This is a first. Usually my students describe the essay as quaintly funny, in an old-fashioned way. They enjoy it, and find it relevant to their lives. Who doesn't struggle with self-image? Some students have described it as "David Sedaris-like" (although Sedaris seems to have less cachet for twenty-somethings now than he did a decade or so ago.) The revulsion of this semester's class to Benchley threw me, and I had to regroup. They liked the essay—quite a bit, in fact—but it made them very uncomfortable, and they felt that what other generations of readers might've found droll or whimsical in Benchley's tone, they find somber and self-destructive. "This is a cry for help!" one student protested. "I feel like I want to do something for him," another offered. The majority of the class felt that Benchley was a really sad guy, beset with body-image woes, suffering in a crass, surface-dwelling society. One woman said she wanted to slide her therapist's card to him on the sly; another was pleased to see a man writing about vanity and vulnerability, traits stereotypically associated with women. Their responses, as always, varied with their experiences: one woman said that she grew up in a home without many mirrors ("it was a thing") and so felt Benchey's feelings especially keenly; another wondered on the effects of their generation carrying thousands of images of themselves on phones, and of the daily anxiety of unasked-for taggings in unflattering photos. This, times a thousand.
My students weren't being humorless about this, or overly earnest. Most of their comments were offered with half-grins, yet their reactions were authentic; no English Major posturing here. It's fascinating to me how different generations read and react. My students admittedly couldn't imagine how a literate, pre-Second War audience would respond to the essay. One particularly bright student suggested that since her generation of twenty-somethings is so attuned to trigger warnings and danger signs of depression, it's apt that they would read "My Face" with a diagnostic eye, open to signs of toxic self-deprecation or mental illness that might be helped with counseling (or medication). Another bright student suggested "LOL I Hate My Life" as a subtitle to the essay. Another said the essay reminded her of Louis C.K. in its darkness and relentless self-scrutiny. Benchley, dark! Fantastic. My students keep teaching me, and I'm grateful for that.
My dad owned three of four Benchley books, and I have fond memories of sitting with my family in the living room after dinner, and my older brother reading Benchley aloud, and all of us falling over ourselves laughing. I guess that in another fifty or so years a group of college students might respond very differently again to "My Face," perhaps on the pendulum swing back to identifying with Benchley's laid-back, witty tone. Who knows. I wonder what Benchley would make of all of this.
2 comments:
I started reading Benchley around age 15 and he is still important to me. I didn't realize other "serious" literary essayists took him seriously, although I did once ask Phillip Lopate -- after hearing him read an essay aloud, which revealed much about his comic timing -- whether he had some Benchley influence in his past, and he nodded and smiled wryly.
I amended this to add that I grew up reading him, too, and that my family sometimes read him aloud after dinner. I hear Benchley in Phillip for sure.
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