Category: Benchley Lost and Found (1970)

“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 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

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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!)

“Atom Boy!” (E28)

  • Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, February 14, 1931
  • 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:
RB contemplates the Atomic Future with a mixture of bewilderment and cosmic irritation, soothed by genuine delight at the prospect of a post-work social order. As concepts like protons, neutrons, and atom smashing trickled into the popular consciousness via reporting on the theories and lab experiments of Ernest Rutherford and others, Transcendental Absurdists of a Benchleyan bent were bound to take an interest, if only until they realized some math would be involved.

This piece offers an excellent demonstration of RB’s perfected approach/avoidance style in dealing with abstruse subject matter (to compare the results with an earlier effort in this vein, see E11). Exasperated by the microscopic scale of his intellectual query (and quarry), our author veers momentarily off course into sub-vaudeville ethnic humor. This goes nowhere either and leads him back to the thought that everything – from open mic routines to the supposed building blocks of the universe – appears to be crumbling under the strain of humanity’s decaying orbit around superseded verities. But hey, if we can bombard the discombobulated fragments of the old order with alpha particles and generate enough leisure time for everyone, maybe it’ll all be worth it? (Annotater’s note – no luck on that score.)

Favourite Moment:
“I think there was even more to the story than that tantalizing bit I have given you, but it is too late now. We are back again on the atom.”

“Accustomed As I Am–” (E3)

  • Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, October 18, 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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Commentary:
Here we find RB in the grip of a signature frustration – his inability to get the last word in a confrontation with an appreciative, uncomprehending audience. The piece begins and ends with our narrator exulting in his near escape from the toastmaster racket. Incorporating bits of Benchleyan biographical detail, the speaker chronicles his first taste of after dinner agony as a society reporter forced to witness the witless in their business class habitat. Seeking to put a stake in this appalling rite, RB prepares his own bourgeois burlesques – and finds himself a stakeholder instead. As the nightmare deepens, the author discovers that every hurtful word he hurls only pulls him more inexorably to the next podium on the circuit. Anyone who would attend such a gathering must obviously hate themselves – and to hate them is to be one of them. You can’t mock mock-civility in a banquet hall.


Favourite moment:
“I worked up some after-dinner speeches of my own, built along conventional lines, and wormed my way into banquet programs, where I would deliver them in hopes of offending some of the old boys who had tortured me for so long.”