20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or David Copperfield

by Robert Benchley

  Try-Outs

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  Between the closing of one theatrical season and the opening of the next (“comes a pause in the day’s occupations that is known as the Children’s Hour”) several hundred plays are “tried out” in the provinces to see what they need before being brought into New York. It is usually found that they need amputation just below and just above the knee. Not enough of them, however, are thrown into the incinerator after the try-out. The managements of many of them seem to have some ingenuous idea that they can be “fixed” and that they will then knock the metropolis cold. “The third act needs a little rewriting,” they say hopefully, “and we need someone else as the parson, but aside from that we’re set.” And there is another drama lined up for us slaves of the public to write an obituary for.

  Avid, as usual, for news, this department has been spending these hot summer weeks going about the Atlantic seaboard spying on abortive dramatic entertainments in the outlying districts, with an eye (sometimes one eye, sometimes two) for possible metropolitan material in the fall. And we must admit that, so far as we have seen, nothing is fit to come into New York at all.

  Take, for example, the show put on for the benefit of the Yacht Club at Sinosset, Rhode Island. It was called “The Sinosset Follies of 1928,” a title implying that there have been others like it in years past and are likely to be more in the future. Reason totters at the very thought of such a sequence. We have laws against liquor and smallpox. Are the “Sinosset Follies” going to be allowed to run their course year after year? It were better that the Sinosset Yacht Club fell into decay like the castles of the Rhineland than that such a thing should be perpetuated.

  The opening chorus of “The Sinosset Follies” consisted of six young men and six young ladies in yachting costume (or what passes in Sinosset as a yachting costume). The lyric to this chorus was written by J. Foster Wrenn, Chairman of the Entertainment Committee and a perfect peach of a chap who, had Fate not made him an indifferent architect, would most certainly have given both the Gershwin brothers a run for their money. All the lyrics in the show, you will find, were written by J. Foster Wrenn, and based on existing lyrics by Lorenz Hart and Buddy De Sylva. Mr. Wrenn also coached the show and worked awfully, awfully hard to make it a success, and everybody ought to be awfully grateful to him – or else take a good sock at him.

  The opening chorus is followed (after a short wait while the back-drop is disentangled from the borders) by a sketch showing one of the less attractive phases of social life in Sinosset, intelligible only to very old Sinossetites and not very pleasing even to them. The author of the sketch is not mentioned, and the supposition is that the actors are making it up as they go along. Then comes a number in which a young lady and young gentleman sing and, what is even worse, dance to, “You Took Advantage of Me,” for which they can be prosecuted and sent to jail by the management of “Present Arms!” now running in New York. And if the management of “Present Arms!” have any social conscience at all they will hire Clarence Darrow and spend millions on the prosecution. This department will head a subscription list with $100 right now.

  When “The Sinosset Follies of 1928” breaks up at a quarter before one in the morning, its patrons have been treated to three paraphrases of current popular songs, two very long monologues (one of which was fortunately cut short in the middle by the monologist’s falling off the platform and disappearing for good), a finale to the first part, a finaletto, a grand finale to the whole show involving fourteen more people than the stage would hold, and four comedy sketches based on topical Sinosset situations which were not essentially dramatic in themselves and which, even had they been excerpts from “The Wild Duck,” would have lacked a certain something as entertainment. These were interspersed with rather long announcements by J. Foster Wrenn in person, who, in common with three or four thousand amateur announcers throughout the country, had seen M. Balieff on his first appearance in this country and had been known as the local “Balieff” ever since for no discernible reason. This epidemic of amateur Balieffs is one of the major harms done this country by the introduction of the Chauve-Souris eight years ago.

  As it was rumored back-stage that a representative of Ziegfeld and one of the Shuberts in person were out front looking for possible metropolitan material, all of the actors were in great form and doing their best, which, unfortunately, was not quite good enough.

  We have singled out “The Sinosset Follies of 1928” because it is representative of a type of entertainment which is going on all summer from Maine to – what is the name of that state? – California, but other productions which we have seen in our tour of inspection have just as little chance of getting into New York in the fall. Among them we may list the revival of “Pinafore” given, much to the disgust of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, by the summer colony at Eagle Lake, Michigan; a kermess entitled, “Around the World with the Roses,” which had the ostensible excuse of providing recreation for the indigent pets of Santa Ira, California; and, as bad as any of them, a performance of “Within the Law” given by a summer stock company composed of “guest stars” from Broadway who were taking their vacations by not learning their lines for a new show each week.

  The fact that the Drama survives the body-blows given it by amateur and professional organizations each summer should be proof enough that it is an essential feature of our civilization. It should be proof enough, but, for us, it isn’t.

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  African Sculpture

  Its Background, Future and the Old-Fashioned Waltz

  (With Photographs by the Author) [a]

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  The recent exhibition of West African sculpture created a furor in art circles which died down in about fifteen minutes – which was just about the time consumed in removing the objets from the packing crates. We are therefore printing a critical estimate of these little carvings in an attempt to arouse enough interest in them among art lovers to have them crated up again to be sent back to West Africa.

  One must understand the spirit which is at the back of West African sculpture in order to appreciate the intense integrity of its technique. It isn’t so much the sculpture itself (although, in a way, it is) as the fact that it is filled with raisins. These can be extracted and eaten if you like raisins. Early Florentine sculpture and late Greek modeling (some of the late Greek was so late that it ran right over into Early Florentine and nobody knew the difference) had no raisins.

  A study of the examples printed on this page will hardly serve to demonstrate this point, but it won’t do any harm to look at them casually.

  Example 1 is a native West African funeral mask, worn by any relative of the deceased who wanted to attend the funeral and yet didn’t want the rest of the relatives to know that he was in town. This would probably account for the strong Irish cast to the features of the mask. No one would think of an Irishman being a relative of a native West African, although stranger things have happened. This mask was brought back by the Huber’s 42nd St. Museum expedition and is now on exhibition in the Renaissance Biped Room of the Museum itself.

  Example 2 is one of the most sincere of these native sculptures. It is a local fetish in the shape of a salt-cellar (a pretty funny shape for a salt-cellar, you are doubtless saying to yourself), as salt is considered to be very lucky on the West Coast of Africa, especially if you happen to have any fried chicken and hashed-in-cream potatoes to put it on. This salt-cellar fetish, in addition to being a talisman, also tells a story (stop it if you have heard it):

  It represents the gradual growth of the seed to the mature plant, the seed being represented by the two hands of the little figure and the mature plant by the two knees. In the spring of the year, when the seed is planted, everything is bright and green. Hence the hands. In the fall, when the grain is garnered, the year is nearing its close, Nature is putting on her winding sheet for the long winter, and nothing seems right. Hence the knees. That may not be th
e explanation at all. How should I know?

  Example 3 is a poser, frankly. It was found on the West Coast, in a district known as the “West Coast Studios.” Nobody seems to know who found this example of native art, or where it was found. It just turned up among some other bits of sculpture in the Museum’s shipment. At first it was thought to be a bust of the local Lon Cha. . . Beg pardon! At first it was thought to be a replica of Naa, the Fog-God – and it still may be. The argument against this theory is that it isn’t round enough. Other experts have placed it in the Post-Fever School (after the scourge of fever which swept the Coast in 1780) and seem to see in it an attempt to show the growth of the seed to the mature grain. Here, again, finders are keepers.

  Now, a study of these three examples, representing, as they do, three distinct schools of West African sculptural art, shows us one thing – namely, that long before the coming of the White Man there was a distinct feeling for aesthetic expression among the natives of that section of the continent. Just how successful these savage strivings were, and just what degree of skill was mastered by these tribal artists, is something which each connoisseur must decide for himself. Personally, I wouldn’t give them houseroom.

  [a] Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations by Gluyas Williams (1888–1982) have been omitted.

  —E.C.M.

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  Football Sagas

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  There has got to be a drastic deflation in style among football-reporters, otherwise the sports-writers are going to find themselves swirling through space on comets, with bulging eyes and throbbing temples, trying to find newer and more ecstatic ways of saying, “Yale and Harvard played football yesterday.”

  The language of football reporting has become so exalted in the past few years that the only thing left will be to have the noble words which the sports-writers have written set to music and chanted by a male choir in white vestments from the top of Bald Mountain at dusk. Compared with the phrases used to describe the most tepid of mid-season games the Latin cadences dealing with rosy-fingered Aurora and her ilk sound like stock-market quotations. When “twenty-two young Titans face each other in a battle the echoes of which will ring down through the centuries as long as man tells tales of valor and cunning,” it is time to give pause and see if, by chance, we are not living in the Golden Age of Heroes and don’t know it.

  When even so unemotional a paper as the New York Times soars to stylistic heights as it did in Mr. Danzig’s account of one Yale-Princeton game and we learn that “never had any in that tremendous gathering ever come to a game with fonder expectations of seeing a struggle to go down the ages. . . and never were expectations more fully realized than they were in this battle between two stalwart lines and two brilliant back-fields – a battle which reached so feverish a heat and which had so startling a dénouement that the most generous impulses were smothered down in the vivid flame of partisanship kindled by the desperateness of the conflict and the turns of fortune. It was a game to live forever in the memories of a gathering which went through a gamut of emotions perhaps never exceeded in the experience of a football crowd” – when the Times does that, what are we to expect of such susceptible word-poets as Grantland Rice? The “perhaps” in the last sentence is the only sign of the Times’ traditional conservatism. Having said “perhaps never exceeded” they can not be sued for libel at any rate.

  We have seen “an autumn sky heavily tinted with flames and flashes of orange and black turn suddenly into the shining glow of Yale’s triumphant blue” (Grantland Rice saw this phenomenon and told the Herald Tribune readers of it) and in four out of eight accounts of this same titanic struggle we found that “twenty-two giants battled” for supremacy in what looks like the most stupendous conflict since Olympus was closed.

  When the heroic mood is not on the writers they adopt the narrative style of Ralph Henry Barbour in his “For the Honor of the School” series. Mr. James Robbins, in the World, began his story of an Army-Notre Dame game as follows:

  “Out in the black and gold of the Army trod a lone ball-catcher. Veterans had failed in what he was to do. The score was Army 6; Notre Dame 0. . . .

  “‘Seven – eleven – twenty-two!’ began the Notre Dame quarter. It was John (Butch) Niemiec’s number being called – Niemiec, the deadly passer.

  “Back of the other line was a youth who had sat an idle sideline slave, but a tiny orb among the scintillating stars, the knights of West Point castle. He was William Lester Nave, from Cleveland. He had been put in to catch the ball.

  “‘It can’t be done, but we’ll try,’ thought his team-mates.

  “Bill crouched for a spring. His heels were off the grass.

  “‘He will!’ shrieked a girl’s voice from the grand-stand.

  “Back snapped the ball. Twenty-one players in combat. Heels-over-head they tumbled as they met and lifted up.

  “Off from the flying tangle was the lone ball-catcher. Over came the spiraling ball.

  “Another cry rent the air above the grandstand.

  “‘Bill!’ it seemed to implore.

  “Into the waiting arms of Nave, the young knight, came the oval. His arms steeled it and he jumped ahead. . . . Off he pushed three opponents, straight-arming them away. Forty-five yards he covered before they brought him down at the goal-line.

  “A crunching of flesh was untangled. A shout! A roar! A touchdown! Nave was over the line. A substitute!

  “Cheer on cheer like volleyed thunder burst forth from the Army side. It was Nave! Nave! NAVE!

  “So the tide of strife was turned at the Yankee Stadium where West Point humbled the lads of Notre Dame 18-0.”

  Of course, the fact that the Army was already one touchdown ahead when the substitute made this run detracts a little from Mr. Robbins’ plot, but having the girl in the grandstand was nothing short of inspiration on his part.

  Another favorite bit of word-wizardry among the sporting writers (initiated, I believe, by Mr. McGeehan a long time ago) is taking the hero of a game and referring to him throughout the story by his full names, Christian, middle and given. This was an effective gag at first, but when, week after week, we find some one player singled out in each game for this distinction, players whose names are never heard again, even during the same season, it loses a little of its vigor as a writing ruse. Perhaps an example is not necessary, and yet we have a perfect one at hand in the Times account of the Army-Notre Dame game already mentioned (oddly enough Mr. Harrison picks out an entirely different hero from the one immortalized by Mr. Robbins in the World, which only goes to show that even two sporting writers at the same game are unaware of exactly which one of the twenty-two Titans is to go ringing down through the ages). Here is Mr. Harrison’s version:

  “A red-headed half-back, who plods along only a trifle faster than that ancient sprinter Mercury, wrote finis across the championship aspirations of Notre Dame yesterday. . . . The fleet-footed lad in question is carried on the official records as Christian K. Cagle, but up at the Point he is better known as plain ordinary Red. He was the hero of a game that abounded in heroes. . . . Near the end of the game Christian K. Cagle grabbed a beautiful forward pass. . . . And so what with one thing and another, including Christian K. Cagle, and a score of other sturdy youths from up West Point way, Notre Dame was outplayed,” etc.

  Perhaps it would be well for them all to go back to the simple direct style with which George Daley in the World led into his story of a Yale-Princeton game:

  “One bold, unexpected play by Johnny Hoben which tangled up and crossed the Tigers was directly responsible for Yale’s football victory over Princeton here today by a score of 14 to 6.”

  At any rate, Mr. Daley tells us right at the start who won.

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  Mr. Mencken

  Reviews Mr. Nathan

  and Vice Versa

  (With apologies, in German, to both)


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  The Literary Katzenjammer

  ART OF THE NIGHT, by George Jean Nathan. $2.50; $10. 13-1/2 x 6-7/8. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  Among the more illuminating manifestations of that imbecilic ratiocination peculiar to the mens Americana is the belief, prevalent in some quarters of our fair land, that Mr. George Jean Nathan is a writer of importance. For preposterous rubbish this is comparable only with the more august imbecility which rates Calvin Coolidge as a great man, Offenbach as a great composer, or salted almonds as great Vorspeise.

  That Nathan is energetic can not be denied. That he is privy to the sonorous hocus-pocus of critical jargon is a fact patent to anyone who has had the time and stomach to delve into the Jahrbuch issued each spring under his name by the obliging House of Knopf. Each contains current forms of prayer to O’Neill, Ziegfeld, O’Casey and other gods, together with expurgatoriana for the year’s daemons. But that these collections of obiter dicta furnish any more lasting contribution to the world’s thought than is offered in the highfalutin rumble-bumble of Otto H. Kahn or the pish-posh incidental to the performance of the marriage service in the Church of England is an admission I am not prepared to make.

  There is a current and quite preposterous impression that Nathan’s hold on the intellectual booberie is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve-centers, causing them to jump. More palpable tosh than this has not formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount. As a matter of fact, Nathan’s appeal is spiritual. Assuming the manner of a cynical fellow, he looks sourly and with a bilious eye on the idols in the temple, but, even as he looks, he beats time to the chant of the priests and eventually, overcome with the religious razzle-dazzle, breaks into a profuse sweat, raises his arms to the heavens and performs a slow, reverent hoochie-koochie, followed by hundreds of zany converts.