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Stephen Vincent Benét, the author of John Brown's Body and one of the most splendid human creatures of these tragic times, was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1898, the year of the Spanish War and one of the critical moments of American history. He was the son of an army officer, James Walker Benét, and of Frances Rose his wife, and he was singularly fortunate in his inheritance. On his father's side he came of Spanish or, rather, Catalonian stock, for his great grandfather had emigrated from the Balearic Islands to Florida early in the 19th century. His mother's people were of English and Scotch-Irish descent and lived in Pennsylvania. Thus, as a hundred critics have noticed, he was actually a blend of the North and South, whose conflict none was to understand better than he. But one might go farther and say that he was a blend of North and South Europe as well. His father was an officer more than usually accomplished in his profession, with a passion for poetry, not common among experts on artillery. His paternal grandfather, General Stephen Vincent Benét, had played a great part in equipping the Northern armies all through the Civil War and rose to be Chief of Ordnance after the struggle. An uncle, Mr. Laurence Benét, is a distinguished mechanical engineer and co-inventor of the Benét-Mercier machine gun, which unhappily had to be used a great deal in the first World War. The tradition of the family is military.

It should also be said of the family, all of whom I had the felicity to know, most of them extremely well, that it is perhaps as distinguished for charm and ability as any family whatever. I should not hesitate to compare them with the Adams, the Darwins, or the Trevelyans. Stephen's elder brother, William Rose Benét, and his sister, Laura Benét, also his senior, are poets of noble ability. And the grace and humor of the circle left nothing to be desired. I never heard better or more unaffected conversation on literature anywhere than on the porch of the Commandant's quarters at Benicia, California, except possibly on the porch of the Commandant's quarters in Augusta, Georgia. The Colonel was the very spirit of wit and taste in such matters and intensely diverted by the fact that his children had turned into poets under his nose. And Mrs. Benét over the tea-cups was not a whit behind him in her enjoyment and understanding of the phenomenon. As one privileged to share for many years the pleasures and sorrows of that enchanting group, I can testify that Stephen Benét was fortunate beyond most poets in his family environment.

One point is so obvious that to mention it is almost trite. There is a real connection between the profession of the father and the performance of the son. In the course of his career, an American soldier is likely to be stationed at posts all over the country. And Englishmen perhaps do not always realize quite what this means. It is as far from New York to San Francisco as from London to Constantinople, and as far from the Canadian border to the southern tip of Texas as from Birmingham to Gibraltar. And though we speak a common language, which all but a few eccentrics admit to be English, we have our share of local diversity and temperament. Stephen Benét had the experience of living in many of the great regions of the republic, for each of which in turn he developed a predilection and sympathy. As a preparation for what he was destined to create, such an opportunity to get the whole country 'into his bones' was beyond estimation. His love for the red-soiled rolling farmland of Pennsylvania, for the yellow hills and particolored marshes of San Francisco Bay, for the half-tropic lowlands and blue-grey mountains of Georgia, for the Sussex landscapes of southern New England, came naturally and early and remained to him always. None of our writers has had a larger sense of the country as a whole or in its parts, as none has made nobler use of that sense. No doubt he was born with a taste for particularity and humor, which vary notably from region to region in the United States, but circumstances had given every opportunity to satisfy any such taste. And genius, achieving a synthesis, was to do the rest.

That genius, as so often happens, was apparent enough when he was a boy of thirteen, at the time I first knew him, for he already talked with a delightful and innocent maturity that was without trace of self-conscious precocity. I still possess a 'scroll' of verses produced by four members of the Benét family to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday, which I happened to spend with them in Georgia. Stephen was sixteen then and his part is boy's verse. But I don't think it is sentiment or hindsight that makes me see the claw of the lion. A year later, and before he entered Yale, he had forced the penetralia of the terrifically conservative Century Magazine, which is a good deal as if a sixth-former had blasted his way into Blackwood. As the wit put it, editors then regarded poetry as typographical adornment which might appropriately be inserted in half-pages, otherwise blank, at the end of highbrow essays or stories which shocked few churchgoers. That such a magazine should grant space and pride of place to a sub-freshman was almost alarming. But the stirring ballad The Hemp was evidence enough that 'another county had been heard from'. Almost at the same time his first book appeared in a series of little volumes whose authors included Gordon Bottomley and Richard Aldington. 'Five Men and Pompey' is definitely young and Browningesque, but its derivativeness is of that healthy order that even the inexpert know is allotropic creativeness. It was only natural and right that he won every prize for poetry which Yale College could offer by the time he was graduated in 1919, not to mention preparing a brilliant abridgement of Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine' for the college dramatic society. It was not hard to foresee a bright future when, after an additional year in the Graduate School, he left college to live by his pen.

It has been considered unfortunate that geniuses, like others, have to boil the pot. But it is well known that it does not hurt the real thing much. Often Stephen Benét had to write in haste for bread instead of at leisure for love. But he always seemed able to put the kettle on the fire with his left hand, and the pot boiled easily. From the time he launched forth there was not a year in his life that he did not write something better than editors demand. Working to meet a deadline, he seemed always to have the precious gift of preserving what was precious. Though some of his stories are hack-work, he always had projects' in hand that were not in that category. And in 1926, by which time he was married to Rosemary Carr, herself a poet with a fine lyric gift and his collaborator in the delightful A Book of Americans, the Guggenheim Foundation gave him a travelling fellowship, subsequently renewed. This at once relieved him from immediate anxieties and also brought it to pass that John Brown's Body, a poem as American in thought and texture as Leaves of Grass, was written in Paris.

John Brown's Body is an epic poem with many strands of personality and action, at first glance only loosely connected but actually woven into one strong cord. Part of its power for us, and, it is believed, for our friends across the oceans, is that it tells us things we needed to be told about our virtues and defects. The great struggle three-quarters of a century ago had grown dim in recollection, but to forget the issues, the beliefs, the self-sacrifice on both sides, was to forget our birthright. This book renewed the sense of 'a great thing done under the sun'. The Civil War, one of the most furious contests in history, in spite of the contemptuous Moltke's lack of interest 'in a battle of armed mobs', had its origins in conflicts of philosophies, moralities, and material interests that lay coiled around each other like the ghastly Gordian knots of blacksnakes or copperheads one may discover in Spring in glens up the Hudson. The war left the North triumphant and exhausted and the South subjected and paralyzed. To this day, seventy-eight years after Appomatox, the effects are visible in great tracts of the country, where the bloody shirt is still waved. The conquerors, unchecked by Lincoln's even hand, could hardly be described as generous. The conquered dressed their wounds as they might. Each side had its special mythology, invariably unflattering to the other. As late as 1910 there were Southerners who believed that Lincoln was a sinister and adroit tyrant and were not apt to be persuaded of the contrary. Many Northerners thought and still think of Southerners as slack and bad-tempered persons quite mad on the negro question and 'States Rights'. We hope this mutual intolerance grows less with time, but it is at least as deep-seated as religious prejudice and no easier to overcome. In some strange way a man in his late twenties was able to look at the origins and consequences of the War at once objectively and passionately, from both sides and for the sake of both. For Stephen Benét the ghastly struggle was 'doing and suffering' that meant far more to him than any philosophy or other interest. This he was able to make clear to others. And as one considers his epic, one hardly knows which to admire most, the kindness, the beauty, or the understanding.

Histories of the Civil War we have had ad nauseam. And they are no 'jewels five-words long' either! But John Brown's Body is nearer than history is apt to get to that veracity which is beyond time. Ruskin's remark that The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church told him more about the Renaissance than many volumes, is apposite once more. A hundred passages in John Brown's Body light up the surface of events, dulled by the ceaseless wash of uninspired repetition, as ultraviolet light brings out unfamiliar flame from a weathered quartz pebble whose inward crystal is suddenly apparent to the most unimaginative. The easy conversational verse meanders along, tautening unexpectedly and in a flash into the fiery and inevitable episode. John Brown, Lincoln, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant each speaks in his proper idiom. Touched by the magic hand of chance they become living men, and no longer steel engravings static in half-forgotten histories. The lesser figures who carry the story forward in their splendor or misery--the southern professional beauty, the Black Horse Troop aristocrats, the bewildered New England volunteer, the girl of the great plantation, the girl calling hogs in the wilderness (what an occupation for a heroine!), the Kentucky hill-billy, the Pennsylvania farmer-soldier, the Union Spy, the fugitive slave--come before us in a succession of incandescent contrasts with a reality beyond accepted versions of the event known to all Americans and not unnaturally ignored by them. The actual emerges from the Bermuda Deep of the unhappy and far off, the thing as it was, the form and pressure.

Every rereading of the book reveals something notable one had failed to note, some correspondence, some piece of 'psychological counterpoint'. This is a normal experience when works of magnitude are examined. 'One is never through reading them.' As the saying runs, pick up Sterne tomorrow and he will surprise you again. Run through Hamlet once more and discover what you never dreamed in a phrase so familiar that you had quoted it yourself dozens of times. It has been properly said that it is one of the qualities of great writing to seem for ever full of novelty though never so familiar. And beyond peradventure John Brown's Body has this quality.

It is perhaps not necessary to dwell on a point which the English reader will probably discover for himself, but it may be mentioned in passing. Don Quixote, the experts say, contains everything that is Spain. Not a sentence, we are told, but indicates a native slant and habit of thought, echoes or perhaps mocks the proverbial, reveals local idiosyncrasy, alludes to and plays on the national character that makes a Spaniard. Something of the kind might appropriately be said of Stephen Benét's epic. Some State Department official is alleged to have given the book to a European diplomat as a short cut to understanding what we are like. If the story is true, that official was more acute than the generality of his brethren. For everything we are is somewhere in John Brown's Body--our heroisms and our shames, our valiant and our cowards, our little and our great, and our men and women, our dreams, our emotions. But I am perfectly willing to let the book speak for us in living poetry no critic can anatomize, poetry that is read by learned men in their studies and Red Indians in mountain camps.

This is not the place to speak at length of Stephen Benét's other work: of his novels, less substantial perhaps than most of his performance; of his many short stories, of which a number, particularly The Devil and Daniel Webster and Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer, seem to have escaped from the category of the merely contemporary; of his superb poems, like The Mountain Whippoorwill, or of the majestic fragment Western Star which was to be prolegomena to the epic of western migration now lost to us for ever. It remains rather to speak a little of the personality and nature of the man who wrote these things.

Physically Stephen Benét was a rather odd looking man, roundheaded, round-shouldered. His sister-in-law, Elinor Wylie, called him 'a cherub in armor', the armor no doubt being his mind. Certainly, despite a constitutional leanness, he had something of the cherubic in his appearance, which I do not think was particularly impressive until you spoke to him. Then you were immediately aware of the quiet intelligence and exciting gaiety in his dark, peering, short-sighted eyes. They had a look as if he were playing in his mind. He was. For, as many noted, he was like Browning's imagined poet: 'you felt he saw'. And again like Browning's poet, there was nothing prying or unkind in his steady scrutiny. He was merely taking stock of 'the diversity of Allah's creatures'. It was his métier. And it was why people liked him so much. For everyone rightly divined that his was a legitimate, systematic and wholly intelligent interest. One doesn't encounter that so frequently that one can afford to ignore it. During his last years he suffered severely from some arthritic trouble which made every motion slow and languid. But pain never killed his interest--or his gaiety. And at any gathering of friends he was invariably, a bright center of strangely catalytic mirth, that made you think of an unorthodox but diverting Buddha.

He was humorous rather than witty, though he could be as epigrammatic as the next man when occasion arose, and it was ill to attempt a score at his expense. His forte was the illumination of what Doctor Johnson called anfractuosity, his own and other men's. It was observed that his fame amused him, as a mild anecdote which he himself related to me may indicate. A battery of cameras was trained on the Benét family as they came down the gangplank from the third-class of the Ile de France on their return from France. Stephen Benét heard the chief photographer ask a reporter, 'What are they shooting the guy for?' 'Why,' said the reporter, gently explanatory, 'He's the author of John Brown's Body.' 'Yes, I know, but what are they shooting him for?' Something like that would make him happy for a week. His enjoyment of the reduction of self-importance was an essential element in his nature. Yet when he deflated a person or an idea, he never seemed to injure personal dignity. At the same time he was a magnificent hater, implacable and determined in a manner to astonish anyone who misinterpreted his habitual gentleness.

He did not seem to be aware of the incredible breadth of his information, which was Gargantuan, but even more striking was his catholicity and the kind wisdom of his judgment. Scores of younger and older writers were the beneficiaries of this wisdom. And you never talked with him about a book or a man without feeling that you had consulted an oracle that was Delphic without being pompous. Wisdom is hard to attain and harder to describe, but he had it and in some unobtrusive manner was able to convey it to others, if they could take it. It has been said that such wisdom is best transmitted by indirection. At any rate, by allusion, 'by the phrase cut short in the middle, by some adverbial modification', Stephen Benét was able to persuade or suggest and for most of too short a life was guide and philosopher to a hundred friends in a thousand connections.

The fact is that the odd-looking man, who was so unpretentious, so gentle, so amusing, had an attribute which I for one should call greatness, though such a statement would not have pleased him. It is not too much to say that one reason he wrote so well of Lincoln was that he had his Lincoln streak. The quality was in him beyond any literary tact or poetic taste. And it helps to explain why in writing of heroic men at tragic junctures Stephen Benét never declines into that hushed, mawkish, reverential, semi-religious tone that characterizes the many who failed where he succeeded. He knew greatness from the inside and could write of it with a fellow feeling--even for its weakness.

His death in March 1943, at a moment of national crisis, was like a great defeat for men and women of good will throughout the United States. Somehow he had gathered our aspirations into himself and had so become himself symbolic. The voice still speaks to us like a trumpet, but there was much more that it lay in him to utter among the captains and the shouting. And it would have been good to hear.

LEONARD BACON

Peace Dale Rhode Island September 1943

To

MY MOTHER

and to the memory of

MY FATHER