Chips Off the Old Benchley

by Robert Benchley

  There is always the old Roman method of writing notes. If you decide on this, just scribble out the following on a bit of ship’s stationery: “I may be deaf and I may be dumb, but if you think that makes any difference in the long run, you’re crazy.” This is sure to attract the lady’s attention and give her some indication that you are favorably impressed with her. She may write a note back to you. She may even write a note to the management of the steamship line.

  Another good way to call yourself to her attention would be to upset the writing desk. In the general laughter and confusion which would follow, you could grab her and carry her up on deck where you could tell her confidentially that you really were not deaf and dumb but that you were just pretending to be that way in order to avoid talking to people who did not interest you. The fact that you were talking to her, you could point out, was a sure sign that she, alone, among all the people on the ship, did interest you; a rather pretty compliment to her, in a way. You could then say that, as it was essential that none of the other passengers should know that you could talk, it would be necessary for her to hold conversations with you clandestinely, up on the boat deck, or better yet, in one of the boats. The excitement of this would be sure to appeal to her, and you would unquestionably become fast friends.

  There is one other method by which you could catch her favor as you sat looking at her over the top of the desk, a method which is the right of every man whether he be deaf, dumb or bow-legged. You might wink one eye very slowly at her. It wouldn’t be long then before you could tell whether or not it would be worth your while to talk.

  However it worked out, you would have had a comparatively peaceful voyage, and no price is too high to pay for escaping the horrors that usually attend commuting across the Atlantic Ocean.

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  Down in Front

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  For years and years the audience has been the worst feature of the theater. Many a good play has failed, and many a frightful one succeeded, simply because the audiences in this broad and fertile (it certainly is fertile, you can’t deny that) land of ours, if all assembled in one large field, would average in a mentality test something approximating one-half of one per cent, or three grammes penny-weight, which is the standard set for the chipmunks before they can become squirrels. If it weren’t for the audiences, the drama would be miles ahead of where it is now.

  Among the many reforms which must be instituted before the theater can progress is the ostentatious and horribly painful execution of all people who come in late.

  What chance has Ibsen if, just as Helma or Tholwig, or whoever the girl is, begins to explain why she finds herself at the age of thirteen with three husbands, you have to stand up and clutch your overcoat upside down and drop your program to allow a theater-party of five to scrape past you on their way to the “fourth-fifth-sixth-seventh-and-eighth seats in, please”? How can you keep your mind on the nuances of Ben-Ami’s performance if your shirtfront is constantly being scratched by the jet beads or the Masonic fob of some tardy dowager or bon vivant crushing in front of you?

  A lot of good it does for them to say “So sorry!” as they grind the gloss from your pump. Slight return is a muttered “I beg your pardon” for the obstructed vision of Delysia kissing the young Prince. If they are so polite as all that, they should begin the good work by starting dinner earlier when they are going to the theater, or going without the demi-tasse, or standing up back until the act is over. Or better yet, hiring the actors to come to their house and give them a private performance.

  So much for them! Lead them away!

  We next come to the bronchial buster, or the man (it is usually a man) who, being in the throes of a terrific throat and tube trouble chooses that night for theater-going on which the crisis is expected. If he can cough his way back to life on that night, the doctor has said that he will pull through, and so he decides that a good show is what he needs to keep him entertained between paroxysms.

  He will soon learn to pick his pauses with finesse. It does no good to cough while there is a great deal of noise going on on the stage. No one can hear. The time is just as the star is about to do a little low speaking to her dying lover or when the hero, alone in his garret, goes silently over to the fireplace and tears up the letter. Then for a good rousing bark, my hearty, followed by a series of short, sharp ones like those of a coxswain! If possible the appearance of apoplexy should be simulated. This will cause consternation among those around you – consternation for fear that you may come out of it alive.

  Before the current has been turned off, let us offer the chair to the person who applauds long after everyone else has settled down to go on with the show. His offense is born of enthusiasm, it is true, and he thinks that he is doing both actors and audience a favor, but that won’t get him anywhere if the reform I have in mind is ever instituted. He will look just the same as the late birds and the cougher when they are all stretched, cold and silent, in the tumbril on its return trip.

  This one appears to be under the delusion that he is an occupant of the royal box, and that, if he likes a song, all he has to do is clap his palms together and the song shall be repeated until he has had his imperial fill. When his favorite actor or actress comes on, the show needs must stop while he lets them know that he is right with them every minute of the time. This is especially satisfying encouragement if the favorite actor’s entrance happens to be one in pursuit of a fleeing policeman or a sudden discovery of his wife saying “hello” to the man who came to fix the bell. In the midst of such trying scenes, the favored actor must either stop in his pursuit to bow in acknowledgement, or stand stock still, in awkward tableau, waiting for the applause to die down so that he may cry: “So this is how matters stand, is it?”

  It may be claimed that the actors themselves like this, and if they don’t mind, who am I to object? Well, I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the guy that some night is going to get right up and go across the aisle and untie the necktie of the inordinate clapper and, if he says anything back to me, I will tie it up again so that it looks simply terrible. That’s who I am.

  There isn’t much to be said about the reform which must be brought about in the line at the box office. Everyone recognizes that, but, as most of the victims will have to be women, we men are rather hesitant about proceeding. Even nowadays a man can’t step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous.

  But sooner or later it has got to come if the women don’t learn how to buy tickets. It makes no difference how good a mother a woman may be, or how lovely in her own home, if she is going to stand at the head of a line of twenty people who are waiting to buy tickets and ask the theater-treasurer to show her a picture of the stage from the seats he is trying to sell her, and change her mind about the Wednesday and Saturday matinées, and lose her money, and demand to be told if that isn’t a picture of E. S. Willard hanging in the lobby, if she is going to do these things, then she must be killed. There are no two ways about it.

  And then, when we have made a start with these few drags on the progress of the drama, it will be time enough to pay some attention to the plays themselves.

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  Confession

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  Pretending to swoon at grand opera when it really bores you, or pretending to crave Château Neuf du Pape 1921 when you honestly can’t tell the difference between it and cooking sherry 1931, is a form of pretense which is universally recognized. We all practice it in one form or another.

  But we also pretend to dislike a lot of things because we know that we should dislike them – that is, if we want to have any standing at all among connoisseurs – when secretly they are exactly our dish.

  Feeling rather low today, and wondering just how long I can hold onto any standards at all, I would like to break down and admit some of the things that I have been pretending to ridicule all my life, or that I have been ashamed to
admit liking before.

  Of course, even in this form of self-exposure, there is a chance for hypocrisy. I could pretend humility in admitting that I prefer cold canned corn eaten out of the ice-box to the best brand of Russian caviar, but that wouldn’t be humility. I would merely be currying popular favor, for no one that I have ever heard of, rich or poor, high or low brow, has ever looked down on the practice of picking at cold canned corn in the ice-box. There is certainly nothing to be ashamed of in it, even in the face of a congress of gourmets.

  What I hope to do is really to abase myself in the eyes of the world of experts, and to confess that, after years of quipping and sneering at them, I really enjoy the following despised items in the connoisseur’s code. Let us get the unpleasant business over with as soon as possible. I really like:

  Edgar A. Guest.

  The music to “Trees.” (I’m a little tired of it, perhaps, but, given a respite, I shall like it again.)

  The odor of onions on people, and living-rooms which reek of cooking cauliflower from the kitchen.

  Paintings which “tell a story,” like “The Doctor.”

  Portraits which look so much like the subjects as to be “photographic.”

  Salvation Army music.

  Westerns.

  Parsley.

  “In the Baggage Coach Ahead,” and similar ballads.

  Pansies.

  Lunch-cart food.

  The old “While Strolling Through the Park One Day,” dance routine, even when being burlesqued.

  Honest whimsey.

  The aroma of fish-houses, the stronger the better.

  “My Rosary” and “Among My Souvenirs.”

  The idea of “Service” in business.

  There are dozens more that I could add to this list, but I can’t think of them now.

  I have tried to be honest. I have not put down anything that I did not like for itself alone, and nothing, as “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” might have been, that I like as a humorous example of the sentiment of an elder day. I am genuinely moved by “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” in just the way that its authors intended, and I am spiritually stirred by Salvation Army music. I have done no slumming in this list.

  So I guess I’ll just get my hat and coat and go, thank you.

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  On Saying Little

  at Great Length

  With Special Reference to that Master of the Art,

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Being simply a person who writes little articles sporadically, and with no distinction, I am always forced to have something in mind about which to write. That is to say, I cannot sit down with nothing to say and then say it to the extent of two thousand words, so that an editor will buy it. Editors always demand a little subject matter in my stuff.

  And, even if I could sell an article about nothing in particular, I wouldn’t feel quite right in doing it.

  I am funny that way.

  When I write a thing, I do it because I have something fairly vital burning within me which I feel it is only my simple obligation to the State to express, and, if I were less susceptible to the voice of the “Stern Daughter” (quotation from W. Wordsworth, an English poet, in his Ode to Duty, in which poem he refers, – and quite rightly, too, – to Duty as the “Stern Daughter of the Voice of God”), I should, by preference, devote all of my time to my insurance work.

  And yet think of all the famous writers who have done volumes and volumes about nothing at all! . . . After three consecutive minutes of thinking, the only author I can think of who has done this is Robert Louis Stevenson, but as it was Stevenson that I had in mind, anyway, he will do.

  Nothing was too trivial for Stevenson to wind up in a beautiful drapery of literary style and send out as an octavo-420 pp.-$1.75 net-volume. He could go from the kitchen to the ice-box and, by keeping a diary on the way, get out something nice in limp leather for the holiday trade. Thus, under the title, “Random Rambles to the Ice-Box,” with a preface by Fannie V. deG. Stevenson, showing how this book came to be written and what the prevailing winds were at the time and what Stevenson said on the occasion of Sydney Colvin’s offering him a match, we might read this:

  “It was already hard upon four o’clock before I was ready to set forth, and, in our back entry, the dark falls swiftly, though not without a touch of Lesbian sureness. I was determined, if not to have a light, at least to have the means of a light in my possession, for there is nothing more harassing to the easy mind than the necessity of feeling about in an ice-box, even one’s own ice-box, in the dark, and the reflected glow from the neighboring apartment is not always to be reckoned sure by those who trudge on foot at late afternoon.

  “A traveler of my sort was considered not without his eccentricities by those in the front room. I was looked upon with doubt, as one who should project a journey to Algeciras, but, yet with respectful interest, like one setting forth for an inclement antipode.

  “It will be readily conceived that I was in a high state of expectancy at the prospect of my unusual, not to say extremely unusual, expedition. Going from the kitchen to the ice-box is a successive progression of steps, no matter from what angle you look at it, and a successive progression of steps has always, even since my boyhood in Ardnamurchan, possessed a strange, impalpable fascination for me. In them you are always moving, always advancing, with the ecstatic swishing of the wind in your ears and the song of the heath in your heart – and when you are progressing, even if it be only toward the ice-box, there is always the comforting certainty which moth cannot corrupt, that you are, at least, not retrogressing.

  “I had with me, to cheer my declining spirits and, incidentally, to make another paragraph: a pocket handkerchief, – not one of your tremendous linen affairs, but a formidable expanse of silk, – and hemstitched, too, if you please, by no less a personage than our old family hemstitcher, Janet MacMac; a bunch of keys, which jangled as I walked, like so many keys jangling, – which, indeed, they were; a pen-knife to be worn closed, – not open, for your life, else you receive an ugly jab in the groin unawares; two cancelled theater-checks for Row H, seats 111-112 at the Adelphi theater; a rubber eraser, such as boys use to erase black marks which they have, in unscholarly fashion, made in their copy-books; and, in conclusion, but not, let us hope, in refutation, the unadaptable end of a match.

  “Thus equipped, I felt myself ready to start. I was, in a sense, free to go my own way, and yet, withal, constrained to modulate my motions to the temporal necessity of walking warily across the kitchen-floor, for it was at that time in the satisfying, yet undeniably slippery, process of being washed with soap and water by an enormous female in seersucker regimentals, who crouched, as one about to leap at some unseen adversary, directly in my path.

  “For those who are restricted to silence in the presence of menials, I can only offer the sympathy of an absolutely democratic and articulate citizen of the world. I dare say that I am not without reserve, and yet, when confronted by an individual of a certain susceptibility to literary reproduction, I become voluble to the point of volubility. Of such a mold was this Woman of the Kitchen Floor. Honest soul! Long may she continue to swosh about in the certainty of a rich reward, happy yet care-free, washing, yet, beyond cavil, insouciante.

  “It was to her that I spoke as my path intersected the field of her purging operations.

  “‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, as I walked to one side to avoid stepping into her pail, or, what were ten times more gruesome, on the woman herself.

  “Thus ended my first adventure by the way. As I raised my eyes from the surface of the floor I beheld the kitchen threshold, and there beyond, in the pleasant cool of the evening, nestling in the back-hall, like an enraged mother bear at bay, stood the ice-box. Was it Destiny, or Fate, or the clean-cut song of the pines? Who shall say? But because of it, we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace and pleasure in our hearts.”

&nbs
p; Not only in paid contributions does this concession to padding hold true. When it comes to writing letters, you simply have to be famous or else have something to say. If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff. You can’t string along for six pages on reasons why you haven’t written before and reasons why you must close now. But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.

  Here again, Stevenson was a master at utilizing style to fill whatever space might be left over when he had said all there was to say. Especially in his boyhood letters did he give promise of writing at space-rates. To judge from his early letters, one might expect from him something like this, written, let us say, at the age of four:

  Ardnaclochenburn

  Thursday

  My dear Mrs. Babington Churchill: –

  To what extremes of heat and cold does the yearly planetary revolution bring us! Now we are suffused by the delicate warmth of genial, let us say, May; now chattering in the equally indelicate rigors of, for instance, November. Before we have first glimpsed the soft luxury of Ceres, – pouf! – and we are confronted with the downy carpet which heralds the advance of the winter solstice.

  So it is here with us. Each day is more like the others than the one before it, and I find myself wondering, my dear Mrs. Babington Churchill, if it is not better so, after all. For just so often as the thrush sings, – nay more – just so often as the linnet warbles, so often do I think of you all in Old House, Ashley Heath, Cheetles Cheshire, and wonder what, in the immutable turnings and strugglings of events, you are doing. You will remember those lines of Stanchfield’s on the coming of age of his grocer: