My method is as follows: I sit by an open window in my farmhouse at Lexington Ave. and 49th St., smoking, reading, shaving, anything. Then, when something occurs to me that I think might possibly go into my autobiography, I shout it out the window at my brother-in-law who is puttering around in the back yard. He takes it down on the back of an envelope or an old laundry list and, when he comes into the house at night, puts these notes away in a big box which he keeps for the purpose. As soon as this box is full of old envelopes with notes on them, it is to be locked and placed in the cornerstone of the new Merchants’ National Bank Building, along with a copy of the New York “Times” of even date. When, in the course of seventy or eighty years, the Merchants’ Bank Building is torn down to make room for an apartment house, the box is to be opened and the manuscript given to the world in book form. If it causes any hard feeling then, I shall be up in Maine trout fishing and won’t hear about it.
Material for the first volume has already accumulated, and is herewith printed for private circulation. Readers are placed on their honor not to divulge the plot.
THE BENCHLEY INFORMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CHAP. I
THE STEWART DICTATIONS
(Dictated about seven o’clock)
The first time I ever saw Donald Ogden Stewart he was eating lunch with Edmund Wilson, Jr. They were having Yankee pot roast (.85). Stewart told me that he had just come from Brooks Brothers where he had been having a terrible time about a golf suit that they had sold him. It seems that the coat didn’t fit very well and he had taken it back to have it altered, but the people at Brooks had said that all alterations, except for moving buttons, etc., would be charged for extra. Stewart protested but the Brooks people were adamant. I told him that I thought that the whole thing was outrageous, and Wilson said that he thought so, too. We went over to Brooks together and saw Mr. Brooks and his brother Mr. Brooks. It was no use. Stewart got a bill for eight dollars over and above the price of the suit which was sixty dollars, making a total of sixty-six dollars.
* * *
In a conference with my lawyers I told them about the Stewart affair and they said that Stewart could bring action against the Brooks people. I called up Stewart and told him this, but it wasn’t Stewart who answered the telephone.
* * *
(Dictated Thursday)
At a dinner given Stewart by the West Side Bowling Association an amusing incident happened. The speaker of the evening was General Leonard Wood. As the guests were coming in, Stewart and I approached General Wood and said: “I guess you wish now that you hadn’t worn that funny looking collar, General.” The General laughed and said: “I don’t remember.” This showed that he, as well as Stewart, had a good heart.
* * *
In December I went around with Stewart again to see the Brooks outfit about that overcharge of eleven dollars. They said that nothing could be done about it. That was on a Tuesday. On the following Monday nothing had been done about it.
CHAP. 2
EARLY DAYS IN WORCESTER
(Dictated during a light sleep)
I was born on September 15, 1889, in Worcester, Massachusetts. I remember that there was a boy in school named George Dixon. Later, when I went back to Worcester to get some things I had left there up in the attic, I found that George had moved and gone to Utica.
There was an old man in Worcester when I was a boy who sold cornucopias. “Motorcycle Dan,” we boys used to call him. One day he called me up on the telephone and said that he had some very good cornucopias in fresh that day and would I like one. I said that I would be right down. So I got Arthur Stone and Walter Woodward and Harrison Prentice and Will Weir and we all three went down to “Motorcycle Dan’s.”
Will said: “Well, Dan, how about those cornucopias?”
“Well, Mars’ Will,” said Dan, “I did have some, but they are all gone.”
Will Weir is working in New York now. Arthur Stone is still in Worcester. I saw him when I went back there last year. Walter Woodward is still in Worcester, but I didn’t see him. As I said before, George Dixon is in Utica.*
* Editor’s Note. – It is Albany that George Dixon lives in now. R. B. was mistaken.
CHAP. 3
CHAPTERS ADDED IN FALL RIVER 1923
(Dictated in the Ocean House, Fall River, Massachusetts, 1923. Present, Mr. Benchley, Mr. Weaver, Miss Whitcomb, secretary, and the Sheriff)
I have just found out about that overcharge of Brooks Brothers against Donald Ogden Stewart. It was Donald Harrington Stewart who had the changes made and who was charged sixty-nine dollars. Donald Ogden Stewart never bought a golf suit in his life, which is very lucky.
CHAP. 4
CHAPTERS FROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF MR. BENCHLEY WRITTEN BY HIS LITTLE SON, BOBBY BENCHLEY, AT THE AGE OF FIVE
“Daddy is a very funny man, at least he thinks he is. Today he tried to carry some wood up from the cellar to burn in the fireplace and jammed his hand against the cellar door. ‘There goes my hand against the door!’ he said.”
* * *
Bobby is wrong there. “What the goddamn!” is what I said, although it was the cellar door and it was wood for the fireplace.
CHAP. 5
EARLY DAYS IN WORCESTER
(Dictated but not read)
My grandfather, Henry W. Benchley, wore a beard. I never knew him, but I have seen pictures of him. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Heyward, although I don’t think that I ever knew her either. The Heywards were always very quiet people and kept to themselves a great deal; so it is quite possible that I never met her. On my father’s side everyone was either a Goddard or a Gale. One of my forebears, I think it was an Endicott, later had his name changed to Lipsky.
I remember how good baked beans and fish balls used to taste at Sunday morning breakfast.
(Thursday, April, May)
Mr. Benchley intercedes in behalf of Thurston, the Magician – As Mayor, he vetoes the Traction Bill – Home life at Kneecap – Mr. Benchley’s letter to ex-President Taft – The big drought of 1920 – Bobby and his father have a fight.
It was early in 1920, I think, when we moved to Scarsdale. We had a terrible time making the furnace work, I remember, because it wasn’t all there, the house being new. So I called up the furnace people and said: “Look here. You didn’t send all of our furnace. We can’t start a fire when all the coal drops right down into the place where the ashes are supposed to be. You’ll have to send a grate right up.”
The furnace dealer said (as nearly as I can remember): “There was a grate in the furnace when it was sent to your house. Have you looked everywhere for it? Perhaps you threw it away with the excelsior.”
I said: “I did not throw it away with the excelsior. I threw the shaker away with the excelsior but not the grate. I guess I ought to know what I threw away with the excelsior and what I didn’t.”
This floored him, and he hung up.
I afterward found out that he was the same man who had worked in Brooks Brothers years before and who had been so disagreeable about that over-charge on Donald Stewart’s suit.
* * *
I met a man the other day who said that he was Dr. Fisher. “What Dr. Fisher?” I asked. “The Dr. Fisher,” he replied. There was a Dr. Fisher who used to live in Worcester, but I don’t think it was he, because that Dr. Fisher was a woman.
* * *
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Visitors’ Day
at the Joke Farm
* * *
The wind blew gently along the porch of the Home for Aged Jokes. It was a pleasant time for sitting about and recalling the old days, the days when Puck and Judge were championing Grover Cleveland and the Full Dinner-pail respectively, and when Life had the same cover-design every week.
“I remember,” said the heavy tragedian, who wore a shabby fur-trimmed ulster with one hand thrust in at the breast, and whose name was Junius Brutus Hamfat, “I remember the time when I was held to be one of the leading feature
s of the magazine and was placed in a preferred position on the right-hand page following the poem of Cupid. It was the rather absurd pleasure to depict me walking along the railroad ties by a mile-post reading, ‘New York – 200M,’ but I assure you—”
“Say, dat don’t go wid me,” said Dusty Rhodes, the tramp with a tomato can tied around his waist. “Me and my pardner Weary Willie seen you practically every day hittin’ de ties when we wus cookin’ our meals down in de hollow by de tracks. An’ you was aluss in de same place, two hundred miles from Noo York. A fine walker, you wus. Nit!”
“Aw weally, you chaps make me vewwy ill,” came a voice from behind the back of a large rocker where Cholly Sapleigh was sitting with the end of his cane in his mouth. “I was considered – aw-weally-don-cherknow – to be the – aw – best thing in the whole bloomin’ field. A gweat many times they wan me in colors, with a weal yellow chrysanthemum in my button-hole of my box-coat, doncherknow. I have that box-coat upstairs in my trunk now. Shall I go up and put it on? Just for fun, you know?”
“If you do that,” said Dr. Goodbody, the missionary, “I shall go out into the barn and get my old cauldron which I haven’t been cooked in for twenty-five years. I understand that the cannibal chief who used to work with me in the pictures (by the way, he never returned that silk hat of mine that he used to wear) has a job over in town at a restaurant and we might persuade him to come over for an afternoon when he has his day off. He was really a good chap at heart, and in spite of the skulls and things scattered around his place, I don’t remember his ever really eating me.”
“It would have been all right with me if he had,” muttered an angry man who came in from the street rubbing his toe. “That’s the five thousandth time I’ve kicked that old hat out on the side-walk without guessing that the boys might have put a brick under it. You’d think that I’d have learned by this time not to give in to my impulses like that. It used to be only on April Fools’ Day that the boys did it, back in the old funny-paper days, but the town boys here have got wind of my failing and never let a chance slip by to humiliate me.”
“I used to be like that, heedless. I used to skate, day after day, just as near as I could come to the sign marked ‘Danger.’ But here I am to tell the tale.” The fact seemed hardly worth boasting of, however, as the speaker hadn’t even a name. He was just The Man Who Used to Skate Near the Danger Sign, and was sitting with The Man Who Used to Turn His Back to a Charging Bull and Say, “I Have a Feeling That I Am Going to be Raised Today.” Nameless heroes both, and soon forgotten.
As the sun grew hotter, the talk fell off. From the field in back of the house came the sound of pistol shots. Little Willie Bostonbeans, seated on a large volume of Browning, became philosophical. “Isn’t it incongruous,” he said, “that, deprived of a means of obtaining sustenance, we should be thrown thus on an eleemosynary institution, while those ordnance vibrations in the back yard would indicate that Alkali Ike the cow-boy is out there practicing shots at Willie Tenderfoot to make him dance, hoping that some day they may be called into service again. When one reflects, there is a bitterness about it all which—”
“Lydia, hasn’t that young man gone yet?” called the Irate Father from the top of the stairs. “It’s past eleven o’clock.”
But there being no Lydia to answer, and no Young Man to go, the rest of the characters looked at each other silently and tapped their heads, indicating that the Irate Father was having another one of his spells.
Suddenly there came the sound of tiny feet pattering down the hall-way and across the porch and down the steps tripped a little girl holding onto her mother’s hand. As she swept by with the cruel aloofness of youth, the pensioners heard her ask:
“Muvver, what did Daddy mean when he said—”
The rest was lost in the slamming of the door of the limousine into which the ever-young joke had flung herself.
“Where is she going, like that?” asked the tragedian.
“They are making up the first February number,” said Dr. Goodbody, “and the editors have sent for her to come over and help them out.
* * *
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“Advice to Investors”
* * *
In the reaction following the election (the 1924 election, that is) the market has shown decided tendencies. So much we can be certain of.
Take bank clearings. (And wouldn’t you like to!) Bank clearings have shown tendencies which cannot be ignored. In 1907, during the hot spell, Owagena Zinc and Bicarb went off forty points, leaving thousands of investors looking into space. This lesson was hardly learned, before it went off again, this time to Atlantic City. Nobody was to blame. It was just one of those things. But it gave the market a shock from which it hardly recovered during the season 1907-8-9-10.
In June 1917 both production and consumption picked up. It was late on the evening of June 19 that credit became inflated. The inflation was first noticed by a passer-by who, in turn, notified the police. The cry of “Credit Inflation! Credit Inflation!” soon filled the streets, and there was a panic.
This much is history. What is not generally known is that the Federal Reserve Board (then known as the State Boxing Commission), in an attempt to stabilize the situation and bring chaos out of order, threw onto the market three hundred thousand (450,000) shares of U. S. Whistle with a view to breaking the deadlock. The result was an influx of gold and another panic.
Now if we can learn anything at all from this, it is that during periods of great national excitement, such as the Six Day Bicycle Race or Presidential Elections, stocks which are safe are likely to be affected in one of three ways. The reader of this department knows very well what those three ways are; so it would be just stupid to re-state them. Suffice it to say that one of them begins with a “W.”
This brings us up to the present condition of the market and an analysis of its significance. According to the tabulation of the Commercial and Financial Chronicle (in its special St. Valentine’s Day Number) bank clearings registered an increase of 18.7 per cent, over the same period a year ago. This does not take into consideration the naturally depressing effect of those factors stated above. Europe’s plight has not been without its influence either. Europe’s plight is never without its significance. No matter what you are figuring on doing, you must count on Europe’s plight to furnish at least fifty per cent, of the significance and ten per cent, of the gross. That makes sixty per cent., to be divided among eleven people, or a per capita distribution of approximately $43.85555.
Bringing the whole thing down to cold facts it becomes obvious that the wise investor will put his money in some good safe mortage bonds paying a cool 3 per cent, and then take up his music again. Never neglect your music, and bring your children up to be musical.
* * *
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“Ask that Man”
* * *
This is written for those men who have wives who are constantly insisting on their asking questions of officials.
For years I was troubled with the following complaint: Just as soon as we started out on a trip of any kind, even if it were only to the corner of the street, Doris began forcing me to ask questions of people. If we weren’t quite sure of the way: “Why don’t you ask that man? He could tell you.” If there was any doubt as to the best place to go to get chocolate ice-cream, she would say: “Why don’t you ask that boy in uniform? He would be likely to know.”
I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who, like Doris, believe it to be the solution of most of this world’s problems. The man’s dread is probably that of making himself appear a pest or ridiculously uninformed. The woman’s insistence is based probably on experience which has taught her that anyone, no matter who, knows more about thin
gs in general than her husband.
Furthermore, I never know exactly how to begin a request for information. If I preface it with, “I beg your pardon!” the stranger is likely not to hear, especially if he happens to be facing in another direction, for my voice isn’t very reliable in crises and sometimes makes no intelligible sound at all until I have been talking for fully a minute. Often I say, “I beg your pardon!” and he turns quickly and says, “What did you say?” Then I have to repeat, “I beg your pardon!” and he asks, quite naturally, “What for?” Then I am stuck. Here I am, begging a perfect stranger’s pardon, and for no apparent reason under the sun. The wonder is that I am not knocked down oftener.
It was to avoid going through life under this pressure that I evolved the little scheme detailed herewith. It cost me several thousand dollars, but Doris is through with asking questions of outsiders.
We had started on a little trip to Boston. I could have found out where the Boston train was in a few minutes had I been left to myself. But Doris never relies on the signs. Someone must be asked, too, just to make sure. Confronted once by a buckboard literally swathed in banners which screamed in red letters, “This bus goes to the State Fair Grounds,” I had to go up to the driver (who had on his cap a flag reading “To the State Fair Grounds”) and ask him if this bus surely went to the State Fair Grounds. He didn’t even answer me.
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