"INSIDE BENCHLEY": THE EARLY DIARIES

Wes D. Gehrig

If by any chance, you have any old diaries of yours lying around . . . don ‘t start browsing through them. It is hard enough to keep one’s chin up these days without digging back into the past to make a monkey of yourself

—from the Benchley essay "The Soothsayer"

Robert Benchley (1889-1945) inundated the public with his comic antihero from every conceivable source: syndicated comedy columnist, droll drama critic, comedic feature film actor/writer, and comedian of stage, screen (his own short subjects), and radio. During his lifetime twelve inspired volumes of collected essays appeared, with titles befitting the acknowledged period leader of "dementia praecox," or "crazy comedy," such as The Treasurer’s Report, and Other Aspects of Community Singing (1930), or From Bed to Worse Or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison (1934). In 1935 his How to Sleep won an Academy Award for best short subject.

At the height of his fame, Current Biography 1941 stated: "One way to describe Robert Benchley is to say that he is all things to all men—and all of them funny. He is probably the most versatile humorist in America, and the most successful."¹

Benchley did not invent the modern antihero, whom humor historian Norris W. Yates describes as the "normal bumbler,"² but he was pivotal in the mainstream American emergence of this character.³ Two celebrated comedy colleagues in this antihero evolution, James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, underlined the central importance of Benchley. Thurber observed, ". . . one of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in l9l9."⁴ Perelman added, "A good, stuffy way to describe

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Benchley would be to say that ‘he occupies a unique position in American humor.’ He occupies nothing of the sort. He is top dog."⁵

In researching a biography of Benchley ("Mr. B" Or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison, [Greenwood Press, 1992]), I have uncovered a critically neglected practice ground for much of the humorist’s future antiheroic writing—five bound diaries for the years 1911–1914 and 1916. These volumes have been made available to the public by the family (see Boston University’s "The Robert Benchley Collection," Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library), and there is little previous reference to them outside his son Nathaniel’s pioneering biography (Robert Benchley, 1955).⁶ But even here diary references are sparsely used, with little sense of their comic nature. If and when other Benchley authors note the diaries, the tendency has been merely to recycle Nathaniel’s examples, such as Babette Rosmond does in her study (Robert Benchley: His Life and Good Times, 1970).⁷

This essay recognizes the importance of Benchley’s more well-known early comedy efforts, such as being president (1911-1912) of Harvard’s famous humor journal, The Lampoon. But scholarly study of this period’s work still finds Benchley awkward and belabored in his comedy.⁸ Consequently, his neglected diaries assume great importance. For instance, in an essay in Humor: International Journal of Humor Research (Volume 5-3, 1992, Purdue University), I use the diaries, and other sources, to explore the influence on Benchley of his mother. The essay in hand focuses on the diaries’ lighter-side entries and how they read as a five-pointed sneak preview to his later writing and the figure he helped bring to center stage in American humor—the comic antihero.

First, and most fundamental, the casually breezy diary entries anticipate his future equally casual essay style—a lightness Benchley fan Woody Allen once likened to a "comic soufflé." (The meandering essay organization, or lack of it, gives the pieces a conversational tone which would later ease Benchley’s transition to film short subjects, especially since those same essays were often the foundation of the shorts.) Though in truth these pieces were anything but spontaneous to produce, they fulfilled a pivotal need of most successful comedy—they seemed spontaneous. Diarist Benchley demonstrated this style after seeing The Taming of the Shrew: "Now that W. Shakespeare is dead, I suppose I may say without offense that I didn’t care much for his farce. . . ."⁹ Years later he observed in "Looking Shakespeare Over": ". . . the stuff that Will wrote, while all right to sit at home and read, does not lend itself to really snappy entertainment on the modern stage."¹⁰ Shakespeare is also an excellent subject to showcase Benchley’s equally relaxed theatre criticism and just how directly it can be tied to the comedic essay. Sandwiched

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in time between the diary and essay quotes, Benchley the reviewer observed: "Shakespeare is all right bound in limp leather . . . for personal use . . . but when recited by a company of players . . . the spoken words of the immortal Bard are like so many drops of rain on a tin roof. . . ."¹¹

A second quintessential connection is that his diary entries, like the later essays, are often very funny. More to the point, they are generally exercises in comic frustration, the key antiheroic component. For example, "I gave the folks my weekly surprise [visit]. Shaved with father’s razor, nearly severing my ear," or:

A hopeless heavy summer Sunday—hard to breathe [Benchley was a hay fever victim] and hardly worth while breathing. Sat around all morning reading the paper and blowing my nose. After dinner sat around some more, blowing my nose.¹²

Benchley’s real life shaving adventure would have felt right at home in his later bathroom essay on "First Aid," where a "random investigator [more comedy paranoia] looking through my medicine chest for dental floss, would say in horror: ‘You don’t use Cuta-mint [for shaving nicks and such], do you? Didn’t you read the latest bulletin of the Bleeders’ Research Division?’"¹³ And his diary confessional on Sunday hay fever problems, slightly abated by the paper, could have served as a starting point for such diverse later Benchley pieces as "A Word About Hay Fever" ("One or two sneezes on arising is not abnormal, but nineteen [in rapid succession] indicate some derangement of the apparatus.") and "The Wreck of the Sunday Paper" (he asks: "What is to be done with people who can’t read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?").¹⁴

Third, the common everyday topic demands of his, and most, diaries (despite the romantic notion of a diary’s earthshaking contents) anticipate the generally non-political, non-issue nature of Benchley’s antiheroic writing. It is as if to say, this comic character has enough trouble getting up in the morning, let alone solving world problems.

Fittingly, Benchley’s most frequent diary topic actually involved getting up. For example: "Forgot to fix my alarm last night and slept till 9:10, which necessitated a parody of dressing to reach the office at 9:30."¹⁵ Such diary revelations have direct ties to numerous future Benchley essays, such as "Sporting Life in America: Dozing," where he horizontally reviews reasons to prolong his stay in bed—"If we leave dressing until we get to the office, snatching our clothes from the chair and carrying them downtown on our arm, there might even be half an hour more for a good, health-giving nap"¹⁶ But I am reminded most of the close to Benchley’s award-winning film short How to Sleep, where the

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humorist, as voice-over narrator, describes the comic insomniac (also played by Benchley)—"he stays wide awake until just before it’s time for the alarm clock to go off. Then sleep begins to creep up on him."

Benchley’s comically inspired ability to expound at length on everyday trivia/frustration remains part of his ongoing appeal. He gives comic voice to the little questions and/or irritations with which we all deal, but which we seldom articulate. Though his diary entries are hardly essay length, they occasionally suggest a similar attention to detail. For instance, his June 5, 1913, notation has a footnote—a diary footnote! A passing reference to "the Eisner Hut in Rotterdam" has the asterisked addition: "One year later—On re-reading this, it seems that the author [Benchley] was slightly confused here, for he never was in Rotterdam, Doubtless he refers to Rottenburg, where there is an Eisner Hut."¹⁷ Besides being an amusing extension of the nebulous, Benchley provides an excellent description of his later comic persona, "slightly confused here" (anticipating the famous future portrayal of Thurber’s antiheroic alter ego as having "a sheer grasp of confusion"). Since Benchley later re-read his diary entries (to the point of adding a funny footnote), it suggests an even more possible diary influence on the subsequent essays.

Regardless, a pivotal expanded Benchley look at life’s trifles occurs in "Rapping the Wrapper!" The humorist expounds on the inherent traumas of opening a roll of mints—the "end had been clamped down by a stamping machine usually reserved for tinning sardines. I tried biting at both ends (one after the other, naturally) and gave up just before an inlay came out."¹⁸ But since the everyday trivia was his forte, quality examples abound, such as "Do Insects Think?," "Back in Line" (where he reveals "six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office"),¹⁹ and the valuable lessons of "How to Break 90 in Croquet":

Taking an easy grip on the handle with both hands in the manner of a flute player, only more virile, you bend over the ball, with the feet about two feet apart and both pointing in the same direction.²⁰

Going beyond the comic universality of Benchley’s everyday topics, humor theorist Hamlin Hill suggests another level of significance. As if directly addressing Benchley’s comedy, Hill observes: the modern antihero is "incapable of inventing homespun maxims about hundred-megaton bombs, or of feeling any native self-confidence in the face of uncontrollable fallout." The antihero eventually deals with this frightening outside world by not dealing with it at all. Instead, he focuses "microscopically upon the individual unit . . . that interior reality—or

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hysteria. . . . In consequence, modern humor deals significantly with frustrating trivia."²¹ Though recent East-West détente has lessened fear, there are enough other global anxieties to maintain a comic trivia escape valve.

This natural Hill-Benchley connection was anticipated years earlier in humorist/historian/theorist Stephen Leacock’s The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936). Praising Benchley’s work as totally escapist, Leacock introduces his remarks on the then contemporary humorist by noting, "We live . . . in an age [Depression and approaching war] of preoccupation, of apprehension, of fear. All the old dead certainties are gone. Mankind, restless and distressed, is passing into a kind of mass hysteria of apprehension."²²

Benchley himself observed in a comic profile of H. G. Wells that he was bemusingly put off by the celebrated author’s ongoingly gung-ho attempt to involve the reader in his latest solution to global problems: "I personally have but little facility for world-repairing. I haven’t the slightest idea of how one would go about making things better."²³ But what if an event occurred under the antihero’s nose? Benchley, in a well-documented comic study ("Johnny-on-the-Spot") of "news-photographs" taken of "cataclysmic events" finds:

In almost every picture you can discover one guy in a derby hat who is looking in exactly the opposite direction from the excitement, totally oblivious to the fact that the world is shaking beneath his feet. That would be me, or at any rate, my agent in that particular part of the world in which the event is taking place.²⁴

Fourth, as the later poet laureate of comic absurdity, à la "dementia praecox," Benchley’s diaries make varied references to this phenomenon. Leacock’s own "crazy comedy" influence on Benchley is a matter of record. But an extensive 1990 interview with Benchley’s daughter-in-law Marjorie, executor of the family’s papers at Boston University, convinces me the humorist’s mother was the more significant influence.²⁵ (See my aforementioned Humor article.) Regardless, his diaries are not without comic absurdities. For example, framed between the most civilized of activities—attending church and lunching at the Harvard Club—one entry reveals extremely anarchic comic emotions:

We [Benchley and friends, after leaving church] saw smoke and flames in the direction of 23rd Street, and ambled down, where from the [Benchley] office in the Tower [building], we looked down on a satisfying flame from a gas-main explosion. . . . As there was little chance of more explosions we walked by to the [Harvard] Club and ate lunch.²⁶

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It is the contrasting (pleasantly proper) framing device, however, which transposes this humor to a touch of the absurd.

A less elaborate non sequitur example from the Benchley diary would be the comment: "[I] took a little exercise in the form of a shave about eleven."²⁷ This technique is a given in his later writing, such as the "Roll Your Own" listing of tennis court surfaces: "grass, clay, and cornmeal."²⁸ And the complete non sequitur focus of "Holt! [sic] Who Goes There?"—a series of clinical child-rearing questions with zany answers: "How should the infant be held during dressing and undressing? Any carpenter will be glad to sell you a vise which can be attached to the edge of the table."²⁹

Benchley increases comic absurdity by merely intensifying the non sequitur sequence, be it the aforementioned gas main explosion diary example, or his wonderfully demented essay, "An Interview with Mussolini":

    ". . . as I understood your theory of government, while it is not without its Greek foundations, it dates even farther back to the ancient, Assyrian system. Am I right?"
    "Assyrian here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y. That was a good song, too," said II Duce.
    "A good song is right," I replied. "And now might I ask, how did you come by that beard?"
    "That is not a beard," replied the Great Man. "That is my forehead. I am smooth-shaven, as a matter of fact."
    "So you are, so you are," I apologized. "I was forgetting."
    We both sat silent for awhile, thinking of the old days in Syracuse High.³⁰

(As a side note, this verbal slapstick is perfectly fitting for a figure whose hold on even everyday reality is slipshod at best, let alone when he makes a relatively rare excursion into the political arena.)

Benchley’s diary is also awake to the modest point of view absurdities of day-to-day life, especially if that life is briefly anchored in the advertising world: "Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated President today [February 26, 1913]. In spite of that fact, Dick [office colleague] and I spent the whole day practically on Beech Nut Peanut Butter [account], searching for elusive words of taste and savour."³¹

A fifth and final connection between the diary and the later essays is a casually anti-social attitude. His June 20, 1912, diary entry reads: "I didn’t get mine today [college degree] because I flunked the gov[ernment] 4 exam. I took [it] in bed [presumably ill; hypochondriac tendencies as an adult]. Nothing serious as I can make it up in the fall."³² And while

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accounting merited ("I never knew less about a course"), there was a naughty little boy-like pleasure over his language skills: "much elated to find I could read a french [sic] book on the subject [human reproduction]. Nothing is easier to read than French that you oughtn’t to read."³³ Benchley was later at his comic essay best when skewering that same education, as in "What College Did to Me": "My courses were all selected with a definite aim in view. . .—no classes before eleven in the morning or after two-thirty in the afternoon. . . On that rock was my education built."³⁴

This casually fifth columnist diary tone is hardly limited to entries on college. It ranges from thoughts on the cost of a family (what is "the minimum marrying wage"?), to sandbagging: "Spent most of the morning writing letters on the company’s time."³⁵

These sneak preview connections between the Benchley diaries and his later essays are important for four reasons. First, they provide a pricelessly more complete view of Benchley’s evolution as a comic antihero writer. That his later humor style (from slang terms and meandering organization, to comic directness about trivia) should find roots in his diaries gives new meaning to Benchley’s forever casual tone. Second, the diaries further link the private person with the public persona, underlining the carryover from real life. Third (though unpublished), these early diaries further document his pioneer status in antiheroic writing. And fourth, coming well before his fame as a writer/ humorist, the diaries provide a candidly fresh and pleasantly entertaining look at a pivotal American humorist. Indeed, their inspired comic nature alone would be reason enough to celebrate this case of Benchley lost and found.

Ball State University

Notes

    ¹Maxine Block, ed. "Robert (Charles) Benchley," in Current Biography 1941 (New York: H.H. Wilson, 1942), p. 63.
   ²Norris W. Yates, Chapter 14, "Robert Benchley’s Normal Bumbler," in The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1964), pp. 240-261.
   ³Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1937; rpt. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, Inc., 1969), p. 169. See also my "The Comic Anti-Hero in American Fiction: Its First Full Articulation," Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor, (Winter 1979-1980), pp. 11-14.

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    ⁴Burton Bernstein, Thurber: A Biography (1975; rpt. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 227.
   ⁵"Bob Benchicy Dies; Noted Humorist, 56" New York Times, November 22, 1945, p. 35.
   ⁶Nathaniel Benchley, Robert Benchley (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1955).
   ⁷Babette Rosmond, Robert Benchley: His Life and Good Times (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970).
   ⁸See especially: Norris W. Yates, Robert Benchley (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968), pp. 28-29.
   ⁹The Robert Benchley diary (1912 volume) entry dated "January 1, 1912," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.
   ¹⁰Robert Benchley, "Looking Shakespeare Over," in Pluck and Luck (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925), p.124.
   ¹¹"What,In Our House?" (humor magazine Life, January 6, 1921) in Benchley at the Theatre: Dramatic Criticism, 1920-1940, ed. Charles Getchell (Ipswich, Massachusetts: The Ipswich Press, 1985), p. 11.
   ¹²The Robert Benchley diary (1913 volume) entry dated "September 14, 1913" and the diary (1912 volume) entry dated "August 25, 1912" in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ¹³Robert Benchley, "First Aid," in My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew (1936; rpt. Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940), p. 303.
   ¹⁴Robert Benchley, "A Word About Hay Fever," in Chips Off the Old Benchley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 343; Robert Benchley, "The Wreck of the Sunday Newspaper," in NO POEMS Or Around the World Backwards and Sideways (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), p. 188.
   ¹⁵The Robert Benchley diary (1913 volume) entry dated "February 14, 1913," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ¹⁶Robert Benchley, "Sporting Life in America: Dozing," in Benchley Beside Himself (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), p. 278.
   ¹⁷The Robert Benchley diary (1913 volume) entry dated "June 5, 1913," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ¹⁸Robert Benchley, "Rapping the Wrapper!" in Benchley—Or Else! (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 69.
   ¹⁹Robert Benchley, "Back in Line," in NO POEMS Or Around the World Backwards and Sideways, p. 158.
   ²⁰Robert Benchley, "How to Break 90 in Croquet," in From Bed to Worse Or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), p. 27.
   ²¹Hamlin Hill, "Modern American Humor: The Janus Laugh," College English, December 1963, p. 174.

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     ²²Stephen Leacock, The Greatest Pages of American Humor (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1936), p. 230.
   ²³Robert Benchley, "A Week-End with Welles," in Love Conquers All (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922), p. 247.
   ²⁴Robert Benchley, "Johnny-on-the-Spot," in From Bed to Worse Or Comforting Thoughts About the Bison, p. 255.
   ²⁵Marjorie Benchley Interview, October 20, 1990, her Manhattan residence (author’s files).
   ²⁶The Robert Benchley diary (1914 volume) entry dated "March 8, 1914," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ²⁷The Robert Benchley diary (1914 volume) entry dated "December 31, 1913," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ²⁸Robert Benchley, "Roll Your Own, "in Love Conquers All, p. 56
   ²⁹Robert Benchley, "Holt! [sic] Who Goes There?" in Love Conquers All, p. 97
   ³⁰Robert Benchley, "An Interview with Mussolini," in The Early Warm (1927; rpt. Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1946), p. 29.
   ³¹The Robert Benchley diary (1913 volume) entry dated "March 4, 1913, "in "The Robert
   ³²The Robert Benchley diary (1912 volume) entry dated "June 20, 1912," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ³³The Robert Benchley diary (1912 volume) entries dated "January 28, 1912" and "January 30, 1912," in "The Robert Benchley Collection, " Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library.
   ³⁴Robert Benchley, "What College Did to Me," in The Early Worm, p. 69.
   ³⁵The Robert Benchley diary (1912 and 1913 volumes) entries dated "October 28, 1912" and "July 19, 1913," in "The Robert Benchley Collection," Box 5, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library

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