20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield

by Robert Benchley

  The New York skater who hies himself to an indoor skating-rink like “Iceland” goes through none of this preliminary mental state. He simply says to himself (or, as seems to be the case at “Iceland,” herself), “I think I will get on some glazed surface and push myself around it for a while and then come back home.” So he takes his skates and gets into the subway or a taxi-cab, gets out at Fifty-second Street next to the Theater Guild, pays his money and goes inside to where hundreds of other unimaginative people are going ’round and ’round and ’round in brutish comfort and complete safety, and, when he has completed as many rounds himself as his craving demands, he gets back into the subway and goes home. An effete civilization, if ever I saw one I

  When I say that the “Iceland” skaters are making their circuit in complete safety, I neglect one phase of the sport which the indifferent skater would do well to bear in mind. There is always the chance that he will fall down and be cut into shreds by the oncoming hordes behind him. He must keep his feet and his pace, otherwise he will suffer the fate of those primeval mammals who, lacking sufficient protective coloration or long enough tails, were eliminated by their more fortunate mates in the inexorable process of Natural Selection. But, aside from this risk (which, after all, every one of us runs in his daily existence) skating at “Iceland” is as dull and colorless as taking the dog out for an airing.

  Which brings us quite logically to that even duller merry-go-round entertainment of mid-winter New York, the Six Day Bicycle Race. The difference between this mammoth Carnival of Routine and indoor-rink skating is that you have to watch it instead of taking part. For one solid week sport-lovers crowd into Madison Square Garden and sit, dozing off and knitting, while fifteen or twenty unhealthy-looking men pedal their way in a mass around a track to the accompaniment of music from one of the worst bands outside of Germany. Now and then terrific excitement reigns when someone in the audience, out of sheer boredom, offers twenty-five or a hundred dollars for the winner of a mile sprint, at the announcement of which the anemic athletes whip themselves into a faster pace until they have gone a mile. During the sprints, especially when the riders are on the turns and at an angle of forty-five degrees, there is a certain thrill if you are seeing it for the first time or even the second, but as the sleepy spectators are constantly offering prizes to keep themselves awake, even the sprints become routine after a while and the only excitement comes from watching the alternate riders, who are resting in their Pullman berths at the trackside, as they eat and have their thighs slapped. As in indoor-skating there is always the danger that one rider will spill, thereby upsetting the entire mob who follow close at his heels, but this happens all too seldom. Subconsciously this must be what the Roman crowd is waiting for, otherwise they would not sit up so late.

  There is one feature of the Six Day Bicycle Race which does not obtain in “Iceland” and that is the presence of the Social Set. Along about two-thirty in the morning parties of ladies and gentlemen in evening dress enter, to the accompaniment of hoots and jeers from the plebs, and seat themselves in the boxes to watch the sprints which are scheduled for that hour. Facing them, in the enclosure in the center of the arena and above them in the galleries, are probably all the gorillas and gun-men in New York, for whom the Six Day Race has had a fascination ever since the old Madison Square Garden Days when the gangs used to gather for their annual elimination festival resulting in anywhere from six to eight deaths. On no other occasion in our democratic procedure as a social organization do the forces of unrest and revolt come face to face with their quarries in such numbers or in such a bright light. Some year, when things have gone a little farther, the Six Day Bicycle Race may be the scene of the Great Upheaval and the Garden, in future years, may be known as the Tuileries of America. It is hardly worth going, year after year, to wait for, however. We can read about it in the papers next day just as well.

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  The Cooper Cycle

  in American Folk Songs

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  A study of the folk-songs of – and indigenous to – the Ohio River Valley (and just a teeny-weeny section of Illinois) discloses the fact that, between 1840 and half-past nine, coopering was the heroic occupation and coopers the legendary heroes of local song and story.

  On all sides we come across fragments of ballads, or even the ballads themselves, dealing with the romantic deeds of such characters as Cris the Cooper, or Warburton the Barrel-Maker, with an occasional reference to William W. Ransome, although there is no record of Ransome’s having been a cooper.

  The style in which these cooper-ballads were written would indicate that they were all written by members of the same family, possibly the Jukes. There is the same curious, stilted rhyme-scheme, more like a random idea than a scheme, and a mannerism of harmony which indicates clearly that they were composed on a comb.

  Probably the most famous of all these ballads in praise of coopering is the one called “Ernie Henkle,” which begins as follows:

  “Oh, my name is Ernie Henkle,

  Oh, in Rister I was born,

  Oh, I never let up with my coopering

  Oh, till I get my rintle on.”

  (A rintle was the special kind of thumb-piece that coopers used to thumb down the hoops, before the invention of the automatic hooper.)

  “Oh, one day ’twas down in Georgia,

  And that I won’t deny,

  That I met a gal named Sadie Fried,

  And (line lost)

  “Oh, she stole my heart completely,

  And that I can’t deny,

  And it wasn’t the tenth of August

  Or the eighteenth of July.”

  (Here the singer interjects a whistling solo.)

  “When up stepped Theodore Munson,

  And unto me did say,

  ‘Oh, you can’t go back on your promised word,’

  And unto me did say.

  “Oh, I killed that Theodore Munson,

  And unto him did say,

  ‘Oh, the only gal is Henrietta Bascome,

  And that you can’t deny.’

  This goes on for thirty-seven verses and then begins over again and goes over the entire thirty-seven for the second time. By this time every one is pretty sick of it.

  But there we see the cooper-ballad at its best. (If you don’t believe it, you ought to hear some of the others.) Ernie Henkle came to stand for the heroic cooper and, even in later songs about baggage-men, we find the Henkle motif creeping in – and out again.

  For example, in the famous song about “Joe McGee, the Baggage-Man”:

  “’Twas in the gay December,

  And the snow was up to your knees,

  When Number 34 pulled ’round the bend

  As pretty as you please.

  Lord, Lord. As pretty as you please.

  “Now Joe McGee was the baggage man,

  On Number 34,

  And he sat right down on the engine step

  And killed that Sam Basinette.”

  (There seems to be some confusion here as to just what Sam Basinette is meant. He must have been referred to in an earlier verse which has been lost.)

  “Now Sam Basinette said before he died,

  ‘This ain’t no treat to me,

  For the only gal is Henrietta Bascome,

  And that you will agree.’”

  It seems that Henrietta Bascome was more or less of a prom-girl who rotated between the coopers and the baggage-men in their social affairs, and even got as far north as Minnesota when the roads were clear.

  It will be seen that in all these folk-songs the picaresque element is almost entirely lacking: that is, there is very little – perhaps I mean “picturesque” instead of “picaresque.” In all these songs the picturesque element is lacking; that is, there is very little color, very little movement, very little gin, please. The natives of this district were mostly rude people – constantly bumping into each other and never apologizing – and
it is quite likely that they thought these to be pretty good songs, as songs go. That they aren’t, is no fault of mine. You ought to know better than to read an article on American folk-songs.

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  Hockey Tonight!

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  The growth of hockey in the brief period which spans my own life is a matter of great interest to me. Sometimes I sit and think about it for hours at a time. “How hockey has grown!” I muse, “How hockey has grown!” And then it is dinnertime and I have done no work.

  But, frankly, hockey is a great big sport now, and I can remember when its only function was to humiliate me personally. I never was very good at it, owing to weak ankles which bent at right angles whenever I started out to skate fast after the puck. I was all right standing still or gliding slowly along, but let me make a spurt and – bendo – out they would go! This made me more or Jess the butt of the game and I finally gave the whole thing up and took to drinking.

  But, at that time, hockey was an informal game, played mostly by small boys with a view to hogging the ice when others, including little girls and myself, wanted to skate. It is true, there was a sort of professional hockey played on an indoor rink at Mechanics’ Hall, but that was done on roller skates and was called “polo.”

  “Polo,” as played by the professional teams from Fall River and Providence, was the forerunner of the more intimate maneuvers of the Great War. The players were all state charges out on probation, large men who had given their lives over to some form of violence or other, and the idea was to catch the opposing player with the polo stick as near to the temple as possible and so end the game sooner. A good, livid welt across the cheek was considered a compromise, but counted the striker three points, nevertheless, just to encourage marksmanship. It was estimated that the life of an average indoor polo-player was anywhere from six to eight hours.

  Then, gradually, the game of ice-hockey came into ascendancy in the colleges. It was made a major sport in many of them, the players winning their letter for playing in the big games and falling behind in their studies, just as in football and baseball. I was on the student council in my own university when the decision was made to give the members of the hockey team a straight letter without the humiliation of crossed hockey sticks as a bar-sinister as heretofore, and the strain of the debate and momentousness of the question were so great that, after it had all been decided and the letters had been awarded, we all had to go and lie down and rest. Some of us didn’t get up again for four or five days. I sometimes wonder if I ever got up.

  And then came professional hockey as we know it now, with the construction of mammoth rinks and the introduction of frankfurters in the lobbies. Every large city bought itself a hockey team to foster civic spirit, each team composed almost exclusively of Canadians, thereby making the thing a local matter – local to the North American continent, that is.

  As at present played, hockey is a fast game, expert and clean, which gives the players plenty of chance to skate very fast from one end of a rink to the other and the spectators a chance to catch that cold in the head they have been looking for. Thousands of people flock to the arenas to witness the progress of the teams in the league and to cheer their fellow townsmen from Canada in their fierce rivalry with players, also from Canada, who wear the colors of Boston, New York, Detroit, and other presumptuous cities. As the number of cities which support hockey teams increases, the difficulty is going to come in impressing on the French-Canadian players the names of the cities they are playing for, so that they won’t get mixed up in the middle of the game and start working for the wrong side. A Frenchman playing for Chillicothe or Amagansett will have to watch himself pretty carefully.

  However, this is all beside the point – or beside the cover-point, if you want to be comical, even though there aren’t any more cover-points. What this article set out to do was to explain how hockey may be watched with a minimum of discomfort and an inside knowledge of the finer points of the game.

  As it is necessary to have ice in order to play ice-hockey, I have invented a system, now in use in most rinks, whereby an artificial ice may be made by the passage of ammonia through pipes and one thing and another. The result is much the same as regular ice except that you can’t use it in high-balls. It hurts just as much to fall down on and is just as easily fallen on as the real thing. In fact, it is ice, except that – well, as a matter of fact, although I invented the thing I can’t explain it, and, what is more, I don’t want to explain it. If you don’t already know what artificial ice is, I don’t care if you never know.

  If you arrive at the hockey game just a little bit late, you will be able to annoy people around you by asking what has taken place since the game began. There is a place where the score is indicated, it is true, but it is difficult to find, especially if you come in late. In the Madison Square Garden in New York, where every night some different kind of sport is indulged in (one night, hockey; the next night, prize-fighting; the next night, bicycle-racing; and so on and so forth) the same scoreboard is used except that the numbers are lighted up differently. I went to a hockey game late the other night and, looking up at the scoreboard, figured it out that Spandino and Milani had three more laps to go before they were three laps ahead of anyone else. This confused me a little, but not enough. I knew, in a way, that I was not at a bicycle race but I didn’t feel in a position to argue with any scoreboard. So I went home rather than cause trouble.

  Spectators at a hockey game, however, are generally pretty well up in the tactics of the game, always, as usual, excepting the women spectators. I would like to bet that a woman could have played hockey herself for five years and yet, if put among the spectators, wouldn’t know what that man was doing with the little round disc. However, poking fun at women for not knowing games is old stuff, and we must always remember that we men ourselves don’t know everything about baking popovers. Not any more than women do. (Heh-heh!)

  The man who thought of installing frankfurter stands in the lobbies of hockey arenas had a great idea. If it looks as if there might not be any scoring done for a long time (and, what with goal-tenders as efficient as they are, it most always does look that way) you can slip out and have a session with a frankfurter or even a bar of nougatine and get back in time to see the end of the period. The trouble with professional hockey as played today is that the goal-tenders are too good. A player may carry the puck down the ice as far as the goal and then, owing to the goal-tender’s being just an old fool and not caring at all about the spectators, never get it in at all. This makes it difficult to get up any enthusiasm when you see things quickening up, because you know that nothing much will come of it anyway. My plan would be to eliminate the goal-tenders entirely and speed up the game. The officials could help some by sending them to the penalty box now and then.

  As a matter of fact, I have never even seen a hockey game in my whole life.

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  “I Am in the Book”

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  There are several natural phenomena which I shall have to have explained to me before I can consent to keep on going as a resident member of the human race. One is the metamorphosis which hats and suits undergo exactly one week after their purchase, whereby they are changed from smart, intensely becoming articles of apparel into something children use when they want to “dress up like daddy.” Another is the almost identical change undergone by people whom you have known under one set of conditions when they are transferred to another locale.

  Perhaps the first phenomenon, in my case, may be explained by the fact that I need a valet. Not a valet to come in two or three times a week and sneak my clothes away, but a valet to follow me about, everywhere I go, with a whisk broom in one hand and an electric iron in the other, brushing off a bit of lint here, giving an occasional coup de fer there, and whispering in my ear every once in a while, for God’s sake not to turn my hat brim down that way. Then perha
ps my hats and suits would remain the hats and suits they were when I bought them.

  But the second mysterious transformation – that of people of one sort into people of another sort, simply by moving them from one place to another in different clothes – here is a problem for the scientists; that is, if they are at all interested.

  Perhaps I do not make myself clear. (I have had quite a bit of trouble that way lately.) I will give an example if you can get ten other people to give, too. Let us say that you went to Europe this summer. You were that rosy-faced man in a straw hat who went to Europe this summer. Or you went to the seashore. My God, man, you must have gone somewhere!

  Wherever you were, you made new acquaintances, unless you had whooping cough all the time. On the voyage home, let us say, you sat next to some awfully nice people from Grand Rapids, or were ill at practically the same time as a very congenial man from Philadelphia. These chance acquaintances ripened into friendships, and perhaps into something even more beautiful (although I often think that nothing is really more beautiful than friendship), and before long you were talking over all kinds of things and perhaps exchanging bits of fruit from your steamer baskets. By the day before you landed you were practically brother and sister – or, what is worse, brother and brother.