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Stephen (Vincent) Benét (1898-1943) |
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American poet, novelist, and writer of short stories. Stephen Benét is best-known for John Brown's Body (1928), a long epic poem on the Civil War, which he wrote in France. Benét received two Pulitzer prizes for his poetry. He was one of those rare poets who was both popular and critically acclaimed. "American muse, whose strong and diverse heart As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
into an army family. His father was Colonel J. Walker Benét. Frances
Neill (Rose) Benét, Stephen's mother, was a descendant of an old
Kentucky military family. Because his father was an avid reader, who
especially loved poetry, Benét grew up in home, where literature was
valued and enjoyed. Most of his boyhood Benét spent in Benicia,
California. At the age about ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock
Military Academy. However, he preferred reading to athletics and did
not like his school mates. Later he recalled his
experiences in a poem about Shelley at Eton: "And there, his back
against the battered door, / His pile of books scattered about his
feet, /
Stood Shelley while two others held him fast, / And the clods beat upon
him. 'Shelley! Shelley!' / The high shouts rang through all the
corridors, / 'Shelley! Mad Shelley! Come along and help!´'" ('The General Public,' in Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét: Volume One: Poetry, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942, p. 342) Benét completed his secondary education in Augusta, Georgia, where his father had been assigned a new post. Benét's first book, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a collection of verse, was published when he was 17. It showed the romantic influence of William Morris as well as the influence of modern realism. Due to poor eyesight, Benét was rejected from the army. During the war he worked in Washington as a cipher-clerk in the
same department as James Thurber, who also had poor eyesight. Benét
received from Yale his master's degree, submitting his third volume of
poems, Heavens and Earth (1920), instead of a thesis.
In Yale his contemporaries included Thornton
Wilder
and Archibald MacLeish. Wilder wrote of Benét: "He is a perfectly
unromantic looking person, although not commonplace. His hair is short
and light and curly. His face is round and quizzical and snubbed and
his eyes are mole's eyes. He rocks his shoulder from side to side while
talking." (The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder by Gilbert A. Harrison, New York: Tichnor & Fields, 1983, p. 52) Benét's first novel, the autobiographical The Beginning of Wisdom (1921), showed the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He continued his studies at Sorbonne, France. He stayed at the home of his Uncle Larry, the managing director of a munitions firm, whose apartment had a view on the Seine and Eiffel Tower. Later he took a room in Montparnasse, lived somewhat bohemian life and met his wife and moral compass of his life, the writer and journalist Rosemary Carr. Many of his playful love poems were collected in Tiger Joy (1925). Sylvia Beach, who ran the Shakespeare and Company bookstore on Paris's Left Bank, brought him to meet Gertude Stein. Back in Benét in the United States, Benét set out to make a living as a writer. In New York City the family lived first at 220 East 69th Street between Third and Second Avenues, and then at 215 East 68th. Visitors often dropped by without prior notice. Benét's study was full of books, from the floor to ceiling, in piles on tables and chairs and spilling onto the carpet. An omnivorous reader himself, Benét used to read aloud to his children in the evening after dinner, Tales of King Arthur, Kilping, Oz books, Arthur Conan Doyle. During the 1920s he published the novels, Young
People's Pride (1922), serialized in Harper's Bazaar,
Jean Huguenot (1923), and Spanish Bayonet (1926),
a historical novel about the 18th-century Florida dealing with Benét's
ancestors. With John Farrar he wrote two plays, Nerves and That
Awful Mrs. Eaton, which opened and closed in September 1924. After
their failure he did not attempt any form of dramatic for several
years. In 1930 he worked with Gerrit Lloyd on the screenplay for D.W.
Griffith film Abraham Lincoln. In
1926 Benét won a Guggenheim fellowship, enabled him to
focus solely on writing, without constantly worrying about money and
bills. With his wife, he went back to France. They took an apartment on
the rue Jadin, and moved then to 89 avenue de Neuilly (now avenue
Charles-de-Gaulle), in suburban Neuilly, just beyond the city limits of
Paris. Several expatriates lived there, among them the writer William
Seabrook and the director King Vidor. Also the American Hospital was
located there. After the renewal of the grant, Benét returned to Paris,
taking an apartment on the rue de Longchamp. Benét lived in France for four
years. Becoming more self-consciously an American in character, Benét began to work on his poem about the Civil
War, John Brown's Body.
"So, from a hundred visions, I make
one, / And out of darkness build my mocking sun. / And should that task
seem fruitless in the eyes / Of those a different magic sets apart / To
see through the ice-crystal of the wise / No nation but the nation that
is Art, / Their words are just. . . . " (Ibid., pp. 6-7) Already in his
childhood, Benét had been fascinated by his father's old Rebellion
Records and his Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. While in
France, Benét collected background material from
libraries for his epic poem. Published in New York by Doubleday, Doran
& Co., it became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and has remained in print since its appearance. Seen
from the perspective of a young, small town boy, it interweaved stories
of historical and fictional figures, from the raid of Harper's Ferry to
General Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. Benét's collection
of verse appeared with the acclaim of critics, although Harriet Moore
labelled it a "cinematic epic" in Poetry, and some other
critics, in tune with the times, tried to find from it important social
issues. In the 1941 preface to the work, Benét said that John Brown's Body"tells
its story in a different way from prose—it uses rhyme and meter and the
words go to a beat. You cannot read it precisely as you read prose, any
more than you can sing the words of a song without knowing the tune.
With poetry, the tune is in the words themselves—and once you begin to
hear it, it will stay with you." Benét's financial success was brief: he lost almost all of
his
earnings in the stock market crash, that signaled the beginning of the
Great Depression. Upon the invitation of D.W. Griffith, he went to
Hollywood, where he co-wrote the screenplay for Griffith's film Abraham Lincoln
(1930). Benét was paid $1,000 a week for twelve weeks. "Nowhere have I seen such shining waste, stupidity and conceit
as in the business and managing end of this industry," he said in a
letter to his agent Carl Brandt. "If I don't get out of here soon I'm
going crazy." ('Benét as Dramatist for Stage, Screen, and Radio' by David Garrett Izzo and Lincoln Konkle, in Stephen Vincent Benét: Essays on His Life and Work, edited by David Garrett Izzo, Lincoln Konkle, Jefferson, North Caroline, and London: McFarland & Company, 2003, p. 218) When the script was finished, Benét
turned down Griffith's offer to develop his idea of a film about the
history of Texas and the stand at the Alamo. He never worked in Hollywood again. Later he contributed to two films, Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941) and All That Money Can Buy (1941), but did not leave New York. Before directing his energy to new works, Benét published a collection of ballads and poems, written over a period of fifteen years. It celebrated American names and people, such as William Sycamore (1790-1871), whose ". . . father, he was a mountaineer / His fist was a knotty hammer; / He was quick on his feet as a running deer, / And he spoke with a Yankee stammer." ('The Ballad of William Sycamore,' in Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét: Volume One: Poetry, p. 368) In 1929, Benét was elected to the National Institute of Arts
and Letters and nine years later to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. In the 1930s Benét published among others A Book of
Americans (1933) with his wife. It was nostalgic excursion to the
past: "When Daniel Boone goes by, at night, / The phantom deer arise /
And all lost, wild America / Is burning in their eyes." ('Daniel Boone,' in A Book of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét, illustrated by Charles Child, New York: Farra and Rinehart, MCMXXXIII, p. 67) 'American Names,' which appeared first in Ballads and Poems 1915-1930 (1931), ended with the line 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,' which gave the title to the 1970 history of Native Americans by Dee Brown, but obviously Benét did not refer to the Wounded Knee massacre of December 29, 1890: "I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. / I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. / You may bury my body in Sussex grass, / You may bury my tongue at Champmédy, / I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. / Bury my heart at Wounded Knee." ('American Names,' in Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét: Volume One: Poetry, p. 368) James Shore's Daughter (1934), a story about wealth and responsibility, is usually considered among Benét's best achievements. The Burning City (1936) included the bitter 'Litany for Dictatorships,' in which Benét attacked fascism and mass mentality: "And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face, / Smoothing her dress. / "We are all good citizens here. / We believe in the Perfect State." / And that was the last / Time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house / And the family ws liquidated later." (Burning City: New Poems, decorations by Charles Child, New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936, p. 14) The Headless Horseman (1937) was an one-act play, inspired by Washington Irving's story. Thirteen O'Clock (1937) included the celebrated 'The Devil and Daniel Webster,' originally published in the Saturday Evening Post. It was later made into a play, and opera (music by Douglas Moore), and a motion picture entitled All That Money Can Buy, directed by William Dieterle and starring Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch. The music by Bernard Herrmann was awarded an Oscar. In the story a hard-pressed farmer, Jabez Stone, makes a deal with the Devil, but is saved from the pit by a famous lawyer's pleading at his 'trial.' The jury which he calls to hear Webster's case in compounded out of the greatest villains of American history. Benét based his tale on Faust, but set it in the 19th-century New England. This work had two sequels, 'Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent' (1937) and 'Daniel Webster and the Ideas of March' (1939). The short story 'Sobbin' Women,' collected in Thirteen O'Clock, later inspired Stanley Donen's musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), starring Howard Keel and Jane Powell. The story drew from Plutarch's tale of the kidnapping and rape of the Sabine women, but its beginning also had similarities with Aleksis Kivi's novel Seven Brothers (Seitsemän veljestä) from 1870, which came out in English in 1929. In 'Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer,' published in Tales Before Midnight (1939), Benét Americanized the Death, whom the hero outsmarts by refusing to accept an offer of immortality. Besides the horror, mystery and fantastic, Benét was interested in science fiction. The dystopic tale, 'By the Waters of Babylon' came out in 1937, years before the Atomic Bomb. The tale was set in the future, in a world after the Great Burning – the fire which fell out of the sky. Poor vision had plagued Benét throughout his life, and he was also crippled by arthritis and suffered a bout of mental illness. These personal problems perhaps affected his later fantasies, such as 'The Minister's Books' and 'The Angel Was a Yankee,' collected in The Last Circle (1946). Besides making a number of radio broadcasts, Benét wrote a series of radio scripts, including Listen to the People
(1941) and They Burned the Books (1942), a radio drama in verse, his best-known contribution to the war effort. His
short stories, produced during these years, were often produced under
pressure to pay bills. In the early 1940s Benét was a strong advocate
of America's entry into the war –
in the United Nations Day speech President Roosevelt read a prayer
specially composed by the author. The antifascist poem 'Nightmare at Noon' (1940) became
a national sensation. First published in Life magazine,
it began with the lines, "There are no trenches dug in the park,
not yet. / There are no soldiers falling out of the sky. / It's a fine,
clear day, in the park. It is bright and hot. / The trees are in full,
green, summer-heavy leaf. / An airplane drones overhead but no one's
afraid. / There's no reason to be afraid, in a fine, big city / That
was not built for a war. There is time and time." ('Nightmare at Noon,' in Stephen Vincent Benét Pocket Book, edited and with and introduction by Robert van Gelder, New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1946, p. 361) For the Office of War Information Benét
wrote a short history of the United States, which was translated and
distributed in Europe. Stephen Vincent Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington, Conneticut. In 1944, Benét was posthumously awarded in the Pulitzer Prize for Western Star. The poem was the first volume of a large verse epic about the American frontier. Benét's elder brother, William Rose Benét, became a journalist, and also a Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped found the Saturday Review of Literature. Benét's The Reader's Encyclopedia (1948) was for decades the standard American guide to world literature. For further reading: Stephen Vincent Benét by William Rose Benét (1943); Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters, 1898-1943 by Charles A. Fenton (1958); Stephen Vincent Benét by Parry Stroud (1962); 'Benét, Stephen Vincent,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Stephen Vincent Benét: Essays On His Life and Work, edited by David Garrett Izzo and Lincoln Konkle (2003); Darling Ro and the Benét Women by Evelyn Helmick Hively (2011); With a Dream So Proud: The Life of Stephen Vincent Benét by Donnell Rubay; edited by Mary Eichbauer, Lois Requist (2016) Selected works:
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