I confess to reading the blurbs on the covers of books before buying or borrowing them. It’s shameful, I know, a guilty concession to the power of marketing over literary worth, though there is a positive side to the practice: some blurbs are so obscenely fulsome they give me a good laugh. Superlatives worthy only of the Deity pile up like cancer cells. It’s reassuring to know the practice of publishers hyperbolizing isn’t new. Almost a century ago, Robert Benchley wrote in “Blurbs”: “[W]hatever else may be rushing to pot, it is quite evident that we are entering the Extra Heavy Golden Age of Literature.”
In
diagnosing “this unparalleled epidemic of masterpieces,” Benchley might be describing
the state of book reviewing and blurbing circa 2022: “Our critics today form
one of the most enthusiastic and optimistic groups in the body politic, and
devote their time to recognizing geniuses with a steady series of bows which amounts
practically to a form of St. Vitus’ dance.”
Benchley notices
a favorite ruse of blurb-writers: comparing the book at hand to an unlikely rollcall
of masterpieces from the past: “[. . . .] has been compared to Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, The Divine
Comedy, Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and Barrie’s The Little White Bird. Vincent Starrett claims, however, that it
is ‘unique in literature.’ Price $1.50.” He adds: “Just why this book has not
yet challenged comparison with Gibbon’s Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire and Froissart’s Chronicles is not clear.”
Benchley was
one of the first “grownup” writers I read as a kid, along with James Thurber
and, a little later, S.J. Perlman. They are no longer as funny as I grew up
thinking they were. Benchley was born on this date, September 15, in 1889 and
died on November 21, 1945. A month later, a much funnier man, W.C. Fields, died
with superb timing on Christmas.
5 comments:
I'll buy Pound's take that literature is "news that stays news." In the Penguin Random House / Simon & Schuster antitrust trial we learned half of the 58,000 trade titles published annually sold fewer than 12 copies. I'm looking at my printings of Rabbit Redux, Stoner, Appointment in Samarra, Steppenwolf. Yes, "news that stays news." Time tells.
I often hear Robert Benchley's name and confuse it with Peter Benchley, the author of "Jaws" (which I read at 13 during the "Jaws mania" of the mid-70s). I just now discovered that Robert Benchley was Peter's grandfather.
Benchley's comic chalk-talks were popular short subjects on movie house programs for a decade or so. When some of them turned up on TV in my childhood they were still funny. Campbell Scott wonderfully portrays Benchley in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle; in one sequence we get to see him invent the form of those talks.
Benchley went on to do bit parts in movies, generally in the character of the genial club-man: most notably in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent because it's probably the most durable movie he appeared in.
Benchley’s problem was that he wrote and published too much, people loved him too much, he drank too much, and the quality declined with time. If you start with one of Benchley’s later books, you’ll be disappointed. I never thought he was funny at all compared to, say, Perelman. But I recently picked up one of Benchley’s earlier collections, and got some real laughs out of it.
I must confess to liking all three humorists. I agree with Faze that they're best taken in small doses, but then they all specialized in short pieces. Thurber, especially, still holds up well. My Life and Hard Times is a book I have regularly returned to since discovering a copy on a shelf in a middle room classroom, and it never fails to please me.
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