First Word on Benet
FERCUSON, DELANCEY
First Word on Benet By Charles A. Fenton Yale. 436 STEPHEN VINCENT BENET has not fared too well with the critics. To the pundits he is suspect because he was lucid and witty and wrote...
...Ben?t took America as he found it, warts and all, and put it into prose and verse that lifts the heart of the reader...
...But this pleasant fooling was merely one of the masks under which Ben?t hid his sensitivity to the changes and chances of this mortal life...
...Yet Ben?t's potboiling is far from being a tale of genius degraded by the demands of bread and butter...
...But that report can be made only with reservations...
...He had made editors momentarily realize that there were other story themes besides boy-meetsgirl, and—what was more—that there was a public to read them...
...Like Yeats, he could make enduring literature out of current affairs...
...The Blood of the Martyrs," for instance, re-read nearly 25 years after it was written, still stands on its own feet as a great story, when most of the anti-fascist writing of the 1930s is hopelessly dated as propaganda...
...But it is something to have said the first...
...This was attributed to Plummert's edition of the Noctivigations of John Cleveland Cotton...
...Then he had to go back to writing formula stories for the popular magazines—more numerous then than now, but just as timidly edited...
...The book aims to be critical study as well as personal biography, and the personal part is the better, for Fenton has had access to Ben?t's many letters, and quotes them freely...
...it is also obvious that Fenton has not said the last words about his life and works...
...To the scandal-snuffers he is a washout, being monogamous and not given to quarreling with his friends...
...it may not have proved to be quite the universal sense, but still it made sense...
...Tales Before Midnight carried a fly-leaf motto: "Tell your tale before midnight...
...The timely grant of a Guggenheim fellowship gave him the 18 worry-free months he needed to finish "John Brown's Body...
...It all adds up to a severe handicap...
...When he began writing his highly individual blendings of humor, folktale and poetic symbolism, his loyal agent, Carl Brandt, could not sell them to the big slicks...
...No statistics exist to show how many PhD's have hunted vainly for the history of the Reverend John Smeet, who shared the jury-box with Simon Girty, Walter Butler, and the rest of the hellish panel before whom Jabez Stone was tried...
...First Word on Benet By Charles A. Fenton Yale...
...To the pundits he is suspect because he was lucid and witty and wrote one of the few long poems which in this century have achieved mass circulation...
...Many people have undertaken to write about "the American dream,'" and have produced corn-syrup...
...Poets can seldom support themselves by writing poetry, and the problem of livelihood bedeviled Ben?t throughout his too-brief life ( 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 4 3 ) . Already nationally known as a poet while still an undergraduate at Yale, he was forced to write prose in order to live...
...In the criticism, however, he has not solved the problem of communication— the problem, that is, of so summarizing the various works as to give the reader some idea of the points at issue even if he hasn't read the books...
...436 STEPHEN VINCENT BENET has not fared too well with the critics...
...When at long last the Post, greatly daring, took "The Devil and Daniel Webster," Ben?t had wrought a minor miracle...
...It is quite obvious now that we should have a collection of Ben?t's letters...
...He had spoken his inmost thought...
...Rather, it is a tale of genius converting the Philistines...
...Through most of this work ran Ben?t's impish humor, often setting traps for the unwary highbrow...
...they finally appeared in such journals as Elks' Magazine and Country Gentleman...
...But there have been plenty...
...it is later than you think...
...Marion King, of the New York Society Library, has confessed that she was one of the many librarians who did a lot of hunting for Cotton before she tumbled to the hoax...
...He deserves a full-scale biography, and it would be pleasant to report that Fenton has provided it...
Vol. 41 • December 1958 • No. 47
