Chips Off the Old Benchley
Page 21
Suddenly the heavy air was rent with a sound like the rending of heavy air. We rested on the shift-keys of our typewriters, and looked at one another. There was really nothing else that we could do.
I was the first to speak. The rest had, by that time, gone to see what was the matter.
I later found out that it was a practice battle between the Bandilleros and the Caballeros, and that the noise was caused by General Ostorzo refusing to make a more picturesque fall from his horse for the moving-picture men. Considering the fact that the old general had done the fall four times already, it was hardly to be sorolla. (The American Public does not realize, as I do, what the “Watchful Waiting” policy of the administration has brought about in Mexico; and the end is not yet.)
As we turned the corner of the cabecillos I stumbled over the form of an old carrai. He was stretched out on the hot sand with his waistcoat entirely unbuttoned and no links in his cuffs. It was like an old clerk I had once seen when I was a very little boy, only much more terrible.
Now and then he raised his head and muttered to his press-agent, “Quien sabe? Quien sabe?” And when the press-agent, who was intoxicated too, did not answer, the poor wretch would fall back into his native Connecticut dialect and dig his nails into the grass.
We passed by, and on into the night. But none of us talked much after that. We had looked into the bleeding heart of a viejos country and it was not a pretty sight.
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I was sitting on the cabron of the old Colorado. The sun was setting for the first time that day. Dark faced centavos straggled by, crooning their peculiar viejas. Suddenly there was a cry of “Viva, viva! Quien sabe?” and out from the garage came General Ostronoco, leader of the Bonanzaists.
There was a whirring of moving-picture machines and the sharp toscadillos of the bambettas, and the man who repudiated Wilson made his way up the escalator.
He is a heavy man; not too heavy, mind you, just todas. In fact, the Ostronoco that I knew looked very much like his photographs. Only the photographs do not show the man’s remarkable vitality, which he always carries with him.
On seeing me he leaped impulsively forward and embraced me as many times as his secretary would allow.
“Mi amigo! Mi bambino,” he exclaimed. “Quien sabe?”
I told him that I was.
Then he passed on his way into the hotel bar. It was the last that I saw of him, for the next moment we were surrounded by muyjas.
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Learn to Write
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There are a lot of schools advertising today that they can teach people how to write for a living. (They don’t explain why anybody should want to, however.) “How Do You Know You Can’t Write?” they ask. And “What Makes Writing Ability Grow?”
The biggest obstacle to professional writing today is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. Any school that can teach me how to do this can triple my earning capacity overnight (making it three dollars). Anybody can write, but it takes a man with snake-charmer’s blood to change a ribbon.
I have never known it to fail, once I get ensconced on a train, or a boat, or up in the country, anywhere far away from that nice man in the typewriter store who fixes my machine for me when it gets full of nut-meats, that my ribbon, new as it may have been when I started, did not suddenly develop pernicious anemia or break out with a rash of holes. As soon as I begin to see those “M’s” come out dark at the bottom and light at the top, I know that the jig is up, the entire page is going to look as if had been written with an old pin, and the ribbon itself is going to stop at the end of the line and refuse to turn. There is no more sickening feeling for a writer of my mechanical ingenuity than to realize that his ribbon has gone bad.
Obviously, if any of the family is going to eat (I don’t ask that all of us eat, just the little ones who need food for bone and sinew), the ribbon has got to be changed. First the top has got to be taken off the machine. This is easy. (We can worry about getting it back on when the time comes.) Then those two spinnets, or spindles, or whatever they are, have got to be lifted off and the old ribbon yanked out of their grip and unwound. This isn’t so bad, either, for you can throw it across the room and haul it in as you would a fish-line. It doesn’t make much difference how you treat the old ribbon. Look how it treated you.
Getting the new ribbon into the spinnets, or spindles, and woven through those two little needle eyes, there’s the trick! You may either put the typewriter on the floor and lie on it, or lie on your back and let the typewriter rest on your chest. Or, you may bury both hands in the keys and work upwards or wind the ribbon around your fists and work inwards, threading in and out among all the openings you can see. Nothing does any good. Eventually you are going crazy, and you might as well face it. You are going crazy and scream and tug at the ribbon until it breaks, or you are going quietly crazy and bite your under lip off and end by pulling the ribbon through slowly with one hand while you type even more slowly with the other. And, in any event, just for the fun of it, go and look at your face and hands! You look like both Moran and Mack, and don’t you wish you were?
That is why I smile grimly when I see schools offering to teach people how to write. What we writers need is not a school, but a good loom operative.
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Knowing the Flowers
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A little learning may be a dangerous thing, but a lot of learning may turn out to be even worse. I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and, if I do say so myself, have succeeded fairly well. And to my avoidance of the responsibilities which go with knowledge I lay my good digestion today. I am never upset when I find that I know nothing about some given subject, because I am never surprised.
The names of birds and flowers, for example, give me practically no worry whatever, for I never set out to learn them in the first place. I am familiar with several kinds of birds and flowers by sight, and could, if cornered, designate a carnation or a robin as such. But beyond that I just let the whole thing slide and never torture myself with trying to remember what the name of that bird with the yellow ear is or how many varieties of gentians there are. (By the way, what ever became of gentians? Are they used only for models in elementary school drawing classes?)
People who specialize in knowing the names of birds and flowers are always in a ferment, because they are always running up against some variety which stumps them. Show an ornithologist a bird that he can’t name and he is miserable for a week. He goes home and looks up reference books, writes letters to the papers asking if someone can help him, and tosses and turns at night, hoping that his subconscious will solve the problem for him. He develops an inferiority and, unless closely watched, may actually do away with himself out of sheer frustration. It isn’t worth it.
I once had a heart-breaking experience with a flower-namer. He was one of those men who began when they were boys spotting the different types of wild-flower, and, at a hundred yards, could detect a purple wolf’s cup (or “Lehman’s dropsy”) and could tell you, simply by feeling a flower in the dark, which variety of “bishop’s ulster” it was. There was practically no wild-flower of North America that he didn’t know to speak to, and he took a little more pride in his knowledge than was really justified. At least, so it seemed to me.
I found myself on a walking trip through Cornwall with this man one summer, for, when he wasn’t spying on wild-flowers, he was very good company. On account of the weather, we spent the first five days of our walking trip in the tap-room of an inn at a place appropriately named Fowey (pronounced Pfui), and on the first sunny day set out with our knapsacks on our backs and a good song ringing clear. Looking back on it now, I don’t see what ever got into me to be doing so much walking.
Along about noon we came to a large field which was completely covered with multi-colored wild-flowers. There must have been a thousand different varietie
s, or, at any rate, a hundred. I saw what was coming and winced. I was going to be a party to a botany exam. Little did I realize that I was also to be a party to a tragedy.
My companion went over to the edge of the field and examined a red flower by the roadside. His face took on a worried look. He didn’t recognize the species! He looked at a blue flower next to it. He didn’t recognize that, either! He gave a hurried survey of the five square feet surrounding him and blanched. He said nothing, but I could tell from his staring eyes and damp brow that there was not one variety of flower that he could name.
He ran into the field, stooping over and straightening up like a mad man, turning round and round in circles and looking wildly about him, as a dog looks when 10 people start whistling at him at once. Here was not only one flower that he had never heard of before, but a whole field full – hundreds and hundreds of unknown blossoms, all different and all staring up at him waiting to be named.
A chameleon is supposed to go insane when placed on a plaid. This man was in danger of going raving crazy from pure chagrin.
I tried to get him to leave the field and continue our little march, but he hardly heard what I was saying. He would pick a flower, examine it, shake his head, mop his brow, pick another, wipe the perspiration from his eyes, and then throw them both to the ground. Once he found something that he thought was a poppy and his joy was pitiful to see. But the stamen or something was wrong, and he burst into tears.
There was nothing that I could do or say, so I just sat by the roadside with my back turned and let him fight it out with himself. He finally agreed to leave his Waterloo, but the trip was ruined for him. He didn’t speak all that day, and that night, after we had gone to bed, I heard him throwing himself about the bed in an agony of despair. He has never mentioned wild-flowers since.
I cite this little instance to show that being an expert in any one line is a tremendous responsibility. For, if an expert suddenly finds out that he isn’t entirely expert, he just isn’t anything at all. And that sort of thing gets a man down.
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A Warning Note
in The Matter of
Preparedness
Some Revelations
in Our Modern Educational System
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At this time, when we have suddenly become so woefully unprepared in everything pertaining to the defense of the integrity of our firesides and our national honor (whatever that may be), it seems to me that we ought to awake to the shocking inadequacy of several other of our national institutions. Each man of us should take himself into his jam closet, shut his eyes very tight, and ask himself “In what department of our daily life, as a nation, are we so lamentably weak that I could make a campaign issue out of it?”
But, feeling as I do that I owe it to my district and my many loyal friends to get elected to the School Committee this fall, it is naturally incumbent upon me to scrape up some issue to represent. And, after talking it over with the family, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing, always excepting our National Defense, in which we are so shockingly deficient as we are in the matter of the education of our own, or someone else’s, children.
Now, here is an issue which is too big for any one man to settle, which relieves me of any responsibility, and yet no possible odium can fall on me for stirring it up, as everyone, when he tries to remember how to prove all that about the square on the hypotenuse or to conjugate “amo,” realizes that there was something radically wrong in the way in which he was educated. So, taken all in all, what could be more suitable for a campaign issue than “Our Educational Unpreparedness”? Absolutely nothing.
To begin with, I shall launch forth on a biting denunciation of our elementary educational system, the so-called “kindergarten” (insidious in its very etymology). At the age of five I was hauled in from a healthy sand-pile, washed within an inch of my life, and sent to “kindergarten.” On the first day, a big girl pushed me over backwards in my chair and I hit my head on a desk and had to be led home. From that event has sprung a feverish dislike for women which has made me the hypochondriac I am today. The second day of my education I went as far as the school door and then, as the automobile blue-books have it, turned “a sharp left and continued along down good macadam road to watering trough by four-corners” and there spent the morning in gleeful contemplation of my sins. This, I shall always feel, was the beginning of my insensate disregard for the Law which has nearly been my undoing in numberless encounters with the authorities.
Thus it may fairly be said that my first two days of the march toward the light inculcated such vicious principles in my spirit that I have never fully recovered from them. As for the rest of that year’s work, I learned the fine points of sewing worsted lambs on cards, and the names, but not the musical equivalents, of the notes in the scale – arts which, while I have been comforted in the knowledge of their possession, have never stood by me in any of the big crises of my life. So much for the elementary training that our boys and girls are receiving to fit them for the struggle for a career.
Appalling as this revelation of affairs is, there is a still more unbelievable condition existing in the so-called “secondary schools” of our country! Here, for instance, our young people are taken and taught that the tibia and fibula are personal assets, but no word of how to use them in an emergency. Why have a tibia about you anyway, rather than an inner-tube, for example, if you don’t know how to utilize its peculiar function at a time when nothing except that peculiar function will answer the purpose? Just as a test of the inadequacy of our educational system I came suddenly upon my young nephew, who has just skipped the fourth grade because he was so bright, and said to him quickly, “Horace, what would you do with your fibula if an attacking force were to appear in the vestibule?” And what did he do? He began to cry and ran and told his mother that I was picking on him. Could anything be more disheartening? Absolutely nothing.
Or, to take another case, the boy learns that if he draws two lines from a point to the extremities of a straight line, their sum will be greater than the sum of two other lines similarly drawn but included by them. Now in all the years of my life since I was let in on that secret I have had many desires. I have yearned to compose immortal lyrics like Gilberts; I have longed to decimate scientifically the man across the court who plays Schubert’s Serenade on his pianola as if he were participating in a six-day bicycle race, – yet all these things have been beyond the reach of my powers. But I have never yet desired to draw two lines from a point to the extremities of a straight line, even though I knew in my heart for a dead certainty that their sum would be greater than the sum of two other lines similarly drawn but included by them. It just simply isn’t in my nature to want to do this, and consequently here I am, saddled with that power for which I care nothing, while I watch other men doing things which I would sell my vote to be able to perform. Such is the wretched lack of adaptability of our present system.
In the other fields we find much the same lack of attention to essentials. What though your boy know a verse beginning,
First William the Norman, then William his son,
Then Henry, then Stephen, di-dum-didi-dum—
indicating the succession of English kings? Does that help him to figure out for himself why there should be any English kings anyway, or why the present English King’s mother didn’t make him stand up straight when he was a little boy so that he wouldn’t look quite so useless when he has his picture taken alongside Lord Kitchener?
What boots it if he knows how to find interest on $256 at 3 per cent. for ten days if he doesn’t know how to get and keep $256 for ten days? These are sobering questions. They have sobered me, and I can prove it.
I remember giving up a good time when I should have been playing tennis to memorizing, by setting it to a tune, that “aus, auser, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, and zu” take the dative and that “Mädchen,” in spite of appearances, is neuter. The
se facts I tucked away so tightly that the only time I have ever forgotten them was when questions were asked on them in the examination. And yet, one afternoon when I happened to be in Germany, I was shocked to hear no reference made to the dative. In fact, they had no more use for the dative, as such, than they have for treaties, as such, because, when you get a regular German sentence well-mouthed up it doesn’t make any difference what constructions you have used so long as you keep your health. And there I had practically broken my spirit learning that stuff for a German master named Kennedy.
I have hesitated to make these disclosures at this time, for it would seem that our country has enough troubles to handle without my bringing any pressure to bear. But when you consider the tremendous interests that are at stake, I feel that I have done only my duty, unpleasant as it may be. And though I have no particular remedy to suggest, I can promise my constituents, if I am elected to the School Committee, a strictly “business administration.” I am in the hands of my friends.
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My Subconscious
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One of the many reasons for my suspecting that I am headed for the last break-up is my Subconscious is getting to be a better man than I am. In fact, I am thinking of resigning and letting my Subconscious take over the business.
I go through the day in my bungling way, making mistakes, forgetting names, going north when I mean to go south and, in general, messing things up pretty thoroughly. I can get affidavits to this effect from five hundred disinterested observers. My average of direct hits is getting smaller and smaller each day and I am afraid that, before long, I shall have to hire somebody to go about with me just to keep me from hurting myself on sharp corners.