“At the Corner of 42nd St. and Hollywood B’v’d” (A Reporter At Large) (E27)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, May 4, 1929
First reprinted in: Never Reprinted
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

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Comments:
This one was personal for Benchley, who got in on the ground floor of the talkie revolution with 1928’s smash hit short The Treasurer’s Report and then spent the next 7 years or so doing his best to stave off the lucrative consequences of his screen success. By all biographical accounts, the acid assessment of Hollywood he presents here remained with him for the remaining 16 years of his life, despite the accelerating tilt of his time and energies toward the sunset after 1935.

The piece was intended as a rebuke to media prognosticators who claimed they saw fertile soil in Southern California for the emergence of a culture capital to rival (and eventually surpass) New York. Benchley expresses no opinion on the relative aesthetic merits of American cinema and theatrical drama, although of course his opinions on this subject were pretty generally known (and none too flattering toward the newer art form), but he does deliver an airtight indictment of LA’s ability to nurture the creative spirit after “working hours”.

For Benchley, Hollywood combines the worst features of two of the greatest blights upon the American social landscape – the company town and the health resort. With all movie industry personnel living in desperate fear of violating their clause-heavy contracts by virtue of some overly frank remark or of waking up on the wrong side of a close-up shot, the majority of them, even the most formerly free-spirited Broadway denizens, wind up spending their off-hours cowering under a blanket. The bedder part of valor, and all that.

Yes, lured by the new media gold rush, great hosts of New Yorkers will continue to make the trek across the continent (no one knew this better than Benchley), but they will always pass a countervailing caravan of sickened cinemaphobes en route. More than enough to populate Broadway’s playbills. And no matter what anyone tells you, Benchley says, don’t expect any Algonquin Round tables or movable feasts to spring up in a studio commissary.

Favourite Moment:
“For you can’t be a man-about-town without a town to be about in, and Hollywood is not a town but a wayside camp of temporary shacks inhabited for the most part by people who are waiting to see if their options are going to be taken up at the end of six months.”

“Ask That Man” (E26)

Originally printed: Life Magazine, May 17, 1923
First reprinted in: Pluck and Luck
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

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Comments:
Prime sitcom Benchley, with the author interrogating not “that man” at the train station or driving the bus, but rather “that man” (along with “that woman”) defined by middle class gender norms. Writing in the soon-to-be-familiar persona of the wily but inept TV dad, RCB takes us on a candidly fearful and self-loathing tour of that impossible subject position (by way of Central America). The heterosexual union Benchley describes is a nerve-wracking thing powered by constant friction between “masculine competence” (or the illusion of it) and “feminine skepticism” (a necessary corollary of the illusion). Taking us into his confidence about his own lack of self-confidence, he admits that he cannot abide being urged to consult an outside authority for instructions, directions, or any other guidance. It is not the asking that threatens his “manhood”. This guy has very little idea where he is going, and he doesn’t mind if we know it. What gets him down is the insinuation, coming from inside the connubial cortex, that he must go to a rival male for answers.

Our vexed speaker goes to great and costly lengths to preserve his patriarchal prerogative in this tale. Fittingly, the trick isn’t done by performing any real or dissembled feats of omniscience. The ideal, eternally frustrated, quality of maleness under this demented dispensation has nothing to do with being “right” about anything. It’s about the freedom from being questioned at all. Of course, by the binary logic of the system, this cherished aim can never achieve total actualization, despite all of the cultural, social, and legal supports furnished by patriarchy, since the supposedly eternal “feminine” role always contains at least a streak of doubt in its subservience. So it isn’t a question of impressing Doris – the Benchley persona sticks it to “that man” by undercutting his wife’s “natural” faith in every exogamous representative of the gender.

Favourite Moment:
“In Chicago, I again falsified what ‘the man’ told me, and instead of getting on the train back to New York, we went to Little Rock, Arkansas. Every time I had to ask where the best hotel was, I made up information which brought us out into the suburbs, cold and hungry.”

Reprint Notes:

All text reproduced faithfully (for a change!) in Pluck and Luck
The Gluyas Williams cartoons (first appearing in the book) do add significantly to the piece.

“As I Understand It” (E25)

Originally printed: DAC News, October 1932
First reprinted in: The Athletic Benchley
Original Byline: Robert Benchley

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Comments:
Benchley concluded a very profitable twelve year run in the pages of the Detroit Athletic Club News with this disinterested observer’s guide to the 1932 Presidential election. The only trouble with “As I Understand It” is that, unlike the 1924 iteration of the rite (see E5), the Hoover/Roosevelt face-off actually promised to have consequences. RB is having none of that in this article, which, it must be said, was never intended to influence anyone to do or think anything. What does come across, however, is the author’s very real mistrust of representative democracy, at least insofar as it had been practiced up until his time, and his scorn for bureaucratic “expertise” (always synonymous in the Benchleyan imagination with abject incompetence traveling under the cover of incomprehensible bar charts).

Benchley correctly identifies the two main points of contention between the Democrats and the Republicans that political season – 1. The Depression, and 2. Prohibition. He goes a little over the line into smugness in his discussion of taxes and the inadvisability of pushing “soak the rich” programs in a nation newly shorn of plutocrats (ha ha). But perhaps this was inevitable, given the upscale readership of the DAC News. He shows more investment in the grand task of freeing the country’s parched throats from ol’ Volstead’s killjoy grip, but here too, he sees little evidence that America’s deliberately obstructionist institutions will be able to crank out an anti-amendment any time during the remaining years allotted to him.

Favourite Moment:
“If I have diagnosed Currency Inflation correctly, the same thing if practiced by a little group of individuals is called ‘counterfeiting’…”

“Art Revolution No. 4861” (E24)

Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, August 8, 1931
First reprinted in: Chips Off the Old Benchley
Unable to compare reprint with original text – Liberty Historical Archives not available at Toronto Public Library
Original Byline: unknown

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Comments:
As you might expect, given RB’s uniquely grounded brand of absurdity, the author never tired of burlesquing the barrage of bouleversements that swept through the art world during the first half of the 20th century. A close relative of E17, this piece is more successful, in that it strings together a stronger set of critical hits at the underground establishment, but it does boil down to the basic assumption that aesthetics should be a refuge from theory – not a lost continent submerged beneath successively waterier nouvelles vagues. It’s a fairly palatable take on philistinism, all things considered, but it’s not a view shared by your humble annotater.

Those reservations aside, this reader has no quarrel with Benchley’s invention of Straw Man Scrawler Jean Baptiste Morceau Lavalle Raoul Depluy Rourke – whose obsessive idées aren’t designed to fix anything. RB opens up a can of wild analysis in scrutinizing the feeble embodiment of Rourke’s theoretico-aesthetic ideals, a half-baked soufflé that wears its sub-mental symbols on its sleeve like so many cut-rate concept billboards. Bring on Art Revolution No. 4862!

Favourite Moment(s):
“Thus, the laughing snake in the lower left-hand corner of Mist on the Marshes is merely a representation of the spirit of laughing snakes, an has nothing to do with Reality. This snake is laughing because he is really not in the picture at all.”
“Whatever it is, you cannot deny that it is in the upper left-hand corner of the picture.”

“The Art of Being a Bohemian: After All, It’s Perfectly Easy If You Can Give the Time to It” (E23)

Originally printed: Vanity Fair, March 1916
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

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Comments:
When Benchley’s early freelance pieces came back return to sender – and they did so with depressing regularity for a while there – they generally bore the scars of editorial disdain for their excessively “collegiate” nature. This one pager displays many symptoms of that core defect before leaving the Harvard Yard entirely during its final paragraphs. For the majority of the essay, RCB affects a tone that will be readily recognizable to anyone who has read a Twitter thread or Substack squib by a Young Person who hates Young People. You know the way that goes: “These damned hipsters are always already part of the Bourgeois system that they claim to oppose and their aestheticization of life on the margins amounts to nothing more revolutionary than a frilly frame around their parents’ society page photos. Besides, they probably aren’t even actually enjoying themselves.”

It’s a dead-end critique we’ve all heard a million times, and it wasn’t any great sociological shakes in 1916, either. Ah, but instead of pursuing his entirely extraneous inquiry to its bitterly foregone conclusion, RCB pulls up his stake in this toothless skewering and lays his literary dance card on the table. Then, to paraphrase Sam Spade, he is dangerous! He has no settled thoughts on “la vie de Bohème”, but he does have a good idea of what Vanity Fair will publish, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Favourite Moment:
“The only trouble with this pitiless exposé of Bohemia is that I know practically nothing about the subject at all.”

“Art in Politics: A Cubist Secretary Might Not Be Out of Place Among Other Squareheads” (E22)

Originally printed: Vanity Fair, March 1919
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley

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Comments:
Taking his cue from a then-current push to create a Federal Department of the Fine Arts, complete with a cabinet level Secretary, the young Benchley takes the reader on a wild ride through the inevitable high culture war implications of such a step. Where would such a creature fit into the line of Presidential succession? And how soon would it be before some southern dominated Senate sub-committee, alerted to the rich possibilities of political conflict beyond the confines of “states’ rights” and the tariff, began shutting down metropolitan museums?

RCB envisions the grim advent of a new rhetorical hybrid plagued by all of the inadequacies of the undergraduate Art History essay and the machine stump speech, while possessing none of their virtues (if they in fact have any virtues). The resultant Fourth Party System, organized around a contest between an airy “Avant-Gardism” and hidebound “Americanism”, actually bears some passing resemblance to the state of affairs one observes in U.S. political discourse today, although, of course, it is not quite as stupid as that.

Favourite Moment:
“Vote for John A. Ossip! He kept us out of post-impressionism!”

“Around the World with the Gypsy Jockey” (E21)

Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, October 24, 1931
First reprinted in: No Poems; Or Around the World Backwards and Sideways
Unable to compare reprint with original text – Liberty Historical Archives not available at Toronto Public Library
Original Byline: unknown

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Comments:
Well… as you might expect from a piece with the above title, this one is a parody of Orientalist/white supremacist anthropological gawking that nevertheless participates a little too blithely in that unsavoury discourse. RB writes chiefly in the persona of Colonel Michington Mea, a Movietone marauder who makes his living by pointing at things you wouldn’t see at your local church picnic and expressing astonishment. The Colonel is certainly a fair target for ridicule, but the piece quickly lapses into a rehearsal of well-worn tropes that undoubtedly fit (alongside his foot) in the mouth of our guide, but aren’t much fun to read.

Benchley does eventually pull the parody together into something resembling a genuine critique, culminating in the delirious expostulations quoted below…

Favourite Moment:
“The Spell of the East! Will it ever release us from its thralldom? Who knows? Who cares?”

“Around the World Backward” (E20)

Originally printed: Liberty Magazine, March 12, 1932
First reprinted in: The Best of Robert Benchley
Unable to compare reprint with original text – Liberty Historical Archives not available at Toronto Public Library
Original Byline: unknown

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Comments:
A touch of proto-gonzo journalism from Benchley, who describes life on the sensation-seeking trail with swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and director Lewis Milestone. With a well-earned reputation for sedentary living, RB makes a fine foil for the determinedly vigorous silent icon. By all biographical accounts, this fit of truncated globe trotting was no Joe Doakes daydream. The trio really did set forth for Paris, Russia, Manchuria, Japan, and points beyond, as part of the research phase of a travelogue picture project Fairbanks aimed to finance. They don’t appear to have gotten very far, and our calorie conserving author gives us a pretty good understanding of the dysfunctional group dynamics involved. Benchley probably never took refuge in the dresser drawer of a fellow ship passenger, but the rest of the events here recounted verge on the veridical.

Milestone’s role in all of this emerges as the most mysterious aspect of the abortive adventure. He does not appear to have been any more hell bent on ship deck hurdling than Benchley was, and one is tempted to conclude that he suckered the writer into joining the party as a means of deflecting the ring leader’s roughhouse demands.

Unusual in drawing material from RB’s actual celebrity associations, rather than from his reading or his sitcom-style suburban side, the piece also references the author’s famed knee injury (sustained during Donald Ogden Stewart’s wedding festivities) and his genuine admiration for Milestone’s masterful film treatments of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Front Page.

Favourite Moment:
“I used to stand in front of an open window and breathe deeply – oh, well, pretty deeply – and cheat a little on some bicep flexing, and, when I was young and offensive, I used to bang a tennis ball against the side of the house…”

“Après la Guerre Finale” (E19)

Originally printed: The New Yorker, February 23, 1935
First reprinted in: Never reprinted
Original Byline: Guy Fawkes

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Comments:
Guy Fawkes expresses concern for the media veterans whose wild experiences covering the “Trial of the Century” are bound to leave them dissatisfied with the ordinary tragedies to come. The author anticipates the emergence of a new “Lost Generation” in the aftermath of Bruno Hauptmann’s death sentence, as the city’s reporters, whose January and February copy had been inflated by previously untapped psychical insights into the malign consciousness of “The Most Hated Man in America”, are forced to refocus their speculative apparatuses on the mundane tales of neighborly animus and political inertia which are a daily paper’s common fare. RB likens this cohort’s easily observable sense of unfounded omnipotence to the kind of temporary elation described by non-career officers tossed into the trenches of the Great War, where their every panicked command carried unaccustomed consequence.

Making no bones of his disgust with the entire affair, from the tone of its reportage to its morbidly salutary effect on “kidnap ladder” sales, Fawkes scrupulously avoids all mention of the Lindberghs. He was the only person laying off that soon-to-be-tarnished name during the winter of 1935. In his hierarchy of journalistic culprits, RB singles out The Evening Journal as the furthest gone offender (alas, that organ doesn’t appear to be archived anywhere within my reach), while the The New York Times appears to have steered clear of the worst excesses (presumably because no “reds” were involved in the case). The modern reader can only imagine what Guy Fawkes would have made of the OJ Simpson frenzy sixty years later.

Favourite Moment:
“You can’t blame a writer for taking his head when it is given him, even if it isn’t much of a head.”

“Another Uncle Edith Christmas Yarn” (E18)

Originally printed: DAC News, December 1929
First reprinted in: The Treasurer’s Report, and Other Aspects of Community Singing
Also Reprinted in: Benchley Beside Himself; The Benchley Roundup; and A Good Old-Fashioned Christmas (naturally)
Original Byline: Robert C. Benchley (Drawings by Gluyas Williams)

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Comments:
As first seen in the 1920 “Bedtime Stories” centered on Georgie (E6) and Lillian (E7), any Benchleyan raconteur who aims to entertain the romper room set is stepping into a theatre of war. (A nautical war, in this case.) Like kindly Old Mother Nature before him, Uncle Edith is not above using Cossack methods to keep his audience in line. In fact, his leaky sea chronicle seems more like a pretext for administering drubbings and clapping hecklers in irons than an attempt to edify or enthrall.

The yarn within the yarn, such as it is, involves Edith’s mystifying mid-Atlantic meeting with a ghost ship full of sleeping Hessian troopers – the mystification due chiefly to the old salt pork’s dead calm approach to the science of narrative momentum. However, just as this miserable tale threatens to settle into something like a permanent trench, three-year old Philip, the secret hero of the piece, breaks free from the brig and steals Edith’s thunder with a rousing account of his thrust up San Juan Hill with Teddy and his Rough Riders. Thus, Uncle Edith is decidedly on his back foot (or perhaps, as Marian suggests, over backwards with his feet in the air) when he snaps the immortal rejoinder: “Who the hell said anything about Christmas?”

Favourite Moment:
“Anyway, I do know that we sailed from Nahant on the fourteenth March.”
“What are you – French?” asked little Philip. “The fourteenth March.”

Reprint Notes:

In all cases, the piece was reprinted under the title “Another Uncle Edith Christmas Story”.
The Treasurer’s Report reprint excises Little Philip’s entire battle saga, drastically altering the balance of power between Uncle Edith and his antagonistic auditors and keeping the avuncular avenger firmly at the center of piece. Much more firmly than he deserves.