Hyde-Bound Don't Tread on Me: the Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman Edited by Prudence Crowther Viking; 372 pages; $19.95

By Stefan Kanfer

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

-- Woody Allen

With this posthumous volume, S.J. Perelman answers his most famous acolyte. The days of the humorist were lettered, with explosive messages to family, colleagues, editors and amours.

In some 20 books of collected short pieces, Perelman offered a unique amalgam of elegant phrase and pratfall comedy. Behind each one was the carefully drawn self-portrait of a curmudgeon, skewering the pretentious, detonating popular culture and putting backspin on cliches ("Jigwise, all is up"). The role of sulfurous commentator was not a disguise. Don't Tread on Me proves that the life story of Perelman was the adventures of Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde. Early on he decided that Will Rogers' statement "I never met a man I didn't like" was "pure flatulence, crowd-pleasing and fake humility," and acted accordingly. Prudence Crowther, Perelman's friend during his last year, provides a wide-eyed introduction to these selected letters: "I talked about the Chaplin I'd just been watching; he knew Chaplin." But her accompanying notes illuminate a long and entertaining list of the writer's enmities.

Coming upon the prose of his young New Yorker colleague John Updike, Perelman is "overtaken by the characteristic nausea that attacks me when this youth performs on the printed page." Lawrence Durrell is "one of those Englishmen whose eye is especially made for spitting into." A publisher's catalog contains "only a few horrors like Tom Wolfe (of whom I suspect they're secretly ashamed)."

Even Perelman's enthusiasms are vinegary. He had famously collaborated on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, but when an editor plans to anthologize portions of the film scripts, their scenarist responds, "If illiterates and rock fans (synonymous) can only be led to purchase my work by dangling before them the fact that I once worked for the Marx brothers, then let us find some other publisher." James Agee and Dorothy Parker were friends of Perelman's, but readers would never know it from his keyhole view of the beach house the two shared: "They both exist in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds."

Dorothy Herrmann's recent biography, S.J. Perelman: A Life, points out what any sensible reader already knows: humorists are not a sunny breed. They pick up their tribulations by the wrong end, and that provokes mirth. But after the audience leaves, the anguish remains. Perelman's boon companion and brother- in-law, Novelist Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts), died young (36) in a car crash. Perelman never fully recovered from the blow, nor did his wife Laura, who descended into alcoholism. Many of his best letters deal obliquely with the disappointments he felt with his family and his work: he did not write a full-length book or earn a big payday in Hollywood. He compensated for periods of depression with solo journeys overseas that shortchanged his children ^ without alleviating his sense of unfulfillment. When his daughter was dejected after reading Crime and Punishment, he tried to console her -- and, implicitly, himself -- by insisting that "you can be as deeply moved by laughter as you can by misery."

His letters refute that claim. Those that gripe are bitterly amusing; but it is when they fail to disguise sorrow that they become poignant. Perhaps the most moving aspect of Don't Tread on Me is a negative one: Sidney Joseph Perelman promised an autobiography, and here is the only one he got around to writing. He died in 1979 at the age of 75, and wordwise, this is his last.