Chips Off the Old Benchley

by Robert Benchley

  All of this made literary contacts very confusing in the old days, whereas today they are so simple that one may avoid them entirely by not going to teas or reading the book notes. I very well remember my first literary contact when I came to New York as a young boy of sixty-five in 1890. I had been out writing a novel, as all young boys were apt to do in those days, and came in, all hot and excited, to find Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Irving Caesar waiting for me to talk over Mark Twain’s latest story about the Drunken Frog of Calvados County. The last part of it hadn’t come over the wire yet, so it didn’t make much sense as a funny story, but we all laughed heartily at it because it was afterward to become so famous. I shall never forget Charles Dudley Warner’s face as he laughed at it. It was terrible.

  It was only a few weeks later that Mark Clemens (“Samuel Twain”) asked me to lunch at the Century. I was very busy on my new book, and rather hated to leave off work as I hadn’t even found my pencil, but my wife said that she thought that I ought to go as it would make such a nice tidbit for my memoirs later. I had also heard that the Century served a very delicious roast-beef hash, browned to a crisp, which was an added attraction. Sometime I must write a book of literary reminiscences about roast-beef hash browned to a crisp.

  So I went. And was I bored! The hash was great, but Edmund Clarence Stedman, Henry Fuller, and Richard Watson Gilder all told the Drunken Frog story, and Mark Clemens (“Samuel Langhorne”) acted it out, and what with beards and mustaches and jumpings up and down, I finally begged off and went to the Players’ to meet J. I. C. Clark, Hamlin Garland, “Buster” West, and Dr. Johnson (who was not really dead at that time but only “playing possum”).

  I remember that it was on that day that I was an unwilling auditor to one of the most famous interplays of rapier wit which ever devastated a literary memoir. Nat Goodwin took me around to see a rehearsal of “All’s Well That Ends All,” where I met Sir Beerbohm Tree, who was in this country straightening out a little libel suit (he had accused William Winter of stealing one of his gags and Winter had retaliated with a suit claiming that the gag was no good anyway). Sir Beerbohm (Tree) was engaged at that moment in a controversy with Lester Wallack, so-named after Wallack’s theater.

  The two wits had been discussing something connected with the theater (otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to discuss at all) and Sir Beerbohm had said:

  “All right, that’s what you think!”

  Wallack looked about him with a quizzical smile.

  “Very well,” he said, dryly, “if that’s the way you feel about it.”

  Tree threw back his leonine head and glared.

  “I see!” he said, and walked away.

  It was a big day for repartee.

  Early in January of that year (what year?) Walt Whitman confided to me that he was doing a play, to be called “Ten Nights in a Broad-brimmed Hat.” I told him that it would never go, as there was no adagio dancer in it. He said that he felt that adagio dancing was going out, and that what the public wanted was something good and sexy without people actually throwing each other about. I never liked Whitman, because of his having once worked on a Brooklyn newspaper, but I told him that the only thing to do was to try it out in Newark and see how it went. I never heard anything more of the play – or of Whitman.

  In my diary (or the diary that I am using) I find an entry: “Oct. 12th. This is the end! Filkins has gone too far.” I am frankly mystified by this entry. So far as I know, there has been no character in our literary history by the name of Filkins (unless it was Ringold Lardner using another name) and I cannot understand just what bearing he has on this matter. If I had my wits about me, I should never include him in this biography. He means nothing.

  It was just about this time that Ralph Waldo Emerson had been dead for ten years, so I never knew him. I did know a man named Emerson Cottner, however, which gives me a pretty good loophole for bringing the Sage of Concord (or was that Thoreau?) into these pages. Although I never knew Waldo Emerson (as we used to call him) I thought that he was all right.

  During the fall before we went back to Hyannis to live, we were the center of quite a round of literary activity. I say “quite a round of literary activity.” I mean that I went to the Century to a dinner given for William Dean Howells. It was a delightful occasion, and I got many names for my list, as well as two new overcoats. Horace Greeley, Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson, Horace Watson Gilder, Richard Underwood Johnson, Robert Greeley, Otto H. Kahn, Charles Dudley Warner, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mrs. S. Standwood Menken (as Columbia). Music by the Yacht Club Boys.

  I shall never forget an incident which occurred between Horace Watson Aldrich and Mark Twain (“Samuel Langhorne Gibson”) during dinner. Twain got up and announced that owing to the limited capacity of the room, most of the people there would have to eat their dinners up in the Children’s Room of the Century (for members under sixty). At this, Aldrich (or Gilder, as we used to call him), proposed a toast to “Our Absent Members,” which J. A. B. Fuller, having only one leg, took personally, and stamped out of the room in a rage. It was delicious.

  At Maybie’s quip, a roar went up (which turned out to be from the furnace downstairs), but a great many of us, including Emily Dickinson (who, I thought, had never left Amherst, Mass., but who seemed to get around quite a bit for a recluse) all joined in the laughter, which was negligible. I shall never forget it, at least, not until this book gets proofread and off the presses. I think that my next book will be more in the nature of a serious history where I won’t have to remember so many things.

  And so we come to the end of the road. What lies beyond, what literary contacts are to be made, all must remain a mystery. (I might make a mystery story out of it, in fact.) There are so many figures in American life which do not come within the scope of this poor outline. But if I can hurry around and get some invitations, I may be able to add a few more names before the next issue. But by the next issue perhaps all my pretty little readers will have flown away. Frankly, I could hardly blame them.

  Sic transit gloria mundi (as we used to call him).

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  What Time Is It?

  And What of It?

  * * *

  By secretly consulting an old bootleg watch which I hid away (set at Standard Time) under my bed when my native state went daylight-saving, I find that it is a little over a month now since the Cossacks stormed up at the door and forced us to set our clocks an hour ahead. And, at the end of this month, I can give out a definite verdict against daylight-saving. I don’t like it. I don’t care what the reasons for it are. I don’t like it. And beginning tomorrow I, personally, am going back to God’s time. My body may belong to the State, but my soul belongs to Standard Time. If necessary, I will carry the case to the Supreme Court.

  Time-keeping is a difficult enough maneuver at best, without monkeying around with an extra hour plus or minus. Just the fact that, when it is noon in New York, it is 5 P.M. in Paris has always worried me, and even now I am more or less inclined not to believe it. And when, last New Year’s, greetings were radioed from New Zealand which reached here on December 31, I went into a sulk which almost spoiled the holiday for my friends. The whole idea is unpleasant to me.

  The thing gets worse the farther west you go. When you cross the 180th meridian in the Pacific (so they try to tell me) you lose a whole day, which I very much doubt. If, at the same time, daylight-saving is in effect just at that time, you lose one day and one hour. I suppose that, if someone were to come along and say so, you lose one day, one hour, and one minute. The thing can easily be made absurd.

  If everyone knew the trouble that the Western Union goes to in order to fix Standard Time, there wouldn’t be so much tampering with it on the part of irresponsible legislators. From the United States Naval Observatory they select a list of about 150 so-called “clock stars.” It is a great honor to be on this list. In order to be
on it, a star has to sit very still and not wiggle or whisper, so that its permanent position can be noted in the American Ephemeris or Social Register. The person who told me all this (and who has, for obvious reasons, asked to remain anonymous) says that only stars which cross the meridian within twenty degrees of the zenith are included, “in order that the azimuth error may be small.” Just how large an azimuth error has to be before it becomes large I forgot to ask, but I should imagine that six or seven feet would be pretty big for any azimuth error that you or I would be likely to have anything to do with.

  Well, sir, after the Western Union has selected its clock stars, it takes a look at them each night through pearl-handled opera glasses, and, according to my informant, in this way finds out what time it is. I am not quite clear on the thing yet, and don’t know whether they see the hour marked out on these stars or whether the stars, if looked at from the right angle, spell out “E-i-g-h-t-f-o-r-t-y-t-h-r-e-e.” However, the experts at the Western Union can tell, and I suppose that is all that matters. If I knew what it was they did, and how they were able to tell time by the stars, I should be an expert at the Western Union. That is, of course, provided that I was socially acceptable to the present experts.

  But, on the whole, I think that I shall keep out of any jobs which involve an understanding of clocks and time-keeping. I can’t even understand my own clocks. I have an alarm clock, a plain, unattractive piece of mechanism which I bought in a drugstore about eight years ago. This clock will keep perfect time so long as it is tipped over on its face. If I humor it in this whim, however, it is obvious that I am not going to be able to tell what time it is, because I can’t see the face. I tried once placing it over on its back, but it raised such a fuss that I had to turn it over instantly into its old position.

  I have now solved the problem by having it on a table with a coarse wire net for a top instead of a solid piece of wood. So when I want to see what time it is, I simply get down on my hands and knees and look up through the wire, and there, clear as day, is the face of the clock looking down at me with the correct time. This maneuver also serves a double purpose, as it gets me out of bed much more surely than the mere ringing of an alarm will do.

  I have had several letters from friends asking me why I didn’t get rid of this clock and get one which would tell time without being coddled; but I have become fond of “Blushing Bennie,” as I call it (because it is always hiding its face) and I wouldn’t know what to do with a new clock staring directly at me every time I looked at it.

  Down in the living room I have a clock which is called a “four-hundred-day” clock, which is supposed to run 400 days without winding. This feat seems to be accomplished by arranging four large cherries on a rotating stem which hangs out of the works of the clock (clearly visible through the glass cover) and they go slowly round one way and then slowly round the other until the person who is watching them has gone mad. I have got myself trained now so that I can lean against the mantel and watch them rotate for six hours without feeling queer, but people who are not used to it should not try watching for more than fifteen minutes at first. If I have any work to do, it is a great comfort to know that I can always keep from doing it by watching these revolving cherries, for after a while I get hypnotized by the sight and am unable to take my eyes away. I have a man who does nothing else but come and lead me away from the clock whenever I have been there too long or when anyone in the room wants to talk to me.

  Sometimes a dash of cold water in my face is necessary, and this is apt to irritate me and make me petulant at first, but when I am myself again I realize that it was for the best and reward the man with a warm smile and a “Well done!”

  I don’t know what we are supposed to do with the clock when the 400 days are up, because the directions distinctly said that under no circumstances was it to be touched once it had been started. I suppose that we shall have to throw it away. I shall want to save the cherries, however, and can perhaps learn to twirl them myself.

  All this will perhaps show you how mystified I am by any time-recording device, even the simplest. And when it comes to chronometers of a more complicated nature, I am frankly baffled. This is probably why daylight-saving not only confuses but irritates me, because I wasn’t really settled in my mind about the old Standard Time and resent any further attempt to make it more difficult. I understand perfectly the attitude of Holland in the matter of so-called “Zone Time.” Or perhaps you don’t know what Holland’s attitude was.

  In 1879 a busybody named Sandford Fleming brought forward a plan for the whole earth which set out twenty-four standard meridians to be fifteen degrees apart in longitude, starting from Greenwich, England. There was to be an hour’s difference in time between each two of these.

  This was the guy who made all the trouble and made it possible for people in California who happened to be in the middle of a big party at midnight to call up someone in New York on the telephone and wake him out of a four A.M. slumber to say: “Hello, you big bum, you! Guess who this is!”

  Well, all the nations accepted this crazy scheme of time-telling except Holland. Holland couldn’t see any reason for messing around with meridians when there was so much trouble in the world as it was (and is). So Holland, although one of the smallest nations, stood out against the whole world and kept its own time, and, as a result, didn’t get into the War when it came. And also makes delicious cheeses. And tulip bulbs. So you see?

  My plan is to be known as “the Holland of Scarsdale,” and to set all my clocks (except the one which cannot be tampered with) back to the old time we loved so well. They may throw me in jail, or they may cut off my electricity, but I am going through with this thing if it takes all summer. I don’t like Time, and I never have, and I want to have as little to do with it as possible. If I am bothered much more by it, I shall take all the hands off all the watches and clocks in my house and just drift along, playing the mandolin and humming. I’m too busy a man to be worried by figuring out what time it is.

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  Do I Hear

  Twenty Thousand?

  * * *

  The scene is in the “Three Æons for Lunch” Club, made up of the shades of those authors who have “done something” while on earth. Shades of advertising men are admitted because advertising is really a form of belles-lettres and, besides, they keep a club going. SHELLEY, SWIFT, TENNYSON, POPE, POE, and others are lounging about the library table preparatory to going in to lunch.

  SHELLEY picks up a copy of the February issue of Book News from the Earth and thumbs its pages over with a badly assumed nonchalance.

  SHELLEY

  Ho-hum! I wonder what the news is from the old book-mart.

  SWIFT

  If you’re looking for the article on the Jerome Kern book auction, it’s on page 45. Congratulations.

  SHELLEY

  (blushing furiously)

  Jerome Kern book-auction? Has there been a – oh, yes, you mean the auction of Jerome Kern’s library.

  (Turns unerringly to page 45.)

  SWIFT

  Don’t be naïve. You read all about it yesterday at that very table. You even copied out the various prices the books brought.

  SHELLEY

  (trying to read article as if for first time)

  Honestly, Dean, I wasn’t reading – that was this article on Richard Halliburton I was reading – well, I’ll be darned – honestly, Dean, this is the first time I knew about this –

  POE

  What’s all the blushing about?

  (to the steward)

  Another round of the same, Waters.

  TENNYSON

  Not for me, Edgar, thanks. Not in the middle of the day.

  POE

  Another round of the same, Waters. . . . Come on, Bysshe, what’s in the magazine you want us to know about?

  SWIFT

  Oh, they had an auction in New York of Jerome Kern’s library and Bysshe was in the Big Mo
ney. . . . $68,000, wasn’t it, Bysshie?

  SHELLEY

  Well, that’s what it seems to say here. I don’t understand it.

  (Puts magazine down where it can easily be reached by the others.)

  POE

  (picking it up)

  What else was sold?

  SWIFT

  Oh, you didn’t come off so badly, Eddie. An old letter of yours about Mrs. Browning was in the money, too.

  POE

  My God! Nineteen thousand five hundred! Say, that’s not so bad, is it – for a letter, I mean?

  SWIFT

  Not so bad! It’s perfect! You never earned nineteen thousand five hundred in your whole life. I almost tied you, though. Some sucker paid seventeen thousand for a first edition of Gulliver.

  TENNYSON

  (yawning slightly)

  May I take a look at that, please?

  SHELLEY

  Your Maud drew down something like nine thousand.

  SWIFT

  I thought you hadn’t read the article, Bysshe.

  SHELLEY

  I just saw that item – it was right there under mine.

  TENNYSON

  (reading)

  Oh, well, it was just a portion of the manuscript – probably a couple of stanzas. Anyway, I don’t like the idea of auctioning off things like that. It sort of takes some of the beauty away.

  SWIFT

  What beauty is that?

  TENNYSON

  You wouldn’t understand, Swift.

  LAMB

  I think Alfy is right. It rather cheapens the thing to have a lot of Americans and things bidding for one’s work.

  POE

  Well, a lot of Americans and things fell pretty heavily for some old hack-work of yours, Charlie. You ran second to Bysshe with a neat $48,000.

  LAMB

  Who – me? Who – I? Forty-eight thousand? For what?

  POE