“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.

“Barnum and the Birth Rate” (E36)

Originally printed: The Forum, July 1923
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

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Comments:
Asserting that no one, not even English readers who derive all of their ideas from Dickens’ American Notes, has less insight into the mind and character of the “Average American” than the Average American, Benchley challenges popular delusions concerning Phineas T. Barnum’s status as a cultural exemplar. Deploring the tendency to place Barnum’s genius for manipulation on some imagined continuum with the legendary “shrewdness” of the foxy grandpas on Main Street, RCB argues that Americans are in fact the most easily stampeded herd of front-page fundamentalists ever assembled. For Benchley, Barnum is the American antitype, in that his achievements rested entirely on his perception of his fellow citizens’ passion for being led around by the headline. Observing fewer critical faculties in the ink swilling millions than in any illiterate mass of medieval peasants, the piece lays bare a despairing streak in Benchley that would find a full-throated outlet in “The Wayward Press” four year later.

The author does find a way to knit Barnum back into the American quilt before the end of the article, but only on the basis of the financial gullibility he demonstrated in losing his first fortune in the collapse of the Jerome Clock Company during the 1850s. But even here, Benchley discerns a difference between Barnum and the American “everyman”, whose eagerness to take up nearly any claptrapsical crusade he encounters in the papers is exceeded only by his terror of taking any single fellow being at their word. Barnum, for all of his misanthropic pronouncements against the masses, believed in his friends. Luckily for the momentarily embarrassed impresario, the reservoir of suckers remained to buoy up his bankbook throughout the succeeding decades.

Favourite Moment:
“To point to Barnum, however, as a ‘typical American’ is like pointing to a cat as a typical mouse. The ‘Typical American’ was Barnum’s meat.”

“Bang Into 1932” (E35)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, February 6, 1932
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

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Comments:
Bang indeed. 1932 finds our media critic in fine Fawkesian form as he tears into a new outbreak of nationalist hysteria, this time focused on the Pacific. Naturally, Benchley finds Hearst’s blowhard organs (Journal, American and Mirror) in the vanguard of this crusade to foment anti-Japanese sentiment, but the issue takes on additional urgency when more cautious papers like the New York Times see fit to wade into the miasma stirred up by fantasies of a potential “race war” in Hawaii. The triggering incident for this escalation of editorial blood pressures around the country appears to have been a random street assault dubbed “The Honolulu Murder Case”. Fawkes disdains delving into the details of the case, keying his analysis to the wild jingoistic oats sown from made to order material which involved “national honor, race hatred, Anchors Aweigh, and a multitude of unprintable, but easily indicated, details of criminal assault.”

The author links the Mirror’s point of view on this case to an approving editorial on Lynch Law which appeared in the paper on the same day as its puerile Pacific reportage (January 12, 1932). Fawkes comes right out and calls the Hearst entity a Klan paper, or just about; but he baits his wryest barb for the Times, which “touched a new low in news value” with a non-story about Honolulu residents Mr. and Mrs. William Laurens Van Alen, who called some relatives in Pennsylvania to tell them that they were fine and nothing had happened to them.

Moving on from the sabre-rattlers, Benchley heckles the holiday editions of various papers all attempting to convince their readers that every American woke up happy and well fed on Christmas morning, 1931, even if there were a few less presents under the tree that year. We also get some animus aimed at yet another totally unnecessary addition to the roster of Sunday papers (the ever-offensive Mirror) and a discussion of the miserable state of collective bargaining in the journalistic field, where all glory comes posthumously.

The final paragraphs of the piece deal with The Journal’s odd write-up on Democratic Presidential hopeful Newton D. Baker, which neglected to inform its readers of the politician’s revised 1932 stance against joining the League of Nations. Of course, since this statement was made at a press conference, every other paper in America splashed the news on page 1, as Baker had been an ally of Woodrow Wilson and was expected to be at odds with Hearst’s preferred candidate (isolationist John Nance Garner) on this issue. Read multiple papers, Fawkes concludes, no matter how much it hurts.

Favourite Moment:
“A good reporters’ union might suggest that a little more money, or a little more security, during life would be welcomed in exchange for half a column of obituary recognition, but a good reporters’ union seems to be out of the question, Journalism being a Career and not a Job.”

“Bad News for Synura” (E34)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, February 9, 1922
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: R.C. Benchley

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Comments:
Here R.C. Benchley takes up the cause of the single celled synura, whose only transgression has been to impart a slight aftertaste of cucumber to the city’s water supply. Objecting to numerous public pronouncements by county officials concerning their efforts to isolate the little fellows in the Kensico reservoir (with a view toward eradicating them entirely), Benchley asks his readers to consider the underdog’s point of view. Okay, sure, some people think their oil savors more of strychnine, and maybe that’s a point against them, but the important thing is, they are not strychnine! And the synura have rights, too. To elicit sympathy from his bourgeois audience, RCB dwells primarily on those upwardly mobile algae who’ve spent long hours at night school prepping to catch a current down into the metropolis, where dreams come true.

To call this piece “slight” would be to ascribe far too much importance to it, but the author shows admirable commitment to his one-joke premise and carries it through to a final appeal for a filibuster of these filtration machinations.

Favourite Moment:
“And then came the official edict. The reservoir gates are to be closed. The open road to New York is to be barred. And in the rural fastnesses of Kensico there is at least one synura who swims idly about, with his life’s ambition thwarted.”

“Back To Journalism” (E33)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, February 11, 1928
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

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Comments:
An appropriately wide-ranging edition of the Wayward Press, with Guy Fawkes providing a generally favourable (or, less unfavourable than usual) survey of the New York media scene as it appeared to him during the fledgling weeks of 1928. He begins by noting that many of the inky inanities that had served as this column’s wellspring seemed to be drying up. Hardly any animal interest stories in The World? New York Times throttling back a little on the aviation exploits and circumpolar portraiture? Herald Tribune holding the line against a relapse into the follies that forced its antecedent components to seek mature completion in one another? What’s a media critic to do? (How much influence do these periodic protests against print culture piffle have, anyway? The writer wonders).

Fortunately for Fawkes, The World is still doing weird things like relegating Thomas Hardy’s death announcement to the agricultural news section, and the NYT still shows signs of a contractual obligation to publicize the minutiae of George Palmer Putnam’s life, despite his withdrawal from the Arctic. On the other hand, RB expresses genuine admiration for the Times’ irreverent take on the vicissitudes of molecular theory, taking particular delight in an anonymous report from the physics front entitled “Atom Theory Upset; Now ‘Wave System’” (possibly planting the seeds for E28?)

The rest of the column deals mainly with the fleeting furor over the execution du mois – of Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, who each paid the ultimate penalty on January 12, 1928. RCB pores over a media concordance of reports-cum-tone poems poured forth by troupes of terse réalitterateurs. Compiled by Andrew McClean Parker, the overview exposes a fourth estate unable to agree upon even the most basic details of the gruesome scene, from the time the switch was thrown to the clothes the murderers wore to their respective rendezvous with doom. What’s the point of applying so much effort and poetic distortion to accounts that will be wrapped around a fish before nightfall? If you want to catch The Saturday Evening Post’s attention with your stark impressions, write fiction! James M. Cain did just that, a few years later, taking Snyder and Gray as anthropological Exhibits A and B.

Oh yes – and Fawkes concludes by chiding The World for currying favour with Eugene O’Neill by taking Alexander Woollcott off the opening night coverage of the Theatre Guild’s production of Strange Interlude, just because Woollcott hadn’t liked the play in manuscript.

Favourite Moment:
“…Thomas Hardy made the front pages of both The Times and The Herald Tribune, but The World considered him worth two-thirds of a column on page five, along with ‘Iowa Attorney Named for Commerce Board.’ That Death itself is not considered news-less by The World is shown by the fact that William Barton French made the front page on February second. The fault must have been with Thomas Hardy.”

“Back in Line” (E32)

Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, November 22, 1930
First reprinted in: No Poems; Or Around the World Backwards and Sideways (1932)
Unable to compare reprint with original text – Liberty Historical Archives not available at Toronto Public Library
Original Byline: unknown

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Comments:
Your postage may vary on this one, which has been reprinted no less than 5 times. An anti-systematic thinker in every sense of that term, Benchley’s pen could sometimes stumble a little too stolidly into the American grain, producing flaccid, Paul Harvey style kvetching about bureaucracy, taxation and the government. I’m sure many readers appreciate the respite from cosmic irony afforded by these hard headed little salvos against the temporal tyrannies of the Leviathan state, but I could do without them.

This particular piece takes on the “Simon Says” sadism of post office parcel regulations, and while RB gets in a few decent jabs against the machine, the litany rarely rises very far above the level of imaginative amplitude one associates with a vindictive Yelp poster.

Favourite Moment:
“Although bundles of old unpaid bills are about all anyone will be sending this Christmas, it doesn’t make any difference to the P.O. Department. A package is a package, and you must suffer for it.”

“Back For the Big Game” (E31)

Originally printed: DAC News, November 1928
First reprinted in: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Or David Copperfield
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (with drawings by Gluyas Williams)

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Comments:
Benchley’s addressee in this anti-nostalgic excursion (“Weekins, 1914”) never makes it anywhere near the big Harvard/Yale game. A lifelong fan of the contest himself, RCB examines the role of the national media in helping to preserve the solidaristic totems of America’s collegiate stratum. As is so often the case with Benchley, the author both buys into and bitterly questions America’s accepted pieties – and during the late 1920s, you weren’t likely to find any piety further up there in the sky than the Ivy League’s autumnal ascendancy.

By no means born to the Crimson, RCB found his way to the Yard through a series of unlikely events kicked off by the death of his beloved older brother Edmund in the Spanish-American War. Reeling from this terrible misfortune, Edmund’s wealthy fiancée Lillian determined to stake the younger Benchley (only 9 at the time) to every advantage that she could, as a feat of Emersonian compensation. (She may also have half-wanted to groom the boy to take his sibling’s place in her romantic plans, although this is strictly a matter of conjecture among his baffled biographers.)

Knowing that he’d reached Harvard – and the incredible social network (I’m not talking about Facebook) it gave him an entrée to – on a tragedy-tainted fluke goes a long way toward explaining the author’s inimitably affable absurdism. Coming of age amongst America’s most favoured citizens – and coming to understand them in their utter ordinariness as human beings – helped to demystify the country’s repressed class arrangements, gifting Benchley with the power to burlesque the bourgeois without resorting to the stridently moralistic critiques offered up by many of his contemporaries. It may also have made him a little too comfortable with the system, or, at any rate, a little too dubious of any possibility of changing it.

What does all of this have to do with three well-to-do old sports page partisans who make tracks back to New England in search of lost homecomings and find themselves ejected from a frat house festooned with irrational numbers? Not much perhaps, except: the fourth estate is a lot more solicitous of its valued customers’ feelings than the fourth dimension is.

Favourite Moment:
“You go to the fraternity house (another concession on my part to my Middle West readers) and announce yourself as “Weekins, 1914.” (My class was 1912, as a matter of fact. I am giving myself a slight break and trying to be mysterious about the whole thing.) … The old place looks about the same, except that an odd-looking banner on the wall says “1930,” there being no such year.”

Reprint Notes:

Reprinted under the title “Back to the Game” in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Or David Copperfield
Only one change to the text in the reprint, with slight softening of the language:
“I remember you,” says Feemer, “you certainly were an awful ass.” (original text)
“I remember you,” says Feemer, “you were an awful pratt.” (reprint)

“The Autocrat of the Modern Breakfast-Table: Showing Just How Far Oliver Wendell Holmes Would Get Today” (E30)

Originally printed: Vanity Fair, December 1917
First reprinted in: Never Reprinted
Original Byline: Brighton Perry

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Comments:
Another early Benchley effort published under the Brighton Perry moniker (an alter-ego necessitated by Vanity Fair’s official policy of one-item-per-issue for its writers). Here, the author imagines the fate of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s Yankee Sage figure when transplanted from his Mid-Victorian boarding house to an analogous establishment during the go-go war year of 1917. Despite every intention of imposing his brand of pseudo-philosophical monologue upon the new century, the Autocrat finds himself, not deposed, but rather lost in a dissonant swarm of similarly single-minded speakers sloughing their own half-baked thoughts all over the morning meal.

Doing his level best to elevate the conversation by seizing upon the various bits of chaff for thought offered by his media-conspiracy, inflation, and alcohol-addled tablemates, the Autocrat is thwarted time and time again by some new eruption from another untoward quarter. Finally, the commuter train and the telephone clear the room, leaving him alone with thoughts that a new generation (Autocrats all!) doesn’t even have the attention span to ignore.

Favourite Moment:
“How often that is the case in this life,” I began again. “The man who has influence, wields it, and the man who has no influence, has none to wield. There used to be an old proverb that whoever ate of the tree of the magnesia-berry—”

“Aubergine’s Way: After Reading Too Much Proust (Naturally in Translation)” (E29)

Originally printed: The Bookman, December 1931
First reprinted in: No Poems; Or Around the World Backwards and Sideways
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

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Comments:
Intentionally tedious parody of Marcel Proust’s vertiginously digressive style, punctuated by some real comedic highlights (such as the ‘favourite moment’ transcribed below). The speaker here leads us on a merry chase through his mental meanderings at a dinner party that he attends in hopes of gaining some intelligence of the movements and behaviour of his absent friend, Aubergine. He hears no news at all about Aubergine, but this leaves him free to dally just long enough among the already established details of their relationship to realize that Aubergine wants nothing to do with him and is probably actively avoiding him. Her way, in effect, appears to be any way but this guy’s way.

Our narrator takes consolation in the feeling of solidarity that can develop between fellow hay fever sufferers. Meanwhile, our metatextual parodist takes pleasure in the knowledge that he can end this farce at any time…

Favourite Moment:
“Neurasthenia, complicated by an interest in fans, sometimes develops into an arthritis, just as an arthritis, which is only a toxic form of neurasthenia, develops sometimes into an interest in fans.”

Reprint Notes:

The main text appears verbatim in No Poems (without any accompanying artwork), but the final teaser from the end of The Bookman article has been omitted:

“In the next volume, ‘Aubergine Disparue’, we shall discover why Aubergine thought it hardly worth her while to stick. And can we blame her?”

“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.”