Perelman and West: brothers in satire

Like the literary brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, or Heinrich and Thomas Mann, S. J. Perelman and Nathanael West were related, close in age, stimulating collaborators and lifelong friends.  Perelman the humorist (1904-79) and West the novelist (1903-40), both sons of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, grew up in New York and Rhode Island.  In February 1922 at Brown University in Providence, Perelman met Nathan Weinstein (later changed to West), who had transferred there from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.  Their meeting in college was crucial to their development.  Later on, they both contributed to the same little magazines, Perelman achieved early success and was West’s mentor, and they wrote a play together.  They strengthened their bond and became brothers-in-law when Perelman married West’s favourite sister, Laura, in 1929.  Four years later the two city boys bought a rural retreat in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 70 miles southwest of Manhattan.

In college the languid and soft-spoken, easygoing and unenergetic Weinstein was given the ironic nickname of Pep.  Well-dressed in Brooks Brothers clothing, he struck Perelman as a sophisticated, exotic and glamorous figure—“a dandy, an exquisite”. “When I got to know him,” Perelman said, “he had a warm and fanciful humor and great erudition that made the rest of us seem juvenile.”  West, in return, admired Perelman’s satirical skill as a writer and cartoonist.

Perelman recalled that West “arrived on campus with gonorrhea and suffered very intensely” during the cure.  In New York in 1923 he’d contracted the disease that caused pain for the rest of his life.  In the summer of 1935 West wrote Perelman an agonised letter: “I have had a very bad week.  My prostate gland became swollen to the size of an orange causing me acute discomfort.  The doctor says it is nothing, or almost nothing.  It is caused by a simple (!) congestion of the gland brought on by a lack of intercourse (may he rot in hell) made acute by the irritation caused by the membrane of the penis giving a false erection without natural relief.”

Perelman called the conflicted West a “cross-grained, fun-loving, serious-minded dreamer” as well as a disillusioned realist.  His biographer Jay Martin writes that West had deep affection for Laura and Perelman, but regarded himself as “a lonely spy”, above emotional displays, “outside of social life”. “Tall, well-built and handsome,” West was Perelman’s physical ideal.  “He loved custom-tailored clothes—his tailor bills were astronomical—first editions and expensive restaurants.”  Perelman noted that when working as the manager of the Sutton Hotel in Manhattan, West “had charm and a quick sense of humor, as well as innate sympathy with the problems of his guests.”

West always spoke about Perelman (“Sid”) with deep affection, admired him as an artist and relied on his literary judgment.  Perelman became “an awe-inspiring figure for West”, his most sensitive reader and severest critic.  “They regarded themselves as emotional and literary soul mates, mirror images of one another,” and did not feel they were competing.  By 1930 their fortunes were reversed.  Perelman’s biographer Dorothy Hermann notes that West was no longer “the pampered young man from a rich family indulging in every whim.  Sid, who had to struggle early in life, was now earning a good living by his drawing and writing.”  At twenty-six, he had already published two books.

Perelman’s style featured comical twists of famous titles—The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, Malice in Wonderland, “Revulsion in the Desert”—as well as puns, incongruity, hyperbole, far-fetched comparisons and baroque prose:

–This is an ordeal by fire.  Make sure you wear asbestos pants.

–My only thespian flight therefore had been a minor role in a high-school pageant based on Pocahontas.

–[My voice] had settled into a monotonous lilt like a Hindu chanting the Bhagavad Gita.

–[His film script] took five months of drudgery and Homeric quarrels, ambuscades and intrigues that would have shamed the Borgias.

Perelman was the first professional writer that West knew and he always sought Perelman’s guidance.  His friend recalled, “he often visited me in Greenwich Village, curious about, though hardly envious of, the precarious life that I was leading.”  Both men believed in and supported each other’s work, and Perelman gave West considerable help at the beginning of his career.  He introduced West to Dorothy Parker and other amusing and influential New Yorker writers.  He also brought him to Horace Liveright, who published West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts in 1933.

In the summer 1934 they worked together on a play, Even Stephen.  Jay Martin notes that they had “a real meeting of tastes and knowledge and their collaboration gave every promise of success”. The heroine of the play is a female novelist who arrives at a New England girls’ college to complete her exposé of their hothouse sex life.  Their comedy satirised publishing, sensational novels, college professors and their wives, newspapermen, young poets and mad scientists.  Despite their talent and theatrical connections, the play was never produced.

West respected Perelman’s judgment, relied on his criticism and valued his help.  Perelman acquired and gave West the lonely-hearts letters a friend had received for her newspaper column, and West used them as material for his comic and tragic novel.  In a letter of April 12, 1930, West revealed that he didn’t always agree with his friend.

Perelman had urged him to make his powerful, weird and original novel more appealing to a popular audience: “Sid read the first four chapters of Miss Lonelyhearts and didn’t like them very much—too psychological, not concrete enough.  He says I ought to put in descriptions of people and things. That’s just what I was trying to avoid.”  In a letter to Bennett Cerf, West noted that Perelman acted as a mollifying mediator between West and the publisher of The Day of the Locust: “Sid Perelman tells me that in your conversations with him you didn’t like several of the landscape descriptions and felt that they were awkward in some cases and overwritten in  others.”  Perelman’s satire on Hollywood in the bitter “Scenario”, one of his best works, influenced West’s novel.

In his essay on “Nathanael West” in The Last Laugh (1981), Perelman recalled West ecstatically leaving the New York hotel for Hollywood in 1933 with the money he had earned from Miss Lonelyhearts: “his mood was jubilant; he was through forever with the hotel business, with the neurotics, drunks and grifters he had been called upon to comfort and wheedle.  He had two tangible licenses to hunt and to fish, and one, invisible, to starve as a free-lance writer.”

Despite his success as a screenwriter for the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and Horse Feathers in the early 1930s, Perelman “continually raged against Hollywood’s vulgarity and stupidity” and condemned it as “a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth”.  But West was keen to earn big money as a screenwriter and Perelman, despite misgivings, tried to get him work in Hollywood.  In a letter to Perelman, West imitated his style and described working for a mad producer at Universal: “He is a sweet fellow but ever since he fell out of that airplane, I think he’s been a little mixed up in the head.  He wants the hero to be in love with snakes. I don’t know if he’s kidding me or serious.  I am having a tough enough time with it because it is a mystery melodrama and that clue stuff gets me down.”

Perelman observed: “I well remember West’s feelings about the current political activity in Hollywood.  The noble piety of the Hollywood folks, as they immersed themselves in the plight of the migratory workers and the like was pretty comical.  One couldn’t fault them for their social conscience, but when you saw the English country houses they dwelt in, the hundred-thousand-dollar estancias, and the Cadillacs they drove to the protest meetings, it was to laugh.”  West was idealistic, Perelman cynical.  But Perelman refused to see that it was quite possible for the well-intentioned rich to keep their wealth and also help the poor.

Perelman was attracted to West’s favorite sister, Laura, who resembled her brother and was “the female embodiment of the physical and emotional qualities he found attractive in West”.  His marriage to the 17-yr-old Laura in 1929 was also a symbolic marriage to his new brother-in-law.  West visited them regularly on Saturday nights and shared their intellectual interests and social life.  In a letter of March 1,1937, Perelman described his newborn son, Adam, and even joked about incest: “He’s four months and a week old and looks like neither of us as much as like Pep [West]—which conjures up some pretty interesting speculations.”  West’s love for Laura conflicted with his devotion to Perelman, and the siblings’ obsessive closeness drew Laura away from her husband and influenced the early failure of their marriage.  She became an alcoholic, and both Sid and Laura had affairs.

Once married, Perelman also sought a suitable wife for West: “His taste in women, with whom he tended to be shy, was catholic enough, but he preferred those tall, rangy girls who had attended finishing schools and universities.”  The Perelmans introduced West to attractive women they thought would be perfect for him, but he couldn’t commit to any of them.  Finally, in Beverly Hills on April 19, 1940, West married Eileen McKenny with Perelman as witness and best man.  Laura was seven years younger than Perelman; Eileen was ten years younger than West.

As soon  as they married, West and Eileen thought of buying their own place near the Perelmans in Bucks County.  Mocking West’s delusions of grandeur, Perelman declared, “He is interested in getting something with a certain amount of water on it (isn’t he cute?) and would be satisfied with a piece of Tohickon Creek.”  He also wants a house “made out of tailored stone, with as many as four levels,” five fireplaces and old rather than new trees.

On December 22, 1940, only eight months after their marriage, both West and Eileen died in a car crash.*  The accident occurred as they returned from a bird hunting trip in Mexico, just across the border in El Centro, California.  A notoriously reckless driver, West ran through a stop sign and was smashed by another car.  Jay Martin states, “The force of the impact spun the two cars around in a kind of whiplash, springing the door open and throwing Eileen between the colliding machines and into a ditch north of highway 80.  West, too, was thrown from the car to the highway.”

As soon as Perelman heard of the accident he flew from New York to California. West’s North Hollywood flat was in a state of chaos, and several acquaintances were already stealing his clothes and furniture.  But his Christmas gifts were wrapped and an unfinished letter to Perelman, still in the typewriter, recalled his old life.  When asked to write a tribute, Perelman replied, “I haven’t any perspective about him, just a dull sense of unreality and shock which I am afraid will be a long while in disappearing.”

Perelman was furious about two nasty incidents concerning his friend.  West had given Dashiell Hammett a free room at the Sutton Hotel when he was writing The Thin Man.  But when Hammett became successful and West needed money in Hollywood, Hammett said that “West could expect no financial help from him.”  Even worse, within days of West’s death, “Cerf called to ask for the return of the advance on West’s next novel, about $150.”  Perelman claimed that when they next met in a rainstorm, he pushed Cerf into the mud.

As literary executor, Perelman continued to look after West’s affairs and guarded his literary interests with fierce devotion.  He dedicated The Dream Department (1943) to his friend.  In December 1965, he encouraged Jay Martin to write West’s biography: “I’ll contrive to bring up as much material as I can from the country relative to West; and when we meet again I can begin providing you with a list of people you will want to sound out.”  When Farrar, Straus brought out a one-volume edition of West’s Complete Works, Perelman told a mutual friend, “how flattered and pleased he would be to see his work achieving solid recognition.  I feel as positive as you do that had he lived, he would have been one of the truly important novelists of our time.”  Perelman must have found it difficult to compete with a dead man for literary fame and the affection of his family.  Indeed, Perelman’s strained and exaggerated humour has dated, while West’s reputation, nurtured by Perelman, has soared.

*T. E. Lawrence, Roy Campbell, Albert Camus and W. G. Sebald, as well as James Dean, Jackson Pollock, Princess Grace and Princess Diana, also died in road crashes.

Jeffrey Meyers’ 43 Ways to Look at Hemingway will be published in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will appear in the spring of 2026.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.