BOOKS
Round and under the table
Philip Hensher
LAUGHTER'S GENTLE SOUL: THE LIFE OF ROBERT BENCHLEY by Billy Altman W. W. Norton, £22.50, pp. 382 Robert Benchley is a curious figure, somebody whose posthumous reputation rests as much on what he did and said while sitting at the dinner table as on anything he committed to the page. He survives, principally, as the subject of the anecdotes of others, and, compared to his energetic and enchanting conversation, as set down by his friends, his writings have the slightly fusty air which settles on even the best humorous writing. He inhabits, perhaps, one of the lower slopes of Parnassus, sharing a paddock, perhaps, with Sydney Smith and Saxon Sydney- Turner in a region devoted to those whose best work, alas, went into their conversa- tion.
This inevitably gives the biography of Benchley a rather deadly air of 'you-had- to-be-there' and 'it-was-funny-at-the-time'. But, fortunately, Benchley was surrounded by so many brilliant people, hanging on his every word, that one is sometimes tempted to think that his every bon mot is set down somewhere, in the diaries, letters and newspaper articles of his friends. And, real- ly, that was what the Algonquin Round Table was for. The Round Table, or the Vicious Circle as its victims preferred to call it, began in 1919 as a lunchtime gather- ing of various writers, editors, actors and wits. Around Benchley and his friend Dorothy Parker, a constellation of more or less ephemeral talents gathered, ostensibly to discuss literature and the events of the day, but in fact to play silly Edwardian par- lour games and be deliberately rude.
Being rude on purpose was the Round Table's most renowned trait and some of the most treasured memories of its denizens are of frank insults. Noel Coward to Edna Ferber, who was wearing a double- breasted suit: 'Why, Miss Ferber, you look almost like a man.' Yes,' Edna replied. `And so do you.' The Round Table's appetite for offensiveness was such that they could not be satisfied with insulting each other, and, from time to time, some hapless dupe was imported to be the butt of ridicule; some innocent who was pre- pared to stand up and announce that his family went back to the Crusades, or that he had read the entire works of Alexander Woollcott, just so that Benchley or Parker could have their joke.
Sometimes these poor saps are so absurdly reckless that one rather suspects the joker of hiring an actor, just so that he can have his one brilliant line. Is it really likely, for instance, that anyone would spontaneously start stroking the playwright Marc Connelly's bald head, or remark that it felt as soft as his wife's backside? Surely, the man must have been a hired help, coached by Connelly so that he could reply `So it does, sir, so it does.'
There is something faintly depressing about the Round Table. They were a group of people very well pleased with them- selves, whom one imagines practising their remarks in advance. Mad, like most of their generation, for parlour games, when the conversation flagged they were all too apt to start a round of 'give me a sentence'. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and they all obviously had a whale of a time, but there is something odd about preserv- ing the results. Challenged to use the word `punctilious' in a sentence, I should be pleased to come up with something like No, Mum, we've decided to stay together because of the kids.' George S. Kaufman's 'I know a man who has two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie; Lizzie is all right, but you have no idea how punc- tilious,' but I hope I should not think it worth printing.
And in print few of them did anything really first-rate. Dorothy Parker came near- est, but even she, like most apparently armour-plated people, was horribly apt to lapse into repellently mawkish sentiment in her poetry and fiction. As for Benchley, his humorous pieces have not quite stood the test of time; of course, such celebrated monologues as 'The Treasurer's Report' or `The Sex Life of the Polyp' are still very enjoyable. They have become, however, period pieces in a way that Thurber or S. J. Perelman have avoided, and they call, now, for a measure of indulgence.
The critical reviews, on the other hand, still seem fresh and enjoyable. If the comic monologues seem firmly rooted in an Edwardian Ivy League jokiness, the reviews of plays have a distinctly modern air. Benchley was probably the first newspaper critic to see that giving a fair and balanced account of some trivial play is secondary to the duty to produce sparkling and enter- taining copy. Nobody before Benchley had thought to write a review of a play in which the critic describes how he walked out as soon as the first line had been spoken, or the coughing of the audience, or — in the case of a particularly dull play — the con- tents of the programme. Benchley wasn't able to exert much influence on the theatre — one of the most amusing stories here is of his five-year-long campaign against a piece of fluff called Abie's Irish Rose, with- out the faintest hint of success. But his influence on writing about the theatre is beyond dispute.
Despite a rather uninspiring title — and the one thing Benchley and the Algonquin wits were not is gentle — Billy Altman has written quite an entertaining biography of Benchley. He gives way frequently to the urge to retell funny stories, which is what one really wants in this sort of biography. Benchley was always a practical joker one of the first things reported about him was the poem he once recited in kinder- garten which ran: 'My mother-in-law hath lately died/ For her my heart doth yearn/ I know she's with the angels now /'Cause she's too tough to burn.' Much of his biog- raphy is inevitably going to be retelling of this sort of thing, and, to his credit, Altman doesn't mind regaling the reader with familiar and unfamiliar stories.
He avoids, too, the temptation to moralise over Benchley's life. Someone who was fiercely pro-temperance in youth, who never had an alcoholic drink until he was 31, had by early middle age become one of the celebrated drinkers of his time. Still, Altman does not think of it as any- thing so very reprehensible, and his sympa- thy never falters. Nor is he tempted to criticise Benchley's career in Hollywood. Most chroniclers of the Algonquin set have yielded to the belief that Benchley, leaving the sophisticated world of the New Yorker for an acting and screen-writing career, somehow sold out; even so general- ly excellent and sympathetic a study as Alan Rudolph's film, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, is not quite immune from the thought. It's certainly true that Bench- ley went to Hollywood because he could make money by doing so; it's also true that Hollywood is where he did a great deal of his work.
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