Skinner

A lot of people know and love Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, but fewer people have gone on to discover Cornelia Otis Skinner’s collections of humorous short sketches. When I was in America in 2015, I ordered a whole heap of them to my friend’s apartment – because they’re much easier to find in the US than in the UK. But I didn’t get Excuse It, Please! (1936) – and yet, here it is, and that is because Lisa May very, very kindly sent me a copy! That was also in 2015, but every book has its correct moment and, in 2022, Excuse It, Please! found its time had come.

(Sidenote: isn’t the cover wonderful?)

The title comes from the opening sketch – which seems a better term than ‘story’ or ‘essay’, though they could equally be called that. Each is a scene from Skinner’s life, probably rather exaggerated and fictionalised, usually telling a self-deprecating foible of mid-century middle-class life. And the first sketch is about trying to get through to a required company on a telephone call, back when all such calls had to go through a telephone operator. The connections go awry.

“Is this 51?” I asked.

“Hello,” came again.

“When’s the next ferry from New London?” I inquired.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Aren’t you the ferry?” I faltered.

“What d’ya mean am I a ferry? This is Billy’s Garage in Goodground.”

And the title comes from the hapless operator asking Skinner to ‘excuse it, please’ – rather than ‘excuse me’. It’s not the biggest punchline in the world, and perhaps might only make a passing anecdote in everyday life, but that is Skinner’s brilliance. She can take the mundane and delve into the hidden ridiculous. She is always the butt of the joke, but she laughs with the reader.

The topics in this book might be everyday, but perhaps only for a certain sort of class of person. She doesn’t talk about an office job or housework, but rather about learning to ride a horse, sitting for a portrait, and being asked to sit on the captain’s table when on a ship. It’s a glimpse into another time and another world, so she manages to combine a sense of the quotidian (for her) and the exotic (for us – or at least for me). It is a delightful mixture, and I suspect her life would have felt quite alien even for quite a few of her contemporary readers.

While she is ultimately always the one we are being encouraged to laugh at, that doesn’t mean that nobody else gets a dose of dry humour. The opening to ‘Seeing stars’ is a case in point:

Of the many varieties of bore one of the worst I know is the person who wants to point out the stars and constellations. This is a form of midsummer pest which, like the sand flea, tends to ruin beach parties.

I cannot help but keep quoting, forgive me… this is on the next page:

He singles me out from a group of ordinary picnickers with the infallibility of the compass pointing out the magnetic pole. Were this individual possessed of any particular allure, I should not at all mind; or were his intensions bordering on the carnal, there might be a little less ennui. But he is generally the kind of man who wears rubbers and belongs to drama societies, and his intentions are purely astronomical.

“Have you noticed how clear the stars are?” he begins.

I have been noticing this phenomenon with dread and secretly praying for fog ever since I have been aware of his approach. But I answer “Yes, aren’t they?” with a politeness that I hope is frigid.

At this point, you know this is either your sort of thing or not. It perfectly chimes with my sense of humour and I can’t get enough of it. If you’re the same, then you can seek out more or less anything by Skinner. I’m very grateful that Lisa May sent me this one, so that I can spend some happy hours immersed in it.

I discovered my love for Cornelia Otis Skinner a while ago, and when I was in America in 2015, I ordered most of her work to my friend’s apartment. It was much cheaper to do that and carry then back then to pay for them to be shipped to England, and her books are very hard to find here. Since then, I’ve been rationing out her very funny collections of essays – this time, picking up Soap Behind the Ears (1941).

She writes very amusingly about the trials of everyday life – as a mother, as an actress, and as an observer of the ridiculous. Think Diary of a Provincial Lady meets Victoria Wood, but American. It’s all very diverting, and I can’t get enough of it. Which is a brief review, but I hope an encouragement to anybody who doesn’t know her to give her a try – her most famous book is the glorious Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written with Emily Kimbrough, about travelling around Europe.

My favourite piece was about trying to get new clothes for her young son – just the right amount of exaggeration in it. And here’s an excerpt from ‘The Body Beautiful’, about trying to get fit at a sort of trainer/clinic hellscape:

The time dragged almost as heavily as my limbs. Finally Miss Jones said I was a good girl and had done enough for the day (the dear Lord knows the day had done enough for me!) and I might go have my massage. I staggered out and into the capable arms of a Miss Svenson who looked like Flagstad dressed up as a nurse. She took me into a small room, flung me onto a hard table and for forty-five minutes went to work on me as if I were material for a taffy-pulling contest. She kneaded me, she rolled me with a hot rolling pin, she did to me what she called “cupping” which is just a beauty-parlor term for good old orthodox spanking. After she’d gotten me in shape for the oven she took me into a shower-room and finished me up with that same hose treatment by which they subdue the recalcitrant inmates of penitentiaries.

I read this one before the Cornelia Otis Skinner that ended up on my 50 Books You Must Read list, but somehow didn’t get around to reading it – but Popcorn (1943) is the book which started off my devotion. And it’s such a lovely copy, too. Even if I hadn’t already known the name Cornelia Otis Skinner, I think I’d have nabbed this book – the condition, the feel of the boards, and the lovely detail on the front basically sum up everything I love most in literature. As you can see in this photo which, lamentably, I’ve taken at dead of night instead of in the glorious sunshine.

Like Nuts in May, this is a series of comic episodes in the life of a hapless wife, mother, and actress. It’s a heightened version of C.O.S.’s own life, complete with the admirably silly illustrations of Alajalov and Soglow, whoever they might be. And it comes with a preface by F. Tennyson Jesse, no less.

The best way to show her is by quotation, of course, and here is a fun example of her visiting a parent of one of her son’s friends, and feeling completely out of her depth:

Once, harbouring the quaint notion that it might be a maternal duty to catch an inside glimpse of the houses to which my son has entrée, I committed the grim error of calling for him at a residence whose marble exterior and wrought-iron garage-door should have forewarned me of the exclusive nature of the juvenile goings-on within. A butler answered the bell. Butlers not only frighten, they have an over-refining effect on me, and I hear myself using the broad “a” on words like “hat”. I murmured my son’s name and the fact that I had come to fetch him. He took me for a governess and started in the direction of a waiting group of nursemaids when I managed to gasp out that I was the child’s mother. This overt confession shocked him considerably and for a moment I wondered if I should send home for my marriage licence. Reluctantly he led me up a staircase that can only be described as palatial and, opening a period door, thrust me into a room of complete darkness.

I love it so much! This collection has quite a lot on the perils and pitfalls of motherhood, but also looks at topics as varied as yoga, the telephone, being ‘the paintable type’ (it isn’t a compliment), sailing, and astrology. This last is not an activity she relishes (as in Nuts in May, many of the short accounts detail her incapabilities and inaptness for various undertakings), and the opening of it is an example of her particular: the amusing employment of simile.

Of the many varieties of bore, one of the worst I know is the person who wants to point out the stars and constellations. This is a form of midsummer pest which, like the sand-fly, tends to ruin beach parties.

And another from the same section…

Then too there is something about lying prone on the shore beside the type of creature who is generally a star-gazer that I find peculiarly distressing. It’s a little like dancing a tango with someone who is studying for the ministry.

It’s been a while since I read it, and any elaboration I would give would simply be repetitions of the same enthusiasm, but… if my previous excitement about Cornelia Otis Skinner didn’t make you dash out and get something by her then, this time, DO! Well, do if any of the quotations above amuse you, or if you find the Provincial Lady books amusing. Go on go on go on go on go on.

F. Tennyson Jesse’s preface starts off with an acknowledgement that ‘it may seem a strange time in which to publish such light-weight articles as go to make up this collection […] are we not all, including that vast country of which Miss Skinner is a citizen and which she has toured so often, engaged in a struggle for survival?’ The answer (of course) is yes – World War Two was waging, and America had entered it, but, like so many writers of the period, refuge was found in humour and an acknowledgement of the absurdity of everyday life at a time when it must have felt remote. ‘They stand, in their light-hearted way, for the very principle for which we are all fighting. There could not be a German Cornelia Otis Skinner – outside of a concentration camp.’ If this is not quite true, there certainly couldn’t have been a Nazi Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Popcorn certainly must have been not only a welcome diversion at the time, but a symbol of those who loved peace and longed for freedom. Today, whether for the same or different reasons, it is equally welcome.