Towards the end of my first year at Melbourne University — a time of exquisite confusion and crippling diffidence for me as I flailed from one to another of the four subjects I was tackling — I was given a book by an older student whom I greatly admired. The only way I could see to climb the mountain of difficulties my studies seemed to present was to work harder and so, as examinations loomed, I stayed back each evening and worked late in the university library. It was after one of these stints, over a cup of the 'caf's' execrable coffee, that my friend gave me the book.
'Don't read it on the tram going home,' he said, 'you might embarrass yourself.'
But I had a long journey ahead and of course I opened it the moment I sat down in the draughty middle section of the nearly empty tram. The book was S. J. Perelman's Crazy Like a Fox and my generous friend was Bruce Dawe. And I did embarrass myself because, within a page or so, I was laughing out loud and attracting the attention of the few late night travellers as they clattered home through the windy dark. Someone buckling with mirth was probably the last thing they needed.
Crazy Like a Fox is a collection of Perelman pieces mostly from the New Yorker. I opened the slim volume at random and began reading 'The Idol's Eye' — 'Four of us had cycled down from London together: Gossip Gabrilowitsch, the Polish pianist; Downey Couch, the Irish tenor; Frank Falcovsky, the Jewish prowler; and myself, Clay Modeling.' They are visiting Gabriel Snubbers at his villa, 'The Acacias', the west wing of which burns down as they arrive. As Clay Modeling notes, Snubbers' eyes 'were set in deep rolls of fat for our arrival'.
After 'a spot of whisky and soda' — 'Littlejohn, Snubbers' butler, brought in a spot of whisky on a piece of paper which we all examined with interest' — they listen to the story of how Snubbers' great-grandfather left Poona and, 'living almost entirely on cameo brooches and the few ptarmigan that fell to the ptrigger of his pfowlingpiece' at last reached 'Ishpeming, the Holy City of the Surds and Cosines'.
A vast, laconically displayed literary range of reference, a restless imagination, an insatiably curious mind and an unerring eye for the phony, the kitsch and the pretentious are