Inside Benchley!

Our book today is Inside Benchley, a 1921 anthology of Robert Benchley’s humorous essays illustrated by the great Gluyas Williams. I recently found a paperback copy of the book at the Brattle, brought it back to Hyde Cottage, opened it in order to revisit Benchley’s essays (something I hadn’t done in decades), and reeled back as the cheap paperback promptly exploded into blocks and shards of shoddily-glued pages. I managed to piece most of the book together again, reminding myself the whole time that Penguin paperbacks and sturdy hardcovers, and I spent some time re-acquainting myself with the world of Robert Benchley’s humor.

It’s a humor typically characterized as “gentle,” which is often code-speak for “not actually funny.” In pieces ranging from two pages to six, Benchley offers mild-mannered, fussily bewildered reflections on a wide variety of comfortable suburban 1920s life. Annoying relatives, outrageous children, workplace woes, befuddled encounters with modernity – anybody who’s familiar with New Yorker cartoons from the period (or any period, really) will know what to expect right down to the last detail. You can practically see what the cartoon version of this passage from a piece on trout-fishing would look like:

You can see that imitating a nymph will call for a lot of rehearsing, but I doubt very much if moving in short jerks is the way in which to go about it. I have never actually seen a nymph, though if I had I should not be likely to admit it, and I can think of no possible way in which I could give an adequate illusion of being one myself. Even the most stupid of trout could easily divine that I was masquerading, and then the question would immediately arise in his mind: “If he is not a nymph, then what is his object in going about like that trying to imitate one? He is up to no good, I’ll be bound.”

You’re supposed to chuckle politely and then move on, and to give Benchley his due, those chuckles still happen. Anybody who’s ever suffered the ordeal of visiting the dentist’s office, for instance, will nod in sympathy while reading “The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing But the Tooth,” even while noticing Benchley’s padding and temporizing:

Too often has the scene in the dentist’s waiting-room been described for me to try to do it again here. They are all alike. The antiseptic smell, the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the ancient Digests, and the silent, sullen group of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned and cordially disliking everyone else in the room – all these have been sung by poets of far greater lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really they they are greater than mine, but that’s the customary form of excuse for not writing something you haven’t got time or space to do. As a matter of fact, I think I could do it much better than it has ever been done before).

The main thing I was reminded of while reading this cheap, exploded paperback was that every time I’ve ever owned this book and read around in it, the thing I was actually enjoying was the fantastic Gluyas Williams artwork that shows up throughout. His artwork likewise tells predictable easy New Yorker-style stories, but unlike in Benchley’s prose, the line-work of these illustrations have no excess, no dithering, no wasted effort. I’ll save them from the wreckage of this edition before I throw it away.