I’m glad to see I was only one generation off on the Benchley-Benchley connection. After being dead wrong so many times lately I’m happy with a near-miss.
“Vandelay!! Say Vandelay!!”
It gets worse. I’m a contractor, so basically, I’d be in the oldest profession if they’d invented computers a few millenia earlier.
And-not-so-heartwarming stories about the war between the sexes and/or mid-life crisis. I recommend A Thurber Carnival for a good sampling of his short stories and cartoons.
Exaggeration to make a point. Doesn’t anyone here read Cecil anymore?
There is, as you quite rightly say, more to Thurber than heart-warming stories about dogs. I just meant that he was no Oscar Wilde.
ben
Probably the most famous writer in America during the '20s and '30s was H.L. Mencken, who is unjustly forgotten today. Yeah, I know you guys have probably read at least something by him, but Joe Sixpack doesn’t know his name. Joe Sixpack has heard of Hemingway and Fitzgerald…hell, he probably remembers reading Gatsby in high school…and he may have heard of Faulkner or even read some of O’Hara’s more racy stuff, if he’s over 55. The problem is that Mencken, like FPA and Don Marquis and Dorothy Parker and Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, mostly wrote what somebody before called ephemera. They wrote stuff that was funny commenting on what was trendy in their times, and those trends are of course forgotten today, so their stuff isn’t funny for the mainstream reader. I think the equivalent of these '20s and '30s writers today would be TV guys and stand-up comics like Seinfeld, Letterman, Leno, Carlin, or Robin Williams. 50 years from now no one is going to find that stuff interesting because it commented on the superficialities of a society long gone rather than on deep truths that all societies have to deal with. That’s why Dos Passos is on college reading lists today while Heywood Broun is long-forgotten.
I still think Mencken’s loss of fame was undeserved. He wrote a lot of ephemera, to be sure, but The American Language and some of his essays and literary criticism stand the test of time. Too bad they’re not more widely available.
IIRC, the group’s “official” name was the “Algonquin Thanatopsis Literary Society and Inside Straight Club”. Harpo said that Woolcott’s introduction of him to the group was “Harpo…Thanatopsis. Thanatopsis…Harpo.” The group was playing poker at the time.
Now where else would I get to use the word “thanatopsis?”
Also, I think it means something that the books that Penguin has had longest in continuous publication in its Portable series are The Portable Bible and The Portable Dorothy Parker.
(This is among The Portable Shakespeare, The Portable Mark Twain, etc.)
I recommend Mencken’s “The American Language” highly. It’s required reading for those lexicographically inclined or other harmless drudges.
Dotty Parker’s poetry is timeless and still hilarious except for the suicidal parts.
Harpo was the odd duck of the ART being, if not silent in real life, nearly illiterate. Woolcott (I can never spell it right either) brought him in after reviewing a performance. Groucho showed up occasionally as well but was never considered a major participant which is odd since Groucho was the brother with the literary aspirations. (Or maybe not so odd given that Groucho was a pretty lousy writer.)
Harpo’s autobiography “Harpo Speaks” (ghosted) has some interesting material on the ART crew and some great stories, including his stint as a spy in Russia and nekkid croquet flashing. It’s a marvelous book anyway. If you only read one book about the Marx Brothers, thats the one.
JB
Lex Non Favet Delicatorum Votis
On the subject of kid’s tables…I find I actually prefer sitting with the kids a lot of the time…you can really dominate the conversation, even if it does tend to centre on the relative merits of Pokémon and Britney Spears.
um…
“Heaven sends us good meat, but the devil sends us cooks”
David Garrick (1717-1779)
Just in case anyone was wondering…
the ART can be found mentioned in The Simpsons more than anywhere else, as all of Homer’s flashbacks to the nights before seem to refer to the ART… check it out some time
by the way, Wilde is by far the best mentioned so far