THE LIBRARY MOVES UPTOWN:
Stephen Vincent Benét
The Devil and Daniel Webster
(1937)
Image Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
"Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. And they say that if you go to his grave and speak loud and clear, "Dan'l Webster - Dan'l Webster!" the ground'll begin to shiver and the trees begin to shake. And after a while you'll hear a deep voice saying, "Neighbor, how stands the Union?" Then you better answer the Union stands as she stood, rock- bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible, or he's liable to rear right out of the ground..."
In the months before he wrote The Devil and Daniel Webster, Stephen Vincent Benét was shadowed by the specters of poverty and self-reproach. "This degrading, humiliating and constant need of money is something that stupefies the mind and saps the vitality," he wrote. "Will I ever get free of it & be able to do my work in peace."
In spite of his financial struggles, Benét managed in ten days to produce a masterpiece of American fiction. In his 30,000 word novella, Daniel Webster rescues from perdition the New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone, who has sold his soul to the devil, known in those parts as Mr. Scratch.
Benét had originally thought of Webster as "an orator with one hand stuck in the bosom of his frock coat." But influenced by Van Wyck Brook's description of the New England statesman in
The Flowering of New England, he created, in the words of one critic, "an ideal folk-hero." Benét writes, "...a man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain and eyes like burning anthracite - that was Daniel Webster in his prime."
The Devil and Daniel Webster, first published in the October 24, 1936 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, established Benét as a major American writer, or, as he describes himself, "quite the white-headed boy." In his biographer's words, he became "a story-teller to the nation." Benét, who had won the nation's attention, now devoted his energies to writing about the growing dangers of Nazi tyranny and American responsibilities in an increasingly dangerous world. He served as a trustee of this Library for less than a year before his death in 1943.
|
