Travels with a Donkey

WESTWARD HA! (159 pp.)--S. J. Perelman & Albert Hirschfeld--Simon & Schuster ($2.95).

Perelman was just leaving a little specialty shop in the Forties (he had been buying "a black girdle with rose panels and a bias-cup brassiere" for his mother) when he ran slap into Cartoonist Al Hirschfeld--a man whose "cunning ferret eyes" share pride of place with a beard as frothy as "a zabaglione." The pair of them were eventually put under contract to make a trip round the world for Holiday magazine, and the result, excellently illustrated by Artist Hirschfeld, is one of the funniest books that Perelman has written. Subtitled "Around the World in 80 Cliches," Westward Ha! is both a juicy parody of the average globe-trotter prose and a ferret's-eye view of the international scene in 1947.

"All Aboard. Numbed by "the dull ache of parting with my creditors," Traveler Perelman took off from New York carrying a machete, cummerbunds, maps, and "an apparatus for distilling seawater." First stop was a world-famous shrine in Camden, N.J. named Joe's Coffee Pot, where the plane was grounded. Second stop was Hollywood, where Traveler Perelman had scrimped a living in the '30s. " 'I'd rather be embalmed here than any place I know,' [Hirschfeld] said slowly. He turned up the collar of his trench coat and lit a cigarette, and in the flare of the match I saw that his tiny pig eyes were bright with tears."

Next stop was the Chinese port of Chinwangtao, where the Marine Flier paused to unload 2,500 tons of girdles ("the engine-room bell was clanging . . . he may have said girders"). "Every sort of object imaginable was being offered by street hawkers . . . noodles, poodles . . . leeches, breeches, peaches . . . roots, boots, flutes, coats, shoats, stoats." Perelman tossed the children "a few worn gold pieces which were of no further use to me," and then he and Hirschfeld took a brief ride in rickshas:

"I experienced what I am told is the customary sense of embarrassment at having a fellow-creature act as one's beast of burden, but mine was such a wiry specimen, weighing as he did well over 80 Ibs. and amazingly fleet for a man of 60 with tuberculosis, that I quickly overcame my compunctions."

And So We Say Farewell. The travelers moved on via gay Shanghai (where, after celebrating, Perelman next day could swallow nothing but "a little clear broth made of Angostura, lemon peel, and bourbon"), the Malay States, and Ceylon. "The last we saw of India . . . was a wizened beggar signaling us frantically for baksheesh. When none was forthcoming, he threw aside his servile manner and, bounding beside our porthole, dynamically thumbed his nose at us until we outdistanced him. It was a touching, and somehow an apt, symbol of the amity between our two great nations."

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