“Cease Firing!” (E71)

Originally printed: The Forum, February 1929
First reprinted: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; or, David Copperfield
Original Byline: Robert Benchley (Forum Table Talk)

🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

A truly fascinating slice of American discourse from the last month of the Coolidge Administration, in which Benchley startlingly asserts that the country’s satirists have more than made their point and can retrieve their pitchforks from the dead horse of Babbittry. In February 1929! After 8 years under the unchecked pro-business “normalcy” of Harding and Silent Cal? With that ballooning Wall Street ticker fixing to burst into a billion useless purchase slips in every “onset-of-the-Depression” movie montage you’ve ever seen? With Herbert Hoover and his disastrous platitudes a week or two away? Hard to discern any hint of this triumph of the public intellectuals over the chamber of commerce on any Jazz Age electoral map.

Of course, that’s not really Benchley’s concern. We’re very far from class analysis in this essay. It’s a matter of aesthetics. He was all for the Sinclair Lewis school, he tells us, when they undertook to bore into the moribund minds of businessmen, opening up a belated, and purely psychological, new front in the Progressive critique of America. One which has outlasted the political death of Progressivism at the polls in late 1920. This made for quite a literary trend, and perhaps a necessary one, what with the cultural overvaluation of the entrepreneurial ethos that had persisted like a bad hangover from the Gilded Age. Then, as now, business jargon was ridiculous, and eminently worthy of a send-up, but what gets sent up must eventually come down. How many of these searching parodies did we need? Not nearly as many as we got, he contends. We all know what’s wrong with these guys now. Even they know it! With Babbitts and Rotarians policing each other’s philistinism on golf courses and at country club luncheons across the nation, who needs satirical novelists? Better to declare mission accomplished, Benchley argues, before the public starts wondering how much these vaunted writers are earning by running up the rhetorical score on Main Street.

Favorite Moment:

For there was a time, not so long ago as the crow-eater flies, when the man who wrote for his living was the butt for jokes around the very conference table which he now throws pop bottles at. There was a time when anyone who made his living by writing was an impractical sap, gifted along certain lines, perhaps, but lines which led nowhere and contributed nothing to the State. If he was spoken to at all by the geniuses of business and organization, it was with fine scorn and in words of two syllables.

Reprint Notes:

Illustration on page LXVI of The Forum was not reprinted.

“Carnival Week in Sunny Las Los” (E70)

Originally printed: DAC News, November 1929
First reprinted: The Treasurer’s Report; And Other Aspects of Community Singing
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley; Drawings by Gluyas Williams

🦉

Comments:

No cause for celebration here! This one is best avoided unless you’re engaged in a bibliographic undertaking of your own. Of course, it’s never wise to confuse a fictional persona with the author of a piece, but even if you interpret “Carnival Week in Sunny Las Los” as an implicit critique of this callow WASP vacationer’s ethnocentrism and horror of “southern Europeans”, all you get is a string of rancid olfactory gags that, in the words of Benchley’s New England forebear Roger Williams, “stink in God’s nostrils”.

The essay does demonstrate, if this was ever in doubt, that Benchley’s unique sense of whimsey depends heavily upon the context it careens through. As a humorist, he is at his best when he can take two-sided shots at both the little man and his modern American world. Transplant that same suburban stumblebum to the Pyrenees and his qualms and reservations become the barbs and prejudices of a dollar-wielding bully. We’ve examined the perils of this mode before – see “A Brief Study of Dendrophilism” (E60) – but here it finally drags Benchley down to the level of a one-owl rating.

Favorite Moment:

Europe has often claimed that Las Los was not part of it, and in 1356 Spain began a long and costly war with France, the loser to take Las Los and two outfielders.

Reprint Notes:

First and third Williams illustrations missing (why on Earth did they leave out the drawing of Benchley and the bull!? It’s the only fun thing about this essay.)

“Bringing Back the Morris Dance” (E62)

Originally printed: Detroit Athletic Club News, June 1929
First reprinted in: The Treasurer’s Report and Other Aspects of Community Singing (1930)
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley; Drawings by Gluyas Williams

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

Patented Benchley refutation-by-recommendation, with the author pushing good old-fashioned Morris-dancing until the jig goes up in smoke. Adopting a one step forward, two steps back approach to physical fitness advocacy, the author trips repeatedly over his exhortation to orbit a pole. Soon, we reel haphazardly into history, as RB’s persona searches in vain to discover some deep-seated folk reason for engaging in the rhythmically strenuous life. Benchley takes issue with those who would draw a parallel between Terpsichorean worship and sexual congress – arguing that the caloric requirements of the former push all possibility of the latter into sometime next week – but he accedes to the contention that these frenetic displays might bear some metaphorical relationship to the chaotic forces which threaten to rip our cosmos asunder. Benchley’s ramble through the ages yields few factoids to entice himself or his readers away from their places at the bar – at least, not until he returns to his original notion that Morris-dancing ought to have something to do with Morris chairs. It doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop our author from sitting this one out.

Favourite Moment:

We are told that, in Merrie Englandie, one of the dancers was always decked out as Robin Hood ‘with a magpye’s plume to hys capp and a russet bearde compos’d of horses hair,’ which is as lousy spelling as you will see grouped together in any one sentence anywhere. At first, the only music was that of the bells, but that got pretty tiresome after a while and they brought out a flute or ‘tabor,’ which probably added nothing. I can, offhand, think of nothing more dismal than that must have been.

Reprint Notes:

All text and illustrations reprinted

“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

🦉🦉🦉🦉

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.

“At the Corner of 42nd St. and Hollywood B’v’d” (A Reporter At Large) (E27)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, May 4, 1929
First reprinted in: Never Reprinted
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
This one was personal for Benchley, who got in on the ground floor of the talkie revolution with 1928’s smash hit short The Treasurer’s Report and then spent the next 7 years or so doing his best to stave off the lucrative consequences of his screen success. By all biographical accounts, the acid assessment of Hollywood he presents here remained with him for the remaining 16 years of his life, despite the accelerating tilt of his time and energies toward the sunset after 1935.

The piece was intended as a rebuke to media prognosticators who claimed they saw fertile soil in Southern California for the emergence of a culture capital to rival (and eventually surpass) New York. Benchley expresses no opinion on the relative aesthetic merits of American cinema and theatrical drama, although of course his opinions on this subject were pretty generally known (and none too flattering toward the newer art form), but he does deliver an airtight indictment of LA’s ability to nurture the creative spirit after “working hours”.

For Benchley, Hollywood combines the worst features of two of the greatest blights upon the American social landscape – the company town and the health resort. With all movie industry personnel living in desperate fear of violating their clause-heavy contracts by virtue of some overly frank remark or of waking up on the wrong side of a close-up shot, the majority of them, even the most formerly free-spirited Broadway denizens, wind up spending their off-hours cowering under a blanket. The bedder part of valor, and all that.

Yes, lured by the new media gold rush, great hosts of New Yorkers will continue to make the trek across the continent (no one knew this better than Benchley), but they will always pass a countervailing caravan of sickened cinemaphobes en route. More than enough to populate Broadway’s playbills. And no matter what anyone tells you, Benchley says, don’t expect any Algonquin Round tables or movable feasts to spring up in a studio commissary.

Favourite Moment:
“For you can’t be a man-about-town without a town to be about in, and Hollywood is not a town but a wayside camp of temporary shacks inhabited for the most part by people who are waiting to see if their options are going to be taken up at the end of six months.”

“Another Uncle Edith Christmas Yarn” (E18)

Originally printed: DAC News, December 1929
First reprinted in: The Treasurer’s Report, and Other Aspects of Community Singing
Also Reprinted in: Benchley Beside Himself; The Benchley Roundup; and A Good Old-Fashioned Christmas (naturally)
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (Drawings by Gluyas Williams)

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
As first seen in the 1920 “Bedtime Stories” centered on Georgie (E6) and Lillian (E7), any Benchleyan raconteur who aims to entertain the romper room set is stepping into a theatre of war. (A nautical war, in this case.) Like kindly Old Mother Nature before him, Uncle Edith is not above using Cossack methods to keep his audience in line. In fact, his leaky sea chronicle seems more like a pretext for administering drubbings and clapping hecklers in irons than an attempt to edify or enthrall.

The yarn within the yarn, such as it is, involves Edith’s mystifying mid-Atlantic meeting with a ghost ship full of sleeping Hessian troopers – the mystification due chiefly to the old salt pork’s dead calm approach to the science of narrative momentum. However, just as this miserable tale threatens to settle into something like a permanent trench, three-year old Philip, the secret hero of the piece, breaks free from the brig and steals Edith’s thunder with a rousing account of his thrust up San Juan Hill with Teddy and his Rough Riders. Thus, Uncle Edith is decidedly on his back foot (or perhaps, as Marian suggests, over backwards with his feet in the air) when he snaps the immortal rejoinder: “Who the hell said anything about Christmas?”

Favourite Moment:
“Anyway, I do know that we sailed from Nahant on the fourteenth March.”
“What are you – French?” asked little Philip. “The fourteenth March.”

Reprint Notes:

In all cases, the piece was reprinted under the title “Another Uncle Edith Christmas Story”.
The Treasurer’s Report reprint excises Little Philip’s entire battle saga, drastically altering the balance of power between Uncle Edith and his antagonistic auditors and keeping the avuncular avenger firmly at the center of piece. Much more firmly than he deserves.