The stake is to be driven at an imaginary corner of what is to be your garden, and a string stretched to another stake at another imaginary corner, and there you have a line along which to dig. This will be a big comfort. You will feel that at last you have something tangible. Now all that remains is to turn the ground over, harrow it, smooth it up nice and neat, plant your seeds, cultivate them, thin out your plants and pick the crops.
It may seem that I have spent most of my time in advice on preparing the ground for planting. Such may well be the case, as that was as far as I got. I then found a man who likes to do those things and whose doctor has told him that he ought to be out of doors all the time. He is an Italian, and charges really very little when you consider what he accomplishes. Any further advice on starting and keeping up a garden, I shall have to get him to write for you. I’ve done my bit, and I’ll leave it for him, as the Oxford chaps say, to “carry on.”
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Picking French Pastry,
a Harder Game than Chess
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Most people, if asked offhand what national pastime requires the greatest degree of concentration and involves the deepest pondering, would say, equally offhand, “The game of chess.” Without carrying the argument further, let us say that they are wrong.
Chess is all right in its way as a thought provoker. It undoubtedly is diverting. But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry from a tray held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties. It is comparatively a matter of touch and go.
Many a man has gone out to get a quick bite to eat between contracts and has been led back at four-forty in the afternoon by a passer-by who has found him, a gibbering moron, muttering to himself: “If I take the little one with the inflamed joint it may be stuffed with library paste, while if I take the lemon meringue pin-wheel, I may find that the meringue stops at the limbo and that the whole inside is flaked confetti, while if I take the – jobble, jobble, jobble.” After seventy cases of this kind had been reported at the State Hospital in one day, an investigation was begun, and it was found out that they were due to over-application to the choice of French pastry.
And it is rather a pathetic fact that the man who orders French pastry does so to avoid choosing anything more definite from the list of other desserts. After deciding which of to-day’s ready dishes among the entrées to have, he is so depleted that, rather than run his finger down the price-list of desserts, he mutters “French pastry” simply to get the waiter out of the way. And what is the result? A quandary of ten times the proportions of the one he has just evaded.
For he is confronted with a tray which looks like a concentration camp, with rows upon rows of varied types of pastry, from which he is to choose two which he thinks will do him the least harm. If he could take it to his room and give a little constructive thought to the thing it might not be so bad, but there is the waiter holding it and giving every indication of breaking into tears if the choice is not made soon; and so it is little wonder that the player, after feverish meditation for as long as he dares, makes a wild dab at the nearest pastry and says, “I’ll take that,” knowing the while that, of all the things in the exhibition, it is the one that he wants least.
The ordeal has assumed such proportions during the last two or three years that it is being seriously considered making a pleasure of it by making it into a game. It would be played similarly to the present game of chess, there being two contestants to each tray of pastry. Each man would have to eat immediately the piece he chose, and the object of the game would be so to choose that the more deadly ones would be left until the end, when the contestant could finish on his nerve. If, for instance, one of the players chose an arsenic-lined cuff in the third round, the other man would obviously win out.
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The Perfect Audience
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Before we do a thing, we must get one point straight; so please pay attention and don’t go woolgathering out the window.
When, in the following jeu d’esprit, I refer to “movie audiences,” I do not mean those members of the general public who go to the movies, but audiences whom we see taking part in the movies themselves. . . . Oh dear, I am afraid that we never shall get this clear!
Let’s get at it from another angle. Let us say that we are watching a movie in which there is supposed to be a performance of a musical comedy. The scene is inside a theater. (Now we’re getting it!) The audience, made up of extra men and women, is in its seats, and we are shown a long shot, first from the back of the imitation theater looking toward the stage, and then from the stage showing how the theater looks to the actors. That is what I will mean from now on when I say “movie audiences.” . . . Whew! I almost wish that I had never started this.
The audiences (remember now!) which one sees in pictures appear to be recruited from a class of people considerably more naïve than those one sees in real theaters. If each and every face were not visible (the house lights always seem to be on during the performance, showing up every nook and cranny of the house and the features of everyone in the audience), one might think that most of them were children who had never been to the theater before. In fact, the nearest approximation in real life to the behavior of an “audience” in the movies is that at a children’s matinée of “Beauty and the Beast.”
There is a constant stirring sense of repressed motion, of excitement, of intense personal interest in the goings-on on the stage. Everyone seems acquainted with everyone else, and there is a running buzz of nervous conversation which sometimes rises to a roar. One would not be surprised to see frequent and tearful departures toward the exits and rest-rooms of the more temperamental spectators who just couldn’t stand the strain of another minute.
But they make ideal audiences, these movie extras. Not only do they fill every seat in the auditorium but they keep their seats. And they all wear impeccable evening dress. There is none of this sneaking-in-late of newspaper critics dressed in sport togs, and no thumping down the aisle of theater parties at nine-twenty. The entire opening chorus is watched by a sea of excited eyes, registering vital emotion, and there is not a seat left empty or a face left blank. It must be a great experience to play to such a house.
Enthusiasm is a weak word for what runs riot. At the conclusion of each number, they applaud hysterically, each one raising the hands high above the head so that the camera may see. And there are no slackers, either. The entire audience, to a man, behaves like those little claques who are present at each opening night in the real theater determined that their favorite shall receive an ovation even though the play be stopped. They all clap very fast, very loudly, and very high up. It is almost as if someone were giving them a signal.
It takes very little to throw a movie “audience” into a bedlam of enthusiasm. They are probably the easiest to excite of any audience in the world, not excepting the kiddies at “Beauty and the Beast.” In several of our current feature pictures, the hero or heroine has been depicted as making a debut before a blasé Broadway audience, and the acts which they have put on, and which have swept the crowd off its feet, have been acts which, to say the least, seemed hardly worthy of such a demonstration. In fact, some of them seemed hardly worth putting on at all.
In a feature picture a short time ago a well-known stage hoofer, now gone movie, literally knocked ’em cold with a dance routine which he himself has surpassed many a time at Sunday-night benefits. At its conclusion, the roof was shaken and the walls rocked by a thunder of applause such as could hardly have greeted Nijinsky on his first appearance in America.
A beautiful young daughter of a talented family is even now, in color, throwing what is supposed to be a typical Broadway revue first night into an hysterical fit simply by lending her charming presence (entirely as an observer) to an “Alice in Wonderland” ballet which, when it w
as done some years ago in the Music Box, was one of the milder features of the show. People not only applaud wildly but many jump out of their seats and cry “Bravo!” (It is perhaps too much to expect that they should cry “Brava!”) and one feels that, as the happy young lady leaves the theater, the milling crowds will unhitch the horses from her carriage and drag it through the emotion-seared streets of hardboiled New York. Nobody knows what ever becomes of the rest of the show, the curtain always falls on the riot, and the supposition is that the audience disperses in a frenzy and rushes out to toll bells and things.
Now all this is very charming, and it is good to know that somewhere in the world there are people who are so well behaved and easy to excite. But does it not explain why Broadway is losing its stars to Hollywood? What hoofer, on seeing an old-fashioned “off-to-Buffalo” step completely panic an audience, would not long for such a spot and determine to go after it? What singer, on hearing one verse and a chorus of a regulation counter-number bring the rafters crashing down on the head of the lucky performer, would not throw a few things into a bag and make for the Coast, where talent is evidently appreciated to the point of epilepsy? Even though they realize, as they are making the picture, that the audience is being paid seven-fifty a day for sitting there and that the applause is the result of a signal from an assistant director, nevertheless the audience is there and cheering and the applause is there and apparently incessant. After all, an actor is only an actor. So either those of us who constitute real audiences in New York must loosen up in our emotions and stop sitting on our hands, or we shall lose what few performers we have left.
And I’ll bet that three out of the possible four readers who have stuck to this article to the end still think that I have been writing about audiences at the movies.
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“Writers—
Right Or Wrong!”
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For quite some time now I have been worried about (among other things) my lethargy in the face of the important fiction of the day. I begin a novel by some new master of English prose, then turn ahead to find out how many pages there are going to be, and, when I start reading again, imagine my surprise to find that I have already skipped half the book! By then it is time to get up and go across the room for something, and the book gets lost.
I had been attributing this haphazard method of reading to some one of the six prominent flaws in my kidneys (which I have arranged in alphabetical order for the benefit of students on the subject) until the other night when I pulled Hugh Walpole’s “Fortitude” out of the book-case and started re-reading it. I have just finished, and now I know that I am all right again. All that I needed was a good book.
By “a good book” I mean one of those books (you remember them) which have not only a beginning, but a middle and an ending. The characters are all designated by names, and each time one of them speaks, you know who is speaking. And the style, although flowery according to present four-letter-word standards, does have a certain swing to it which carries you along with it instead of your having to go back and find out what happened to it. It may be very poor form to like Walpole today (and don’t think I’m not blushing), but when you’ve finished “Fortitude” you know that you’ve been reading a book. My theory is that this is because Walpole knows how to write a book.
There is no doubt that in many modern novels you get “a feeling” for things. You get a feeling for old Southern pappies soaking the blood off their knuckles, and you get a feeling for anchovy-paste in Mayfair. Once in a while you can recognize a character the second time you come across him. And, occasionally, a writer will let himself go mid-Victorian enough to write a sentence that will parse. But, when you put the plot, the characters and the style together in one bundle, you get a unit-effect something like those long tables of Swedish hors d’oeuvres. It really doesn’t make up into a very nourishing meal.
People who begin sentences with “I may be old-fashioned but – ” are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the time would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now. I may be old-fashioned, but I still feel that a writer has a certain obligation to his readers. If he is going to write a book (and Heaven knows there is no law making him do it) he might go at least half way toward making it understandable. That seems little enough to ask.
And I am just ill-tempered enough to maintain that a writer who doesn’t make his book understandable to a moderately intelligent reader is not writing that way because he is consciously adopting a diffuse style, but because he simply doesn’t know how to write; that’s all. It is not my fault that I can’t read his book. It is his.
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Your Change
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It may be that my fingers were frozen when I was a very small child and have never quite thawed out, or it may be that I just become panicky at having a man look at me through a little window, but, whatever the cause, I am physically unable to pick up change which has been shoved out at me by a man at a ticket-booth.
I can scoop up change like lightning from a store-counter, and in the morning it is but the work of a split second for me to gather up the pocket-money I have left on the bureau the night before (possibly because there is so little of it), but let me stand in front of a ticket-window in a theater lobby or a railroad station, with a line of people behind me, and a boy with a magnet could pick up a mound of iron-filings one by one quicker than it takes me to garner 20 cents in change.
People in front of me seem to have no trouble. Even women with gloves on do a better job of it than I do. I see my predecessors sweep up their change with one swoop, and I say to myself: “Come now, Benchley! Be a man! You can do it, too!” And then I buy my ticket, pass in my bill, and, when the rattle of the change sounds on the marble slab, everything goes black in front of my eyes, my fingers grow numb and I pick and claw at each individual coin like a canary. Sometimes I will get a dime almost up into the air high enough to get a grip on it, and then, crazed with success, loose my hold and off it rolls into the money-drawer or onto the floor. I would sometimes suspect that the man at the window had put some sort of stickum on my particular coins were it not for the fact that they roll so easily once I have lost my grip.
By this time the man behind me had pushed up to the window and ordered his ticket, shoving his money past me in an unpleasant manner. I frantically draw my pile of change over to my side of the window and there, in ignominious panic, scrape it off into one hand, or rather partly into one hand, partly down into the front of my overcoat, and partly onto the floor. Often I dash off without waiting to pick it all up, rather than subject myself to the scorn of the people behind me. I suppose that I leave thousands and thousands of dollars a year on ticket-counters and surrounding floors. I must leave them somewhere. I haven’t got them now.
I do not know how to combat this weakness. I have thought of just handing my money, taking the ticket, and then dashing off with a cheery: “The rest is for you!” to the man. I have tried saying to myself, as I stood in line: “Why should you be afraid of a man behind bars like that? He is probably just as afraid of you.” (This is not true and I know it.) I have tried pushing my whole hand under the bars and holding it open for him to drop the change into, but then I find that, as I close my fist on it, I am unable to get my hand out again.
I think the only way out for me is just not to try to buy tickets except at a ticket agency.
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Inter-Office Memo
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It will always be a mystery to me why I was asked “into conference” in the first place. I am more the artistic type, and am seldom consulted on the more practical aspects of life. I have given up wearing soft collars and can smoke a cigar, if it is a fairly short one, but I don’t seem able to give off any impression of business stability. I am just one of the world’s
beautiful dreamers.
So when McNulty called me up and asked me if I could come over to his office for a conference with somebody named Crofish or Cronish of Detroit, I was thrown into a fever of excitement. At last I was going to sit in on a big business conference! I think there was some idea that I as a hay-fever sufferer, might have a suggestion or two on handkerchiefs that might be valuable. For the conference was on the marketing of a steel handkerchief which the Detroit people were about to put out.
So all in a flutter I rushed over to McNulty’s office, determined to take mental notes on the way in which real business men disposed of real business in the hope that one day I might extricate myself from the morass of inefficiency in which I was living and perhaps amount to something in the business world. At least, I would have caught a glimpse of how things ought to be done.
Mr. Crofish or Cronish (whose name later turned out to be Crolish) was already there, with his briefcase open in front of him and a lot of papers piled up on the desk. He and McNulty were both so bustle-y and efficient-looking that it hardly seemed worth while for me to sit down. This conference couldn’t last more than a minute and a half!
Chips Off the Old Benchley Page 23