July 5, 2007
Stephen Vincent Benét Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST Stephen Vincent Benét wrote “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in 1937. I was thinking about that short story yesterday, because I once celebrated the Fourth of July by reading it aloud to some undergraduates the summer after I’d graduated from college. In that time and at that place, patriotism was not a fashionable political or moral posture, and my initial impulse was not love of country but injured pride. One of the other people present had for some reason remarked that Benét was a Popular Front hack, and I wanted to rebut the part about hackery. I had no idea whether Benét had sported any affiliation to the Communist party, but I’d loved the story since hearing it read aloud around a fire at summer camp, hearing its author patronized was irritating, and I was surprised to learn that neither the fellow condemning Benét nor anyone else in the room had ever heard of it (or of anything else the man had written). Their ignorance was in fact a mark of their sophistication—I had a more middle-brow background than those people did, and much less exalted taste. In any event, a friend who admired the poem “John Brown’s Body” and liked some of the fiction had just lent me a book of Benét’s collected short stories, which meant the evidence was readily at hand, and I let rip. My memory of the occasion is that the others conceded that the story provided authentic if modest pleasure—they thought it low, but oddly appealing. Googling it, I discover that the thing is available on-line, and any reader of this blog ignorant of the story may decide the question for her- or himself. I am sufficiently uneasy about its merits to have refrained from re-reading the story, for this event took place well over thirty years ago, and I make no promises; it is very possible that “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is like Tolkien or Edgar Rice Burroughs, wonderful if read (or heard) young enough, unendurable if first encountered thereafter. Having just Googled not only “The Devil and Daniel Webster” but also Benét and the Popular Front, I was intrigued to get an awful lot of hits on the latter subject, so maybe my college friend was right, at least in part of what he said. If so, it is intriguing to compare the sensibility and successes of the Popular Front to those of the New Left of the early 1970s, or for that matter the Left of today. Making someone like Daniel Webster into a folk hero for school children does not seem like the kind of thing many (if any) people on the Left have attempted since the 1930s, and I am not sure the Left has done too brilliantly from this abstemious choice. And as it happens, I do not think that an initially uncritical enthusiasm for Webster, contracted at a tender age, bars a citizen from critical thought for the remainder of his life. At the height of the anti-war movement of the early 1970s, I remember a Fourth of July on which I asked a pretty militant friend “Neighbor, how stands the Union?,” and got a prompt and enthusiastic “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible!” Both the question and the answer are from Benét’s story. By the time I finished high school I had encountered Samuel Eliot Morison’s witty and deflating remark on Webster (his joke went something like “two eyes like live coals, under a precipice of brow; no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked”), which gave me a sense of Webster pretty directly opposed to the one I’d gotten from Benét’s story a decade or so earlier. But I am grateful to have gotten that earlier sense first.
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