Author: anagramsci

I am Fortune 500's fool.

“A Brief Study of Dendrophilism” (E60)

  • Originally printed:  The New Yorker, February 18, 1933
  • First reprinted in:  From Bed to Worse (1934)
  • Original Byline:  Robert Benchley

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Comments:

Always a dicey proposition when an early 20th century writer dabbles in mock-anthropological and/or mock-psychotherapeutic discourse. Here, Benchley essays both, with results that fail to justify the gamble. Sprouted from the unimpeachable (although by now axiomatic) kernel of a connection between the aficionado and the fetishist, the piece soon gets lost in the thorny underbrush of the Eurocentric unconscious, projecting all manner of outré tree trysting upon the usual targeted demographics before doubling back to take stock of the photosynthetic perversions being practiced “right here where we live”. I always want to give Benchley the benefit of the doubt when he slips into these callow catalogues of counterfeit cultural relativism. Certainly, the wild sociology of the period required caustic pruning back, but when an author resorts to mere ridicule by reproduction, the roots of the enterprise are blighted.

Favourite Moment:

In America, dendrophilism has not gained much headway, owing to there being so many other things to take up people’s minds, although Kiernan, in the Detroit Lancet, does mention a case of  a woman who was under suspicion of going pretty strongly for an old elm, which she claimed had been in the family for a hundred years and which she wanted to have brought into the house just to keep her company.

Reprint Notes:

  • Illustration not reprinted

“A Brief Course in World Politics” (E59)

  • Originally printed:  Liberty Magazine, December 6, 1930
  • First reprinted in: Benchley Lost and Found
  • Unable to compare reprint with original text – Liberty Historical Archives not available at Toronto Public Library
  • Original Byline: unknown

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Comments:

Another smug entry that first saw the light of day in Liberty Magazine (a three-year gig that seldom brought out the best in Benchley). Whatever modicum of mirth the piece might have afforded readers at the time is very hard to discern beneath the intervening carnage of the 1930s and 1940s. Dulled by an admittedly brain-atrophying state of affairs on the domestic political front in 1930 (when Democrats and Republicans were even more anxious than usual to assure the electorate that neither entity could ever possibly stand for anything), Benchley’s decidedly anti-Fawkesian persona eschews any interest in trying to disentangle (or even take cognizance of) the political struggles and upheavals occurring elsewhere.

With its emphasis upon the author’s tendency to confuse and conflate various nation states with one another, to draw back in horror from ballots filled with multi-word party names, and to take offense at the very idea of national elections that don’t take place on regularly scheduled Tuesdays in November, the text does provide some ammunition for an against-the-grain reading of the essay as a satire of American ignorance and apathy, rather than of incomprehensible international squabbling. However, like “Back in Line” (E32), the predominant mode of address here appears to assume a readership afflicted with precisely those intellectual shortcomings.  

Favourite Moment:

As it stands now, I am likely to throw the whole thing up and go in for contract bridge. There, at least, you know who your partner is. You may not act as if you knew, and your partner may have grave doubts about your ever knowing, but, in your own mind, the issues are very clearly defined.

“The Bridge of Don Gene’s Nose” (E57)

  • Originally printed:  The Bookman, October 1928
  • First reprinted in:  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; or, David Copperfield (1928)
  • Original Byline:  Robert Benchley

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Comments:

A slight piece occasioned by a trio of 1928 pop culture headlines: 1. Gene Tunney’s retirement from boxing as heavyweight champion of the world; 2. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey; and 3. The European walking tour undertaken by this supposedly unlikely pair. Already celebrated by the media as “The Thinking Man’s Pugilist,” especially after ensorcelling slugger Jack Dempsey with sweet science in back-to-back bouts, Tunney’s eagerness to express his thoughts on Shakespeare and other aspects of literary history made irresistible copy. News of the boxer’s friendship with novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder was music to editorial ears everywhere, and their plans to ramble across rural France and Germany got nearly as much coverage as a Trans-Atlantic Flight or a Polar Expedition. What would these extraordinary men talk about? What magnificent epiphanies awaited them? Wouldn’t it be amazing if Gene Tunney guided Thornton Wilder to a new understanding of The Iliad? And if Thornton Wilder enlightened Gene Tunney on a fine point of feint and jab? Wouldn’t that be wonderfully counterintuitive?! Well, possibly it would it have been. But in Benchley’s account, we get the bro version of “dog bites man”.

Favourite Moment:

To all of these, and many more problems, Don Gene turned an ingenuous attention. And, in the meantime he lived immaculately, read much, and punched a large, harassed leather bag.

Reprint Notes:

  • Reprinted under the title: “The Bridge of Sans Gene”

“A Breath from the Pines” (E56)

  • Originally printed:  Life Magazine, October 6, 1921
  • First reprinted in:  Never reprinted
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley (column header: “The Latest Books”)

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Comments:

Benchley’s first impulse as a critic was never to reach for the knife (unless his Guy Fawkes persona had command of the pen), but sometimes only a knife will do. Your humble chronicler has never read Gene Stratton-Porter, but this piece makes an excellent argument against the advisability of taking the time to experience Her Father’s Daughter, at any rate. Celebrated in her day as a feminist and an ecological activist, Stratton-Porter appears to have embraced (in this late-career novel, at least) one of early-20th century Progressivism’s least savoury side-issues: white supremacist eugenics.

Benchley identifies the book’s protagonist – a homespun huckster for birth rates and “efficacy” – as a proto-Fascist. The term itself wasn’t available to him just yet, as Mussolini’s party was still a year away from power in 1921, so Benchley brings its American analogue into the discussion, nominating this vile character for a fictional leadership position in the distressingly resurgent Ku Klux Klan. What else can you do with a dismal dynamo named “Linda Strong”? As amusing as this takedown is, Benchley’s liberal disgust with all forms of jingoism and chauvinism emerges palpably from the piece, lending a crusading edge to the hilarity rarely seen outside the precincts of the Wayward Press.

Favourite Moment:

Linda Strong is the kind of girl who is ‘just a bully good pal to a fellow’. She is constantly going out on ‘hikes.’ She wears low-heel shoes and common-sense clothes and delivers little three-minute talks on their efficacy during occasional lapses in her ardor for ‘bucking up’ her boy-friends to make them do better in school. And she believes that every woman ought to have at least six children, training them to grow up into fine, strong, virile women and men, fit to fight the Japanese some day.

“The Brave Illusion” (E55)

  • Originally printed:  Collier’s, May 20, 1922
  • First reprinted in:  Never reprinted
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley (with illustrations by Ray Rohn)

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Comments:

Sooner or later, every Benchley fan, biographer, and encomiast must reckon with a defining aporia in the humorist’s life – the moment he reinvented himself as exactly the same person he had always been. During the past couple of hundred years, thousands – probably millions – of men have morphed from budget-conscious, maritally faithful, teetotalers into financially reckless debauchees. No other human being has ever made this transition without the slightest change in the quality of their humour, their sense of commitment to other people, and their basic stance toward the cosmos.  

Only Robert Benchley.

Even if he’d never written a word, Benchley would’ve made an irresistible subject for an inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of wry good humour raised to a Transcendental value; but it is impossible to conceive of Benchley without his words – the pixelated exoskeleton that held his genial essence intact once he crossed the alcoholic Rubicon in 1920.

What does any of that have to do with this piece from Collier’s? Not much, probably, although this is a very early (pre-emptive?) formulation of the thesis that still makes its way into many bullet-pointed accounts of his baffling trajectory – i.e. after opposing the consumption of alcohol on moral grounds throughout the 1910s, Benchley reversed himself after the passage of Prohibition laws and took up residence in a bottle on a contrarian lark. This essay likens the impulse behind that act (attributed to Benchley’s friend “Lou”) to the naturally libertarian whims of irresponsible youth – whims that the author deems “a bore”. Writing in 1922, Benchley could not have known what the next 23 years held in store for him, but from our perspective we can infer that, regardless of the specific reason for his decision to take that first drink, his decision to continue down that road long past Prohibition’s expiration date may have had a great deal to do with his sense of himself as a bore.

We know he was no such thing – but that doesn’t help much, does it?          

Favourite Moment:

Better a stolen raw potato passed from hand to hand than the cookies of respectability.

“The Boys Go Literary” (E54)

  • Originally printed: The New Yorker, November 5, 1927
  • First reprinted in:  Never reprinted
  • Original Byline:  Guy Fawkes

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Comments:

In this early installment of The Wayward Press (so early it’s called “The Press in Review” instead), Guy Fawkes expresses grudging admiration for a fit of aberrantly elevated expression which gripped the city’s newspapers in October 1927. Writing in an appreciative mood more reminiscent of Robert Benchley, Broadway’s most doggedly delighted dramatic critic, than of Guy Fawkes, celebrated foe of the Fourth-Rate Estate, the author heaps promiscuous acclaim upon the various outlets’ moving memoranda on the deaths of Mexican General Alfredo Quijano and NYC underworld figure James “Little Augie” Orgen.

Fawkes does recover some of his wonted facetiousness in time to question the World’s step too far into sonorousness in its October 22nd issue, which he describes as a series of short story prize entries laid end to epiphanic end. Benchley stays with that much-abused organ as he coasts toward the close on a tongue-in-cheek treasure hunt for the faltering World’s late 1920s signature dog, cat, and pony show puff pieces on companionate creatures. He locates only one in this unusually highfalutin month of issues, although he briefly considers lumping a press release on the Rockefellers at play in with the rest of the animal antics.

Favourite Moment:

Once again, we must complain of the World’s household-pet news. After a frantic search of the files for the past three weeks, the only really exclusive story in this field appears to be the one on October 19 in which it is told (with two photographs) how Ethelbert, the cat in the County Clerk’s office, sits by the mail chute watching the letters drop past and tries unsuccessfully to stop them. A very pretty story, and told in that sharp, incisive manner which characterizes all the World’s animal news, but hardly sufficient for three weeks’ reading.

“This Boys’ Camp Business” (E53)

  • Originally printed: Detroit Athletic Club News, January 1927
  • First reprinted in:  The Early Worm (1927)
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley [with drawings by Rea Irvin]

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Comments:

Concerned that the youth of America are in danger of maturing into a squadron of toothsome, early rising goons, Benchley aims to dissuade this cohort’s fading fathers and mothers from succumbing to the summer camp magazine ads in the slicks. The author propounds a bleary-eyed anti-vision of masculine independence with the strength of character to resist the bugle call of back-slapping, raft-capsizing bonhomie. Admitting that his resistance to the trend owes at least a little to his own loss of prestige on family swimming parties since a filial exile to the great outdoors came home leagues beyond the old man in the nautical arts, RB makes his slouching stand based primarily on principle. Benchley raises the alarm (the only alarm his idealized snoozer will accept) against the coming Hobbesian orgy of citizens pushing each other off rafts and into an abyss of mirthless, muscle-toned laughter.         

Favourite Moment:

In the first place, when your boy comes home from camp he is what is known in the circular as ‘manly and independent’. This means that when you go swimming with him he pushes you off the raft and jumps on your shoulders, holding you under water until you are as good as drowned – better, in fact.

Reprint Notes:

  • Reprinted in full, with the Irvin drawings replaced by two new Gluyas Williams illustrations.

“Botany Exam” (E52)

  • Originally printed: The New Yorker, June 14, 1930
  • First reprinted in:  No Poems; Or, Around the World Backwards and Sideways (1932)
  • Original Byline:  Robert Benchley

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Comments:

Ambushed by pedantry on the footpaths of Central Park, Benchley plots to claw back civic quietude from the clutches of municipal overreach. Things were bad enough for anxiety-ridden greenspace seekers when they were forced to contend with Latinate horticultural labels bent on literalizing the landscape, but now the botanists have used their pull with Tammany to salt the earth with demoralizing quiz inscriptions. No one, the author argues, heads to Central Park in search of further proof of their own ignorance. And yet, this is the inevitable result of the city’s current initiative. Benchley imagines Mayor Jimmy Walker himself lurking in the bushes in judgment.      

Refusing to wither altogether under this harsh light cast upon his defective understanding of the life sciences, RB conceives a text-based revenge scheme of his own. If the government wants to go around forcing embarrassing questions on people, it had better be prepared to face a return volley of the same. He does his best to incite a kind of grassroots, pretechnological Yelp campaign in the streets of Gotham, with the citizens leaving passive-aggressive placards about town in hopes of securing a cease-fire with the know-it-alls in the New York Parks Administration.    

Favourite Moment:

The only way in which we, as citizens, can get back at our tormentors is to ask them questions in return. We may not be erudite in our questions, but we can be embarrassing. We can put a sign over that hole in Forty-Fourth Street asking: ‘How much macadam would it take to fill up this hole, and why the hell isn’t it done?’ On every street corner, we could string up little signs reading: ‘what belongs here for the reception of waste-paper?’

Reprint Notes:

  • Reprinted in full, with a new Gluyas Williams illustration.

“Boost New York!” (E51)

  • Originally printed: The New Yorker, August 24, 1929
  • First reprinted in:  Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949)
  • Original Byline:  Robert Benchley

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Comments:

Here, RB examines the deranged reasoning processes which afflict the Chamber of Commerce set. Arguing that his burg has more than enough to contend with, without an uptick in plenty-crazed pilgrims peregrinating in from the provinces, Benchley takes exception to the very concept of civic boosterism. But, he argues, if the thing has got to be done, is this really the way to do it? The “this” in question is a stat-stuffed pamphlet put forth earlier that year by the New York Merchants’ Association. To hear the author tell it, this stirring call to farms relies heavily on a barrage of factoids concerning the city’s gross consumption rates, reproductive figures, working animal population, and telephony network. Certainly, as the saying goes, there is strength in numbers. But is there tourist appeal?

Benchley comes down squarely on the negative side of that question – indeed, he is banking on a lack of method in the merchants’ madness to keep the throngs off the sidewalks that fall. As ill fortune would have it, the imminent Wall Street Crash and its attendant dislocations probably made the whole project a moot point, at least for a little while, and one shudders to consider its effect on the city’s egg consumption.   

Favourite Moment:

It is hard to imagine a man who has never been out of Des Moines picking up his newspaper and saying to his wife: ‘Marion, get out your good clothes – we’re going to New York. It says here that people there eat three and a half million tons of food a year.’ Or his wife saying: ‘But how many eggs a day do they eat?’ and, on hearing that it is seven million, replying: ‘Good! That’s all I want to know. We’re off!’

Reprint Notes:

  • Reprinted in full, with no amendments.