Chips Off The Old Benchley by Robert Benchley, 1949, HC

Description: Thank you for looking at our listing. A purchase is supporting Friends of Spanish Peaks Library District! These books are all donated from different sources. This book is in good condition, spine is beginning to pull loose and it is still intact, see photos for details. If you find several items, message me and I’ll be happy to combine shipping. HERE, unexpectedly and delightfully, is a Benchley collection of articles, few of which have been seen before in book form. The publisher, optimistic soul, has an idea that I can deal with Mr. Bench- ley in a mere preface. I'll do my best. Which Benchley do we take up first? The humorist and satirist? The drama critic? The book critic? The actor, stage, movie and radio? He was all of these at some time and some of them all of the time. Yet he liked to pretend that he was a lazy man. Or shall we talk about the New England Benchley from Worcester, Massachusetts? Or the Benchley who was Caliph of Manhattan? The Hollywood notable? The Scarsdale householder trying, usually unsuccessfully, to start the furnace, or the Benchley with a genius for friendship? A rather large biography might possibly encompass all these Benchleys. I was first his fan and later, by my great good fortune, his friend but I was not as close a friend to him as I should have liked to have been. There was too much competition. Every body, it sometimes seemed, wanted to be Mr. Benchley's close friend, and be with him all the time, and he, kindly and gregarious man that he was, would have liked to oblige, within reason. But there simply was not enough Benchley to go around. As it was he achieved remarkable results with the supply of Benchley that was available and when he died in 1945 he left friends in all the known walks of life and in a number of special walks invented to accommodate friends of his who did not fit into any of the conventional walks. If "Mr. Benchley" seems a formal way of referring to the most informal and affable of men, let me explain. Some of us fell into the habit of calling him Mr. Benchley as often as we called him Bob because of a placard that held a prominent place over a doorway in that wonderful, cockeyed hotel apartment that was his Manhattan home for many years. It read: "MR. Benchley, please." His tilts at windmills in this collection cover a number of the recent years but read as though they were written yester-day. He pays his respects and disrespects to the heath hen, to Gilbert and Sullivan audiences, bird fanciers, Sir Walter Scott, buttered toast; to people who applaud too long at theatres and men who run around the Central Park Reservoir every morning; to customers who are overbearing toward waiters, and to musicians who take a pleasant tune and "arrange" it until it is mangled out of all recognition. He suffered from hay fever and you may guess what he thought of people who were jocose about hay fever. In common with many of his fellow-Americans, he had great difficulty picking up change at movie-theatre windows, and it seemed to him that French pastry trays were rigged up just on pur pose to make a selection excessively difficult. As for mankind's prospects he thought man would eventually become prettier but would have no legs. There are not many subjects he did not probe at one time or another. Often he dealt with the same common or garden variety of subject other writers tackled, but a subject was rarely the same after Mr. Benchley got through with it. "Well," the reader would think, "here he goes on Turkish baths; now, even Benchley cannot think of anything new to say about Turkish baths." And then Benchley would say something new about Turkish baths. Every sentence the reader traversed with him was apt to become an adventure. You never knew when you started where you would end but then neither did Mr. Benchley. Mr. Cassidy, in Safety Second, fell into a pulp machine and was "swashed around until all they had to do was dry him out and they could have printed the Sunday Times on him." A lesser man would have left Mr. Cassidy with this requiem. Not Mr. Benchley, who continues: "In fact that is just what they did do, and it was one of the best editions of the Sunday Times that ever was run off the presses. It had human interest." The Benchley that Gluyas Williams understood and pictures so brilliantly did not take the Gadget Age, or Our Vaunted Civilization, lying down. He battled it to the end and sometimes gave as good as he got, though he usually came off second best in his encounters with machines, income taxes, banks, and daylight-saving time. He did not like daylight-saving time but, as he explains, he did not even like time, and his friends could add that he didn't think much of daylight, either. The Caliph of Manhattan was largely nocturnal in his habits, as a good Caliph should be, He deals herein with his difficulties as a bank depositor and it is a pity that his bank was not given fifteen minutes for rebuttal. I should like to have seen this book enriched by a piece called "Banking With Benchley" by the Bankers' Trust Company, That institution remembers him with affection, though it was never quite the same after he bestowed his checking account on it. I understand the bank preserved some of his more uproarious checks, among them surely the one dated three A.M, at an uptown hot spot, made out to Cash, and endorsed something like this: "Dear Bank, having wonderful time. Wish you were here. Love to all. Bob." In common with another great humorist named Dickens, Mr. Benchley had a talent for giving his characters lovely names, and in this book you will meet Mr. Manvogle, Mr. Cramsey, Mr. Anderson M. Ferderber, Mr. Wheer, Mr. Crolish, Mr. Reemis, Mr. McNordfy and, my favorite, Miss Janet MacMac, a faithful old Scotch retainer who, we are told, was for years family hemstitcher to the Benchleys. If he sometimes won a battle over a gadget, Mr. Benchley never won one against Nature, which had him stopped cold. I find no more evidence in this book than in any of his works that he ever won in a tussle with a wild flower. He distrusted wild flowers. Tame flowers, too, especially azaleas. When he tried to take a sun bath, with the sun shining on his closed eyelids, "large, purple azalens whirling against a yellow back-ground" appeared, without invitation. Birds were even worse. In Hollywood one night the basso profundo song of "a great big, burly bird with a long black beard" made him so nervous that he wished he were back in New York listening to the good old Sixth Avenue El rumbling past his diggings. Yet when he got back to Forty-fourth Street what turns up at his lattice to frighten the daylights dawn would probably be the mot juste here out of him but an ugly customer he describes as a bull pigeon. He did not like exercise, sports, or the watching of sports. Since I knew this I was not surprised to meet him at the Saratoga races one August afternoon. Not caring particularly for horse racing, Mr. Benchley would of course be in some place where horses were racing. He was holding a talisman which he explained was to bring luck, through him, to a friend's horse in the big race of the day. But Mr. Benchley lost the talisman and the horse lost the race. It was probably a mistake to pick Mr. Benchley as a go-between to get in touch with the occult. That night he went to the yearling sales, where little horses are bought for great sums by the flicker of a millionaire's pinky. Bob brushed a mosquito from his cheek, the auctioneer misunderstood, and Bob found that the gesture had bought him a charming year-old filly. Mr. Benchley as an owner of race horses. What fascinating possibilities the thought suggests. But, as I never heard any more of the filly, I suppose some kind friend took her off his hands. His lance pierced more shams than all the preachments of the indignation boys and do-gooders. He was the sanest of men and saw things clearly. He had humility, honesty and in-tegrity. And he had a great, wholesome, hearty laugh which merely to hear made you smile and feel better. One of the chief troubles of the American theatre today is that Bob Benchley's laugh is no longer heard in it. To be in his com pany made you feel happy; he had a faculty for making you feel that you were far more brilliant and personable than you probably were. It is a talent given to few. Wholly without pretense, he would be ribald but patient at such fond words about him as these. I wish we could be assured that by some miracle a new Benchley collection like this would be unearthed and published annually for quite some time. It would make the future seem brighter. In the absence of the miracle, we can, of course, always reread this and the older Benchley books.

Price: 6.25 USD

Location: Walsenburg, Colorado

End Time: 2025-01-02T05:33:43.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.63 USD