“Busy as Bees” (E66)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, July 12, 1930
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

Guy Fawkes gives no quarter (no Sunday edition nickel either) to his nemeses on the New York Times editorial staff, who found themselves hoist by their Boys’ Own Adventure headline policy during the summer of 1930. After years of flogging takeoffs, landings, ascents, and polar perambulations, a perfect storm of derring-do caught the “paper of record” short of frontpage real estate, allowing The Herald Tribune, The World, The Telegraph, and The American to latch their lousy linotypes onto the gravy plane. Roger Williams’ non-stop Bermuda journey and the Hunter Brothers’ 553-hour endurance flight were among the exclusive “scoops” that slipped through the Times’ clutches while they were busy chasing that aeronautic will-o’-the-wisp Charles Kingsford-Smith.

In other non-news, Benchley raps knuckles on both sides of the political aisle for the epidemic of bad faith arguments propounded by the Democans in support of and in opposition to the latest tariff law. Apparently, Hoover’s supporters contended that the new act had no connection whatsoever to an unfortunately timed dip in the already anemic 1930 Stock Market, while the Democratic organs naturally averred that Hoover’s policy would merely compound his economic felonies. Then, everyone turned on a dime (Benchley wouldn’t pay that either), adopting the opposite positions when trading ticked upward the next week. Through it all, much was made about the impact (or irrelevance) of “dominant bear” activity on Wall Street.

The author also takes the Treasury Department to task for pretending there’s no such thing as a “deficit” until the American people (in this case, the soon-to-be-famous Great War bonus veterans) actually need financial assistance. Then, suddenly, all of those Chamber of Commerce prosperity tales about bountiful national surpluses evaporate into hysterical mists of austerity. Some things never change.

Guy Fawkes isn’t all gunpowder this time out, though. He finds space for a paragraph in praise of the New York Times’ “French Correspondent”, who delivered an unaccustomedly graceful appraisal of the Allied evacuation of the Rhineland in the July 1^st edition of the paper. And he ends on a note of mock-exhilaration in anticipation of keeping cool with ex-president Coolidge’s daily column for the remainder of the summer!

Favorite Moment:
Just as we were beginning to worry about light paragraphs for this department and to wonder if it might not be well to discontinue for the summer, the Herald Tribune starts in on daily sermonettes by Calvin Coolidge. So far, we have seen only followups to his old “Have Faith in Massachusetts” routine, evidently extending the series into “Have Faith in the Republican Party,” “Have Faith on the Lower Mississippi,” and “Have Faith in the Rockies,” but they are sufficient to make us cancel our passage to Europe. We can’t miss those.

“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

“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”)

🦉🦉🦉🦉

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-20^th 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.

“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]

🦉🦉🦉🦉

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“‘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.

“A Belated Tribute” (E40)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, November 12, 1932
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Benchley apologizes for being otherwise engaged while the literary world celebrated the life and works of Walter Scott on the 100th anniversary of his death in September of 1932. RB explains that he meant to say something earlier, as his “particular lack of interest in Scott” gives him a different perspective on the 19th century icon’s career. Warming to his subject, RB jestingly scrambles Scott’s Waverley cycle of novels with the, if anything, even more obnoxious “Leatherstocking” books that they inspired on this side of the Atlantic. He then presents his credentials as a teen-aged victim of Ivanhoe poisoning. After being forced into the lists against this medievalist monstrosity at every new high school he attended, the battered Benchley felt compelled to gather a few facts about their creator, if only as a means of self-defense.

Omitting any further discussion of the books themselves, Benchley focuses on the fabulous wealth Scott amassed by dint of his best-selling assault upon the annals of history. Strongly implying that these legendary sums have kept Scott’s name alive long past its aesthetic expiration date, RB digresses into a manic passage trumpeting his discovery of the £ sign on his typewriter. For a moment, the tone becomes genuinely jubilant. But from that point on, the piece proceeds to plot every line of Scott’s prose, poetry and correspondence onto a literary ledger, with the ridiculous expense of Abbotsford on the other side. One finishes this tribute with the sense that the wily old Tory spent wisely on his citadel, which certainly makes a better conversation piece than his reactionary ramblings.

Favourite Moment:
It was here that Scott dined with Coleridge and made his famous remark: “Sam, the more I see of gooseberries, the sicker I get of them. Honest, I do.” He got £15,000 for this.

“The Beginning of the Slump” (E39)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, September 3, 1927
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:
Guy Fawkes takes stock of the calm that descended upon the New York papers in the days following the flashpoint execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. The author expresses admiration for the purity and elegance of the “pre-war” layout (8 discrete one-column heads) which graces the front page of The Times, whenever that paper finds itself with nothing to say.

There had certainly been plenty to say earlier in August, and Benchley had read every word of it with ever-deepening disenchantment. The humorist had played an unusually active role in the public furor surrounding the fate of the railroaded Italian immigrants. Abandoning his customary observer’s stance, RB had returned to Massachusetts in order to offer testimony against Judge Webster Thayer’s conduct while presiding over this celebrated miscarriage of justice. All to no effect, of course, and The Times edition for August 23rd, 1927 had carried the following headline across the entire width of the front page: “Sacco and Vanzetti Put To Death Early This Morning: Governor Fuller Rejects Last-Minute Please For Delay After A Day of Legal Moves and Demonstration.”

Taking a last look back at this defining defeat for roaring twenties liberals and radicals alike, Fawkes applauds the Times’ unusually fair-minded coverage of the affair’s dire denouement. Meanwhile, in The World, Benchley’s fellow Vicious Circler Heywood Broun found his column contradicted at every turn by the copy that surrounded it, due to the paper’s cowardly capitulation to the supposedly neutral Lowell Report, which rubber stamped the preordained exoneration of Judge Thayer. Broun and The World would soon part ways. But Benchley singles out The Sun’s piece of Thayer theatre for particular censure, citing comments praising the judge’s gentlemanly conduct and refusal to engage in controversy with the “persons [i.e. Robert Benchley] who have most maliciously assailed him.” Satire of the first order, RB asserts.

In the article’s second page, Fawkes examines the kinds of stories that were apt to find their way into 1927 newspapers whenever the state found itself temporarily deprived of opportunities to engage in red-baiting show trials and judicial murder – notably, picture laden spreads on young female competitors at the Caledonian Games and other rural contests involving farm implements. Oh yes, and the Herald Tribune saw fit to sound an utterly unnecessary front page alarm when President Coolidge spent a little bit longer than usual on a fishing trip and found himself without an overcoat as the evening cool fell upon Lake Yellowstone.

Favourite Moment:
As if this were not enough news for one day, The World, in the same issue and even on the very next page, gives us a two-column photograph of Miss Helen Barnaby, of North Danville, NH, who is the champion woman scythe-swinger and, “until a day or so ago” [that would make it about August 23 – ED.] “the champion mower of New Hampshire.”