“Browsing Through the Passport” (E64)

Originally printed: Detroit Athletic Club News, August 1930
First reprinted in: Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949)
Original Byline: Robert Benchley; Drawings by Gluyas Williams

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Comments:

Here Benchley details the first world torments of the bourgeois caught in bureaucratic amber on the deck of a homecoming Transatlantic liner. The indignities of international travel are bad enough, RB says, without the U.S. government making an open question of the sojourner’s right to return to their native shore, or at least to get away from the gang of floating drips they’ve been cooped up with for a few thousand nautical miles. We get a lot more Benchleyan bashing of red tape and protocols designed expressly to catch a man halfway between his favorite speakeasy and the 12-mile limit.

At such times, the defenseless subject of Foucauldian discipline is wont to take solace in any means of distraction handy. But what is handy when you’re quarantined in a queue and your gear is stowed in a steamer trunk? Well… people… certainly… lots of people around, but Benchley has already made short sport of that option – this bunch of Babbitts all paid $3000 to sight-see during the depths of the Depression! All you’ve got, really, in this extremity, is the legalistic fine print and the arcane customs scribblings in your passport, which our author turns to with the desperate gusto of a child absorbing the B Vitamin complex data set on a box of Corn Crackos. You can’t fight city hall, but you can take refuge in its inane publications.

Favourite Moment:
Standing in line waiting for Uncle Sam to look at your tongue or hanging around on deck waiting for the tide to turn, there is nothing like a little red passport to while away the time. And what a bit of reading-matter that is!

Reprint Notes:

None of the 3 Gluyas Williams illustrations from the original magazine were reprinted. A new Gluyas Williams drawing (with shortened caption “Shipmates suddenly seem very dull”) has been added.
Topical 1930 reference to “all those Americans who weren’t going to Europe this summer because of the old Wall Street plague of last November” has been replaced with the prosperously straightforward: “all those Americans who went to Europe this summer.”

“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 Bridge of Don Gene’s Nose” (E57)

Originally printed: The Bookman, October 1928
First reprinted in: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; or, David Copperfield (1928)
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

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Comments:

A slight piece occasioned by a trio of 1928 pop culture headlines: 1. Gene Tunney’s retirement from boxing as heavyweight champion of the world; 2. Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey; and 3. The European walking tour undertaken by this supposedly unlikely pair. Already celebrated by the media as “The Thinking Man’s Pugilist,” especially after ensorcelling slugger Jack Dempsey with sweet science in back-to-back bouts, Tunney’s eagerness to express his thoughts on Shakespeare and other aspects of literary history made irresistible copy. News of the boxer’s friendship with novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder was music to editorial ears everywhere, and their plans to ramble across rural France and Germany got nearly as much coverage as a Trans-Atlantic Flight or a Polar Expedition. What would these extraordinary men talk about? What magnificent epiphanies awaited them? Wouldn’t it be amazing if Gene Tunney guided Thornton Wilder to a new understanding of The Iliad? And if Thornton Wilder enlightened Gene Tunney on a fine point of feint and jab? Wouldn’t that be wonderfully counterintuitive?! Well, possibly it would it have been. But in Benchley’s account, we get the bro version of “dog bites man”.

Favourite Moment:
To all of these, and many more problems, Don Gene turned an ingenuous attention. And, in the meantime he lived immaculately, read much, and punched a large, harassed leather bag.

Reprint Notes:

Reprinted under the title: “The Bridge of Sans Gene”