I Shudder by Paul Rudnick

At least a year ago I ran into my friend, Janet, the Grand Dame of Bookselling. She always has more than a few suggestions for me and told me how I must read I Shudder by Paul Rudnick. She thought it was my kind of humor. Dutifully, I added it to my list of books to be purchased. It was several months before I found a beautiful hardcover at my favorite used book grotto and, as usual, she was right. 

Rudnick is best-known as a playwright (I Hate Hamlet, Jeffrey) and has had some Hollywood successes (Addams Family Values, In & Out), as well.  Sub-titled And Other Reactions to Life, Death and New Jersey, I Shudder is a series of rollicking personal essays interrupted by the fictional diary entries of Elyot Vionnet, a persnickety aesthete and substitute teacher. 

The essays are sprightly personal pieces describing friends, family and experiences. His reminiscense of the Chelsea Hotel and it's merry mess of oddfellows only adds to my fascination with 1970's New York, an age when people could actually afford to live in Manhattan. The opening piece, The Sisters, a fond though stinging look at his mother and aunts not only had me laughing and nodding but imagining my mother and sisters behaving the same way had they lived in the same city. Enter Trembling, his piece about Hollywood exec Scott Rudin brings warmth and humanity to a ruthless Type-A type. 

There are five pieces billed as excerpts "from the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet" and they were far and away my favorites. I found both the character and how Rudnick writes these pieces very reminiscent of the hilarious minutiae of S. J. Perelman entwined with the haughtiness of a Thurber man. 

To give you a taste of what I found so funny, here Vionnet describes his underwear:  "...my intimate apparel is manufactured from a Swiss cotton of such whisper-soft resilience that it is normally used only to wrap the painfully sensitive faces of the world's wealthiest women as they recuperate from acid peels in private clinics. Unlike these women's jowls and browlines, however, my undergarments require mending only once per decade, when I mail them to a Long Island convent, where the nuns compete to gently darn and patch my private attire because, as Sister Herbert Elizabeth once wrote to me, in her own blood, "Mr. Vionnet, your boxer sorts and undershirts do not merely speak to me. They sing.'"

Needless to say, when I read this, I awakened Mrs. Next with my howls of laughter. 

An old friend visits

The work of James Thurber has meant a great deal to me since I paid a quarter for a copy of The Thurber Carnival at a thrift store almost 25 years ago. Most people had to read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" or "The Catbird Seat" as part of a college collection or as an assignment in high school. Maybe that's all the Thurber most people need but his work spoke to me immediately and with immediacy. It was smart and funny and literate and snobby and drunken and sad--all qualities to which I aspired. For many years, I would bore most anyone who would listen to me go on (and on and on) about James Thurber. His work turned me on to Perelman, Runyon, Benchley and the rest of the Harold Ross/New Yorker set and changed how I read.

The other night, for the first time in several years, I picked up The Thurber Carnival and am delighted to report it is STILL smart and funny and literate and snobby and drunken and sad. Certainly it is dated and some of the pieces have little in common with our present world nor how humor has evolved since but the writing holds up as truly classic American literature.


The selections, especially those from The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, knocked me out all over again: Elliot Vereker from "Something To Say", Barney Haller's accented speech and Thurber's fear of 'grotches' from "The Black Magic of Barney Haller", Charlie Deshler 'coming out of the anesthetic' of his wife's charms from "The Curb In the Sky". Still funny, still clever, still beautifully written. I was also quite moved by the longing and loneliness in both The Evening's At Seven and One Is A Wanderer. Thurber is remembered as a writer of humor but he was a hell of a writer, period.

I could go on (and usually do) but instead suggest you, too, dig out your old copy of The Thurber Carnival and give it a read. Or should you come across a copy in a thrift store, spend the quarter. My guess is you will be rewarded and delighted.