Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade

until he entered high school. To avenge himself on his mother, Benchley waged passive war on the female sex for the rest of his life.
    If the flora and fauna of Benchley’s homeland had been alcoholism and rejection, he grew up seemingly untouched by misfortunes of any kind. During his adolescence, a wealthy woman who claimed to have been his brother’s secret fiancée offered to pay for his education at Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by four years at Harvard. In college, where he became one of the best-liked students on campus, Benchley was editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a star of the Hasty Pudding shows. Two years after he graduated, in the class of 1912, he married Gertrude Darling, a Worcester girl whom he had known since elementary school. By the time he arrived at Vanity Fair , he seemed to be a well-adjusted family man with his personality and his life set as if in concrete. Though the couple had a small son and Gertrude was pregnant again, Benchley had yet to earn enough to support his family. He still entered the purchase of each newspaper and every postage stamp in his pocket expense book.
    It was a mystery to Dorothy why Crowninshield had selected Benchley to be managing editor and how—or even if—he had written all the loony pieces that had been appearing regularly in the magazine. On the basis of his writing, she had imagined him to have a delicious sense of the absurd, some rare and extravagant madness that she described as “a leaping of the mind,” and that others would describe as “almost-logic, the same chilly, fascinating little skid off the hard road and right up to the edge of the swamp.” Yet on first meeting her new colleague, Benchley’s lunacy was not obvious to Dorothy.
    Several days passed. Just as she was growing accustomed to sharing her office with the methodical Mr. Benchley, Crowninshield brought in another new employee and assigned him a third desk in the room. Never before had Dorothy laid eyes on anyone quite like this individual. He was a giant—six foot seven inches, stooped, rail-thin, with cavernous brown eyes and a nailbrush mustache. Robert Sherwood, a twenty-three-year-old veteran who had served in the Canadian Black Watch and had been gassed and wounded, was plainly ill because he filled the office with his gasps as he struggled for breath. Communication was difficult because he refused to speak. When a stenographer came in to take dictation from him, he sat on the floor and turned his back on the woman.
    Nobody knew what Sherwood was supposed to do. Applying for the job, he had appeared in his Black Watch uniform, and Crownie, no doubt impressed by the kilt, had hired him for a three-month trial period at a salary that was only five dollars more than the secretaries were earning. He gave him the vague title of drama editor, but told Benchley that he was to be picture editor. Eventually Sherwood decided that his real job was to be “a sort of maid of all work.”
    He made Dorothy and Benchley so uncomfortable that before long they began lunching together just to discuss the problem. She put forth the theory that Sherwood was a “Conversation Stopper” and that, in her experience, trying to talk to a “Stopper” was like “riding on the Long Island railroad—it gets you nowhere in particular.” She also thought he looked tough and sinister. Benchley wondered how Crowninshield could have saddled him with a freak whose military exploits even remained a mystery. With so much of Sherwood to shoot at, how could the Germans have managed to hit him in both legs? He suspected that Sherwood must have been lying on his back, waving his feet in the air. The truth about Robert Sherwood did not occur to either of them. He was merely struck dumb in their presence.
    Several days later, as Dorothy and Benchley were leaving for lunch, they were surprised to find Sherwood waiting for them outside the building. Hesitant, he asked whether they would mind if he walked down West