On Saying Little at Great Length

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY

With Special Reference to That Master of the Art, Robert Louis Stevenson

BEING simply a person who writes little articles sporadically, and with no distinction, I am always forced to have something in mind about which to write. That is to say, I cannot sit down with nothing to say and then say it to the extent of two thousand words, so that an editor will buy it. Editors always demand a little subject matter in my stuff.

And, even if I could sell an article about nothing in particular, I wouldn't feel quite right in doing it.

I am funny that way.

When I write a thing, I do it because I have something fairly vital burning .within me which I feel it is only my simple obligation to the State to express, and, if I were less susceptible to the voice of the "Stern Daughter" (quotation from W. Wordsworth, an English poet, in his Ode to Duty, in which poem he refers,— and quite rightly, too,—to Duty as the "Stern Daughter of the Voice of God"), I should, by preference, devote all of my time to my insurance work.

And yet think of all the famous writers who have done volumes and volumes about nothing at all! . . .

After three consecutive minutes of thinking, the only author I can think of who has done this is Robert Louis Stevenson, but as it was Stevenson that I had in mind, anyway, he will do.

NOTHING was too trivial for Stevenson to wind up in a beautiful drapery of literary style and send out as an octavo-420 pp.-$1.75 net-volume. He could go from the kitchen to the ice-box and, by keeping a diary on the way, get out something nice in limp leather for the holiday trade. Thus, under the title, "Random Rambles to the Ice-Box," with a preface by Fannie V. deG. Stevenson, showing how this book came to be written and what the prevailing winds were at the time and what Stevenson said on the occasion of Sydney Colvin's offering him a match, we might read this:

"It was already hard upon four o'clock before I was ready to set forth, and, in our back entry, the dark falls swiftly, though not without a touch of Lesbian sureness. I was determined, if not to have a light, at least to have the means of a light in my possession, for there is nothing more harassing to the easy mind than the necessity of feeling about in an ice-box, even one's own icebox, in the dark, and the reflected glow from the neighboring apartment is not always to be reckoned sure by those who trudge on foot at late afternoon.

"A traveler of my sort was considered not without his eccentricities by those in the front room. I was looked upon with doubt, as one who should project a journey to Algeciras, but yet with respectful interest, like one setting forth for an inclement antipode.

"It will be readily conceived that I was in a high state of expectancy at the prospect of my unusual, not to say extremely unusual, expedition. Going from the kitchen to the icebox is a successive progression of steps, no matter from what angle you look at it, and a successive progression of steps has always, even since my boyhood in Ardnamurchan, possessed a strange, impalpable fascination for me. In them you are always moving, always advancing, with the ecstatic swishing of the wind in your ears and the song of the heath in your heart,— and when you are progressing, even if it be only toward the ice-box, there is always the comforting certainty, which moth can not corrupt, that you are, at least, not retrogressing.

"I had with me, to cheer my declining spirits and, incidentally, to make another paragraph: a pocket handkerchief,—not one of your tremendous linen affairs, but a formidable expanse of silk,—and hemstitched, too, if you please, by no less a personage than our old family hemstitcher, Janet MacMac; a bunch of keys, which jangled as I walked,like so many keys jangling,—which, indeed, they were; a pen-knife to be worn closed,—not open, for your life, else you receive an ugly jab in the groin unawares; two cancelled theatre-checks for Row H, seats 111-112 at the Adelphi Theatre ; a rubber eraser, such as boys use to erase black marks which they have, in unscholarly fashion, made in their copy-books; and, in conclusion, but not, let us hope, in refutation, the unadaptable end of a match.

"Thus equipped, I felt myself ready to start. I was, in a sense, free to go my own way, and yet, withal, constrained to modulate my motions to the temporal necessity of walking warily across the kitchen-floor, for it was at that time in the satisfying, yet undeniably slippery, process of being washed with soap and water by an enormous female in seersucker regimentals, who crouched, as one about to leap at some unseen adversary, directly in my path.

"For those who are restricted to silence in the presence of menials, I can only offer the sympathy of an absolutely democratic and articulate citizen of the world. I dare say that I am not without reserve, and yet, when confronted by an individual of a certain susceptibility to literary reproduction, I become voluble to the point of volubility. Of such a mould was this Woman of the Kitchen Floor. Honest soul! Long may she continue to swosh about in the certainty of a rich reward, happy yet care-free, washing, yet, beyond cavil, insouciante.

"It was to her that I spoke as my path intersected the field of her purging operations.

" 'I beg your pardon,' I said, as I walked to one side to avoid stepping into her pail, or, what were ten times more gruesome, on the woman herself.

"Thus ended my first adventure by the way. As I raised my eyes from the surface of the floor I beheld the kitchen threshold, and there beyond, in the pleasant cool of the evening, nestling in the back-hall, like an enraged mother bear at bay, stood the ice-box. Was it Destiny, or Fate, or the clean-cut song of the pines? Who shall say? But because of it, we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace and pleasure in our hearts."

NOT only in paid contributions does this concession to padding hold true. When it comes to writing letters, you simply have to be famous or else have something to say. If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly pay-checks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff. You can't string along for six pages on reasons why you haven't written beforei and reasons why you must close now. But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.

Here again, Stevenson was a master at utilizing style to fill whatever space might be left over when he had said all there was to say. Especially in his boyhood letters did he give promise of writing at space-rates. To judge from his early letters, one might expect from him something like this, written, let us say, at the age of four:

Ardnaclochenburn

Thursday

My dear Mrs. Babington Churchill:—

To what extremes of heat and cold does the yearly planetary revolution bring us! Now we are suffused by the delicate warmth of genial, let us say, May; now chattering in the equally indelicate rigours of, for instance, November. Before we have first glimpsed the soft luxury of Ceres,— pouf!—and we are confronted with the downy carpet which heralds the advance of the winter solstice.

(Continued on page 120)

(Continued from page 61)

So it is here with us. Each day is more like the others than the one before it, and I find myself wondering, my dear Mrs. Babington Churchill, if it is not better so, after all. For just so often as the thrush sings,—nay more—just so often as the linnet warbles, so often do I think of you all in Old House, Ashley Heath, Cheetles Cheshire, and wonder what, in the immutable turnings and strugglings of events, you are doing. You will remember those lines of Stanchfield's on the coming of age of his grocer:

Noo lyart leaves blaw ower the green,

Whilk noo, wi' frosts ohint her.

These words are often brought home to me by the febrile, even openhearted, attempts of my man-servant to brush my waistcoat, and I feel that I am no longer capable of judging such things.

You will doubtless deem me a churlish fellow for not having replied to your last epistle long ere this, and, indeed, such I am. But you must know, in your coeur des coeurs that I am inseparably bound up with my work here.

Yesterday I saw a man on a bicycle. He was pedalling along, hands on the handle-bars, feet in their proper places, eyes on the road, for all the world like Promethus on the rocks, and, although I incur your verdict of sentimentalist, I must tell you that I whistled at him as he went by. It is little incidents such as this that make life here what it is.

And now comes the twilight, and with it the consciousness of approaching darkness. Will you not write at an early date, and tell me all about your good self? Do plan to favor this province with a visit before the Equinox. We have artichokes every day. What more can I say?

Believe me, my dear Mrs. Babington Churchill, Yours, etc., etc.,

R. L. S.

But I won't be able to sell this article myself if I run on so, even in imitation of Stevenson. Editors simply won't take padded stuff from an unknown writer.