Love Conquers All Read online

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  LOVE CONQUERS ALL

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  BY

  Robert Benchley

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  About this Ebook

  Love Conquers All

  by Robert Benchley

  (1889-1945)

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  Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist, actor, and drama critic. His main persona, that of a slightly confused, ineffectual, socially awkward bumbler, served in his essays and short films to gain him the sobriquet “the humorist’s humorist.” The character allowed him to comment brilliantly on the world’s absurdities. (—Encyclopedia Britannica)

  Benchley's humor influenced and inspired many humorists and filmmakers, among them E. B. White, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Horace Digby, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Dave Barry.

  Benchley is best remembered for his contributions to periodicals such as Life, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Collections of these essays and articles stand today as tribute to his brilliance.

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  First published 1922.

  This ebook was created by E.C.M. for MobileRead.com, January 2016.

  This ebook may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

  The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

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  Compiled from the following sources, using Notepad++ and Sigil:

  Text was obtained from the Internet Archive (scan of the 1922 first edition from publisher Henry Holt & Co.). Punctuation, italics, and diacritics have been formatted. Chapter-end links provide access to table of contents and title index.

  Due to copyright restrictions, illustrations by Gluyas Williams (1888–1982) have been omitted.

  Embedded fonts:

  (all licensed for re-distribution)

  “Special Elite” by Brian Bonlislawsky,

  “Monospace” by George Williams.

  Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.

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  Contents

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  LOVE CONQUERS ALL Titlepage

  About This Ebook

  Caution – Chortles Ahead: The Benchley-Whittier Correspondence

  Family Life in America

  This Child Knows the Answer— Do You?

  Rules and Suggestions for Watching Auction Bridge

  A Christmas Spectacle

  How to Watch a Chess-match

  Watching Baseball

  How to be a Spectator at Spring Planting

  The Manhattador

  What to Do While the Family Is Away

  “Roll Your Own”

  Do Insects Think?

  The Score in the Stands

  Mid-Winter Sports

  Reading the Funnies Aloud

  Opera Synopses

  The Young Idea’s Shooting Gallery

  Polyp with a Past

  Holt! Who Goes There?

  The Committee on the Whole

  Noting an Increase in Bigamy

  The Real Wiglaf: Man and Monarch

  Facing the Boys’ Camp Problem

  All About the Silesian Problem

  “Happy the Home Where Books Are Found”

  When Not in Rome, Why Do as the Romans Did?

  The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth

  Malignant Mirrors

  The Power of the Press

  Home for the Holidays

  How to Understand International Finance

  ’Twas the Night Before Summer

  Welcome Home – And Shut Up!

  Animal Stories – I

  Animal Stories – II

  The Tariff Unmasked

  Literary Department “Take Along a Book”

  Confessions of a Chess Champion

  “Rip Van Winkle”

  Literary Lost and Found Department

  “Darkwater”

  The New Time-Table

  Mr. Bok’s Americanization

  Zane Grey’s Movie

  Suppressing “Jurgen”

  Anti-Ibáñez

  On Bricklaying

  “American Anniversaries”

  A Week-end with Wells

  About Portland Cement

  Open Bookcases

  Trout-Fishing

  “Scouting for Girls”

  How to Sell Goods

  “You!”

  The Catalogue School

  “Effective House Organs”

  Advice to Writers

  “The Effective Speaking Voice”

  Those Dangerously Dynamic British Girls

  Books and Other Things

  “Measure Your Mind”

  The Brow-Elevation in Humor

  Business Letters

  Index of Titles

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  LOVE CONQUERS ALL

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  The Benchley-Whittier

  Correspondence

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  Old scandals concerning the private life of Lord Byron have been revived with the recent publication of a collection of his letters. One of the big questions seems to be: Did Byron send Mary Shelley’s letter to Mrs. R.B. Hoppner? Everyone seems greatly excited about it.

  Lest future generations be thrown into turmoil over my correspondence after I am gone, I want right now to clear up the mystery which has puzzled literary circles for over thirty years. I need hardly add that I refer to what is known as the “Benchley-Whittier Correspondence.”

  The big question over which both my biographers and Whittier’s might possibly come to blows is this, as I understand it: Did John Greenleaf Whittier ever receive the letters I wrote to him in the late Fall of 1890? If he did not, who did? And under what circumstances were they written?

  I was a very young man at the time, and Mr. Whittier was, naturally, very old. There had been a meeting of the Save-Our-Song-Birds Club in old Dane Hall (now demolished) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Members had left their coats and hats in the check-room at the foot of the stairs (now demolished).

  In passing out after a rather spirited meeting, during the course of which Mr. Whittier and Dr. Van Blarcom had opposed each other rather violently over the question of Baltimore orioles, the aged poet naturally was the first to be helped into his coat. In the general mix-up (there was considerable good-natured fooling among the members as they left, relieved as they were from the strain of the meeting) Whittier was given my hat by mistake. When I came to go, there was nothing left for me but a rather seedy gray derby with a black band, containing the initials “J.G.W.” As the poet was visiting in Cambridge at the time I took opportunity next day to write the following letter to him:

  Cambridge, Mass.

  November 7, 1890.

  Dear Mr. Whittier:

  I am afraid that in the confusion following the Save-Our-Song-Birds meeting last night, you were given my hat by mistake. I have yours and will gladly exchange it if you will let me know when I may call on you.

  May I not add that I am a great admirer of your verse? Have you ever tried any musical comedy lyrics? I think that I could get you in on the ground floor in the show game, as I know a young man who has written several songs which E.E. Rice has said he would like to use in his next comic opera – provided he can get words to go with them.

  But we can discuss all this at our meeting, which I hope will be soon, as your hat looks like hell on me.

  Yours respectfully,

  Robert C. Benchley.

  I am quite sure that this letter was mailed, as I find an entry in my diary of that date which reads:

  “Mailed a letter to J.G. Whittier. Cloudy and cooler.”

  Furthermore, i
n a death-bed confession, some ten years later, one Mary F. Rourke, a servant employed in the house of Dr. Agassiz, with whom Whittier was bunking at the time, admitted that she herself had taken a letter, bearing my name in the corner of the envelope, to the poet at his breakfast on the following morning.

  But whatever became of it after it fell into his hands, I received no reply. I waited five days, during which time I stayed in the house rather than go out wearing the Whittier gray derby. On the sixth day I wrote him again, as follows:

  Cambridge, Mass.

  Nov. 14, 1890.

  Dear Mr. Whittier:

  How about that hat of mine?

  Yours respectfully,

  Robert C. Benchley.

  I received no answer to this letter either. Concluding that the good gray poet was either too busy or too gosh-darned mean to bother with the thing, I myself adopted an attitude of supercilious unconcern and closed the correspondence with the following terse message:

  Cambridge, Mass.

  December 4, 1890.

  Dear Mr. Whittier:

  It is my earnest wish that the hat of mine which you are keeping will slip down over your eyes someday, interfering with your vision to such an extent that you will walk off the sidewalk into the gutter and receive painful, albeit superficial, injuries.

  Your young friend,

  Robert C. Benchley.

  Here the matter ended so far as I was concerned, and I trust that biographers in the future will not let any confusion of motives or misunderstanding of dates enter into a clear and unbiased statement of the whole affair. We must not have another Shelley-Byron scandal.

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  ....... TOC INDEX NEXT

  Family Life

  in America

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  The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest. If this school progresses, the following is what we may expect in our national literature in a year or so.

  PART 1

  The living-room in the Twillys’ house was so damp that thick, soppy moss grew all over the walls. It dripped on the picture of Grandfather Twilly that hung over the melodeon, making streaks down the dirty glass like sweat on the old man’s face. It was a mean face. Grandfather Twilly had been a mean man and had little spots of soup on the lapel of his coat. All his children were mean and had soup spots on their clothes.

  Grandma Twilly sat in the rocker over by the window, and as she rocked the chair snapped. It sounded like Grandma Twilly’s knees snapping as they did whenever she stooped over to pull the wings off a fly. She was a mean old thing. Her knuckles were grimy and she chewed crumbs that she found in the bottom of her reticule. You would have hated her. She hated herself. But most of all she hated Grandfather Twilly.

  “I certainly hope you’re frying good,” she muttered as she looked up at his picture.

  “Hasn’t the undertaker come yet, Ma?” asked young Mrs. Wilbur Twilly petulantly. She was boiling water on the oil-heater and every now and again would spill a little of the steaming liquid on the baby who was playing on the floor. She hated the baby because it looked like her father. The hot water raised little white blisters on the baby’s red neck and Mabel Twilly felt short, sharp twinges of pleasure at the sight. It was the only pleasure she had had for four months.

  “Why don’t you kill yourself, Ma?” she continued. “You’re only in the way here and you know it. It’s just because you’re a mean old woman and want to make trouble for us that you hang on.”

  Grandma Twilly shot a dirty look at her daughter-in-law. She had always hated her. Stringy hair, Mabel had. Dank, stringy hair. Grandma Twilly thought how it would look hanging at an Indian’s belt. But all that she did was to place her tongue against her two front teeth and make a noise like the bathroom faucet.

  Wilbur Twilly was reading the paper by the oil lamp. Wilbur had watery blue eyes and cigar ashes all over his knees. The third and fourth buttons of his vest were undone. It was too hideous.

  He was conscious of his family seated in chairs about him. His mother, chewing crumbs. His wife Mabel, with her stringy hair, reading. His sister Bernice, with projecting front teeth, who sat thinking of the man who came every day to take away the waste paper. Bernice was wondering how long it would be before her family would discover that she had been married to this man for three years.

  How Wilbur hated them all. It didn’t seem as if he could stand it any longer. He wanted to scream and stick pins into every one of them and then rush out and see the girl who worked in his office snapping rubber-bands all day. He hated her too, but she wore side-combs.

  PART 2

  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 that the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be stifled. She needed torture to be happy. She also needed a good swift clout on the side of the face.

  A drunken man lurched out from a door-way and flung his arms about her. It was only her husband. She loved her husband. She loved him so much that, as she pushed him away and into the gutter, she stuck her little finger into his eye. She also untied his neck-tie. It was a bow neck-tie, with white, dirty spots on it and it was wet with gin. It didn’t seem as if Bernice could stand it any longer. All the repressions of nineteen sordid years behind protruding teeth surged through her untidy soul. She wanted love. But it was not her husband that she loved so fiercely. It was old Grandfather Twilly. And he was too dead.

  PART 3

  In the dining-room of the Twillys’ house everything was very quiet. Even the vinegar-cruet which was covered with fly-specks. Grandma Twilly lay with her head in the baked potatoes, poisoned by Mabel, who, in her turn had been poisoned by her husband and sprawled in an odd posture over the china-closet. Wilbur and his sister Bernice had just finished choking each other to death and between them completely covered the carpet in that corner of the room where the worn spot showed the bare boards beneath, like ribs on a chicken carcass. Only the baby survived. She had a mean face and had great spillings of Imperial Granum down her bib. As she looked about her at her family, a great hate surged through her tiny body and her eyes snapped viciously. She wanted to get down from her high-chair and show them all how much she hated them.

  Bernice’s husband, the man who came after the waste paper, staggered into the room. The tips were off both his shoe-lacings. The baby experienced a voluptuous sense of futility at the sight of the tipless-lacings and leered suggestively at her uncle-in-law.

  “We must get the roof fixed,” said the man, very quietly. “It lets the sun in.”

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  PREV TOC INDEX NEXT

  This Child Knows the Answer—

  Do You?

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  We are occasionally confronted in the advertisements by the picture of an offensively bright-looking little boy, fairly popping with information, who, it is claimed in the text, knows all the inside dope on why fog forms in beads on a woolen coat, how long it would take to crawl to the moon on your hands and knees, and what makes oysters so quiet.

  The taunting catch-line of the advertisement is: “This Child Knows the Answer – Do You?” and the idea is to shame you into buying a set of books containing answers to all the questions in the world except the question “Where is the money coming from to buy the books?”

  Any little boy knowing all these facts would unquestionably be an asset in a business which specialized in fog-beads or lunar transportation novelties, but he would be awful to have about the house.

  “Spencer,” you might say to him, “where are Daddy’s slippers?” To which he would undoubtedly answer: “I don’t know, Dad,” (disagreeable little boys like that always c
all their fathers “Dad” and stand with their feet wide apart and their hands in their pockets like girls playing boys’ rôles on the stage) “but I do know this, that all the Nordic peoples are predisposed to astigmatism because of the glare of the sun on the snow, and that, furthermore, if you were to place a common ordinary marble in a glass of lukewarm cider there would be a precipitation which, on pouring off the cider, would be found to be what we know as parsley, just plain parsley which Cook uses every night in preparing our dinner.”

  With little ones like this around the house, a new version of “The Children’s Hour” will have to be arranged, and it might as well be done now and got over with.

  The Well-Informed Children’s Hour

  Between the dark and the day-light,

  When the night is beginning lo lower,

  Comes a pause in the day’s occupation

  Which is known as the children’s hour.

  ’Tis then appears tiny Irving

  With the patter of little feet,

  To tell us that worms become dizzy

  At a slight application of heat.

  And Norma, the baby savant,

  Comes toddling up with the news

  That a valvular catch in the larynx

  Is the reason why Kitty mews.

  “Oh Grandpa,” cries lovable Lester,

  “Jack Frost has surprised us again,

  By condensing in crystal formation

  The vapor which clings to the pane!”

  Then Roger and Lispinard Junior