Life & Wisdom Quote by Max Eastman

Eastman’s jab lands because it pretends to be a craft note and behaves like a character assassination. “Style” is treated as a body: not just flawed, but physically frail, collapsing mid-sentence for a nap. The comedy is in the faux-gentle phrasing. “Weak” could be a neutral workshop critique; “lies down frequently to rest” turns that critique into a cartoon, implying Benchley’s prose can’t keep its footing long enough to finish a thought. Eastman isn’t arguing with Benchley’s ideas so much as attacking his stamina, his seriousness, his right to be taken as an adult in print.

The subtext is a larger anxiety about what counted as legitimate writing in early-20th-century American letters. Benchley, a celebrated humorist and Algonquin regular, made a career out of digression, anticlimax, and deliberately underpowered conclusions - the very “resting” Eastman mocks. Eastman, a critic and political writer with modernist ambitions and a taste for polemics, is drawing a border: on one side, literature as discipline; on the other, comedy as indulgence. It’s gatekeeping, but with a grin.

Context matters: this is a period when wit was both currency and weapon in literary circles. To say Benchley’s style lies down is also to suggest it refuses the strenuous masculinity of “serious” prose. The insult works because it’s vivid, quotable, and slightly unfair - the kind of line that, like Benchley’s own humor, prioritizes the laugh over the verdict.