This Day in Literary History

March 13, 1943—As war raged in Europe and the Pacific, poet and fiction writer Stephen Vincent Benet—author of the Civil War epic poem John Brown’s Body, and himself the son and grandson of career army men—died of a heart attack at age 44 in New York City.

Poor eyesight kept the poet out of the armed forces, but family tradition—a father who rose to colonel, a grandfather who served in the Union Army in the Civil War and rose to chief of ordnance afterward—left him with a fund of stories and understandable fascination with war. Benet put all of this to good use in John Brown’s Body, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. (War was just one strand of the family tradition—the other was writing, since brother William Rose and sister Laura also became poets.)

Benet wrote in a variety of genres—novels, short stories, screenplays, radio broadcasts, and a libretto for an opera—but if you’re like me, you encountered him first in either some scattered short verse or the much-anthologized short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937), adapted for film four years later with a script co-written by the author himself.

In the 1980s I saw this movie on the big screen, the way audiences in Benet’s time would have done, at the Biograph Theater on 57th Street in Manhattan, one of the revival houses that flourished for awhile before giving way to the VCR (now itself experiencing the agony of obsolescence in the face of the DVD).

Next time you have a chance to see this on Turner Classic Movies or on DVD, catch it. The burly character actor Edward Arnold, usually typecast as a villain (as in Meet John Doe), finally with a chance to play a hero, ran with the role of the titular senator, and Walter Huston does a delicious, wink-in-the-eye turn as “Mr. Scratch” that avoids the kind of scene-chewing used by Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate.

Believe it or not, the actor-director Charles Laughton adapted John Brown’s Body for the stage in 1953, with Raymond Massey reprising his acclaimed screen roles as John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, Judith Anderson playing a southern matriarch and northern girl; and Tyrone Power appearing as both a Yankee and Confederate soldier. I was lucky to see a June 1989 version of this at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires.

The big draw for the play was Christopher Reeve, who received his start as an actor with the festival and continually repaid the debt by appearing here as long as he was healthy each summer. It is poignant now to think of Reeve then, commanding the stage with his 6-ft.-4-inch frame, before the terrible equestrian accident that changed his life forever.

Despite the affection the audience had for Reeve, the actor who stole the show that night, judging by the periodic applause that broke out, was Robert Lansing, who made his mark principally as a TV actor. Reeve had assumed the Tyrone Power role, while Lansing was reading the Massey parts of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, and he endowed the Great Emancipator’s lines with simple but unmistakable authority.

Around the same time as the Williamstown show, I bought a copy of John Brown’s Body in a Montclair, N.J., antiquarian bookstore that I dropped in on by chance. This edition was part of the Heritage Press, the more affordable version of the Limited Editions Club, which featured slipcased, heavily illustrated volumes that once made me part with my hard-earned money in a heartbeat. This edition appealed to me for an additional reason: it was an inscribed association copy, i.e, either it had once belonged to the author or been signed or annotated by the author to someone closely associated with the author of the book or the book itself in some way.

This particular “associated person” was a gem all his own: Douglas Southall Freeman, the Virginia editor who became the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

In small but precise print, the famed biographer had written in the front of the book: “If I think I have any right to autograph this book of my friend Stephen Benet –and that right is highly doubtful—I could do it for none more gladly than for W. Otis Fitchett. Douglas Southall Freeman, March, 1953.”

My heart leapt when I read the date. Freeman had signed this only three months before his own death. (He is buried in Richmond’s famed Hollywood Cemetery, not far from many of the Civil War heroes he wrote about.) Moreover, the inscription told me something that his preface to the book had not revealed (though his admiration for the book’s artistic and accuracy was obvious): that he was a good friend of Benet.

But who was Otis Fitchett? For years, I had no way of knowing—until the onset of the Internet, that is. There, I discovered that the University of Virginia holds seven letters between the distinguished historian and Fitchett, who is identified as a friend of his from Caldwell, N.J., and “an employee of the General Electric Co.”

For many—myself, anyway—Stephen Vincent Benet has been almost as mysterious a figure as Fitchett. What was he like? A 1923 Time Magazine profile gives a hint: “Stephen Benét has a large head, indefinite hair, wears huge glasses, carries an entire desk-full of papers, gum, candy, cigarettes and a book or two constantly about his person. His military ancestors, among them a Chief of Ordnance, have not given him precision of movement.”

This “simple, honest, retiring” poet won a second Pulitzer Prize for his posthumously published Western Star. I never read any of his works in high school or college. There are several reasons for his relative neglect by academe: his lack of experimentation, a productive but short career, and an earnestness about his artistic purpose and his country’s past and potential that mark him as middlebrow. Our loss.