“Bobby Goes A-Bicycling” (E50)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, December 23, 1926
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

🦉🦉

Comments:

A rather lackluster entry in the Benchley family phantasmagoria. Throughout his career, RB showed a decided fondness for the depiction of barbed interactions between grade schoolers and their guardians. This could sometimes generate real hilarity (see “Another Uncle Edith Christmas Yarn” – E18); but, in this case, we get an unfunny filial fizzle. Purportedly written by young Bobby Benchley Jr. (aged 7 in 1926), the piece announces itself as the chronicle of Benchley père et fils’ efforts to join in the then-current race to the North Pole, with the dubious help of some kibitzing crony called Lieutenant Commander Connelly. From the start, however, the author is more interested in establishing his portrait of Young Mister Benchley as a precocious practitioner of dire dad jokes at his own pop’s expense.

As you might expect from such a trio (or however many people there are in this two-wheeled caravan), they don’t get very far, stalling out somewhere near White Plains, New York. Along the way, the son-persona jabs mercilessly at the patriarch’s pet peeves, triggers, and insecurities, without occasioning much mirth. Benchley deprecating himself is generally a delight – but Benchley delegating that task to a prepubescent print golem of his own flesh and blood forces the author’s sense of guilt over his increasingly absentee parenting a little too palpably onto the page.

Favourite Moment:
Four days out from Scarsdale, the expedition is now somewhere around North White Plains, N.Y. If things go on at this rate, we’ll need a new map before long.

“Bobbing For Words” (E49)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, July 16, 1932
First reprinted in: Never Reprinted
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

Here Benchley pokes fun at a brand of navel-gazing ethnography that has persisted as a popular timewaster into our own day. In the 1930s, they called it “A Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada”; now, it’s a BuzzFeed Quiz. Unnerved by the prospect of having to hear about this study for the rest of the decade (Benchley tells us that these intrepid dialect cartographers have gotten bogged down in Eastern New England, where the quaint residents of Block Island, Rhode Island insist upon calling a seesaw a “tipity-bounce”), the author undertakes to jolly the infernal project along by contributing a few Manhattan-based observations.

As a connoisseur of the Litvokshire dialect and its subvariants, Benchley can pinpoint the exact pier a New Yorker dangled off as a child, based solely on their preferred term for a paper-clip used in lieu of a pipe-cleaner. Having settled that matter, he takes us to Long Island, where the word “fox” has undergone some startling metamorphoses in a misguided effort to avoid the appearance of baby talk.

Favourite Moment:
In the neighborhood of Fifty-second Street, and as far north as Sixtieth, where the speakeasy influence has crept in, vowels and consonants are used interchangeably and whole syllables are lopped off simply to make the going easier.

“Blurbs” (E48)

Originally printed: The Forum, December 1923
First reprinted in: Never Reprinted
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

We discern intimations of Benchley’s Guy Fawkes persona in this piece, which applies the Wayward Press treatment to the unctuously undiscerning literary criticism in vogue during the Fall of Calvin Coolidge’s accession to the Presidency. Benchley begins in a mood of mock amazement, basking in the froth of fiction’s self-styled apotheosis. One recent barrage of ballyhoo heralded the arrival of no less than 38 all-time exemplars upon the literary landscape – just in time for Christmas! A veritable embarrassment of rich exaggeration.

And yet, the author has no pointed quarrel with any of the esteemed works on that year’s publishing schedule. He cites a number of critics for contempt of their own métier, but negs nary a modern masterwork. Doubling back to poke fun at the stuffiness he had exhibited during the opening paragraphs of the piece, Benchley admits there is nothing inherently ludicrous in imagining that some of these “instant classics” of the early 1920s might indeed emerge triumphant from the chrysalis of damnation by attainted praise. In the final analysis, it is the paucity of perspicacity that Benchley abhors in these peripatetic paeans – a defect he would continue to dog in his mass media interventions of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Favourite Moment:
The Boston “Transcript” uses the word “unique” a bit more cagily, in speaking with characteristic New England repression of another book. “A more unique self-revelation,” it says, “has perhaps never been given to the world.” There may have been an equally unique self-revelation. The “Transcript” reviewer does not let himself go to the extent of denying this. But the point to be emphasized is that, since man first began drawing picture-stories on the walls of his cave, there is every reason to believe that the world has never seen a “more unique” personal record than this.

“The Birth of a College Comic Paper” (E47)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, June 2, 1927
First reprinted in: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield
Unable to Access Original Text at This Time – Benchley Data will analyze any excisions/amendments when Life 1927 enters the Public Domain (in 2023)
Original Byline: Not Available

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
An extremely off the cuff entry in the Benchley canon – but one with its heart on its sleeve. Here, the author takes us behind the scenes at The Razorblade, a fictional entrant in the college humour sweepstakes of the 1920s, where Messrs. Youling, Beamish, Roffen, and Phielo take their bi-weekly half-assed stab at putting together a passable periodical. It is a truism that no one wants to see how the sausage gets made, but in The Razorblade’s case, it seems pretty clear that encountering this sausage at any stage of its life cycle would be a mistake.

Benchley’s disdain for puerile sex jokes, which he considered a substitute for actual humour, comes through pretty clearly in this piece, as does his irritation with an epidemic of ersatz nonsense churned out by Boston Bro-mins whose approach to the mirthful metier lacks any tinge of cosmic absurdity. These charmless chums, whose every “anarchic” act or statement comes embalmed in quotation marks, seem to conceive of comedy as a fraternity hazing ritual perpetrated upon the public. Rah rah rah!

Favourite Moment:
Eighteen poems, five of them to Milady’s ankle, and twenty-nine necking jokes. If we use them all, we are still five whole pages short.

“Biography By Inches” (E46)

Originally printed: The Bookman, June 1925
First reprinted in: Pluck and Luck
Original Byline: Robert Benchley (with sketches by Herb Roth)

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Drawing fractured inspiration from Amy Lowell’s posthumously published 1,200 page long literary biography John Keats, Benchley admits that he has neither the time nor the particular genius that powered his late contemporary through her subject’s short life at the rate of 48 pages per annum. He pays homage to Lowell’s extrapolatorily encyclopedic method by executing a series of narrow deep dives into the stream of Victorian poet William Bodney’s consciousness. In 1925, Lowell’s book was making waves among critics, who disagreed sharply upon the merits and advisability of her approach, and Benchley would almost certainly have elicited similar responses from his own readers, if William Bodney had been a real person.

Given the special circumstances, RB tackles the fragmentary relics of Bodney’s imagined existence with even more confidence and gusto than Lowell had shown in teasing out her thick descriptions of a thinly documented life. Having made up his primary research materials in the first place, Benchley presses this advantage to provide maximum insight into the workings of the artist’s putative mind, whilst judiciously leaving some room for interpretation when confronting multivalent passages such as the reference to “open fires” in Bodney’s I wonder when, if I should go, there’d be.

Here, your humble annotater begs your leave to return to this entry in the future – once he has read Lowell’s John Keats (which, as I’m sure you can imagine, may take a while – but his curiosity is piqued).

Favourite Moment:
Of the boyhood of William Bodney we know but little. He was brought up as most of the boys in Suffix were brought up, except for the fact that he did not go out of doors until he was eleven, and then only to strike at the postman. He was kept in the house so much because of an old prejudice of Edna Bodney’s against fireflies.

Reprint Notes:

Herb Roth sketches not reprinted.
No Gluyas Williams illustrations for this one.
The opening preamble, which makes specific reference to Amy Lowell’s John Keats, has been excised – and once again this does damage the piece a little.
Parenthetical subtitle has been added: (Such as has recently been done for John Keats)

“A Big Edition” (E45)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, November 21, 1931
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
A big edition indeed! Guy Fawkes covers a lot of ground in this 5-page installment of The Wayward Press. He begins with an expression of pity for American journalists forced to pretend that they understand or care about “international news”. Given a line on a good murder spree or their semi-annual Trial of the Century, those press boys could really kick up some copy, but with nothing much cooking on the domestic front in early November 1931, Fawkes finds them serving up second-hand statecraft scraps. The papers were abuzz that autumn with hearsay concerning French Prime Minister Pierre Laval’s fruitless confab with Herbert Hoover. Fawkes chides the media for churning out placeholder headlines and stories, all claiming to be on the cusp of big balance-of-power altering revelations, when, in fact, not even Laval knew what he was doing on this side of the Atlantic.

The author does a little digging in the London papers and finds them even more at sea in their reportage, with the Daily Express going furthest astray in their accounts of a “shocking” shipboard slip and fall by U.S. dignitary Henry Prince, which was supposed to have upset Monsieur et Madame Laval greatly and augured ill for discussions of a Franco-American Pact. In reality, RB asserts, Prince had the stomach flu and the Lavals weren’t anywhere near him when he took a tumble. This was no mistake on DE’s part – the paper simply understood that beleaguered Britons were eager for a little comedy relief in their foreign correspondence.

Fawkes makes short work of the New York City Aldermanic elections, described by various organs as indicative of a victory for Tammany or for the anti-corruption Seabury commission (definitely seems like the latter, in retrospect, given the imminent fate of Mayor James J. Walker) and the death of Thomas Alva Edison (he’s just happy the sportswriters weren’t asked to pile their purple clichés onto his pyre – if they had any words left in their artless arsenals after emptying them for their encomia to Knute Rockne). In between these segments, RB goes in for some multiple regression data analysis (comparing October 1930 circulation figures to the October 1931 numbers) in order to demonstrate that a sizable portion of the now-defunct World and Evening World readerships wound up falling to the Hearst papers, while a hefty percentage of the populace (188,196 to be exact) appears to have stopped reading entirely.

Things really heat up during the final two pages, as Fawkes holds up his end of two feuds initiated by The Wayward Press – one with The Sun, which has a rather distorted view of the meaning of the term “reading matter”; the other with Times Business Manager Louis Wiley, who pleads innocent to the charge of accepting press coverage payola from the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Along the way, we also get an amusing play-by-play of a fall flare-up of nonsense numbering in the New York papers, several of which appeared to be trying to one-up each other by going far beyond the traditional “Three/Four/Five Star Final” formula for identifying their last gasps of the day. Fawkes tracks The Sun, The Post and The World-Telegram through their paces, observing nigh-exponential progress from the usual 5, to 14, to 16, to 118, to a truly preposterous edition number 219 shamelessly put forth by The Post.

Favourite Moment:
Now that we know The Times wasn’t paid for anything [re: stories about the Waldorf-Astoria], the thing is even less understandable than ever. The Herald Tribune at least got a great big advertisement for its pains.

“The Big Coal Problem” (E44)

Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, February 18, 1933
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

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Benchley returns to the primal scene of his domestic frustrations – the suburban cellar. He begins with some topical discussion of rising coal prices and collapsing purchasing power during the infernal months between the November 1932 election and FDR’s forthcoming inauguration (the final one held in March). Okay, the author admits, this is a serious problem. Too serious for a Liberty humour piece. So, Benchley says, let’s talk about how coal doesn’t work even when you can afford it.

After more than 15 years of vain stoking, Benchley appears to have given up blaming his heating troubles on the Scarsdale furnace. In this piece, he places the onus for his failure directly upon the coal. Benchley’s lifelong feud with the mechanical world has passed into legend, but neither did he scruple to engage in hostilities with raw materials. The remainder of the essay lays out the details of his controversy with the unruly fuel. By 1933, it seems unlikely that the Biographical Benchley ever went near a furnace (he scarcely made it to Scarsdale), but the proto-Joe Doakes persona remained in the trenches, battling an implacable foe bent on gas lighting him with an assortment of carboniferous cantrips.

Favourite Moment:
I remember one night back in 1926 when I went down into the cellar to fix the furnace for the night (and what a misleading phrase that “fix the furnace” is!)

“The Big Bridegroom Revolt: All Honor to Hershey, The Emancipator” (E43)

Originally printed: DAC News, June 1925
First reprinted in: Pluck and Luck
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (Drawings by Rea Irvin)

🦉🦉

Comments:
Benchley’s writing falls flattest when it slides too stridently into sync with the sloganeering subjectivity of the scared suburban sovereigns he specialized in situating down to size (see also E32). Here, RCB presents himself as a future cultural historian exploring the origins of the “Male Liberation” movement, ignited by that Bartleby of the Bridegrooms, Arthur Hershey, whose preference not to put himself out whilst tying the knot became the “not” heard ‘round the world (or, at the very least, ‘round the men’s club).

The piece’s ghastliest missteps involve the repeated analogy drawn between slavery and male acquiescence to women’s wedding plans. Every reference to betrothed men held in bondage boosts bile production in the modern reader, and ought to have elicited even more extreme effects in 1925, with the eradication of actual chattel slavery having taken place within living memory. Yes, by likening Hershey’s refusal to address envelopes or make himself ridiculous in a place of worship to an act of world historical rebellion, Benchley is drawing attention to a histrionic streak in his husbands-to-be, but that aspect of the critique is sadly diluted by the delight the author himself appears to be taking in these fantasies of flouting bourgeois nuptial norms. So much delight, in fact, that he has forgotten the reader’s own right to enjoy (or, at the very least, chuckle slightly at) these passages.

For me, this essay is saved from the ignominy of a 1 Owl rating by its pointed traipsing into the fragile ego-scapes of his affianced freedom fighters. Sensing every other-directed step toward the altar as another faux-pas down the slippery slope to a genuine reckoning for patriarchy, these men do exhibit a hair-trigger (and potentially homicidal) sensitivity to any challenge to their utterly unearned social privilege. In these moments lie the lineaments of a far, far more interesting essay than the one we find in the pages of Detroit Athletic Club News. How much more tragic, then, that the excisions made for Pluck and Luck take the piece in the opposite direction – reducing it to (hopefully, anyway) the smuggest rehearsal of battle of the sexes banalities in the Benchley canon.

Favourite Moment:
Then there was the ordeal of the ring, the cracking of the voice in the responses, the itch in the middle of the back during the ceremony and, finally, the ghastly march down the aisle on the bride’s arm (technically the bridge was on his arm, but that fooled no one) under the searching stare of hundred of curious women, all pitying the bride and wondering what on earth she saw in him.

Reprint Notes:

Original drawings replaced by a Gluyas Williams illustration.
Severely shortened in Pluck and Luck, with several entire paragraphs excised – see comment above.

“‘Bicycling’, The New Craze” (E42)

Originally printed: DAC News, April 1925
First reprinted in: Pluck and Luck
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (Drawings by Rea Irvin)

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Here RCB adopts the persona of a trend watcher and lifestyle columnist intent on selling bicycling as the latest fad amongst America’s favoured classes. He does a thorough job of it, providing a deadpan etymological breakdown of the 50-year old word, delving into the trial and error process of its development by inventor Philip G. Bicycle, and even advising early adopters on the best way to fall off their ultra-modern contraptions.

Examining his subject along lines suggested by the “baseball is a game of inches” school of sports writing, Benchley tells us that old Philip G. tossed his prototype aside when he realized that “there won’t be enough people in our world who can stretch their legs out from one to four feet to make any decent kind of sale for my machine at all!” Temporarily soured on practical mechanics, Bicycle went off and invented the apple instead. But he never completely abandoned his first love (if he had, America’s favourite desert would be known as Bicycle Pie). At last, a vision of pedals situated a leg’s length away from the seat flashed into his mind, and the thing came together very quickly as a status symbol among the rich at play in Newport, Rhode Island. Some of them are even managing to make it move forward! Soon, all major mergers and distribution contracts will be negotiated by executives hunched over their handlebars. If you want to make your way in this world, better give bicycling a tumble!

Favourite Moment:
That is one thing about riding a bicycle. You can’t stand still once you are seated and ready to go. There are three ways for you to go – forward, over to the right, or over to the left. Let us say that at first you go over to the right side. This is the most popular side for beginners, as it carries out the arc begun by the process of mounting. Once you have fallen over to the right side, try the left.

Reprint Notes:

Original drawings replaced by a Gluyas Williams illustration.
Reference to Rea Irvin’s Figure 2 (of the falling rider) is removed, as there is only one Figure in the book.

“The Benchley-Whittier Correspondence” (E41)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, May 11, 1922
First reprinted in: Love Conquers All
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Inspired by then-current efforts among literary historians to establish the trajectory of a letter written by Mary Shelley to Byron and then possibly forwarded onto a third person who doesn’t ever appear to have received it, Benchley moves to set the record straight regarding his own epistolary interactions with New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Casting his mind back to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1890, RCB recalls a lecture hall cloakroom mishap which resulted in a fateful hat switch.

Disliking Whittier’s hat intensely, and also craving an audience with the legendary abolitionist, the younger man’s (Benchley was 1) first missive strikes a tender balance between Puritan plain speaking and Transcendental enthusiasm. With no letters coming back the other way, Benchley’s tone becomes increasingly irritable as he laments Whittier’s negligence. He abandons all talk of introducing the Quaker versifier to influential musical comedy people and finally drops the matter of exchanging hats, after committing a mild curse to the mails in a letter dated three months prior to the inciting incident at the Save-Our-Songbirds meeting. A very strange year, that 1890.

Favourite Moment:
But we can discuss all this at our meeting, which I hope will be soon, as your hat looks like hell on me.

Reprint Notes:

Reprinted in its entirety with no alterations