Sunrise with Seamonsters (49 page)

... I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured: the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the pre-destined, I ticketted my performance
Treasure Island
... as I pored over my map of Treasure Island, the future characters in the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, or they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure. The next thing I knew I had some paper before me and was writing out a list of chapters...

I was delighted to find this example for Stevenson's cartographic inspiration, because for two years I worked on a novel—
The Mosquito Coast
—with a map of Central America next to my desk. When I was stuck for an idea, or when I wanted to reassure myself that my fictional settlements really existed, I studied this map.

Most novelists are map conscious, and all great novelists are cartographers. So are all true explorers, and the most intrepid travelers and traders. The real explorer is not the man who is following a map, but the man who is making one.

I do not think that it is profit alone, the desire for financial gain or celebrity, that animates such men. But it is a fact that the most commercial-minded countries have also been the most outward-looking. In the past, there were no trading nations that were not also the dedicated patrons of cartographers. Today, the proudest boast of any commercial enterprise is its illustration, with a map, of its influence and success. All
maps are records of discovery; without fresh discoveries no new maps are possible. Our fastidious curiosity and our passionate business sense and even our anxieties have made ours a cartographic age.

Maps reflect the face of the land. They tell us most things but not everything. Long ago, they were shorelines; and then they were riverbanks; and at last they were territories with a million features. But they have always been surfaces figured with routes and suggestions. To the most courageous and imaginative of us, these surfaces are eloquent, showing the way to new discoveries. In a sense, the world was once blank. And the reason cartography made it visible and glowing with detail was because man believed, and rightly, that maps are a legacy that allows other men and future generations to communicate and trade.

A good map is better than a guidebook: it is the ultimate tool of the man who wishes to understand a distant country. It can be merciless in its factuality. It can also tell us things that are unobtainable anywhere else.

About ten and a half years ago, in Singapore, I rented a house—sight-unseen—in the English county of Dorsetshire. I had been to England twice, but never to Dorset. The village, South Bowood, was not mentioned in any guidebook. What descriptions I came across were general and unhelpful. After a great deal of reading I still knew absolutely nothing of the place in which I was now committed to spend six months with my wife and two small children. I began to wonder if the place existed.

It was then that I found some Ordnance Survey Maps. The whole of Britain is scrupulously mapped. I had the correct sheet. I located South Bowood: it was a hamlet of about eight houses. Letters and symbols told me there was a public house down the road, and a mailbox, and a public telephone. The post office and school were a mile distant, and the nearest church was at Netherbury; but we would be on a hill, and there were meadows all around us, and footpaths, and not far from us the ruins of an Iron-Age hill fort. The houses were small black squares, and at last, sitting there in the Singapore Library studying the map, I worked out which house would be ours. So I knew exactly where I was going, and all my fears vanished. With this map, I was prepared: without it, I would have been in darkness.

Humorists are often unhappy men and satirists downright miserable, but S. J. Perelman was a cheery soul who, when he flew into one of his exalted rages, seemed to have the gift of tongues. He gave his mockery a bewitching style. In his stories, or
feuilletons
as he liked to call them, he represented himself as a victimized clown. He was "button-cute, wafer-thin" and reared turkeys ("which he occasionally exhibits on Broadway"); or Doctor Perelman, "small bore in Africa"; or a mixture of Sad Sack and Pierre Loti, haplessly sampling the pleasures of out-of-the-way places; or finally as a sort of boulevardier and roué who, at the moment of sexual conquest, is defeated by a wayward bedspring.

When I first began reading him in the 1950's—I was in junior high school—I was excited by his malicious humor, his huge vocabulary and what I took to be his lunatic fantasy. I sensed a spirit of rebellion in him that stirred the anarchy in my schoolboy soul. After I started to travel, it struck me that much of what he wrote was true: Perelman's Africa was the Africa no one else had noticed. His stories were bizarre because he sought out the bizarre. He cherished oddity and, being truly adventurous, was willing to put himself to a lot of trouble to find it (he strolled around Shanghai, in 1947, looking for it). Then I met him. He
was
button-cute, and also a bit of a roué, and accident-prone. If he had been writing fantasies, we would think of him as a humorist, a writer of gags, whose object was merely to entertain. But he wrote about the world, and his intensity and his anger made him into a satirist.

A satirist seems a sour and forbidding figure—a mocker, a pessimist, a grudge-bearer, a smirker, something of a curmudgeon, perhaps with a streak of cruelty who, in inviting the reader to jeer at his victim, never misses a trick or withholds a nudge. How does one suggest that such a man may also have a great deal of charm? Perelman's friends liked him very much. He was generous, he was funny, he was enormously social, he didn't boast. Travel has the effect of turning most people into monologuists; it made Perelman an accomplished watcher and an appreciative listener. When he talked in his croaky drawl he did so in the elaborate way he wrote, with unlikely locutions and slang and precise
descriptions diverted into strings of subordinate clauses. He was small and neatly made; he wore very handsome clothes, usually of an English cut, and in his pockets he carried clippings he tore from the newspapers—one he showed me was about the movie
The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre,
which he eventually worked into a story. He read the London
Times
every day (he had an air-mail subscription)—more, I think, for the unusual names than for anything else. In today's
Times,
Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes has just reached the South Pole; Captain Sir Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys has just died; and both Miss C. Inch and Miss E. L. F. I. Lunkenheimer have just got married. Perelman welcomed news of this kind.

In his way, he was a man of the world. A man of the world, almost by definition, is never content anywhere. Perelman was a bit like that. He had a great capacity for pleasure, but he was restless, always active, game for anything; he fed himself on change. He began writing at Brown University, where a fellow classmate was Nathanael West (Perelman married West's sister Laura in 1929), and at the age of twenty-five, with the success of his first book,
Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge,
he was invited to Hollywood to write jokes for the Marx Brothers. He went, and he liked to say that Hollywood reminded him of a novel he had read in Providence as a boy,
In The Sargasso Sea,
by Thomas Janvier (anyone who has the luck to find this 1899 story of marooning and murder in the nightmare swamp will immediately see the connection). From time to time throughout his life, Perelman returned to Hollywood, struggled with scripts and then fought free. At the age of seventy-four, fresh from the travels he recounted in
Eastward Ha!,
he tried to drive his vintage 1949 MG from Paris to Peking, commemorating the trip of Count Something-or-other. It was not such a crazy scheme. He had been around the world a dozen times. He was in good health, his car had recently had a tune-up, he had a generous sponsor and many well-wishers, and he liked to say (though joshing himself with his chain-smoker's chuckle) that he knew Malaysia and Hong Kong like the back of his hand.

In a Thai restaurant, in London, on Christmas Eve, he told me about his drive to Peking. He had just flown in from China. The trip, he said, was a total disaster. The glamor girl he had chosen for navigator had been fired at the outset for selling her story to a magazine. He had quarreled with his fellow drivers all the way through India. There had been kerfuffles with customs men in Turkey. The car was not allowed through Burma and, as there was no room on a ship to Malaysia, the car had been air-freighted to Hong Kong. There were more scenes in Hong Kong. "The others freaked out," Perelman said, but with the old car now parked in Kowloon, he flew to Peking and spent two weeks in a Chinese hospital with a severe case of bronchitis, aggravated by double pneumonia.

"Now I have to write about it," he said. "It'll be horrible."

Frankly, I thought the subject was made for him. Nothing is more Perelmanesque than a marathon drive across the world, interlarded with set-backs, blown gaskets, howling Turks and long delays in flea-ridden Indian hotels. And pneumonia in Peking was the perfect ending for someone who always racked his brain for grand finales. (His editor at the
New Yorker,
William Shawn, told me, "He always had trouble with endings.") But the last collection of Perelman pieces contains nothing about that Paris to Peking trip. This is odd, because he had made his reputation by describing the complicated orchestration of fiascos.

A month before he died, he wrote me a letter in which he said, "I myself have spent altogether too much time this year breaking my nails on the account of the Paris—Peking trip I made › ... and after a lot of bleeding cuticle, I decided to abandon it. I guess there are certain subjects—or maybe one's subjective reactions to them—that in spite of the most manful attempts are totally unproductive. The one I picked certainly was, and it took a lot of
Sturm und Drang
to make me realize that my Sisyphean labors were getting me nowhere."

This was the only gloomy paragraph in an otherwise chirpy letter. His letters were long, frequent, and sensationally funny—indeed, so funny that, after receiving a few, Raymond Chandler (always a hoarder and procrastinator where writing was concerned) replied worriedly warning Perelman against squandering his wit: "You shouldn't give the stuff away like that when you can sell it, unless of course your letters are just rough notes for articles."

But they weren't "just rough notes for articles." They were generous and intelligent expressions of friendship and most of them far too scandalous to be retailed. Here is the opening paragraph of a letter Perelman wrote me on Christmas Eve, 1976:

"Between the constant repetition of 'White Christmas' and 'Jingle Bells' on Station WPAT and the increasing frenzy of Saks' and Gimbel's newspaper ads as these fucking holidays draw near, I have been in a zombie-like state for weeks, totally incapable of rational thought or action. I must have arrived at near-paralysis yesterday afternoon when I was in the 4th-floor lingerie section ('Intimate Apparel') in Saks 5th Avenue. I had just purchased two such intimate garments for gifties to a couple of ladies of my acquaintance, a tall blonde and a somewhat shorter brunette. For the former, I had chosen a black lace chemise in the style known as a teddy back in the 'twenties (familiar to you as the scanty garment worn by Rita Hay worth in the war-time pin-up). For the shorter brunette, a similar peach-colored job. Both of these real silk, parenthetically, and as I signed the charge slip, I knew that when the bill comes in after January 1st, I would kick myself for my prodigality. Anyway, while
the hard-featured saleslady was wrapping them up with appropriate mash-notes to each bimbo, I went upstairs to the men's dept. to buy myself a cheap tie-tack. When I returned for the feminine frillies, I found (a) that the saleslady had forgotten to identify which box was which, and (b) that she had switched the notes. In other words, the blonde Amazon would find herself with the brunette's undershirt and some steamy sentiment addressed to the latter, and vice-versa. I broke out into a perspiration—it's tropically hot in those department stores anyway—and insisted on the saleslady clawing open the boxes, which meant destroying all the fake holly berries, silver cord, and mish-mash they were entwined in. This of course put her in a foul temper, and meanwhile a waiting queue of customers became incensed. The upshot was a group shot of seven or eight people leering and cackling obscenely as I stood there holding the two chemises and the notes appropriate to the recipients. Given the savoir-faire of Cary Grant I might have risen above it, but the only savoir-faire I possess is Oliver Hardy's, and little enough of that..."

When Perelman's letters are collected, as they surely deserve to be, they will comprise the autobiography he promised and began, but never got around to finishing. The three chapters printed here are all we have of
The Hindsight Saga
—anyway, with a title that good you hardly need a book; or did its promise of disclosures intimidate him? He was always more personal and ruminative and risqué in his letters than he was in his stories, and he heartily disliked people Who boasted by reminiscing about the past. "I see Scott Fitzgerald's gossip-columnist mistress has been cleaning out the contents of a thimble," he wrote me when Sheilah Graham's
The Real Scott Fitzgerald
appeared.

Perelman knew Fitzgerald as a sober, hard-working script-writer, who had gone to Hollywood for the money, much as today's writers accept tenure at universities. Fitzgerald believed himself a failure, but Perelman was one man (Faulkner was another) who used Hollywood to fuel his other projects; his script-writing career coincided with his first appearance in the pages of the
New Yorker.
It seems extraordinary that he was able to keep his enthusiasms separate, but to California and New York he added the world. From the 'thirties onward he traveled widely, first in the Pacific and then in Africa, Europe and Asia. I cannot think of another writer who was so adept as Perelman in prevailing over such vast cultural incongruities and whose appreciations included B-movies, pulp magazines, Joyce's
Ulysses,
Hollywood dives, the societal norms in Bucks County, Manhattan and Nairobi, detective fiction, English country-house weekends, vintage cars, dogs (he once, on a whim, bought a bloodhound), cantankerous producers and pretty women. He talked with passionate energy about Fellini's
Satyricon
and Alfred Russel Wallace's
The Malay Archipelago.
He knew Dorothy Parker well and had a close
friendship with Eric Ambler. He was the only person I have ever known who dropped in on J. D. Salinger, whom he called "Jerry."