“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.

“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

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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)

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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)

“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!)

“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)

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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)

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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

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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

“Beating Nature at Her Own Game: At Last a Substitute For Snow” (E38)

Originally printed: DAC News, November, 1927
First reprinted in: The Early Worm
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (Drawings by Rea Irvin)

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Comments:
Here we find Benchley ensconced in an absent-minded/oversharing brand ambassador persona which anticipates the vitamin researcher of E16 (Liberty, 1931); however, this earlier effort yields far more high-spiritedly insightful dividends. Beginning from the supposed premise that modern consumers are eager to embrace any artificial alternative to a naturally occurring substance, so long as the ersatz product requires no assembly or other effort on the part of the purchaser, our speaker hits upon the notion of going for broke as a snow manufacturer. At first, the reader assumes that, somewhere in the back of this person’s frozen brain, there must have been some inkling of the value that might be attributed to on-demand blizzards by Hollywood producers or skiing enthusiasts; but the spiel, as written (and who it is written to is an open question), dwells instead on the myriad ways in which this miserable stuff impinges upon and thwarts humanity’s best efforts to remain warm, dry, and moderately comfortable.

But Benchley takes pains to show us that there’s no mistake here (at least, not at the conceptual level – it’s true their formula doesn’t seem to work).

If they ever figure out how to churn out this cruel commodity, the addled ad man stands ready to mush on to the crux of his pitch. Why be vexed and drenched by real snow, which pours down upon us at the oddest times, prompted by atmospheric conditions so inexplicable that they are almost as annoying as their product, when you can be pelted and bedeviled by new “Sno” any time you want?! Of course, it all sounds insane when you put it this way, especially when you appear to be putting it this way to a room full of business and marketing executives; and it is insane. However, that puts it right in line with the dominant political imperative to manufacture and impose artificial harshness and austerity upon the majority of our world’s citizens, as a way of naturalizing the scramble for security and resources that keeps capitalism humming.

Favourite Moment:
The problem of distribution thus unsatisfactorily met with, the next thing was to decide what other attribute our “Sno” must have that would give it a place in the hearts of millions of snow-lovers throughout the country. Someone suggested “wetness,” and in half a second the cry had been taken up in all corners of the conference room – for we were in conference by now – “Wetness! Wetness! Our ‘Sno’ must be wet!”

Reprint Notes:

Drawings in The Early Worm are by Gluyas Williams
Title in The Early Worm shortened to: “At Last A Substitute For Snow”
Text mainly reprinted verbatim, with one minor excision:
- Original Text: ‘then indeed might we cry “Eureka!” or even “Huzzah”‘
- The Early Worm: ‘then indeed might we cry “Eureka!”‘
No Huzzahs in hardcover?
My version of The Early Worm is a Blue Ribbon Books edition re-issued in 1946 and it does contain some typos: “curse” instead of “course” and “snow-show” instead of “snow-shoe”. Uncertain whether these typos appeared in the 1927 printing of the book.

“Bayeux Christmas Presents Early” (E37)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, December 1, 1927
First reprinted in: Chips Off the Old Benchley
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

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Comments:
True to its title – rooted in the Vicious Circle’s patented portmanteau patois – this festive bauble careens from concept to concept through a series of dissociative leaps. Given the announced subject matter, experienced Benchley readers would almost certainly have been expecting to encounter a little good-natured tugging at the tired threads of medieval mise en tapis, along with some anachronistic agonizing over the problem of what to buy the liege lord who has everything (including a rainy new realm). But the mysterious transatlantic transposition of a strip of this Old World wonder to the New Jersey suburbs (if Bayeux, NJ is, in fact, Bayonne) comes out of nowhere, like those Golden Plates unearthed by Joseph Smith in upstate New York. Then Benchley hefts that old oaken bucket (see passage quoted below) and we get a genuine splash of dementia praecox in our collective faces.

The second half of the piece proceeds along more conventional lines, with the author taking pot shots (or is that pot sherds?) at the astigmatic aesthetics of Pre-Renaissance Europe; but they’re fun pot shots, and well-deserved, in the bargain.

Favourite Moment:
’Going home for Christmas?’ must have been the question on all lips, framed in probably the worst Norman-English ever heard. ‘Noël’ they probably called it. The old oaken bucket that hung in Noël – to put it badly.