Goods and Chattels

The alchemy by which a book finds a sympathetic reader is often mysterious. A friend recently sent me a bunch of duplicates and  discards from his extensive collection, which centers around one main author, but also includes this author’s friends and even some of their family members. In the pleasant task of removing these books from a box, I focused quickly on one particular book as one I wanted to read soon: Good and Chattels (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1930) by Laura Benét.

Laura Benét (1884-1979) is the lesser-known writing sibling of  two famous brothers (famous, at least in terms of the first half of the twentieth century): poet and fiction writer Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), who is perhaps best remembered for his 1936 short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (filmed in 1941), and poet and long-time writer for The Saturday Review of Literature, William Rose Benét (1886-1950).

Laura Benét was a social worker as well as a writer. Like her brothers, she published collections of poetry, but she also did anthologies and nonfiction books aimed at young people, including novels and stories about the younger lives of people who became famous. She published, I believe, only two collections of short stories, Goods and Chattels and  Barnum’s First Circus and Other Stories (1949). The second of these contains fictionalized episodes in the early lives of famous people. Whether or not it contains material for adults I do not know.*

Goods and Chattels intrigued me initially for the ungrammatical description on the front cover of the dust-wrapper: “12 highly imaginative, some of then delicately satirical tales and legends”. First, the collection actually contains fifteen tales, not just twelve. Second, I then checked a few of the usual sources on fantasy. Nothing by Laura Benét is listed in E.F. Bleiler’s Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948), but Goods and Chattels is listed in R. Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist 1700-1974 (1979).

The next thing, obviously, was to read the book. And having read it, the problem became how to describe it. The blurb writer for the front flap of the dust-wrapper didn’t do a very good job:  “Goods and Chattels consists of twelve delicate, highly imaginative tales, suggestive of Hawthorne’s lovely allegories and some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories, yet closely attuned to the modern world.” There is a light satire to some of the tales, as well as a modernness, but the depth of Hans Christian Andersen is absent, as well as the allegory in Hawthorne.  The plots twist and swerve in unlikely ways, reminding me a bit of the present day writer Kelly Link, but without some of Link’s especial qualities. The prose is lyrical, and the direction the stories take is almost always unexpected. But they also feel quite ephemeral. Reading them is like eating cotton candy, sweet and pleasant to the initial taste, but in the end not very filling.

After struggling to describe the book, I looked up some contemporary reviews of it, only to find that the reviewers didn’t really know how to describe it either. 

One hesitates to write about the tales of Laura Benét, There is in them an evanescent quality that defies analysis and threatens disaster to heavy-handed paraphrase. Herself a master of figurative accuracy, she leads the hapless reviewer into unconscious and unsuccessful simile and makeshift metaphor. . . .  most of Miss Benét’s prose [is] so gratifyingly free from the sentimentality that has unfortunately come to be associated with fantasy.” The Saturday Review of Literature, 4 October 1927

The tales in this book are like soap bubbles, fragile, airy, exquisitely colored things which tease the imagination and draw it after them. They drift and change even while you look at them, and if you so much as touch them they vanish—a property which puts reviewers at an enormous disadvantage. The New York Herald-Tribune Books, 4 May 1930

A few other reviewers use the term “whimsical” to describe the tales but I think that is a little off. For Benét’s stories don’t really have whimsy in the sense of humor, though they do have the requisite eccentric imagination and sudden changes. 

Laura Benét

 

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to give a few examples. Here is the opening of “Always Keep a Butterfly”:

Once there lived a husband and wife who, being childless, had worked very hard all their days, raising butterflies to capture people’s lost youth and bring it back to them. In their squat, wooden house the walls were littered with butterfly cocoons; and window boxes with sweet-smelling, growing plants stood in the windows. When the little shy, winged creatures came forth their wings were delicately tinted with a magic water color that made them glow like iridescent lights. Then away and away they flew to the Lost Mountain of Living Springs that only butterflies could enter, where slept eternal youth in the laughing bodies of little children.

From there the story shifts away from the butterflies to the travails of the husband and wife as they grow too poor to continue, and must try other things before they travel on in diminished situations. Yet the eventual denouement is satisfactory.

The short tale “The Wind That Worked Itself Up” begins:

The Wind was a wild boy who loved to run away from his calm, deep-bosomed mother, the blue-eyed Sky, and spin tops with his streaming hair. She did not like to scold him because when he was tiny he had been sick and needed fresh air.

The naughty boy Wind eventually gets his comeuppance.

Only one story is labelled as from a legend, and that is “The Magic Balloon,” which is subtitled “An old Swiss legend.” However, it doesn’t much read like a legend, and is actually quite in line with the other tales in this volume. Herein a sad young girl is given a yellow balloon by a strange man with a warning that she must keep its heart light, which brings sunshine, but it shrinks to a pinhead with sorrow and mortification. So follows the young girl’s experiences. 

Some of the titles of the stories give a bit of an impression of what they are about.  I mention a few here, which include some of my favorites:  “Goods and Chattels” (originally published in The Forum, December 1928); “Never Rent Eyes”; “The Girl Who Wanted a Career”; “Mr. Windsor’s Back Door”; and “The Blue Village”.

Of the collection, the stories as a whole are subtle, original, and well-written.  Despite their evanescent qualities, I quite liked them.

*The New York Times said of it on publication: “These twenty-three stories vary in length, place, amount of suspense and activity. A few are quiet glimpses into the childhood of famous people, incidents which point to the kind of fame which will be achieved. Some are about encounters between fictional characters and real people -- Audubon, Johnny Appleseed, Edgar Allan Poe.”