William Riley and the Fates (1941).

The concept of Fate is recurring theme in the fiction of Stephen King.  It's one of a handful of ideas he keeps circling back to in various ways time and again in his writings.  Perhaps one of the often unspoken truths about storytelling is that all writers have their pet subjects.  An assorted collection of notions that they either just can't let go of, or else its an assortment of ideas that have somehow grabbed ahold of the artist's mind, and never loosen their grip until the last breath is over and done with.  It's something that's happened before with other scribbling fellows out there.  Nathanial Hawthorne and Mark Twain spent their lives preoccupied by the sins of the Nation's past.  For Twain, it was the knowledge of growing up as a member of a slaveholding community, and the mindset that birthed it.  Hawthorne takes those same guilty associations and extends them further back into time, to the early years of America's Founding.  It's there that Hawthorne pinpoints the establishment of Puritanism as the bedrock point for the Nation's troubles.  It's his best candidate for where all of America's original sins had their genesis, and hence the conflicts the Country still has to deal with to this very day.  King is more or less an inheritor of this line of thought from Hawthorne and Twain.  Much like his fellow literary New England Gothic forbearer, King's fiction finds the author searching for any lost pathways that would reveal, and hence allow him to arrive at some kind of understanding for both what makes America tick, and allow him to come to grips with whatever causes its occasional lapse in reason.

For King, Fate is one of those ideas that he keeps coming back to in the course of crafting his secondary worlds.  He keeps working his way back to the concept not because there's anything inherently Inspiring about it.  Instead, it's more that Fate seems to be one of the key elements in his longtime catalogue of personal fears.  It's the notion that none of us ever have full control of our lives, that we might just be nothing more than a collection of cosmic playthings.  This seems to be one of the engines powering some of the best of King's literary nightmares.  The primary examples of the author's exploration of this theme can be found in works like The Shining, Pet Semetary, 112263, Salem's Lot, and It.  The trick with these novels is that he's good at embedding the idea deep within the framework of his narrative, so that it's easy for the notion to escape the reader's notice.  It also doesn't hurt that since these are all examples of King's best efforts, the strength and quality of the writing tends to obscure the author's ongoing concerns with the question of free will, or the lack thereof.  It's only in stories belonging to The Dark Tower series that we find the author willing to let his own ruminations on the topic be spoken aloud by his characters.  The Mid-World series is where you'll find Roland the Gunslinger and others spouting on for pages about how everything is a matter of Fate, or Ka as its labeled in that series.

The irony there being that Ka is actually an ancient Egyptian word for soul.  So if you take the word as it appears in the Tower books in its literal older historic meaning, then it implies that the answer to the artist's conundrums is that it's all a matter or question of character.  That is, it's the choices we make, and how that molds our personalities, and the kind of people we become which really determines all outcomes, rather than anything being foreordained.  I'll get back to this alternate, real life idea of Ka, later on.  For now, it's enough to note that ideas of Fate and Free Will are one of what might be termed as Stephen King's Constant Themes.  If the guy has his Constant Readers, as he likes to call them, then why extend to the same courtesy to his Constant Themes, with the question of Ka being among the top concerns?  If there's any validity to this way of looking at where at least part of King's Inspiration comes from, then it still leaves the enquiring reader's mind with the question of where did this particular thematic obsession even come from in the first place?  I have some ideas on that score, and a lot of it can probably be traced back to the idea of King as an inheritor of themes first laid down by the likes of Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.  At the same time, there might be other avenues worth exploring in terms of where the Gothic scribbler from Maine either gets his ideas from, or else that share a certain amount of thematic overlap with King's ongoing obsessions about whether or not we have Free Will.  Stephen Vincent Benet's story about a bright young man and his run in with Fate one bright day seems to be just the sort of story that fits the category for the type of story King often tends to write.

The Story.

"There are quite a few proverbs and such about a young man going out to meet his fate. But the only one I ever heard of who did it was a boy named William Riley. And he didn’t really intend to. It just happened to him.

"He lived in a town called Snapperville, in the days when Big Bill Taft was President, and he worked for the Snapperville Gazette. That is, he did so summers and after school —next year, when he’d graduated from high school, Mr. Slater was thinking of hiring him regular. He’d started out by delivering papers and worked up to local items and odd jobs around the plant. And once or twice a year, because he intended to be a real journalist and a power in the com¬ munity, he’d get his nerve up and write a slam-bang editorial about civic corruption or how Wall Street preyed upon the farmer or some new subject like that. He never got them printed, of course, because Mr. Slater wrote the editorials himself, but he had the satisfaction of writing them.

"Once he did show Mr. Slater the one on civic corruption, and Mr. Slater read it and grunted and said, “Well, William, I’m getting on in years and I’m sure I’ve seen worse. I must have. But next time you talk about flinging the gauntlet in the teeth of an abysm, just hold yourself in and count ten. Because an abysm with teeth is a pretty unusual object for Snapperville.” This encouraged William and he bought a dictionary next day, to find out more about abysms. He had a great respect for Mr. Slater’s opinion because, as every¬ body knew, Mr. Slater had once worked for Dana on the Sun.

"Of course, if you looked at it one way, William’s job wasn’t very important. And yet it was to him. To be sure, the Gazette came out only once a week, but it covered the whole county, and they had one subscriber who lived as far east as Chicago. And over Mr. Slater’s desk hung the framed front page of the extra he’d gotten out for McKinley’s assassination. William used to look at that often and hope something like it would happen in his time. He could see himself dashing into the office with the news. And sometimes on make-up night, when the cranky old press started wheezing, he’d shut his eyes and imagine it was the Twin City Standard or the New York Times or some big paper like that. Then he’d usually get yelled at by Mr. Slater. But other times Mr. Slater would grunt and allow that he might make a newspaperman yet, and William would be pleased.

"Often and often he wondered about the future. Of course, he felt pretty sure how some of it would be. He liked Mr. Slater a lot, but he didn’t intend to be just like Mr. Slater. He intended to go to New York and be a great journalist and make a million dollars and reform society and marry the handsomest girl in the world and vote the straight Republican ticket and have his name printed on the front page of the Snapperville Gazette as “our leading citizen.” At least these were some of his intentions—they didn’t include the times he was going to be President or the times he was going to be a world-famous ventriloquist, but they covered most of the ground. The only thing that really bothered him was what to do first. For suppose he started after the million dol¬ lars and missed the girl—-or started after the girl and missed the million dollars? He wished he could get a little guidance on that—but he knew if he asked Mr. Slater, Mr. Slater would just grunt and ask him if there’d been any new arrivals on the 5:30 train. And yet William wanted to know. You generally do, when you're young. He was thinking about it one make-up day—maybe that's one reason why things turned out as they did (227-29)".

An Almost Forgotten Writer.

He's remembered for one thing, at least.  I get the impression that some of us have heard of "The Devil and Daniel Webster".  If Stephen Vincent Benet is known for anything, then this simple short story is more or less at the top of the list.  Of course it might also be the only story of his that anyone ever knows about.  That's seems to be to the only reputation he has left.  His entire claim to fame ends up resting on the shoulders of this one work of short Horror fiction, and no one's really bothered with him ever since.  That sounds very much like an accurate description of all anyone knows about this artist, and it's probably a safe bet that most of us think of him as this long-forgotten contemporary of Poe and Mark Twain.  Just some minor 19th century scribbler who tried to compete with the major league players of the day, and who managed to at least win himself a sort of consolation prize for his efforts by penning the kind of story that's easy to teach in English Lit. classes alongside "The Tell-Tale Heart".

You could be forgiven for thinking this was the popular view of who Benet was as a writer.  I know its an unreal caricature that I believed in for the longest time, myself.  The reason its easy for me to go lenient on such a glaring mistake is because of the way "Daniel Webster" is written.  There are certain qualities to the writing of that old Halloween standby which makes it easy to accept that it was written no sooner than anywhere between 1866 to 1898.  The prose is sturdy and lucid, yet its also tinged with this old-time, homespun, folksy quality.  The good news is this antique tone is a help, rather than a hindrance to the narrative, and serves as a crucial part of its strength as a Tall Tale.  It's also this matter of tone and diction which leaves us thinking that what we've got on our hands is a perfect specimen of late 19th century Gothic fiction.  That's why it always comes as a shock to learn that it was composed in 1936, and had its debut in the October 24th edition of The Saturday Evening Post, where it has the luck to be sandwiched between a piece of cover art done up by none other than Norman Rockwell himself.  The thing is, this is the kind of information that tends to throw modern audiences for a loop.

The author is so good at making readers believe his story is the product of an earlier time, that once you find out the truth of its publication, all it does is serve to deepen the mystery about who this fellow Stephen Benet is supposed to be.  Or at least it would if anyone ever felt curious enough to bother about it.  My curiosity started out slow.  It began with just a few hints here and there that sounded kind of interesting.  Such as hearing that Benet was on a panel of judges who awarded a prize of $250 to none other than J.R.R. Tolkien for his work on The Hobbit; I kid you not.  It was chosen by a panel of judges as the winner of the New York Herald Tribune's Children's Spring Book Festival.  Benet was a deciding member on that same panel and lauded Tolkien for his efforts.  Time and tide have also rendered him the only famous name on the jury.  Yet even this is a fascinating bit of trivia.  It's interesting tidbits of forgotten information such as the one about Tolkien mentioned above, or learning that Benet was once the mentor of the woman who would go on to marry C.S. Lewis, that slowly began to raise the profile of the artist in my mind, until at least you're left wanting to know more about this man who could have the generous kind of creative temper that would allow him to enjoy the nature of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

That's when you discover it takes a bit of digging, and even if you do manage to find some information on the guy, it all stands as a sort of ironic testament to how pop culture treats those talents it chooses to all but forget about.  What I've been able to discover about today's forgotten subject all comes from the pages of Stephen Vincent Benet: Essays on His Life and Work, by David Garrett Izzo, and Lincoln Konkle.  There's one thing about this hybrid biography full of literary criticism that's best kept in mind.  It's the most up to date source for Benet and his writings that I've been able to find.  It's publication date was also as far back as 2002, with some of the essays in it dating all the way to 1999.  That whole collection is the product from not just another time, but also something of a lost world.  Let this stand as a sideline testimony of just how far off the map this writer has fallen, and of how much work remains to be done in order to give him a fuller spot on the stage.  Everything I'm about to reveal on the life of the artist's mind can only be taken a preliminary sketch for such efforts.  Here are the basic facts, at least so far as I've been able to discover them.  According to Izzo and Konkle, this is what happened.

"Stephen Vincent Benet was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Colonel James Walker and Frances Neill Benét. Contrary to the contemporary stereotype of a military man, his father was an expert in the appreciation of poetry. Stephen was the youngest Of three children. His brother, William Rose, and sister, Laura, also became poets and writers. Benét published his first book of verse, Five Men and Pompey (1915), at age seventeen; it featured dramatic monologues by classical Roman figures. A penchant for the dramatic became a Benét standard. Benét attended Yale and was recognized as a rising Star by such future literary luminaries as Thornton Wilder (his Yale classmate and friend), Malcolm Cowley, John Peale Bishop, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While at Yale Benét published two more volumes of verse: Young Adventure (1918) and Heavens and Earth (1920). Both feature youthful exuberance and sonorous lyrical fluidity in a manner more nineteenth century than twentieth. A strong influence on Benét's verse at this time was the poet Vachel Lindsay, whom Benét met twice at Yale. Lindsay was the first poet as performance artist and his recitals were electrifying theatrical events.

"With a master's degree earned from Yale in 1921, Benét ventured to Paris like so many of his contemporaries whom Gertrude Stein dubbed "the Lost Generation (4))".  It was during this sojourn in France and the Left Bank of Shakespeare and Co. that Benet met "Rosemary Carr, his future wife, who was working there as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune. His courtship featured cleverly playful love poems, many of which were collected in Tiger Joy (1925). Stephen and Rosemary married in 1921; she became his muse and moral compass. They would have three children, and their marriage was the great love story behind the rest of his life and work (ibid)".  When the couple returned to New York, Benet set about trying to make a name for himself in the field of Arts and Letters.  He began to achieve a gradual and acknowledged bit of success as a writer of poetry, rather than that of a short story artist.  This is something that has to be emphasized up front, because it explains a lot of what happened to Benet's public reputation later on.  His initial claim to fame was as a poet, to begin with.  It didn't take long for him to start achieving success in the realm of the short story.  That came along soon enough, almost as a natural development of the artist's talents.  However, for the longest time, he was praised as a poet.

This sort of reputation was never a problem for Benet.  In fact, it was his skills and efforts as a verse artist that he wanted to be remembered for the best.  Flash forward today, and his reputation is lucky enough if anyone even finds out he wasn't a contemporary of Nathanial Hawthorne.  So what happened to all that acclaim Benet built up for himself?  It seems possible to offer a good explanation here, and it consists in gaining a proper understanding of the pattern of Benet's artistic skills, and how it stacks up to the reality of the literary market as it was evolving during his lifetime.  The first thing to realize is that while he had skills as a poet, they don't seem to have had enough quality to stand alongside the likes of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.  Instead, all Benet has managed so far as audiences are concerned is one great Epic ode about the Civil War, entitled John Brown's Body.  The rest of his verses have proven to be of a more serviceable, rather than lasting quality.  For another thing, what we're dealing with here is the case of an artist whose poetry demonstrates the times in which he lived.  During the last years of his life, as World War II broke out into open conflict between nations, Benet's last few efforts of verse were spent supporting the Allied Efforts in fighting back against fascism and the Nazis.  There's nothing wrong with any of that, and sometimes the Art of that era is able to transcend the time it was made.

A good example of this is Pablo Picasso's Guernica.  That's an example of the artist capturing both the pain and endurance of the human spirit in a stark yet somehow memorable, and even Inspired and Inspiring image.  If we let that painting stand as the kind of high watermark that Benet might have been aiming for with his war poems, then it becomes easy to understand that his efforts in this regard will never take their place alongside poems such as In Flanders's Fields, or In Parenthesis, much less get anywhere near the status of The Waste Land.  Again, he was a serviceable poet, and that's all he remained on that front.  What the passage of time has revealed is that all of his best talent rested in the short story format.  It's here that we get a better understanding of the nature of Benet's skills as a writer, and how he found it much easier to jibe with kind of direction the world of fiction was headed prior to, during and after the Second World War.  What his short stories reveal is that Benet's truest legacy seems to rest in the kind of fiction that he praised early on in his career, with books like Tolkien's The Hobbit.  

In short, the guy was always at his best as a literary Fantasist whose work displays an easy combination of elements.  These would be an easy mixture of the English Fantasy Tradition stretching perhaps as far back as the poetry of Spenser (which may help explain his initial enthusiasm to be a writer of verses) all the way down to the time of Tolkien, Edith Nesbit, and H.P. Lovecraft.  This is the biggest influence in which the best of Benet's efforts as a writer are caught up.  His own dose of personal originality comes from the way he married the tropes of High Fantasy to the folksy and homespun colloquialisms of American Folklore.  What allows Benet's own voice to stand in this latter Tradition is his ability to marry the contents of Epic Myth to the American Tall Tale, and meld the two into a series of successful examples of the best popular fiction of his day.  If this helps explain where the real talents of the artist lie, then it also provides an understanding for why his reputation began to decline not long after his death.  It means that Benet is best regarded as an author of pulp fiction at the end of the day.  

He was the kind of author whose output ultimately places him on the same shelf alongside folks like Ray Bradbury and Washington Irving.  In a way, it was sort of his bad luck to become something of a darling of the critics at the start of his career.  It meant that when the gatekeepers of the Ivory Tower began to understand that Benet always had Pulp in his heart, such a discovery made it all the more easy for them to leave him stranded in Grub Street with the likes of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch.  It's meant that just like every other major Fantasist of the 20th century, Benet's reputation has had to sit and wait patiently for a newer, more appreciative generation of readers to come along and not just recognize where his true talent always belonged, but also to give him the kind of popular reception that's helped propel authors like Tolkien and Bradbury into the literary institutions they are now.  The problem in Benet's case, is that his reputation is still stuck waiting for a rediscovery to come along.

That leaves just one final ingredient in the artist's storehouse of Inspirations to explore, and it's the most interesting to talk about, because its the one element which might help connect his story of Fate with the concerns of Stephen King.  It's an influence that stems from Benet's years as a college student at Yale University.  It was there that Benet seems to have had the good fortune to run into what might have been the major influence of his artistic apprenticeship, the one that determined where his final legacy as a writer lay.  It was at Yale that Benet fell in as a member of the college's Elizabethan Club, and the academic legacy bequeathed to both it and the University in general by one of its most prestigious teachers, William Lyon Phelps.  His goals for creating the Elizabethan Club seems to have revolved around seeing if it was possible to introduce Liberal Humanism to the students of Yale in a way that wasn't a burden to them, for lack of a better word.  Phelps' idea was to invent a club focused around the most bookish students in the school, and have a library collection of the best authors and works of Renaissance literature at its center to serve as both a conversation piece, and as the Inspiration spark for any talent that might be wandering the University's grounds.  He idea seems to have been a success.

During the years of the First World War, three particular Yale talents, Stephen Benet and Thornton Wilder, along with Wilder's older brother Amos, were accepted into the group, and promptly began to find their own voices amidst a sea of older echoes (Izzo and Konkle, 107-8).  Prof. Jared Lobdell chooses to call the years that Benet and Wilder spent at the Yale Elizabethan Club as "part of the intellectual ferment of a sunshine age (ibid, 109)".  Lobdell admits that "the poetry of this sunshine age right after World War I was largely derivative and even the sunshine was arguably that of an Indian summer. But the ferment" generated during that singular space of time by the emergence of several talents under the same academic roof "was unmistakable (ibid)".  Lobdell then paints an impressionistic picture of what it was like to be an Elizabethan Club member back in those older college years.

"If I hold the first printing of Othello in my hands, or Ben Jonson's own copy of his Works, or Izaak Walton's copy of the first edition of Milton's Lycidas, there bubble up in my mind not only thoughts for conversation with my like-minded friends but—more slowly and from deeper levels—thoughts Of greater moment, about history and the nature of language and the peoples of this Earth. If I hold Othello and look at the Reynolds portrait of David Garrick in the front room of the club, I can be transported back in my imagination to Johnson's eighteenth century and history becomes a palpable thing. I can fancy Dr. Johnson there, dribbling snuff. So could— and did—Benét and his friends. That's not American history, Of course. Yet I believe the experience with Othello and Garrick carries over into experience with other histories, other rooms. Moreover, I believe that Benét had a similar experience in those rooms at the Elizabethan Club, with those books and those pictures and the visitors from England (111)".  It seems as if Benet's exposure to the contents of Renaissance Literature is the final puzzle piece that helps give us a clearer picture both of who he was as a writer, and how it connects to King's work.

The vast majority of Renaissance literature can best be described as a dialogue with the world of ancient mythology.  In one piece of writing after another from the Early Modern Period, you'll see names like Jonson, Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton all engaging with the worlds of Classical Myths and the various fantastical creatures that inhabit it.  This means that a lot of the older writers Benet studied at Yale were engaged in one form or another with the Fantasy genre.  The fact that he showed such a natural affinity for the same genre in his later written works does open room to theorize that it was this adolescent exposure to Myth as refracted through the lens of the Renaissance that goes along way toward explaining his writings as a fantasist.  It provides a probable answer for where he could have learned about such topics as the Fates, and how he used them in a work of fiction.

Conclusion: A Story that Shapes Future Fantasies to Come.

In terms of both setup and structure, the tale that Benet has to offer his readers is one that plays out very much like a modern day fairy tale.  The very nature of the premise is that of a typical folktale in and of itself.  An apprentice of some kind is sent on what sounds like a mundane task, only for the protagonist to have a "fateful" meeting with some element or representative from the world of Myth.  In this case, the apprentice is a trainee at a local newspaper, and the assignment he's sent on sounds very much like this kind of pointless, hazing-the-new-guy chore.  He's to head over to a local park and interview the members of a Freemason or Shriners type society that's passing through, presumably collecting funds for various charities along the way.  It isn't until our novice hero is handed a company card by the Lodge that Benet chooses to introduce the first note which clues the reader in that something is off.  The group call themselves The Sons and Daughters of Destiny, and while Slater dismisses it as "bound to be just another lodge", somehow just hearing the name is enough to send "a little shiver in his mind (231)".  Even the location where the meeting is supposed to take place is described in mythological overtones.

"It was a big shady grove of trees by the river—Snapper’s Grove—and the whole town was proud of it. There were picnic tables and rustic benches and a stone fireplace and a bandstand, and picnic parties came there from all over the state. It was well kept up, too—the town saw to that—and, if parties didn’t behave as parties should, those parties never got another permit. There were trees in Snapper’s Grove that had been there before there was a Snapperville, and you could still find Indian arrowheads down by the river. It was a pleasant place and people enjoyed themselves there, but always, to William, there was a great sense of Time in it—Time flowing by like the river, rustling and flowing by like the wind in the trees. You could look at some of the trees and see initials cut there by hands that had long been dust. You could lie by the river and wonder how things had been when the first settlers came (ibid)".  It even has a fitting entry gate, "a sort of rustic entrance it was, beyond the trolley stop (ibid)".  

Here's what's interesting about the way Benet sets his stage.  It should be noted first off that he's not doing anything all that original in the strictest sense.  He's not the first author to take figures from older Greco-Roman and/or Medieval Fantasies and transplant them into a modern setting.  Writers like Edith Nesbit and Kenneth Graham were writings fairy stories in which a thoroughly modern set of protagonists often found themselves interacting and trying to reckon with the myths of England's past, long before Benet had his imaginary main lead does the same thing.  Even writers like Frank Stockton were churning out tales of imaginary realms in the USA during the 19th century, and long before then, Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle had his own encounter with fair folk.  What makes Benet's treatment of this same idea work as well as it does is because he seems to have an instinctive grasp of all the right ways this sort of narrative can play.  While the story's setting remains firmly rooted in the United States, there are moments when Benet showcases his skills as a Fantasist by finding a good way of presenting the older tropes typically associated with Grimm's Fairy Tales, and describing them in ways that makes them fit in with a typical suburban setting.  Take his description of the Grove.

It's clear we're dealing with the type of setting that would have been set somewhere in the middle of an enchanted forest if this kind of story were told in an earlier period.  It's the kind of magical setting where all sorts of fantastic encounters and events are meant to take place.  None of that changes here, the stage setting fulfills the same task as it always does.  The novice hero is sent into the bewitching glade where a confrontation with the Otherworld awaits.  Even Benet's description of the crucial moment of transition between the mundane to the Supernatural is written with a light hand.  "So he went in...But as soon as he entered the Grove he began to get the feeling. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, just at first (233)".  It's just that this has got to be the first time in which the inhabitants of the Perilous Realm are described in a way that makes us understand how easy it would be for the Fair Folk, or the inhabitants of Olympus to walk around disguised as mortal looking humans.  Take the way Benet introduces this iteration of the Dwellers in the Sacred Grove, just before the novice meets them.  It happens just as he's about to enter the forest, and the groundskeeper give his opinion of the visitors.

"They may be foreigners, and then again they mightn’t be. They may be just what they say or they might be otherwise. But I’m not mixing in any of it. There’s a little wizened-up fellow who claims he knew my great-grandfather. Well, every¬ body knows my great-grandfather died before the family moved West. And there’s three ladies in an oxcart who say they came from Wisconsin. Well, maybe they did, and they look to be respectable ladies, but the ox has flowers on his horns. Decoration, probably, but there it is. I'm not mixing in it at all. And if you had the sense of a June bug neither would you, Willie—paper or no paper (232-33)".  The sense of the uncanny continues to be handled well in that ongoing "Just So" fashion, complete with a parting word of caution by the resident wise old sage.  

Then we come to the way Benet handles the titles characters of the Fates themselves.  Run his descriptions across your mind for a second and see how it reads.  "He’d seen the Grove crowded, before—and naturally, with any lodge meeting, some people would have regalia and badges and such. But there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the regalia these people wore. A good many of them were dressed like anybody else—and then there was one old man in a leather suit and moccasins who carried a long, old-fashioned gun in the crook of his arm. William rubbed his eyes at that, for he knew guns weren’t permitted in Snapper’s Grove, but nobody else seemed to be paying any attention. 

"The three ladies with the oxcart were there all right- very handsome they looked in their bright costumes, with their long yellow braids of hair and their icy gray eyes. They seemed to be knitting all the time, but you couldn’t tell where the knitting began or finished. Then there were the people who looked like pictures out of old books—and the conjurers and the sleight-of-hand men and the pitchmen. William couldn’t see how they got in—games of chance and such weren’t usually allowed in Snapper’s Grove, but there they were. Only these were different, for as soon as one fellow had finished some sort of trick somebody else would step up from the audience and do it better. He’d never seen that done before, and it bothered him to see it now.  

"And yet, at the same time, he felt a queer exhilaration. He couldn’t make head or tail of these Sons and Daughters of Destiny—he couldn’t even find anybody who seemed to be in charge. And yet, in spite of the oddness of the occasion, there was something exciting about it. For some reason the light seemed brighter and the air sweeter and the sky deeper than he’d ever found them before, even at Snapper’s Grove. There was something in the air that reminded him of spring and fall—and yet it was neither fall nor spring, as he knew. “It’s outside of Time,” thought William Riley, though he couldn’t have said how the words came into his mind. And suddenly he felt a little afraid (233-34).  I began this essay review by using Stephen King as a jumping off point.  My goal was to see if it was possible to find anything in Benet's forgotten short story that would help shine a light on King's preoccupation with Fate in his own works.  What I've managed to discover here is the kind of stage setting that is at once similar to King's efforts, and yet at the same time its not quite the same as anything the creator of Castle Rock ever did.

On the one hand, what Benet's given us here is a very familiar looking setup.  The society that William encounters within the enchanted grove bears some of the hallmarks associated with the Fair Folk.  There's a sense that the members of the Destiny Society have this extra-added dimension to their personalities and gestures, as if the people you're looking at are never quite as human as they appear.  You're left with the impression that if you caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of your eye, that's when the glamor, and all the masques they use to disguise themselves begin to slip.  Then you might just catch a peak at whatever lies underneath, leaving it an open question of whether you'd like what you see or not.  There is also the presence of familiar images associated with the Fates.  The clearest example of this is the brief glimpse we catch of the Three Ladies sowing an endless, and somehow alive looking garment in the oxcart.  This is nothing less than the Classical presentation of the Destiny trope in all of its original glory.  This just so happens to be the one version of the trope King has used in a gender swapped variation for his 1994 novel Insomnia.  At the same time, it's clear that Benet is the one who has managed to take this concept, and run with it to an extent that King has never tried in his work.

This comes from the way he portrays the Fates as part of a traveling carnival.  There are moments in Benet's depiction here that point forward to works like Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.  It all stems from the shared artistic notion of a troupe of traveling figures from ancient Myth who go around traversing the Earth as an ever moving side show caravan.  It was an old idea by the time Bradbury used it for what remains perhaps his best effort as a novelist.  And even before Benet utilized it here, Charles G. Finney beat him to the punch with The Circus of Dr. Lao.  Even then, the very concept probably goes all the way back to at least the Middle Ages in one form or another.  The archetype of an Elf Fair, or Spectral Carnival appears to be one of those Poetic Images which has just been lying around in the storehouse of the Imagination for ages.  Benet here proves to be one of the handful of talents who proved they could use it well.  A lot of that is down to the way the writer uses this old setup to tell his story.  Here's what happens to young Bill Riley once he enters the Grove.

He spends a few disoriented minutes looking around for a likely interview subject, and has some difficulty, because there aren't many around who look like a reasonable citizen.  "But he finally picked on a wizened little fellow because he had merry eyes. He had a sort of booth rigged up between two big trees and he was spinning a dingy old wheel-of-fortune (234)".  When he goes up to interview this particular gentleman, the first word's out of the older timer's mouth upon seeing William is, "Where on mortal earth did you spring from? I haven't had a customer like you in a hundred years (234-35)".  Things get curiouser and curiouser from here.  This old Wheel of Fortune carny proceeds to declare that he knew William's " great-great-great-grandfather, Theophilus—fleshy man, he was—interrupted a cousin of mine, just because he didn’t like the fate that seemed to be laid out for him (235)".  The net result of this bit of ancient history is that the fortunes of William's family were altered quite a while back.  If his third grandfather had followed the will of Ka, as it were, he could have come to America as a rich man, and William himself would have grown up as a Silver Spoon Brat.  "So that turned out all right, on the whole (235)", is how ol' Mr. Wheel of Fortune chooses to sum the whole business up.

He then proceeds to challenge William to play his chances at the Wheel.  Bill decides to humor the old man, though he knows that games of chance, especially Wheels, can be fixed.  He gives the item in question a college try spin, anyway.  The net result is that he's awarded a badge with a gloomy looking prognostication embossed upon it.  "It says Poultry Inspector (236)".  After giving it some thought, however, the old man decides a mistake has been made, and in looking to correct it, he calls for his daughter's help.  A girl with " brown hair and brown eyes" who "looked like all the girls" William had "known and liked in high school", and with "two little golden- brown freckles on her nose", then comes out and helps her old man see that William gets his proper fate.  This time it's a badge that reads "Editor and Publisher (236-37)".  While things seem to have arrived at a better conclusion, Williams still has a few questions left unanswered.  For instance, who are these people, what is this "place" of theirs, and what are they doing here, claiming that they know so much about townspeople like William himself?

The closest explanation that Mr. Wheel of Fortune ever gives out goes as follows: "“I told them!” said the old man, nodding his head. "I told them it was bound to happen! But they wouldn’t pay attention. Of course, I’m only a third-degree man, myself—never could pass through to the fourth degree, though I’ve studied and studied. But I told them just the same. ‘If you want to have the convention in a grove,’ I said, ‘that’s right and fitting. But for goodness’ sake pick a grove that isn’t all tied up with human living and dying. Otherwise,’ I said, ‘somebody’s likely to walk in without an invitation and then there’ll be a pretty kettle of fish!’ But they wouldn’t listen, of course, and so here you are (235)".  His daughter is a bit less cryptic, though just by so much.  She's the one who guides William away to where they can talk a little bit, and its during the course of their somewhat Romantic conversation that things begin to fall into place, and the meaning of Benet's narrative starts to become clear.  The Daughter tells William a bit about herself, “I’m new", she explains. "I’m young. I’m beginning. I was born in this country. I’m not very wise, but I’m growing. I don’t know all I can do yet, but I want to try. I’m not like one of the Eastern Seaboard destinies—not that they aren’t very fine stock—but I like all kinds of people (238)".

William protests that nothing about the way the girl, her father, or the others talk makes a lick of sense.  For instance, a pair of the older gents just "got news that some youngster named Schicklgruber back in the old country is growing up just about the way they expected. Now—does that make sense?" "I wish it didn’t,” said the girl (240)".  When William protests that the name sounds like a delicatessen, and that just because some random person in another country grows up to be a bad lot doesn't mean it has anything to do with him or his hometown.  This causes the girl to give him a sad look.  "Yes, you’ll think that for quite a while, William Riley,” she said. "But you’re not one man alone—you’re part of a nation and a time. And that nation and that time are going to be changed and altered by all sorts of things and people. You’re going to wake up in the morning and wonder what’s happened in China; you’re going to lie down at night and wonder what’s happened in Egypt. You’re going to make efforts you never thought were in you, and be helped and hindered by men you’ll never see in the flesh (ibid)".  William then gets told the shape of thing to come, and how this will impact his life going forwards.

As things shape out, a lot of the future turns out to be little more than a news report of the troubled WWII of Benet's present.  He's told about how things start out slowly with the death of a man named Ferdinand, and how that domino effects the entire world into a First World War.  This will cause ripple effects that result in the son of the troubled Schicklgruber growing into a funny little man with a mustache, and wreaking all sorts of havoc with people's lives.  The more William is informed of the future, the more the nature of Benet's work becomes clear.  What the reader is being treated to in this story is nothing less than an early example of the Urban Fantasy with an Imaginative moral drawn from real life at its heart.  In essence, what Benet has done is to craft the sort of ethical fable that guys like Rod Serling would go on to make famous a decade and a half later on down the road.  Benet never lived to see his particular style of Fantasy writing blossom into the kind of tales that would help create one of pop culture's most enduring franchises, yet he is responsible for providing some of its building blocks.

It's the exact nature of those literary foundation stones that deserve to get their time in the spotlight now.  Because doing so can tell us a great deal about where writers like Serling and Stephen King get their ideas.  It was mentioned in passing earlier that the foundations for Benet's type of Fantasy storytelling had their greatest origin point during the author's time as a student member of Yale University's Elizabethan Club.  It was also brought up that Thornton Wilder was both a member of this same academic gathering place, as well as one of Benet's fellow alumnus and friends when they were at college together.  I bring this up because following the breadcrumb trail of textual clues leads me to the conclusion that not only were Benet and Wilder good friends, but also something of hitherto unacknowledged literary influences on each other.  This becomes apparent when you stop and take time out to examine the surprising number of shared tropes the two writers utilize between themselves for their written works.  On the surface, it seems like the writings of the celebrated theater playwright have nothing to do with the man who wrote of Daniel Webster's exploits against Mr. Scratch.  Then you go back and read some of Wilder's early one-act plays, and notice old split-foot himself among the cast.

This same shady character appears in early and now forgotten efforts such as Proserpina and the Devil, where Benet's Scratch appears in a more traditional form, alongside characters from Greek mythology such as Demeter and Hermes.  In overlooked writings like Proserpina, what we're treated to is the sight of the playwright drawing on figures and tropes that were still common in the time of Chaucer or Shakespeare, and somehow finding ways of placing them back on stage at the height of early 20th century Modernism.  What's interesting about Wilder's use of these older Elizabethan characters and styles of writing is that as his efforts as a novelist and playwright go on, the more he continues to take these sort of Medieval and Classical tropes, symbols, and sometimes even complete structural patterns, and find ways of translating them into appearances and modes of expression that are more in keeping with the modernity of his early to mid-20th century time and place.  He goes from presenting the contents of an Everyman Morality Play in its original Middles Ages garb in playlets like The Angel that Troubled the Waters, to taking the exact same content, and setting it all, let's say, within the confines of a modern passenger train, as in Pullman Car Hiawatha.  That's a dramatic piece which sees the original figures of Medieval and Elizabethan stage repertoire presented in new form, one that makes careful use of the type of modern dress and artistic expression that is characteristic of 20th century fiction.

A series of vignettes play out in a train car traveling through the Midwest to the Northeast at night, and all of it is seen from the sort of Macrocosmic perspective which comes off as surreal and fantastic to a modern viewer or reader, but which was more familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  While the appearances and actions belong to the 20th century of Wilder's age, it's all still framed from the kind of perspective that would have been common to Chaucer and Dante.  We're dealing with a fictional secondary world in which "The minutes are gossips" and "the hours are philosophers (102)".  Wilder has somehow taken the content of Medieval and Elizabethan drama, and made them modern.  In doing so, Wilder sort of helps to further on a process that had been taking place for some time before he and Benet came around.  Neither of them can be thought of as the first authors to write Fantasies in the modern era.  That honor goes to the likes of Nesbit, Twain, and later English practitioners like Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen.  Out of all the contemporary Fantastic authors, it's the latter two just mentioned who have a greater claim to beating Benet and Wilder to the punch.  It's just that when you study the efforts of the American playwright and short story author together, and then learn that not only were they contemporaries, but also college friends united by a shared love of Elizabethan literature, then it's kind of like a lot of the content of their best work begins to make not just a bit more sense, it also becomes possible to catch all the ways that the two seem to tap into the same creative wellspring source.

Both Wilder and Benet each try their hand, and somehow manage to be successful in rummaging through old textual trunks full of the kind of ancient bric-a-brac they find fascinating, and then they place it either up on the stage, or else on the page.  Wilder accomplishes this feat with plays like Our Town, whose purpose, according to biographer Penelope Niven,  was to contemplate "the perennial dramas of ordinary life as they played out again and again on a cosmic stage, one person at a time, one place at a time, throughout, the ages (422)".  It's a theme he keeps circling round to time again not just in his plays, but also novels like The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Benet tends to be more down to Earth, and less experimental than Wilder, yet a careful study of the shared thematic and subject overlap between the two writers leaves enough information that tells you he's probably drawing from the same well as Wilder does.  Benet's own approach is perhaps best described as a riff on what Mark Twain was doing with works like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.  He draws on mythology in its original contexts, and re-expresses it through the creative channels of America's Tall Tale Tradition.

Most of Benet's Fantasies tend to fit into this particular mode of artistic expression.  They are stories told in the form of whale-sized whoppers with a bit of modern finesse added to them.  The implication here being that the same type of American Imaginative impulse that birthed both Paul Bunyan and his companion Babe the Big Blue Ox is what also allows Benet to take a real life figure like Daniel Webster, and turn him into a latter day folk hero for the modern age.  Benet's single claim to originality in this regard is to give a slight air of literate sophistication to his efforts by trawling deeper into the myth pool that such stories come from.  Much like Twain, he has no problem in taking a folk hero like Webster, and pairing him off against a fundamentally Medieval conception of the devil, with perhaps a dash of Marlowe and Milton thrown in.  He's up to a similar tactic in "William Riley and the Fates", and while its not the same kind of story as "Daniel Webster", there may still be a sense in which its possible to speak of the writer examining the same set of themes from a different perspective.  Here's what I mean by that.  It becomes pretty clear what kind of story Benet is penning as he relates the encounter an ordinary journalist trainee has with a traveling carnival of Fates out of both Greco-Roman and Medieval literary traditions.  He's using it all to comment on the situation of WWII, which was raging at the time.

In doing so, what's interesting about the final result and effect of Benet's efforts is that he's sort of constructed his own episode of The Twilight Zone.  I wasn't being casual with the statement that stories like this and "Daniel Webster" tend to function as precursors to Serling's own future creative endeavors.  the story of Will Riley and his encounters with the Fates is proof enough if you step back and take a close enough look at the material of the story as a whole.  You've got this ordinary protagonist leading a normal life, and then reality takes this strange little twist that lends everything an uncanny sort of air.  The next thing you know, the familiar pattern of his own idyllic, almost Norman Rockwell style hometown takes a shift, and suddenly the local public park is transfigured into this Delphic Grove out of Homer or Spenser, and he's conversing with mythical Olympians about the nature of humanity, and what the future holds in store, and how it all ties together in a note on the importance of ethical responsibility.  It even ends with Fate's Daughter sending Bill on his way a wiser, chastened man than the young novice who entered Fate's Bower earlier at the start.  There's a more wistful yet mature quality about William when the Fates depart, and the story even ends in a proper Serling-esque style.

"Then he crossed the street, and down by the market square he passed a girl named Ellen Chesney and stopped to speak to her. She was a nice girl with brown eyes and brown hair, like a lot of girls in high school, and he’d known her all his life and never paid much attention. But today, as they stood there talking, he saw that she had two little golden freckles on her nose (246)".  The entire setup couldn't be more on brand if you tried.  It's easy, for instance, to even suggest some good ideas for actors who could play the major parts in a hypothetical Zone episode adaptation of this story.  It's easy to envision, say, Roddy McDowell or Anthony Perkins in the role of William Riley, with Anne Francis (of After Hours fame) as the Daughter of Fate, along with someone like Elisha Cook Jr. as the Wheel of Fortune Man, and maybe George S. Irving as William's harried newspaper editor.  The reason its easy for the mind to go to these sort of places with a story like this, down to seeing how it would look in that classic Black and White style, is because Benet has given us the kind of story in which all of the ingredients come together to make the kind dramatic presentation which would find its natural home in the Zone.

A lot of it is down not just to the way the writer handles the fantastical elements in a familiar narrative, its also in how Benet manages to weave it all in service of a vital moral imperative, without sacrificing the drama for the sake of what Robert Bloch called "a plotful of message".  It's something that Benet has very much in common with Serling.  Both men grew up in the kind of households where an emphasis was placed on the public welfare.  Each of them seems to have nurtured and kept a liking for tales of the Fantastic and the Macabre, with an occasional peek into the Science Fictional.  Benet even going so far as to pen one of the first major modern post-apocalyptic short stories, "By the Waters of Babylon".  In each case, Serling and Benet ended up turning their literary skills to the composition and dramatization of the same kind of Fantasies that they grew up on, and yet each brought enough of a similar sounding moral slant to the table, that it almost makes sense to claim that Serling (along with the likes of Ray Bradbury) is the one who picked up where Benet left off.  It's also possible to see how this logic works in reverse when your realize Benet is using figures from ancient Myth to comment on the troubles of his own times, much as Rod did with his TV show.  The historical milieu is set during the years of World War II, yet the basic gist of both writers doesn't seem to differ much from the other.

Let's put it this way, "William Riley and the Fates" is concerned with a call to action.  It was published in the November issue of The Atlantic, and was meant to act as a wake up call to Americans about the looming threat of the Nazis and Fascism that was threatening to engulf the world.  The purpose of the titular Fates are there to shake the main character, who acts as a stand-in for the still Pre-War readers of the United States out of their personal sense of complacency.  Just one month later, Pearl Harbor would turn Benet and his Fates into harbingers of unheeded prophecy.  Rod Serling was still just a pup fresh out of high school and into college when December 7th rolled along, and yet he was the one who put on the Uniform and did his tour of duty in the Pacific Theater as a result of the threat Benet warns about in this short story.  The net result for Serling was a permanent helping of PTSD and memories of combat, death, and desolation that continued to haunt him, even to the end of his life.  At the same time, much like with J.R.R. Tolkien during WWI, the experience of battle seems to have galvanized his Imagination into a constant stream of creative activity, with most of it being geared toward the kind of stories that Benet helped pioneer back during the 1920s and up to the early 40s.  Serling was therefore, in an ironic and yet somehow fitting sense of the term, perhaps the best audience member Benet could ask for.

A careful look back at seemingly disconnected events in history like this can help us pull the camera lens back a bit, and begin to see how one example of fiction and the world shaking events that inspired them could go on to have similar repercussion for later artistic talents.  It therefore makes reasonable enough sense to view a story like this was one of those forgotten efforts that nonetheless managed to create a ripple effect.  One that still continues to resound in the voices of other artists like Bradbury, Serling, and even Stephen King.  I started this article by asking what an examination of this overlooked Benet story could tell me about the way creator of Castle Rock deals with the topic of Fate in his own writings.  At the very least, I can say that I've found another avenue for exploration, one that might help gain some knowledge about where King gets some of his ideas from.  In terms of the ways he uses Fate in distinction to Benet, it seems as if both artists tend to follow a similar pattern of behavior when dealing with the very idea of Destiny, and that human beings are bound to it.  They like the idea as concept you can play around with on paper, yet when it comes to real life, they always tend to fall back on the idea espoused in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.  There's no fate but what we make, and that seems the best policy to live a life on.  Neither of them can do without that free choice in their lives.

Benet seems content to use the Fates in much the same way Serling utilized the Fantastic elements in his own work, it's there more to help drive the thematic moral point home, rather than to function as any kind of grander theme.  King is the one who appears to have stumbled upon the concept of man as a slave to destiny, and then become fascinated enough with it to let it become one of his constant themes.  At the same time, it's clear enough that, much like Benet, King can't bring himself to place too much stock in it as far as the real world is concerned.  When it comes down a contest between Ka and Humanity, King can always be counted on to side with Benet, Serling, and James Cameron.  It's the choices we make that define the course of our lives, and if it's possible to speak of humans as part of any larger cosmic pattern, then it's got to be one that leaves that crucial distinction between a choosing subject, and a cosmic plaything.  That seems to be were things stand so far as King and Stephen Vincent Benet are concerned.  This is a tacit admission that the author of "William Riley" makes when the Fate's Daughter says: "You’ll hear this country is finished—well, we’ve heard that right from the first. You’ll hear things will never be the same—well, they never have been quite the same, to my knowledge, since John Smith came to Jamestown. You’ll hear people say that they can’t bear to have children with times so unsettled—well, if they feel that way, let them—I don’t want their children. I’m young and I’m free and I’m growing, and I want the bold and the merry and the enduring. I want the laughers and the thinkers, the strong-hearted and the daring (243)".  I think King and Benet always fall in that line.

Beyond that, there's the final and ultimate question of the overall quality of the story left to determine.  In the end, I'd have to say that what we've got on our hands is a fairly well-done Twilight Zone episode.  Since it bears so many of the hallmarks of Serling's series about it, I guess the best way to judge Benet's short story is to ask on what level of quality it belongs to in terms of the regular kind of rankings most of us have for episodes of the Zone.  In my case, I'd have to call it a very respectable offering that fits somewhere way above the worst the show could sometimes cough up, despite everyone's best efforts.  I don't know that it ranks up in the top tier shelf with entries like Walking Distance, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, or Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.  Nor does it belong on the bottom rung with The Bewitchin' Pool or Caesar and Me.  Instead, it seems to occupy some corner of the shelf near works of a similar nature, such A Hundred Yards Over the Rim, or A Game of Pool.  Now bear in mind, one of the constant headaches of trying to rank Zone episodes is that beyond a certain point, every one of us is stuck having to rely on our own judgement about what makes for a good or bad series offering.

An episode like Game of Pool tends to be one of those that are remembered fondly, and there's plenty of good reason for that.  Yet the idea that such a simple, straightforward short story offering like the one Benet gives us here is equal to it can very well come off as blasphemy for even the most casual of Serling's fans.  So that means there'd better be a damn good bit of logic behind the statement I'm making here.  The best defense I can offer has to do with the kind of Zone content that Benet's story gibes best with.  It fits in best with the more lighthearted, yet serious episodes in the series catalogue.  The kind of stories, in other words, that focused on an essentially decent protagonist, and where the Fantastical elements may be there to serve a warning, but they're not meant as punishments.  Sometimes they can come in the form of encouragements, or even present solutions to whatever problems the protagonist is facing.  That's the role and function the Fates seem to perform for the title character in Benet's narrative.  They're there to help young Mr. Will Riley learn to grow up and accept responsibility not just for himself, but also for others.  It's a lesson the main character takes to heart, and as a result, he exits the stage with the sense of being more ready and willing to live life on its own terms and benefit from it.

It's similar to Zone entries where a father from the 1800s is able to help his son grow up to be a pioneer in the field of medicine by being allowed to travel into the future to fetch the cure he needs to save his boy's life, or the title character of the Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room, who is able to transcend his own personal weaknesses.  If there's any Zone entry that seems to be the closest in tone and message to Benet's Tall Tale, then it would have to be Passage for Trumpet, which has to be considered as Serling's own version of It's a Wonderful Life.  That's an example of Rod penning a tale in which the narrative is very much on the side of the Little Guy.  It's big hearted in a way similar way to that of Benet's overlooked fantastic yarn.  Each tale is about learning how to appreciate life in a way that does justice to the responsibilities that come with being human, and while neither shirks away from looking at the darker side of things, they also deny that this has to be the fundamental nature of reality.  So that's the kind of shelf space "Williams Riley and the Fates" belongs on.  It's one of those nice and cozy outings that even the Zone knew how to offer every now and then.  It's a moral fable of WWII that handles its themes with the greater sort of wisdom that Serling and others were better at writing back in the day.  

In addition, it might help to to broaden the scope and context that writers like Stephen King operate in.  There's more to explore in this vein of course (such as the fact that Thornton Wilder once wrote a play called Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came) yet all that is for another day.  Right now, the main point comes down to just this.  Steve Vincent Benet has written a pretty decent, Capraesque, feelgood Fantasy.  I'm even willing to argue that it might even be of enough quality that I can see how it might have worked as something of a good send-off for the Zone during its final season.  The kind of tale that would help act as a closing summation for the ideas Serling tried to grapple with all his life.  Beyond all this, however, the fundamental point is that I had fun reading it.  If I can come away from either a film or written work saying I had fun, then it tends to get a pass from me.  It's with all this in mind that I'd have to say that "William Riley and the Fates" is a worthwhile read, and it's author deserves rediscovery.