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Stephen (Vincent) Benét (1898-1943) |
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American poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, best-known for John Brown'sBody, a long epic poem on the Civil War, which Benét 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 the insensitivity of his school mates. Later wrote about his experiences in his poem about Shelley at Eton: "His pile of books scattered about his feet, / Stood Shelley while two others held him fast, / And the clods beat upon him." 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. Benét was rejected from the army because of his defective vision. 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 Thronton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish. 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, where 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, where he lived for four years, and started 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." 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, he collected background material from libraries for the poem, which became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and has remained in print since its publication. 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. Benét's financial success was brief: he lost almost all of his earnings to the stock market crash. Before starting any new work, he published a collection of ballads and poems, written over a period of fifteen years. It celebrated American names and people, such as William Sycamore, whose "... father, he was a mountaineer / His fist was a knotty hammer..." "I have fallen in love with American names, Benét was elected in 1929 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." Benét popular poem, 'American Names,' which appeared first in Ballads and Poems (1931), ended with the famous line 'Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.' 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: "We are all good citizens here. We believe in the / Perfect State." 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 was taken 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). Benét also made a number of radio broadcasts and worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He wrote a series of radio scripts, including Listen to the People (1941) and They Burned the Books (1942). His short stories, produced during these years, were often written 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), published in Life magazine, became a national sensation. For the Office of War Information Benét wrote a short history of the United States, which was translated and distributed in Europe. Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943. He was posthumously awarded in 1944 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, become a journalist, and 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); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Stephen Vincent Benet: Essays on His Life and Work, ed. by David Garrett Izzo (2002) - See also: The Headless Horseman; Washington Irving Selected works:
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