea: to evoke, attract that “pleasing, anxious being,” the squawking, dusty, feverish human chicken. Aldous Huxley could always throw the corn but nothing alive came fluttering to it.

But immensely clever novelists have to beware of self-dispersal when they run to great length. I enjoy Saul Bellow in his spreading carnivals and wonder at his energy, but I still think he is finer in his shorter works.
The Victim
was the best novel to come out of America—or England—for a decade.
The Dangling Man
is good, but subdued;
Seize the Day
is a small grey masterpiece. If one cuts out the end,
Henderson the Rain King
is at once profound and richly diverting in its fantasy. These novels had form; their economy drove their point home. By brevity Bellow enhanced our experience. And, to a European
reader—though this may be irrelevant—he seems the only American of this generation to convey the feel and detail of urban America, preserving especially what is going on at the times when nothing is going on: the distinctive native ennui, which is the basic nutrient of any national life.

It is when he turns to longer books, chasing the mirage of “the great American novel,” that Bellow weakens as he becomes a traveller, spreading the news and depending on the presence of a character who is something like a human hold-all, less a recognisable individual than a fantastic piece of bursting luggage. His labels, where he has been, whom he has met in his collision with America are more suggestive than his banal personal story. In
Herzog
, the hero or rather the grandiose victim, is a gifted Jewish professor and polymath with a rather solemn pretension to sexual prowess. He seems a promising exemplar of the human being exposed to everything without the support of a settled society or fixed points of belief or value. This theme has offered the American novelist a chance to show his vitality for a long time now and the Jewish novelists have done strikingly well with it, for as a group they have acutely felt the sense of a missing law or covenant.