From Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film
“I first read The Sheik, by E. M. Hull, during the winter of 1922–23, standing up behind the counter of a curious cigar store of which I was the night clerk, though I preferred the loftier designation of relief manager,” wrote S. J. Perelman, recalling the year he was a sophomore at Brown University. Twenty-five years had passed since Perelman has first read the book and “heavy with nostalgia,” he decided to reread it. “If my examination of The Sheik did nothing else, it confirmed a suspicion I have been harboring for over two decades; namely, that the relief manager of a small cigar store in Providence about 1922 showed the most dubious literary taste of anyone I ever knew.”
Thus was born the idea for the “Cloudland Revisited” series: fond yet often scathing and farcical reappraisals of books and movies he had enjoyed in his youth. Perelman wrote twenty-two such reviews of books and silent films, including such cringeworthy fare as Gertrude Atherton’s sensationalist fantasy Black Oxen, Sax Rohmer’s supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the “underwater” silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and the D. W. Griffith melodrama Way Down East, starring Lillian Gish.
Hard to find and never before collected in one volume (as Perelman had hoped they would be), all twenty-two pieces have been gathered in a new Library of America paperback. Adam Gopnik has admired the Cloudland essays since he himself was a teenager, and in his introduction to the collection he points out that, while all of Perelman’s essays on mostly forgotten books are wonderful and funny, the reassessments of old silent films resonate more strongly today. “The movies occupied then, as they do now, a more central and fraught place in American life than does old boudoir and adventure fiction,” yet silent films, unlike popular and pulp fiction, “had first fully blossomed and then entirely died—giving his recollection of them an absolute, sealed-off King Tut’s tomb quality. They were past in ways the books were not.”
For one silent film star, the original “vamp” Theda Bera, this vanishing act remains especially true, since nearly all her movies were destroyed in the Fox Studio fire of 1937. Fortunately for Perelman (and for us), a copy of A Fool There Was (1915), the film that made her famous, did survive, and Perelman spent a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York rewatching it. The result is one of the more hilarious (yet wholly accurate) summaries of a silent film ever written. We present his essay, “The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont,” as our Story of the Week selection, with a preface that details his introduction (and reintroduction) to the overnight success of Theda Bera.
