No Poems!

Our book today is a carefree little 1932 gem No Poems, Or, Around the World Backwards & Sideways that celebrated Algonquin Club wit and raconteur Robert Benchley. By the point in his career when Benchley was writing the kinds of friendly observational squibs that comprise this volume, he’d carved out a niche for himself doing exactly that, and readers lapped it up (then as now – writers like Dave Barry and David Sedaris would be unimaginable had not Benchley re-invented their genre a generation or two ago). And since the way you get readers to lap something up is to mash it and mush it until it’s a kind of patter-based pabulum, that’s exactly what Benchley did in “essay” after “essay,” year after year, paycheck after paycheck.

It can be the perfect restorative, in limited doses – and since nothing in No Poems is any longer than a couple of pages, limited doses are everywhere. We get quick, hangdog musings on all the little quotidian things that don’t seem to change much from one age to the next (if Benchley were alive today, you can bet your last Algonquin martini he’d be writing about That Wacky Internet) – the travails of hailing a taxi, the decorum of dinner conversation, the tedium of dull conversation, etc. In “The Truth about Thunderstorms,” for instance, he does a little bit about how he’s frightened of thunderstorms:

Just where any of us in the human race get off to adopt the Big Man attitude of “What is there to be afraid of?” toward lightning is more than I can figure out. you would think that we knew how to stop it. You would think that no one but women and yellow dogs were ever hit by it and that no man in a turtle-neck sweater and three days’ beard on his chin would give it a second thought. I am sick of all this bravado about lightning and am definitely abandoning it herewith.

And of course the dilatory old Post Office comes in for its usual can-you-believe-how-long-these-lines-are drubbing, this time in the piece called “Back in Line”:

The U.S. Post Office is one of the most popular line-standing fields in the country. It has been estimated that six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office. When you realize that no provision is made for their eating or sleeping or intellectual advancement while they are thus standing in line, you will understand why six-tenths of the population look so cross and peaked. The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.

Not everything Benchley writes about is quite as evergreen as post offices and thunderstorms – that could hardly be avoided in an author who liked to flirt so assiduously with topicality. He writes about the subway and office and the beach, yes, but he also writes about the telegraph, Prohibition, and that staple of bygone eras, the passenger liner, so genially lampooned in “Abandon Ship”:

There has been a great deal of printed matter issued, both in humorous and instructive vein, about ocean travel on those mammoth ships which someone, who had never ridden on one, once designated as “ocean greyhounds.” “Ocean camels” would be an epithet I would work up for them, if anyone should care enough to ask me. Or I might even think of a funnier one. There is room for a funnier one.

Benchley was prolific; he wrote a shelf of books as long as your arm, and those books brought a lot of enjoyment to a lot of people. No Poems is fairly typical of the rest, mainly because they’re all fairly typical of each other (unlike the works of Benchley’s celebrated grandson, which had definite peaks and valleys). This volume came to my hand during a routine tour of my beloved Brattle Bookshop, but I’d have just as readily snatched up anything this kind, sarcastic man wrote – as an aforementioned restorative, against a dull or scratchy day. And the smile-inducing illustrations by Benchley’s old friend Gluyas Williams only add to the fun.