The Benchley Roundup

Oddly enough it is quite unnecessary to know anything about Benchley the Man. Perhaps some might delve into his life and find that his children were all either congenital idiots or monsters. This, of course, can be easily disproved by the fact that Nat, one of them, has chosen as fine and as funny a collection of Benchley stories as any the humorist himself collected and published in book form.

Benchley's style, however, is a different matter indeed. It is probably urban and sophisticated. Not that his stories are invariably that way, but a good part of them are. Study thoroughly the works of Robert Benchley, and you will inevitably reach this conclusion. You will also be approaching him the wrong way, and mark yourself as impossibly dull and pedantic.

Humor, and especially Benchley's humor, has no commonly accepted high point. The preamble can be as funny as the punch line, if there is any, and each story is up to the individual. If the individual likes it snide, he can have it; if he likes it zany, it's here. Long, short, tall, reserved, stupid, odd, out-of-place, out-of-taste, all of them are here--almost ninety of them.

Anyone can pick the stories he likes best, and usually does. And the good part about it is that nobody ever gets too excited about someone, else's opinion of Benchley; that is how he wrote, and that is why a hundred years from now people will still be saying, "Good old Benchley, they don't write like him these days."

The one called "Family Life in America" is a satisfying parody of the American naturalistic school: "The street was covered with slimy mud. It oozed out from under Bernice's rubbers in unpleasant bubbles until it seemed to her as if she must kill herself. Hot air coming out from a steam laundry. Hot, stifling air. Bernice didn't work in the laundry but she wished that she did so the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be stified. She needed torture to be happy. She also needed a good swift clout on the side of the face." Or there's "Christmas afternoon, done in the manner, if not the spirit of Dickens."

And there are the horrible little Benchley children in such selections as "Kiddie-Kar Travel" and "The Stranger Within Our Gates." Shakespeare, the opera, and the French language get theirs, in bitter doses. Sometimes a line stands out alone, like the crafty nostalgia of "It was April, long before Spring had really understood what was expected of her." Or the smooth unexpectedness of, "One evening I had been working late in my laboratory fooling round with some gin and other chemicals."

A reviewer is tempted to say that here is some of the best of Benchley-ana, if he were not afraid that the master would descend from among the happier angels, and write off a little piece called "--Anas, Their Use and Function."