Jesse Bentley
A farmer convinced that God has singled him out, in a four-part sequence set a generation before the rest of the book. He never meets George Willard.
A son, and a sign, and he asks for both in the same breath. Running through the fields at night while his wife is in labor he calls out: "Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth." A daughter is born instead.
The book
At a glance
- The subject of 'Godliness,' a tale in four parts
- The Bentley farms, in the valley of Wine Creek outside Winesburg
- Twenty-two when he takes over the farm; fifty-five, and looking seventy, when his grandson comes to live with him
- The Presbyterian ministry, until the Civil War called him home
- Katherine, his wife, dead within a year; a daughter, Louise; a grandson, David Hardy
- Never. 'Godliness' runs on its own clock, a generation before most of the book.
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJesse Bentley owns the Bentley farms in the valley of Wine Creek outside Winesburg, and he is the subject of 'Godliness,' a tale in four parts inside Winesburg, Ohio, the 1919 book of linked short stories by the American writer Sherwood Anderson. It is by a wide margin the longest thing in the book, it is set largely a generation before the other stories, and Jesse Bentley never once crosses paths with George Willard, the young reporter the rest of the book runs through. Readers often feel they have wandered into a different book here, and they have.
He came home in his early twenties to run a farm he had never wanted. He had left at eighteen to study for the Presbyterian ministry. Then the Civil War took all four of his older brothers, one after another, and his father sent for him. The neighbors laughed at the idea: he was small, slender and, by the standards of the time and the place, womanish of body, and he turned up in a long black coat and a narrow black string tie to do the work four strong men had been doing.
He did it, by thinking about the farm night and day while other men were too tired to think about anything. Within two weeks his father signed the whole place over to him and retired into the background, and so did everyone else in the house. "Jesse Bentley was a fanatic." He made the household work as it had never worked and took no pleasure in any of it. What he read was the Old Testament, and what he wanted was what the men in it had: God coming down out of the sky to speak to him and appoint him some heroic task.
The rest of his life is a collision between that and the other thing he wants, which is more land and more money. He drains swamp, buys machines that let him keep fewer men, invents a machine for making fence out of wire, reads the newspapers and the magazines, and tells his son-in-law the banker to get into the big things that are coming. Then at night, out under the stars, he asks God for a sign and does not get one.
How the book draws them
- The four dead brothersEnoch, Edward, Harry and Will Bentley all enlisted in the Civil War, and all four were killed before it ended. Their deaths are what put the youngest and least likely son in charge of six hundred acres.
- How he looks"By the standards of his day Jesse did not look like a man at all." Small and very slender, with brown curly hair and grey eyes that are hard and direct at some moments and wavering and uncertain at others, and a mouth like the mouth of a sensitive and very determined child.
- What he does to the householdHe makes everyone on the farm work as they never have, and there is no joy in the work. When things go well they go well for Jesse and never for the people who depend on him. Anderson's summary is that he could master others but he could not master himself.
- His wifeKatherine, brought from the city and too delicate for a Northern Ohio farm in the hard years after the Civil War. She helped with the milking, made the beds for the hired men and cooked their food, worked every day from sunrise until late at night for a year, and died after giving birth. Anderson is careful to say Jesse did not intend to be unkind to her, and was simply too absorbed in his own destiny to notice she was killing herself in his service.
- What he thinks he isA new kind of man come into possession of these fields, and possibly the servant God has been waiting for. Walking the valley one moonlit night he works out that every farmer who owns land along Wine Creek is a Philistine and an enemy of God, and that one of them may yet rise up like Goliath and take his possessions from him.
- The other appetiteHe buys harvesting machinery and builds modern barns, drains a strip of black swamp with great ditches and thousands of tiles while the neighbors laugh, and clears enough on one crop of cabbages and onions to pay for the work and buy two more farms. He invents a machine for making fence out of wire, and thinks that if he were younger he would give up farming and start a factory in Winesburg.
- His bodyHe was threatened with paralysis at one point and his left side stayed weak, so that when he grows excited the whole left side of his face twitches. At fifty-five he looks seventy, worn out with much thinking and scheming.
- The grandsonDavid Hardy, his daughter's boy, comes out from town to live on the farm at twelve, and for a while the hard insistent thing in Jesse Bentley goes out of the house and everyone in it is happy. He takes the boy on his rounds from farm to farm in an old phaeton behind a white horse, and decides that the sign he has waited for will come through him.
The four parts do not all stay with Jesse Bentley.
The sequence ends in the woods.