Arts and Letters

Stephen Vincent Benét lived with such intensity that he accomplished more in his forty-five years than all but a very few veterans of letters, and his writing was so multiform that one hesitates to single out any of his compositions as the most important. He was a novelist; some of his short stories were among the most brilliant of their time; he wrote a libretto, a musical comedy, motion-picture and radio scripts, plays, essays, prefaces, addresses. His poems included ballads, sonnets, folk-rhymes, and epics; for the fragmentary Western Star, which appeared soon after his death, was the first book of a narrative poem that was planned on the scale of John Brown's Body. These heroic historical poems gave him the position of a sort of poet laureate of the United States, and fifty years from now perhaps John Brown's Body will be the work of Stephen Benét that is most generally read. One can scarcely imagine a day when Americans will not know this poem. It seems destined to survive in the mind of the nation among the few final achievements of our time in letters.

The circumstances of Benét's life, his family history, his early surroundings, concurred to shape his feelings for the "American Muse," the muse whom he addressed in a well-known Invocation and who also inspired some of his finest prose-pieces. He grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and history, the child of three generations of West Point men, bearing the name of a grandfather who was a general in the Civil War and an author and translator of military books. His father, an officer also, was a great lover and reader of poetry, whose "reading voice," as Stephen Benét's eminent older brother has said, "made you astonishedly aware of nobility and heroism." This father constantly discussed even the most abstruse poets, such as Thomas Holley Chivers and the English Beddoes, and Stephen Benét talked over with him the campaigns of Grant and Lee and read as a young boy Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. He studied other records of the War between the States, as Northerners too are not unwilling to call it. The sequence of cause and effect has seldom been so apparent in a poet's life as in the case of the author of John Brown's Body. Moreover, he lived as a boy in every section of the country, following the fortunes of a military household that was stationed in the East, in the West, and in the South. Born in 1898, the historic year of the Spanish War, familiar as a child with northern New York and Pennsylvania, he was at school in California and then for a while at Augusta, Georgia, before he went to college at Yale in New England. By virtue of this all-American boyhood, as well as this heredity, Stephen Benét was rooted in the life of the country as few of his contemporaries could have been; and this explains not only his passion for the native ground but also in part his astonishing talent for capturing local atmospheres. Every reader knows how well he conveyed the character of New England in his tales of Daniel Webster and Paul Revere, and many readers know his truthful impression of California in the charming early novel Young People's Pride. This gift is most strikingly evident in his scenes of the South, for although he later lived in New York, when he was not in Connecticut—in the Whistler house at Stonington, where he spent his summers—he had for the South a very special feeling that found expression alike in his verse and in his prose. He catches wonderfully the note of the Southern mountaineers in the story called "The Sobbin' Women," and one remembers the Southern sections of John Brown's Body as perhaps the most fully developed and deeply felt. Then one recalls the story "Glamour," so quintessentially of the South, and the radiant pictures of Georgia in the novel Jean Huguenot and of Benét's ancestral St. Augustine in Spanish Bayonet. How often and how beautifully he evokes the quality of the Southern scene—“the sun and long afternoons and slow rivers, and time, time, time," as he says in one of these novels, "just gliding along like a current, not going anywhere particular, but gay."

One can easily over-stress, however, this note of Benét's "American Muse," for his sympathies and the range of his writing were as wide as the world. It was the world-crisis that absorbed his whole mind in the last two years, and some of his finest stories and poems dealt with aspects of it that had no connection with this country. One thinks of his "Ode to the Austrian Socialists" and "The Blood of the Martyrs," that moving tale about the German biochemist who would have none of the Nazis, and the fine fantasy "Into Egypt," in which the Holy Family seems to emerge in the sorrowful stream of Jewish refugees. All the world and much of history appear in Stephen Benét's writing, stories of the eighteenth century, of the ancient Romans, and Paris constantly reappears, especially in the novels that reflect so much of the life of his "younger generation." Benét lived and wrote in Paris, like Franklin, Jefferson, and Joel Barlow, and like Hemingway, Dos Passos, and others in his own time. He wrote John Brown's Body there, as Fenimore Cooper wrote The Prairie, as Washington Irving wrote Tales of a Traveller and John Howard Payne wrote "Home, Sweet Home." For writing in Paris is one of the oldest American customs, and Benét shared the affection for Paris that was almost universal among the writers of his group and day. Then he had an extraordinary feeling for youth, in this resembling Scott Fitzgerald, for the glamor and pathos of first love and for childhood too in all its phases. One gathers that The Shropshire Lad had played its part in the growth of his mind—he mentions these poems I think in four of his novels—and he catches perfectly the accent of young lovers and the wonder of early childhood and the life of a boy. Boarding school and camps and children's parties appear with startling reality in his tales, along with the style of the jazz age and stories of young married people and fantasies of the utmost delicacy like "The King of the Cats." He was almost always a storyteller, whether in verse or in prose, and one wonders, reading his masterly tales, if he would have returned in time to his earlier preoccupation with novel-writing.

Stephen Benét felt at home in too many scenes and too many forms to be pigeonholed in a single category. Yet one feels that the "American Muse" was present in his finest hours, those in which his mind was fired by heroic events and memories. In his work on the native ground he had hosts of imitators, although as a folk-writer he was preceded by Vachel Lindsay, while he had something in common with Carl Sandburg. He had the art of making what seemed to be a real folk-legend—Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer and The Devil and Daniel Webster—in which all improbable realities were simplified away. These tales had an air of coming out of a timeless past. Elsewhere he caught American essences, the essence of the Irish railroad worker, of the Southern die-hard, of the fugitive slave, while even in his early novels one heard the strain of the ballad-maker who was already evolving into the maker of epics. It is not possible here to dwell on the luminous traits of John Brown's Body and its fragmentary successor Western Star. One can only mention the brilliant portraits of Grant, Lee, Jackson, Sherman, the great shadow of Lincoln brooding over all, the pictures of the little people, so varied, so typical, so sympathetic, the panoramic grasp of all the regions. One notes the unfailing tact of the poet in varying his verse-forms so that one never wearies of the lengthening tale, together with his skill in developing a style that suggests at every point the modern talker. At a time when so many writers seemed negative, this poet was affirmative, while he exemplified "public speech" in a day of private poetry. In these ways he revived the role of the older American poets, who were true voices of the people. These older poets would have rejoiced in the zest and gallantry of a life that was given, like a soldier's, in war-time, for the saving of his country.