Hanover Browsing
It is difficult to believe that Ben Ames Williams is dead. He was so vital a spirit, so full of courage, so tireless a worker, so unassuming and modest, so cheerful and full of good sense, that it does not seem possible that he has gone at 63. But he worked and played hard, and to go suddenly as he did would be the way he would have wanted.
It is not my purpose here to write his obituary, or even to pay him tribute, though I admired him greatly and proudly counted him a friend. Rather I want to tell the alumni of his college a little of what a tremendous writer he was, and how proud we may all be of his accomplishment.
In our collection of his books in Baker Library, and it is not complete as yet, we have 36 novels and books of short stories, several books he edited, such as Amateursat War (1943) and A Diary from Dixie (1949), and at least 16 translations into foreign languages.
These novels run from the 204-page Allthe Brothers Were Valiant (1919), the first book of Ben's I read, to the two-volume novel, his masterpiece, House Divided (1947), which runs to 1500 pages.
He learned his craft by hard work. He worked first as a newspaperman for four years, and every night during those four years he wrote short stories and the four years were up before he sold his first one. From then on until the end, his output was enormous and I daresay that he wrote at least 50,000 pages of manuscript during his lifetime.
The Derrydale Press issued The HappyEnd, a volume of autobiographical sketches, in which he tells about his Maine mentor, Bert McCorrison, who, thinly disguised, is the character Chet McAusland in his short stories about Fraternity (Searsmont), issued in 1949 as Fraternity Village.
According to Ben's own statement, meeting McCorrison one day in the summer of 1918 was the most important event of his professional life.
Bert McCorrison lived in Searsmont, Maine, and when he died in 1931 left Ben his farm. For years they hunted, fished, and talked together. Ben writes: "Bert had an abiding love for the out-of-doors, a timeless memory, and a story instinct which led him to remember most vividly those incidents in which dwelt the elements of drama. Through him and with him, I began to know the countryside around his farm, and some of the things that in his memory had happened there."
These "Fraternity" stories were written from 1919 to 1940, though in 1927, with Splendor, a sympathetic novel of newspaper life, Ben Ames Williams began his distinguished career as a writer of novels.
As the years progressed his ambitions and stature grew. From novels now forgotten like Evered (1921), Black Pawl (1922), Audacity (1924), Great Oaks (1930), AnEnd to Mirth (1931) and many others, he turned to write Crucible (1937), described as a novel of character, and then to his major books which I can only briefly mention here.
Thread of Scarlet (1939) is the story of David Swain of Nantucket during the momentous times around 1812. Come Spring (1940) is a novel of 866 pages, describing action in Sterlingtown, incorporated as Union in 1786, during the American Revolution. In spite of hell and high water faith remains that things will be well, "come spring." And most successful of this trilogy is The Strange Woman (1941) which probes the secret heart of a woman who more often than not surrendered to her evil nature. The setting is Bangor, Maine, from 1812 to after the Civil War, during the height of the lumber boom. This story of Jennry Evered became, perhaps, the most talked about of all his novels.
His House Divided (1947) was a major work of American fiction and the best American novel on the Civil War ever written. At least twenty years of research went into it, and four and a half years of writing.
The sequel to this novel, Unconquered, in which all the familiar characters will once more reappear, is scheduled for this coming summer. I can hardly wait, as Travis, Faunt, and Cinda have become part of my life.
Ben Ames Williams was born in the state of Mississippi, and he knew the South well. He once wrote: "The South today boasts not so often of its 'cavaliers'; it has learned to hold a just pride in its men of humble ways. The War saved the Union, but it did much more: it proved, once and for all, the valor and the virtue of the common man."
In Owen Glen (1950) Ben again drew from his own memories of Ohio, and of his father, and wrote a book about a great labor leader. This book was not a success, but it is one of his best, and must be read to understand his unique love and understanding for these great United States.
Let our common friend Kenneth Roberts have the last word: "In all his activities I have found Ben Ames Williams always the same: tolerant, wise, the best of sportsmen, and the best of friends qualities that shine out from every paragraph he writes."
I believe this, too.
