Idiom Savant

By R. Z. Sheppard

VINEGAR PUSS

by S.J. PERELMAN

224 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Humorist S. (for Sidney) J. (for Joseph) Perelman is in immediate danger of becoming solemnized, a process that begins as a stiffening in the joints where criticism is written, and is likely to end with an untenured English instructor laboring on "Laundry and Dry Cleaning as Objective Correlatives in the Humor of S.J. Perelman." The humorist himself quite possibly anticipated this situation 25 years ago when he titled one of his essays Don't Bring Me Oscars (When It's Shoesies That I Need).

Lately Perelman has been fighting back in other ways. Four years ago, scarcely a fortnight after he was declared a national resource in the New York Times Book Review, he declared a pox on New York City's street life and "twice breathed air," and announced that at the age of 69 he was exiling himself to London. Two years later Perelman was back, grumbling about "too much couth" and the lack of seeds in British rye bread.

It was a pity that things did not work out hi England. For Perelman is one of the great nibblers of the mother tongue. In his impeccably cut parodies, words like wattles and dottle, boffin and horripilating are used in ways that have caused two generations of grown men with attache cases to break up in solitary laughter on public transport. But in London, Perelman was removed from the effluvia of his native American id iom and the home-grown idiocies that have produced his best work.

With a few sparkling exceptions, the pieces collected in Vinegar Puss (written mostly during the past five years) show Perelman at his second best. But this is usually the case in humor collections: the author is always made to look as if he is playing Can You Top This? with himself. Pieces that look good in the casual format of a weekly magazine are rudely upstaged by the hand ful that are very good.

Around the Bend in 80 Days is only good. It is a six-part slight exaggeration about Perelman's 1971 trip along the route taken by Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. (Fifteen years ago, Perelman wrote the film script for the Mike Todd spectacular.) Perelman's traveling companion was not Passepartout but a 6-ft. 1-in. "toothsome cupcake" named Sally-Lou Claypool. Aboard H.M.S. Choleria, 19th century British sang-froid bunks amiably with the 20th century cynicism of a hornswoggled American tourist.

Few writers can get away with first-degree malice as well as Perelman: "I drew a deep breath, brushed a small, many-legged Arab off my sleeves and went down to unpack." Most of the other lines, though, could have been written for Groucho Marx and perhaps were: "I was tempted to fling him a lakh of rupees with a princely gesture. Not knowing how many ru pees there were to a lakh, though, I had to content myself with the princely gesture."

Firm Believer. Anatomists of the Perelman corpus may detect a slight twice-breathed air here, as well as in "Nostasia in Asia," the five-part piece that concludes the collection. Some of the ground and most of the mock dudgeon are reminiscent of Westward Ha! (1948). That magnificent Middle Eastern curse, "May you live a thousand years and a trolley car grow in your stomach annually!" appeared at least once before in The Rising Gorge (1961).

But I Have Nothing to Declare but My Genius is full of fizz and vinegar. It is a magnificently spiteful spoof about a rich, prolific hack written by a man who frequently describes himself as a bleeder and a firm believer "that easy writ ing makes hard reading." The hack is the kind of man who dashes off a few mysteries before breakfast and boasts of popularizing Shakespeare so that he will be "comprehensible to the veriest moron ... to even a rock fan." He is also a painter with a worldwide reputation.

"One has long enough been acquainted with your eminence in the belletristic sphere," Andre Malraux writes him in English. "Now we are overturned to un cover you as a painterly ace ..." This is Perelman at his best, inspired by the pompous, the fake and tawdry, and hell bent for leatherette.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

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