In a file cabinet is a stack of old pocket-size address books, most of them dating from my years as a newspaper reporter. When I would go to work for another paper, usually in a new city, I would buy a new book and start accumulating new names, addresses and telephone numbers. Now they read like collections of obituaries. Many of my former contacts, personal and professional, are dead. In one of the address books I find the contact information for the novelist Williamu Gaddis (d. 1998), whom I met and interviewed several times. Here is the home number of the late George Smith (d. 2014), mayor in the early eighties of Bellevue, Ohio, and a notably nice guy. Arousing fewer pleasant memories are the phone numbers of several former girlfriends.
“The plot, in spite of
whatever virtues may accrue to it from the acid delineation of the characters
and the vivid action pictures, is the weakest part of the work. It lacks
coherence. It lacks stability.”
That’s how a literary critic
might evaluate my moribund address books, as if they were some postmodern mutation
of the novel. It’s how Robert Benchley reviewed the New York City telephone
directory in “The Most Popular Book of the Month” (Of All Things, 1921).
Benchley plays it straight, with hardly an exaggeration:
“There may be said to be
two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of
the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely
unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one
cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of
becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.”
Benchley was one of the
first “grownup” writers I read, in such collections as Chips Off the Old
Benchley (1949). Then I preferred him to such fellow New Yorker colleagues
as Thurber, Perelman and Parker. In another piece from Of All Things, “The Scientific Scenario,” Benchley purports to find movies too “low-brow.” His
solution:
“I would suggest as a book, from which a pretty little
scenario might be made, ‘The Education of Henry Adams.’ This volume has had a
remarkable success during the past year among the highly educated classes.
Public library records show that more people have lied about having read it
than any other book in a decade. It contains five hundred pages of mental
masochism, in which the author tortures himself for not getting anywhere in his
brain processes. He just simply can’t seem to get any further than the
evolution of an elementary Dynamic Theory of History or a dilettante dabbling
with a Law of Acceleration. And he came of a bright family, too.”
Of course, Benchley himself appeared in the movies, most
memorably in “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928).
2 comments:
As far as the years go, Benchley was an exact contemporary of Hitler (1889-1945). I think Benchley had the more successful - and less stressful - career.
Benchley was pretty good in I Married a Witch (Fredric March and Veronica Lake do all the heavy lifting), but my favorite of his movies is Hope and Crosby's Road to Utopia, in which he pops up in the corner of the screen now and again to clear up any confusion the viewer might be in. (He only adds to it, of course.)
As a writer, when taken in small doses and at decent intervals, he can occasionally surprise me into laughter, but I've always preferred Thurber.
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