Bob Benjamin, a founder of the Overseas Press Club, was the only father that Victoria Roberts, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, knew. The character “Pops” in her first novel, After The Fall [W.W. Norton, November 2012] was inspired by Benjamin and he’s also the model she uses for men in her cartoons.
In a January 3 blog on The New Yorker website, Roberts writes about Benjamin, who was her stepfather, and the special presents he would bring home when they lived in Mexico: “He was a self-made man who read everything and traveled extensively, always returning with a suitcase full of curious food items, like Jiffy popcorn (this was before NAFTA, and we had not seen this aluminum-foil magic) and crystallized violets.”
After the Fall is about an eccentric family who after a turn in fortune moves with the contents of their penthouse to Central Park – not near the park but in it. The book is not about homelessness. Pops is an inventor and makes the family comfortable. Benjamin, Roberts said, had a fondness for gadgets.
The fashionable and moody “Mother” is drawn on Roberts’ mother, Inés. The young drama queen “Sis,” Roberts concedes, is close to her. The earnest narrator is Alan, after Benjamin’s youngest son from a previous marriage. Alan Benjamin is four years older than Roberts, who had been an only child; the two were raised together during the time her mother and Benjamin remained married.
Roberts, who never met her birth father, said after she finished the book she realized “I had tried to repair real life in fiction. My mother divorced Bob when I was eleven and Alan was fourteen. … I have missed the family ever since. They are alive and together in After the Fall, with all of their eccentricity, and all of their faults, intact.”
In a New Yorker blog from 2008, Roberts described Benjamin as someone who “loved to cook with tinned food, or if there was gadgetry involved.” She wrote: “Years later, long after my mother had divorced Bob but they remained cordial, Bob invited my mother and my grandmother over to dinner. We usually took care with Bob to make sure to eat out beforehand, lest we be guinea pigs for a new recipe.”
Benjamin used his byline in founding the OPC’s Robert Spiers Benjamin Award in 1998 for best reporting in any medium on Latin America. He and 12 other correspondents started the OPC in 1939. In 1940, he chaired the club’s first dinner and edited The Inside Story, a book written by OPC members on world affairs and their personal experiences. As Roberts said, Benjamin was self-made and he started early. At 15, he sailed to Europe on a tramp ship and sent stories to United Press on events that led to the Spanish Civil War. He sailed to South America when he was 16.
He was an intelligence officer during World War II, assigned to Chile and Argentina. He was a staff writer for the Panama Star & Herald, assistant editor at Dodd, Meade and Co., Time-Life bureau chief in Chile, director of Latin American operations for Vision magazine, New York Times correspondent in Mexico and founder of his own press agency, Inter-American Press Service, and a public relations firm. His books included Call to Adventure (1934), The Vacation Guide (1940) and I’m an American (1941).
Benjamin, who died in 2008, married four times. His first wife, Dorothy Calhoun, who died in 1961, was a Red Cross correspondent and editor in Europe during WWII and a member of the editorial staff of the Curtis Publishing.