Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Characters Themes Style Critical Overview Sources Further Reading |
Criticism
Wendy Perkins
Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines Benét's mix of modernist and realist elements in the story.
Modernism, one of the most fruitful periods in American letters, emerged in the decade that followed World War I (1914 – 18). Modernist authors such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald became part of what Gertrude Stein called, the "lost generation" — the generation who saw, often first-hand, the horrors of war and who struggled to survive despite a sense of lost values and ideals.
The 1920s became an age of confusion, redefinition, and experimentation. The spirit of the Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age as Fitzgerald called this period, was reflected in modernist themes. On the surface, the characters in many of the literary works of this decade live in the rarified atmosphere of the upper class. They drink, party, have sexual adventures, but underneath the glamorous surface emerges the meaninglessness at the heart of their existence. This meaninglessness was compounded in the 1930s when the Great Depression hit and so many Americans lost their wealth. The modernists reflected the zeitgeist (a German word for "spirit") of their age — a time when, in the aftermath of World War I, many Americans lost faith in traditional institutions such as the government, social norms, religion, and even the worth of family relationships.
Each modernist writer focused on different ways to cope with this loss: some of their characters try to drown a sense of emptiness in the fast-paced life of the 1920s, some in sexual relationships, and some in personal notions of courage. All ultimately have difficulty sustaining any sense of fulfillment and completion in the modern age.
Not all writers in the 1920s and 1930s dramatized the tenets of modernism in their works. Many, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Willa Cather, continued the tradition of realism, the dominant literary mode of the end of the nineteenth century. Realism focuses on the commonplace and the everyday, giving readers an impression that what is being presented is an accurate portrait of ordinary experience. Some incorporated the old with the new, combining elements of both schools. One such writer was Stephen Vincent Benét. In his award winning short story "An End to Dreams," Benét adroitly combines modernist subjects with realist sensibilities as he explores one man's pursuit of the American dream.
James Rimington could walk into any story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and be at home. Like Jay Gatsby, James is devoted to the American dream, to the belief that anyone can achieve financial success. Humiliated by the "grinding" poverty of his youth, which forced him to wear a patched jacket, James vows not to let anything stand in his way as he strives to gain wealth and the power it affords. After seeing a rich classmate gain popularity, James concludes, "if you had a pony and your father owned the bank, they wouldn't laugh at you." He believes that "you could stop being poor if you wanted to enough."
He is unable to recognize the decency of the residents in his small town, including his mother, who works selflessly for her family, and the value of their slow-paced but fulfilling lives. He turns down a job offer from the president of the local bank, which promised advancement but not the kind that would satisfy James. His ambition drives him to abandon the girl he loves and move to New York City where he becomes as corrupt as the "pirate" John Q. Dixon, eventually beating the powerful tycoon at his own game.
James ends up like many modernists characters. His single-minded pursuit of wealth has thrown him into a world of "the books and the pictures, the charities and the gifts" because "one was not interested enough." He had plenty of women, but they were "light and hollow as figures made of pasteboard; they had no importance." All he had was his work and the power it gained him, but ultimately those were not enough to save him. Money could not buy him health, and as he lies apparently dying in his hospital bed, reviewing his life, he cannot find one person to help him, not one person who cares about his fate.
If the story had ended here, it would be an apt illustration of modernist themes with its focus on the meaninglessness in the materialism and superficiality of the American dream. But this ending would not fit Benét's own sensibilities. When James awakes from his dream of what might have been, he becomes a realist hero: he has made a nobler choice for the direction of his life. He is rewarded for that choice by the loving attention his family offers him, the immediate attention his wife Elsa expresses to him in the hospital. She refuses to leave his side and his children and sister are "just crazy" to see him.
Realist literature centers on conduct and the consequences of actions, especially on the dynamics of cause and effect relationships. While realist writers incorporated the idea of individuality from the Romantics, they focused on the ability to choose, which involved deliberation, weighing alternative actions through a consideration of consequences. A responsible choice produces a moral hero, and as such, a definition of self. A classic illustration of this point can be found in Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn. Huck's decision to "go to hell" on behalf of Jim the runaway slave makes him a realist hero. In the southern states before the American Civil War, Huck makes the moral and risky choice of helping Jim escape against the socially approved evil of slavery.
James weighs his alternatives in the story, deliberating about whether to stay in his hometown and marry Elsa or strike out for success and glory in New York City. By the end, James has made a responsible choice, rejecting the shallow pursuit of wealth and power and opting for the quiet but fulfilling small-town life with the comforts of human connection in his family. Benét's own sensibilities are evident here in his depiction of the extremes of the two choices: one offering a materially successful but emotionally empty existence, while the other offers the joys of family life.
Benét's vision of the American dream is illustrated in James's choice. Basil Davenport, in his introduction to Benét's Selected Prose and Poetry, writes that the attitude Benét expresses in his work is that life is "too good to waste in being rich and proper." Commenting on Benét's continuing popularity in America, David H. Webster concludes in his review of Benét's Selected Prose and Poetry (1960) that Benét is "significant in the sixties partly just because he rejected some of the attitudes common in the twenties and thirties."
In "An End to Dreams," Benét gives James a clear choice that is not available in modernist works. Relationships do not work out so smoothly in Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's worlds. They are destroyed by the pressures of the post-war age. Benét's ending appears to ignore those pressures in its celebration of family values and commitment. Yet the story presents a more complex vision of human desire. Ironically, through the depiction of his realist hero, Benét employs a modernist technique as he focuses on James's subconscious.
Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, modernists explored the psychology of their characters, often attempting to convey both subconscious and conscious motivations. To accurately reflect these levels of consciousness, modernists employed stream-of-consciousness narratives (disjointed reflections of the conscious mind) and replaced traditional omniscient narrators with subjective points of view limited by the narrow, sometimes distorted vision of reality of a given character.
While James's narrative is not strictly stream of consciousness, it is subjective and fragmented as it jumps back and forth in time. Benét explores in a Freudian way James's subconscious desire for wealth and power that is so strong that it causes him to dream about an alternate world based on a moment in his past when he had to choose his path. Benét thus creates a realist text with an ironic modernist twist in its Freudian suggestion of dual layers of consciousness.
"An End to Dreams" echoes and at the same time overturns the modernist focus on spiritual stagnation, yet Benét complicates the issue in his presentation of James's dual worlds, suggesting Freud's contention that dreams reveal the dreamer's subconscious desires. At the end of the story, after James awakes from his dream and finds Elsa at his side, he is "at peace," but in that final moment, he knows "the measure of his victory and defeat." His choice to stay in his hometown can be viewed as a defeat since it denied his ambition, his dreams of glory. Despite the fact that he is at peace, his dream and sense of defeat suggest that he has some regret about the choice he has made.
Benét's adept combination of modernist themes and technique with realist sensibilities creates a compelling portrait of one man's ambivalent attraction to the American dream. In his examination of James's conflicting desires, he illustrates the complex nature of that dream.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on "An End to Dreams," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Sheldon Goldfarb
Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb discusses the stark choice between two competing lifestyles depicted in "An End to Dreams."
In Stephen Vincent Benét's most famous story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster," Daniel Webster is able to convince a jury of damned souls that, despite promising his soul to the Devil in return for material prosperity, Jabez Stone should not have to surrender his soul after all, even though he did indeed receive ten years of prosperity. Avoiding the fact that Jabez Stone is breaching his contract, Webster focuses on the fact that there is good and bad in everyone and in all of American history, and without that good and bad together there could be nothing new.
Similarly, in his story "Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer," Benét has his hero argue that there can be no progress unless people do foolish things. And in his story "Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly Gates," the central character is frustrated in Heaven because there are no sick people there on whom to practise medicine. He ends up going to Hell for a while in order to have a chance to practise his chosen profession, there being plenty of sick people there.
What emerges in all these stories is a sense of dualism, a sense of a need for good and bad. To live in Heaven without a chance to visit Hell once in a while would be stultifying. To be unable to do foolish or even evil things once in a while would mean an end to progress. What Benét argues for in these fairly well-known stories of his is for a mix of good and evil, a mix of ambition and morality, of adventure and staying home. Thus in "Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer," Johnny Pye gets a chance to run away from home and take up with a snakeoil salesman, a money-obsessed merchant, and a band of soldiers before returning home to become a postmaster and marry his childhood sweetheart.
It is different in Benét's less well-known story, "An End to Dreams." Instead of a chance to have it all, James Rimington, the hero of "Dreams," is forced to choose. He has no possibility of pursuing both ambition and home-town values; he must choose one or the other. As he says rather unhappily, "Of course you made a decision and took one path out of two. That was what life was for." In this story there seems no hope of duality.
In some ways, "An End to Dreams" is much like "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and "Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer." All three stories tell of a suffering central character. There is Jabez Stone in "Daniel Webster," for whom nothing seems to go right. There is Johnny Pye in his story, who is abused by his adoptive parents. And then there is James Rimington in "Dreams," who is teased and bullied by the other schoolchildren because he is poor and wears patches on his clothes. "Patches," they call him. Like Johnny Pye, James Rimington decides to run away from home. And like Jabez Stone, he makes a deal with a devilish sort of figure. Not the literal Devil as in "The Devil and Daniel Webster," but a shady financier named John Q. Dixon. He is warned that Dixon is "crooked," and in order to become rich like him he has to cut his ties with his mother, his sweetheart, and his whole hometown; but he goes ahead, or so it seems, and as the story draws to a close it appears that he has done exactly what Jabez Stone did: sold his soul for material prosperity.
At the very end, though, in the little coda to the story, it turns out that all of James Rimington's life as a successful businessman was just a dream. Actually, he did not choose to leave his sweetheart and his hometown. His sweetheart, Elsa, is his wife of thirty years, and she is by his side in the hospital when he wakes up from an operation. All of his life as a hard-edged, powerful businessman seems to have been a dream induced by anesthetic during that operation. At first this seems like a good thing. Most of the story consists of James Rimington reviewing his apparent life as a prosperous businessman and not seeming to like it. It may have given him money and power, houses and women, but the women were "light and hollow" and they passed away with no importance in his life; and when he fears he is dying in the hospital there is no one to care about him. He frantically reviews who there might be. He seems not even to have any friends. The only people he can think of are his employees and his servants, and he knows they will not care about him dying. Even his sister would think first of their mother, not of him.
Thus when he wakes up from the operation and finds that he is alive and well in his old hometown with Elsa at his side, he is relieved. The last words of the story say he is "at peace." And yet the very same sentence says that he knew "the measure of his victory and defeat," an odd thing to say if choosing to stay with Elsa in the small town was entirely the right thing to do. Why is it a defeat as well as a victory? Moreover, the use of the word "defeat" reminds the reader of the earlier description of James Rimington the successful businessman as having "bleak, undefeated eyes." As a businessman, James Rimington did not suffer defeat; his life may have been bleak, but it was a life of triumphs. In contrast, James Rimington as the man who stayed in his hometown has in some way been defeated.
It is as if at one level Benét is pushing the reader to think that it is better to renounce the "crooked" world of the John Q. Dixons, as if it is best not to follow the path of ambition, while at the same time the story suggests some dissatisfaction with such a renunciation. In this context, it is interesting to consider the story's title. What are the dreams that are supposed to be ending in this story? On a literal level, the one dream there seems to be is the one about James Rimington pursuing a shady financial career; that is the dream he wakes from at the end of the story. Since that dream ends so badly, with James Rimington dying all alone, uncared for in a hospital bed, one might expect it to be referred to as a nightmare. But the story is not called "Escape from a Nightmare" or even "An End to Bad Dreams." It is "An End to Dreams."
Now, the word "dreams" usually has a positive connotation, and looking closely at what the word might be referring to in this story, the reader is likely to think of dreams of success and ambition. Is that what is ending for James Rimington? But is it an altogether good thing to give up one's dreams and ambitions? Perhaps not. And perhaps that is why at the end of the story James Rimington feels defeat as well as victory.
Joel Roache, in an article analyzing Benét's works in general, says that in Benét's stories the conflicts "are too easily resolved." That may be true of Benét's other stories, but it does not seem true at all of "An End to Dreams." Here the conflict between big city ambition and small town values remains totally unresolved. The life of ambition seems empty and bleak, but life in a small town, where James Rimington has taken a job in the local bank, seems lacking in achievement. He could have done so much more; in his dream he did do more — but at a price. As he himself says, "You can buy anything there is but you have to pay for it." In this story it seems that the price of success is giving up the comforts of a wife and family. It seems a high price to pay, and yet not to pay it seems a problem. As James Rimington says, speaking as the successful businessman from the middle of the bad dream, staying in the small town and working in the bank, becoming a "settled small-town citizen," would have meant "thirty years of rolling a stone uphill."
The stone reference is an allusion to the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to an eternity of rolling a stone up a hill, only to see it roll back down to the bottom as soon as he gets it to the top. The myth is a symbol of futility, and that is how James Rimington sees life as a small-town banker married to Elsa. Of course, that is James Rimington the big-city businessman speaking, and perhaps his view is not to be trusted, but his view is there in the story competing with the view that small-town ways are best.
The two competing views remain unreconciled in this story. Indeed, the choice between them is so stark and absolute that at times there seem to be two James Rimingtons in the story, the one who went off to become a businessman and the one who stayed home. In the middle of the dream, James Rimington thinks, "Suppose you'd stayed in Bladesburg, worn the patched coat? Would you still be James Rimington?" Near the end of the dream, when the dying businessman tries to contact Elsa telepathically, he thinks, "If he could only make her think of him — of him, not merely James Rimington " It is as if there is a "him" separate from James Rimington, a core personality perhaps beneath the successful businessman or a small-town boy different from the businessman.
In any case, what the story presents is two paths so different that to pursue either is to call one's identity into question. To become James Rimington the successful businessman is almost to become a different person from the little boy who lived in Bladesburg and who might have grown up to work in the local bank. Thus in the end the story leaves us with two irreconcilable options, neither of which seems altogether appealing.
Robert Combs, in an article on "The Devil and Daniel Webster, says that the Faustian bargain of selling one's soul to the Devil for material prosperity is Benét's "great theme." It is certainly the theme of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" in a quite literal way. It also is the theme in a figurative sense of "An End to Dreams." But whereas in "Daniel Webster" it is possible to sell one's soul and some-how get it back, in "An End to Dreams" there is no such possibility.
In "Daniel Webster" and some of the other stories, the world Benét depicts is one in which a person can do some foolish or questionable things and still return to a life of virtue. In "An End to Dreams" there seems to be a brief yearning for such a situation, when the dying James Rimington thinks, "It couldn't be true. James Rimington couldn't be there dying. James Rimington was a boy in a patched coat who meant to grow up and marry Elsa and do all sorts of things."
The trouble is that the boy cannot marry Elsa and also do all sorts of things if those things are supposed to include big city success in the financial world. In this story, the boy can grow up to do one or the other, but not both. It is a sad conclusion, sadder than that in "The Devil and Daniel Webster."
Benét is more optimistic in "Daniel Webster," as he is in "Johnny Pye" and "Doc Mellhorn." In those stories Benét is able to create resolutions, but perhaps they are too easy resolutions as Joel Roache says. As an author Benét had his own choice to make, between suggesting that the pursuit of ambition could be reconciled with family and small-town values and suggesting that there could be no reconciliation between these approaches to life. It is a choice between a perhaps too easy resolution on the one hand and dissatisfaction on the other. In "An End to Dreams," he opted for dissatisfaction.
Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on "An End to Dreams," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
David Garrett Izzo
In the following essay, Izzo discusses Benét's writing career.
Stephen Vincent Benét is best known as the author of the classic Civil War verse epic John Brown's Body (1928) and the much-anthologized short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936). Yet, Benét, once one of the most popular writers in America, wrote many more stories, novels, poems, and dramas. The fact that Benét wrote plays has largely been forgotten, even though millions of Americans heard his radio plays in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Benét's poems and prose emphasize the spoken word and, in fact, many of his short stories have been adapted as plays by other writers because of their inherent stageability.
Stephen Vincent Benét was born on 22 July 1898 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Colonel James Walker Benét and Frances Neill Benét. His father, as a military man, took Stephen and his older siblings, William Rose and Laura — who also became writers — across the country to military posts in Watervliet, New York; Benecia, California; Rock Island, Illinois; and Augusta, Georgia. These varied experiences gave Benét a colorful childhood that was augmented by a lively imagination and the doting attentions of his parents and his brother and sister.
Benét's family was a ready and willing audience for his stories, and his parents were openminded and progressive. In his Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters, 1898 – 1943 (1958), Charles A. Fenton quotes Benét as saying of his father, "I cannot agree with those who say that the military mind is narrow and insensitive. [Father] could write any fixed form of verse, was interested in everything. He represented integrity — and a sense of humor." Moreover, family friend and poet Leonard Bacon writes of James Walker Benét in his SemiCentennial, Some of the Life and Part of the Opinions of Leonard Bacon (1939): "He knew more about English poetry than most poets and all professors. Such a man deserved to have all three of his children become poets." In 1915 William Rose Benét helped his younger brother to get his first book published. Five Men and Pompey: A Series of Dramatic Portraits, while certainly verse, is verse drama in the form of six first-person orations by Roman figures. Benét's inclination toward the dramatic and dramatic monologues served him well for the rest of his writing career.
When Benét entered Yale in 1915, he was already considered a wunderkind by such notables as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who thought Benét's poetry better than that of his good friend and Princeton classmate John Peale Bishop, whom he considered an accomplished poet. Fenton quotes critic Malcolm Cowley as remembering that "Benét was the bright star not only of Yale but of all the Eastern colleges." At Yale, Benét concentrated on getting published in the Yale literary magazines and enjoying his friendships with fellow writers Thornton Wilder, poets H. Phelps Putnam and John Chipman Farrar (who cofounded, with Stanley M. Rinehart Jr., the publishing firm of Farrar and Rinehart in 1929), novelist Hervey Allen, and playwright Phillip Barry. Tappan Wilder, the nephew of Thornton Wilder, recalls his uncle telling him about the Yale days when he and Benét read their plays to each other. In November 1919 Wilder and Benét, along with Richard Bassett, John F. Carter, Arthur Dallin, Norman Fitts, Ramon Guthrie, William Hanway, Quincy Porter, and Roger Sessions, founded a little literary magazine, titled The S4N (which stood for "space for name"), that lasted four years. They called it an "idea exchange."
At Yale, Benét and his classmate Wilder met with and saw a recital by poet Vachel Lindsay, who wrote poems meant to be dramatized. Lindsay did so powerfully and with a profound impact on the two undergraduates. In his diary (now at the Beinecke Library, Yale University) Wilder wrote about meeting the poet in his entry of 18 March 1918: "Wednesday aft. met Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay at the [Elizabethan] club and Dr. Seymour asked me to dinner that evening to meet him. Steve [Benét] came in afterward at table: [drawing of table] Afterward Mr. Lindsay read Congo, Gen. Booth enters Heaven, Lincoln and many others! He reads dramatically with shreeks, intonings and chantings." Lindsay died in 1931, but Wilder and Benét never forgot Lindsay's impact. Wilder based the hero of his 1935 novel, Heaven's My Destination, on Lindsay, and in his 1936 collection, Burning City, Benét published his poetic ode to Lindsay, "Do You Remember Springfield?" For Benét, Lindsay proved that poetry could be potent dramatic oratory, and critics frequently compared Benét's poems to those of Lindsay. Many of Benét's poems were written as dramatic monologues with an eye toward potential performance.
Farrar, Benét's classmate, recalls in his 1943 memoir, "For the Record," that at Yale his friend's "first play was a farce concerning the Greek Gods and heroes called Poor Old Medusa. It was produced under Monty [Montillion] Woolley's direction along with a satire by Philip Barry and a war number of mine, in the ballroom of the Taft Hotel at New Haven before the 'Pump and Slipper Dance' in the spring of 1919. It was pungent and certainly, before that exacting audience, successful." Woolley, who later became a stage and screen actor, was a Yale professor. In the same year he and Benét also collaborated on an acting version of Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great (1590). Later, in 1924, Farrar and Benét cowrote two plays, including a longer version of the "war number." Benét received a master's degree from Yale in 1920 and received a traveling fellowship for 1920 – 1921. Benét went to Paris, as did so many of his contemporaries, and there he wrote his first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom, published by the firm of Henry Holt and Company in 1921. This novel earned immediate recognition. Bishop praised it in a tripartite review in Vanity Fair, republished in The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop (1948) titled, "Three Brilliant Young Novelists (The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Beginning of Wisdom by Stephen Vincent Benét; Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos)":
The Beginning of Wisdom is a picaresque novel of a young man who successively encounters God, country and Yale. [Benét] has so rare a skill with color, so unlimited an invention of metaphor, such humorous delight so brave a fantasy.
While in Paris, Benét met Rosemary Carr, the Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Returning to New York, they married on 26 November 1921. The Benéts had three children: Stephanie, born in 1924; Thomas Carr, born in 1926; and Rachel, born in 1931. In the 1920s Benét earned a living as a writer, mainly from his short stories and novels. He continued to write poetry but more for love than money. In 1922 and 1923 Benét published two long narrative poems that owed much to Lindsay: "The Ballad of William Sycamore," in the New Republic, and "King David" in The Nation, which magazine awarded it the prize as best poem of 1923. (Both poems were also published in book form in limited editions in 1923.) The former poem is about an American frontiersman and the latter portrays the biblical king of Israel. Both are dramatic narratives, as was the earlier Five Men and Pompey, but the later poems are more mature, particularly "King David." Benét's biographer Charles A. Fenton writes that at this time Benét was making the "perilous and by no means automatic transition from natural aptitude to acquired craft. He had something to say and the will to say it properly."
In 1924 Benét and his friend Farrar collaborated on two Broadway plays. The first was a long version of Farrar's "war number" from their Yale days, called Nerves; the second was That Awful Mrs. Eaton. The two friends wrote these plays, their first as professional dramatists, virtually simultaneously. In "For the Record" Farrar recalls that during the rehearsals of Nerves; they managed to convince a then-unknown actor, Humphrey Bogart, that he could be a natural on the stage. Bogart did, of course, become a stage and screen star, receiving his first good review for his performance in this play. Nerves is a World War I melodrama about an American officer who in training camp is falsely labeled as being a coward but who later proves his courage in battle and ultimately wins the girl. That Awful Mrs. Eaton is about the wife of John Henry Eaton, President Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War. Margaret O'Neill Eaton, the daughter of a tavern keeper, is looked down upon by the wives of the Washington establishment. (In the play Eaton is the Secretary of the Navy and his wife is a former tavernkeeper.) Jackson champions her attributes and she ultimately wins over her detractors by hosting a successful party at the White House. Nerves opened on 1 September 1924 and That Awful Mrs. Eaton on 24 September 1924. Reviews for both ranged from poor to mixed. Critics recognized youthful talent but also faulted the young writers for trying to say and do too much. One reviewer said That Awful Mrs. Eaton was "overstuffed." Benét later considered these plays as object lessons teaching him what not to do. His future screenplays, librettos, and radio scripts emphasized a lean rather than an "overstuffed" approach.
In 1925 and 1926 Benét continued to produce prose fiction, and his short stories were being published regularly in popular magazines. During 1927 Benét benefitted from a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him an income just for writing so that he did not have to worry about writing for an income. He once again turned to verse and composed his American Civil War epic John Brown's Body. This book-length poem was published in 1928 and was an instant success, achieving both critical praise and public popularity. The book was a best-seller, an unheard-of situation for a volume of verse, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1929. Benét was now famous. That Awful Mrs. Eaton earned him enough cash to invest in stocks. In October of 1929 he lost nearly everything in the stock-market crash that started the Great Depression. Relief from his financial troubles came from Hollywood, where the acclaim for That Awful Mrs. Eaton had reached.
The most esteemed American moviemaker of the silent era, D. W. (David Wark) Griffith decided it was time to do his first "talkie," and he asked Benét to write the screenplay for the cinema biography Abraham Lincoln. Benét traveled to Hollywood and quickly learned that screenwriting was a frustrating process that required on-the-fly rewrites to accommodate the day-to-day changes that evolved as Griffith directed the movie. Often, Griffith was not sure of what he wanted for a scene until it was actually being shot, and Benét would write dialogue on the spot. The task was arduous and frustrating for Benét, who also recorded his dismay at the backstage intrigue typical of Hollywood. Benét wrote to his agent Carl Brandt, "Nowhere have I seen such shining waste, stupidity and conceit as in the business and managing end of this industry. Since arriving, I have written four versions of Abraham Lincoln, including a good one, playable in the required time. That, of course, is out. Seven people, including myself, are now working in conferences on a 5th one. If I don't get out of here soon I'm going crazy." Nonetheless, the motion picture was made and released by United Artists in 1930 to generally good reviews. Benét, however, while learning the motion picture business and sharpening his skills as a dramatist, never worked in Hollywood again. Although he worked on two further movies, he remained in New York. The Hollywood scene was too unreal for Benét, who was concerned about the bitter reality of business failures and mass unemployment caused by the Great Depression.
Benét began to write prose and poetry with an eye on current events. In the early 1930s he was a supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. In the mid-to-late 1930s he was one of the first American writers to realize the threat that fascism in Europe and Japan posed to world peace.
In 1937, perhaps inspired by his children, Benét wrote a libretto aimed at young audiences. He adapted Washington Irving's short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) as the libretto for a light opera composed by another old Yale friend, Douglas Moore. They called it The Headless Horseman, and it was written specifically for the theater department of Bronxville High School in New York City, where Moore's children were students. The school staged the operetta on 17 March 1937. This production was followed by a radio performance broadcast on NBC on 22 April 1937, and a published version appeared later that year.
On 24 October 1936 Benét's most famous short story was published in The Saturday Evening Post, the best-selling weekly magazine in the United States. Published separately in book form the following year, The Devil and Daniel Webster struck a chord with millions of readers. The story of the great lawyer and orator who saves a man who had sold his soul to the devil resonated with readers who were still mired in the Great Depression and were troubled by the rise of fascism in Europe. Webster has to convince a judge and jury of scoundrels, handpicked by the devil from the souls of the damned, to nullify the contract signed by Jabez Stone, a farmer driven by a run of bad luck to make a deal with the mysterious stranger who calls himself Mr. Scratch. As a political parable, the story can be read with Jabez Stone representing the average American down on his luck; the judge and jury representing the fascists; Mr. Scratch, the forces of evil; and Daniel Webster, as the United States, coming to the rescue. No short story has ever had the national impact of The Devil and Daniel Webster. It was almost inevitable that the story would be adapted to the stage and then the movies.
Benét could now find support for new artistic ventures. Moore had wanted to do a bigger opera with Benét after their collaboration on The Headless Horseman. Benét's formidable popularity opened doors and The Devil and Daniel Webster was the logical choice for a new opera. In the short story Webster's summation to the judge and jury is described by its effect on the listeners:
He painted a picture and to each one of that jury he spoke of things long forgotten. For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something. And when Dan'l Webster finished he didn't know whether or not he'd saved Jabez Stone. But he knew he'd done a miracle. For the glitter was gone from the eyes of judge and jury, and, for the moment, they were men again, and knew they were men.
In the operatic version Webster's effect has to be conveyed through Webster's words themselves. In Benét's libretto, Webster's closing speech is longer and must accommodate Moore's music, but it is no less effective, as the closing lines show:
WEBSTER: Do you know him? He is your brother.Will you take the law of the oppressor and bind him
down?
It is not for him that I speak. It is for all of you.
There is a sadness in being a man, but it is a proud
thing too.
There is failure and despair on the journey — the endless
journey of mankind.
We are tricked and trapped — we stumble into the
pit — but out of the pit we rise again.
..........................................
I see you, mighty, shining, liberty, liberty! I see free
men walking and talking under a star!
God save the United States and the men who have
made her free!
The defense rests.
JURY: [Exultantly] We were men — we were free —
we were men — we have not forgotten — our children
shall follow and be free.
Benét was quite aware that in 1939 Webster's words were also a warning that fascism in Europe and Asia were threats to freedom everywhere. The opera was staged through the auspices of the American Lyric Theater under the direction of the legendary John Houseman of the Mercury Theater. Benét's reputation and winning personality attracted famous names to work with Houseman, who later said in his autobiography, Run-Through (1972), "My collaborators were men whose work I admired: Fritz Reinder was our conductor; Eugene Loring, creator of Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid, was my choreographer. Even more important — and the main reason for doing the production in the first place — was the presence of [set designer] Robert Edmund Jones. For years he had been an illustrious figure in the American theater; histories of the contemporary stage were filled with his designs."
The opera premiered 18 May 1939 on Broadway, in the Martin Beck Theater, to great acclaim. Renowned New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote on 6 May 1939 that "The Devil and Daniel Webster represents some of the finest and most painstaking work of the season." The expense of the production prevented a long Broadway run, but the opera was produced many times by United Service Organization (USO) troupes during World War II and was an annual feature for many years at the Old Sturbridge Festival in Massachusetts.
Benét fashioned another adaptation of the story, this time for a movie version, co-writing the screenplay with Dan Totheroh. The movie was released by RKO Pictures in 1941 and was also well received. Unfathomably, however, RKO changed the title. Instead of using the title of what is one of the best-known stories ever written in America — ensuring instant public recognition — the studio called the movie All That Money Can Buy. In the motion-picture version, Walter Huston, who had portrayed Lincoln in the Griffith epic, played Mr. Scratch, receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Edward Arnold played Daniel Webster. In 1943 the script was included in Twenty Best Film Plays, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols, as one of the twenty greatest screenplays since the "talkies" began in 1927.
During the late 1930s Benét, as were many other Americans, was alarmed at the growth of fascism in Asia and Europe. Benét took seriously his role as national spokesperson and began to write poems and stories as warnings to the American people. Among these were "Into Egypt" and "The Last of the Legions," collected in Tales Before Midnight (1939), and "The Blood of the Martyrs" and "By the Waters of Babylon," collected in Thirteen O'Clock: Stories of Several Worlds (1937). "By the Waters of Babylon," is credited by historians of science-fiction as the first tale written about a future world of survivors after an apocalyptic war. Benét wished to reach more Americans and realized that radio was the way to accomplish that. In those pre-television days radio had devoted audiences just as television does now. Benét's good friend Archibald MacLeish had written three plays for radio, and he encouraged Benét to do the same. Benét was a natural writer for radio: his mastery of the short story suited the need for compactness with an impact; his reputation as a man of conscience and a patriot who loved his country was exactly right for a United States facing the threat of fascism.
Benét wrote tirelessly for the cause of democracy before and during the war and either accepted no payment or directed that payment be sent to the USO. Benét's scripts were broadcast over national radio and were heard by millions. Many of them were subsequently published in pamphlet form and collected in We Stand United, and Other Radio Scripts (1945). The first was We Stand United, read by Raymond Massey at an America United Rally in Carnegie Hall sponsored by the Council for Democracy, broadcast on CBS Radio on 6 November 1940 and published in pamphlet form that same year. Its impact became a front-page story nationwide. Listen to the People was broadcast over NBC Radio on Independence Day 1941. Three days later Life magazine published the script. Biographer Fenton notes: "The response was extraordinary. Letters and telegrams came to him [Benét], and to Life and NBC, from every part of the nation: 'Your poems thrilled me,' Arthur Train wrote him, 'It is superb and inspiring and will have a tremendous effect throughout the nation. Congratulations!'" More scripts followed: Thanksgiving Day — 1941 (broadcast 19 November 1941), They Burned the Books (broadcast 11 May 1942), A Time to Reap (broadcast 26 November 1942), A Child Is Born (broadcast 21 December 1942), and Dear Adolf, the last a six-part series based on actual letters written to Adolf Hitler from representative Americans — a farmer, a businessman, a worker, a housewife and mother, a soldier, and a foreign-born American — broadcast on NBC Radio on successive Sunday afternoons from 21 June 1942 to 2 August 1942, with the exception of 19 July. New York Times writer John K. Hutchens wrote about Dear Adolf, in an article published 5 July 1942:
Mr. Benét could not have chosen a better time or a greater subject and it would seem that some of his colleagues among the first-rank writers might follow his lead — the 'names' who wrote so passionately a little while ago, and should not be silent now if they have their doubts about [radio's] value as an artistic medium, let them ponder on the success with which Mr. Benét, long established as a poet and short story writer before he turned to radio, adjusted himself to the new field. Not all of them are so well equipped as he, lacking the poet's gift of sharp, exact words and the singing phrase. But they might have a try at it.
Although frail health from a weak heart barred Benét from active military service, he worked as a soldier of democracy through his words. On 13 March 1943 he died of a heart attack in his wife's arms. He was only forty-four years old. Had he lived longer, Benét might well have written in his maturity works that would have superseded his last patriotic works, which came to limit his literary reputation and obscure his other artistic successes.
As a dramatist Benét is chiefly remembered only for the movie and opera versions of The Devil and Daniel Webster. Yet, from 1940 to 1944, his radio plays were listened to by millions of Americans. His other work remained enormously popular in anthologies throughout the 1950s, and many of his poems and stories were adapted for stage and screen or set to music because of their inherent dramatic qualities. For example, in 1953 actor-director Charles Laughton adapted John Brown's Body for the stage, where it had a successful Broadway run and a national tour. In 1954 M-G-M released a successful adaptation of Benét's short story "The Sobbin' Women," the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which in turn spawned a stage musical and a television series.
In a one-man play The American World of Stephen Vincent Benét, written and performed by David Garrett Izzo for Benét's one-hundredth birthday celebration on 24 July 1998 in his birthplace of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Benét's ghost speaks to the audience and recites from his work. Contemporary audiences enthusiastically responded to Benét's words. Cynthia Gordon of the Easton (Pa.) Express Times wrote of the play on 25 July 1998 that it "has created a remarkably moving portrait of one of the literary greats of the century. The warm, well-balanced qualities of Benét shone." Ultimately, the audience responded to the life and especially the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, which remain as resonant as when first written. Everything he wrote is imbued with dramatic qualities meant to be seen and heard. Audiences knowing little, if anything, about Benét, came to listen without prejudice and left wanting to know more about the man and his words. In 1999 Penguin Classics published the first Benét anthology in thirty years, The Devil and Daniel Webster and Other Writings. In time Benét may well once more be thought of as a great writer, not just a "patriotic" writer.
Source: David Garrett Izzo, "Stephen Vincent Benét," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 249, Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Third Series, edited by Christopher Wheatley, The Gale Group, 2001, pp. 12-20.
What Do I Read Next?
- "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937), one of Benét's most famous stories, focuses on the battle of good and evil in the soul of a Yankee farmer.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925) shares many of the same themes as Fitzgerald's short story "Winter Dreams."
- The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway, one of Fitzgerald's "lost generation" compatriots, focuses on a group of disillusioned Americans living in Paris after World War I.
- Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (1989), written by David J. Goldberg and published as part of the American Moment series, presents an overview of this decade and focuses specifically on how World War I affected American society.
