S. J. Perelman, Aquarian escape artist ?

S.J. Perelman born 1 February 1904, Brooklyn, NY. No time of birth available.

Sidney Joseph Perelman, was commonly known as S J Perelman. He was yet another writer in The New Yorker's pantheon. His early career included script writing for the Marx brothers. Later he collaborated with Ogden Nash to write the stage show "One Touch of Venus". It is for his satirical New Yorker columns he is best remembered, several collections of these have been published over the years. His humour is less whimsical, more brittle than Thurber's or Nash's I think. I also suspect that it has become more easily dated. Much as I admired his wit, it was not always as immediately accessible as that of Nash and Thurber. One needed to be fairly well read and well informed to grasp the point many of SJP's parodies and satires.

In Perelman's natal chart we find his Sun in Aquarius conjunct Saturn. Here's another of my Super Six with a planet conjunct the Sun. Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Parker both had Sun conjunct Mars, James Thurber's Sun was conjunct Venus. This is getting interesting!

Perelman's Sun/Saturn are exactly opposite his Moon in Leo. Another similarity with Ogden Nash's chart - both have Sun/Moon oppositions, signs reversed ! Could this be partly why they got on so well ? Another opposition in SJP's chart - Neptune in Cancer opposite Venus in Capricorn. Mercury is also in Capricorn.

With Saturn strong in it's traditional rulership of Aquarius, and two planets in Capricorn, Saturn's other rulership, there is a strong Saturnian feel to this man - in my opinion it over-rides the more humanitarian idealistic side of his Aquarian Sun.

Jupiter and Mars both lie in Pisces, Pluto in Gemini and Uranus in Sagittarius.

This writer was also a keen traveller ( evidenced by his books "Westward Ha!" and Eastward Ha!") I expected to see more Sagittarian influence in his chart. The modern ruler of his Sun, Uranus is in Sagittarius, but I'd have liked to see more. Perhaps his ascendant might account for this, or perhaps several planets fall within 9th house. I have not been able to discover his birth time.

It has been said that S J Perelman was something of a Pagliacci - wearing the face of a clown, but hiding much misery. In a review of the biography " S. J. PERELMAN: A Life". By Dorothy Herrmann the following is disclosed:

" Perelman's childhood was poverty stricken, his parents having failed at everything from dry-goods merchandising to chicken farming. His marriage was largely unhappy, his wife, Laura West, having been melancholic, alcoholic, unfaithful and perhaps excessively attached to her brother, the writer Nathanael West, whose early death in a 1940 automobile accident seems to have permanently wounded her.
His children were often a source of pain to him. Doubtless in part because of his own remoteness, his daughter failed repeatedly at marriage and his son committed several street crimes before eventually settling down. Perelman's own emotional life seemed crabbed and depressive. Ms. Herrmann speculates that at some point in his life, he had to resort to electric-shock therapy or lithium. "

Elsewhere it's said that SJP was something of a philanderer, though his affairs are not documented. Neptune opposite Venus might well indicate secret love affairs. In spite of any affairs, he and his wife Laura were a successful screenwriting team for many years, it is said elsewhere that he never recovered from her death from cancer in 1970. He sold their farm and moved to England. He didn't enjoy life in England, though he had always professed to be an anglophile. He moved back to New York, where he died in 1979.

Another extract from the above review:

"At least in Ms. Herrmann's hands, he comes across as a consummate escape artist. When people's emotional demands pressed him, he withdrew into hidden parts of himself. When commitment was expected of him, he ran to other women, other countries, other forms of artistic expression. The precise mechanics of his surrealistic comedy have been analyzed too often to require further elaboration here, but one generalization that can safely be made about the best of his writing is that whatever the emotional impulses he began with, they were disguised nearly beyond all recognition by the time they were transformed into his riotously funny prose"

One facet of a textbook Aquarius is described quite well there - withdrawal from emotional demands, running from commitment. I think perhaps Saturn so closely conjunct SJP's Sun might account for this characteristic being emphasised in his personality - the opposition to his Moon must also have something to do with this.

Finally, a couple of quotes from S J Perelman himself. The first is SJP describing SJP:

"Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy."

and brief samples of his writing:

"The whole business began sixteen years ago, as so many complex ventures, with an unfavorable astrological conjunction, Virgo being in the house of Alcohol. Late one August day in 1932, I was seated at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris with my wife, a broth of a girl with a skin like damask and a waist you could span with an embroidery hoop. I had had three mild transfusions of a life-giving fluid called Chambéry Fraise and felt a reasonable degree of self-satisfaction."

"On the basis of an overnight sojourn, I can report that I found the Pearl of the Orient slightly less exciting than a rainy Sunday evening in Rochester "

"I don't believe in kindly humor--I don't think it exists".-S.J. Perelman, The New York Times, October 18, 1979

That last quote has a very Saturnian ring to my ears! I'd like to think that compassion and affection CAN and do exist in humour. I was a little disappointed in my second Aquarian subject, I must admit. It was said by one observer that Perelman became increasingly bitter as he aged, almost a parody of himself. It's sad that so many of these writers who brought laughter and enjoyment to their readers seemed to lack joy within themselves.