Helen Bevington was born and reared in upper New York State, but her career as a writer really began when her husband, Merle, joined the English faculty at Duke University in 1942 and they moved to the outskirts of Durham. She began writing, she once said, "Because of the particular pleasure of living in the country in North Carolina." Her career was launched when she won a poetry contest sponsored by Houghton Mifflin.

In 1946 she published her first collection, Doctor Johnson’s Waterfall. She is best known for light poems that are witty and polished and marked by a disciplined grace. Her themes often come from her wide reading, her extensive travels in Europe, or the landscapes and lifestyles of her adopted state. Although she refused to take herself seriously as a poet, her poems often strike a somber note.

Soon after her first book came out, her delightful, witty, and sophisticated lines started appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Saturday Review, and the American Scholar. To an interviewer, she once said, "My intention is not to write serious poetry. I write verses because I enjoy and like writing, as other people play the piano, sketch, or follow other amusement." She became known, in the words of one critic, for taking "artful notices of life’s comedies."

In a memoir of her childhood, Charley Smith’s Girl (1965), Bevington tells of her youth in upstate New York, where she was born in her grandfather’s Methodist parsonage. From high school she entered the University of Chicago for a degree in philosophy, then earned a master’s from Columbia with a thesis on Thoreau. While teaching at Bedford Academy, she met Dr. Bevington, whom she married in 1928. He died in 1964, but Mrs. Bevington, who had returned to the classroom in 1943, began teaching English at Duke, writing regularly for the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review.

Like Doctor Johnson’s Waterfall, another volume, Nineteen Million Elephants (1950), is made up of poems that treat, with high humor, the things that attracted and amused her in both books and everyday life. Her third volume, A Change of Sky (1956), won the Roanoke-Chowan Award and was listed by the New York Times among the outstanding books of the year. When Found, Make a Verse of (1961) contains favorite quotations, original verses, and short prose commentary.

In 1974 Bevington published Beautiful Lofty People, lighthearted essays and poems about writers and poets, for which she received the Mayflower Cup. Her three autobiographical books are The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm (1971), about life at Duke between 1942 and 1956; Along Came the Witch (1976), her journal of the 1960s; and The Journey Is Everything, A Journal of the 1970s. She and Burke Davis were awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1973.

Three poems from

Dr. Johnson’s Waterfall and Other Poems
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946
Copyright © 1945, 1946 by Helen Bevington. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

An excerpt from Charley Smith’s Girl, A Memoir
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965

Addie had worked all spring as secretary to the principal of the Binghamton High School, with enough typing still to keep her at the office through the summer. Charley was unemployed. He stayed busy at home taking care of me and teaching himself, with tremendous enthusiasm, two subjects he especially wanted to know – the Pitman method of shorthand and the Czech language. Our days together were soon fully occupied. Though I slept upstairs with Addie, in a bedroom hastily furnished for that purpose because of my father’s strange sense of propriety, she was gone in the morning when Charley and I got around to breakfast. He would put buns and buttermilk on the table and a record on the victrola, Evan Williams singing from the Messiah, "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth." The whole room shook to their powerful voices, both of them, Williams and Charley, singing a vibrant tenor during the meal: "And because He lives, and because He lives, and because He lives, I too, I too, I too shall live!" Charley was still holding on to the high note when the record ended and the needle began to scratch. He rose to his feet, the winner, louder and more magnificent to me than any other singer in the world, as he probably was to himself. We washed our dishes in cold water, though there was plenty of hot. Charley preferred to put his hands in cold water. And he used this brief time in the kitchen to outline a few of his theories and conclusions. He was not a disciplinarian like my mother, but an educator who worried about my ignorance. In a hurry to teach me something, he spoke fast and on a broad scale, touching upon two major themes: Life was the one. And the other was Death. Charley has been, there is no denying, a lifelong puzzle to me. He remained the stranger, a man I alternately loved and hated, a man I never knew. I believe the reason is that too many contraries met in him. There were the endless contradictions in his nature that I failed to understand or forgive, and because of them I have had to try to write this story. Perhaps I shall only fail again. Yet it was not until I became older than he himself was that summer that I began to realize how far it is possible to feel, as my father felt, both joy and terror at once in being alive – to despair of one’s existence and to love it desperately at the same time, a rejoicer and hell-gazer with equal passion and conviction. Charley lived in heaven and hell, and he knew thoroughly the hot winds of both. Despite the unquestioned horrors, his aim in life was to live forever. Barring that possibility he would try to hold on till at least a hundred or a hundred and ten. To hold on, he and I drank buttermilk at breakfast and all the other meals; somebody had told him it was the key to longevity. A time before, it had been lemons. These elixirs he did not actually believe in, yet he had to make the placating gestures toward mortality. It was better than submitting without a struggle. Calamity seemed to him his handmaiden, and sorrow loved him dearly: she was so constant to him and so kind. A marked man, he attempted to stave off intimations of doom by taking a firm hold on the realities at hand, by putting his trust in harmless physical objects, such as lemons. When he had lived alone in New York in a hotel bedroom, he kept under his bed a chamberpot brought in his trunk from home. Sometimes he would look at it, "my pot," and reflect that this family heirloom was his only security. It remained his only friend, the one certainty he had left on earth. Charley was a man, I think, of little faith. He expected little from an afterlife, but he had a passion for living in this world that nearly overwhelmed him. And he tried to convey something of its precious value these mornings to a child of eight. "The first thing you do," he would say briskly, "is keep your bowels open. Then with health and a big appetite all you need besides is sheer fool courage, the courage to survive. Grit, in other words. I don’t know about you – you look too meek to me, you’re so timid, so small for your age. You must eat up and speak up! You must be strong, learn to be strong, brave, like your mother. She could always fight back and get a good night’s sleep afterwards. Addie too, strong as an ox, nothing keeps her awake and nothing stops her." The thought of Addie reminded him of the absurd pleasure she took in funerals, sufficient proof in itself of her mettle and resolution. She would stand on a street corner to watch a funeral procession as if it were a circus parade, crying like a happy child, "Somebody’s having his funeral! What a classy one it is!" "That’s the way I want you to be, exactly like that. Fearless and undismayed," Charley would say. "Maybe women have the secret, after all." And he would put another record on the phonograph. "A Wonderful Saviour Is Jesus, My Lord." His mind went back darkly at times to my brother Raymond, who died at birth. Charley claimed, at such moments believed, that all the many disasters of his life had begun on the hideous day when he lost his only son. Death was more than he could bear, the one awful, unbelievable, unpardonable fact of existence. "I suppose you don’t realize yet what death is. Or even that there is such a thing. Do you?" "No," I said. It was always safer to say no. "You’re too young," Charley said, "and still lucky. It hasn’t knocked at your door. No one you love has ever died." It was not a question. I didn’t have to tell him. I didn’t have to answer. "Not a day goes by, not a minute of my life," Charley said, "that l don’t grieve for him. If only he could have lived! Fourteen years old he would be now, almost a man. Afterwards I never wanted another child for fear it too would have to die." He looked at me and smiled wanly. "I was wrong that time, wasn’t I? Thank God." But his face darkened again. "You never get over it," he said. "It might have happened yesterday. When you really love someone, you die with him. You never forget it – the unbearable loss and the grief." Charley then went to work till lunchtime on shorthand and Czech, both of which he cordially invited me to learn with him. He soon gave up, impatient at my slow grasp, and taught me instead to say the alphabet backwards – that is, he advised me to learn it backwards, and l did as I was told. Why it seemed a good idea he didn’t say. After a while I could rip it off in a single breath, "Z-y-x-w-v-u-t-s-r-q-p-o-n-m-l-k-j-i-h-g-f-e-d-c-b-a." And though it is an accomplishment I’m seldom asked to display publicly, it is one I’ve been inordinately proud of ever since.... A question baffling to Charley off and on all summer was whether or not I was really bright. I appeared no more than half-bright to him, with my monosyllables and vacant air. Yet the fact was I was supposed to be. He would stop work sometimes to watch me staring off idly into space and shake his head, pondering how many brains I had. "You say you get 100 in arithmetic?" he would ask. The news impressed him that I had been skipped a grade in school, from Miss Allie Wilcox’s third grade to Miss Ella Van Dusen’s fifth, which I would enter in September. Charley couldn’t imagine how on earth it had happened. Finally he laid it to my mother’s being on the faculty. By occasional probing, he was unable to discover that I knew anything at all about geography, history, world events, or life in general. My spelling was childish, my grammar shaky. "Aren’t I?" I would say, to his hooting scorn. The worst blow was to find with musical parents, I had to turn out unmusical. Though my mother had given me piano lessons for the last three years, the one piece I knew and reluctantly performed on the old-fashioned reed organ in the corner was "To a Little Violet." Charley hated it, particularly when I played and sang him the words. After a hasty lunch of buns and buttermilk, we went to the matinee five afternoons a week. The movie at the Orpheum, with two acts of vaudeville, began at two o’clock after which we had a sarsaparilla and usually went on to the nickelodeon to see an episode of Pearl White in "The Perils of Pauline," arriving home after Addie had started supper. We saw a number of pictures twice. By midsummer I began to object to sitting through another show, filled with yearning instead to stay on the open-air trolley for a longer ride or to make a shopping trip to Woolworth’s. "Come on, come on! Let’s get ourselves in off the street," Charley would cry impatiently pulling me along. "I don’t want anyone to see me here in broad daylight. How would I look? – a man out of work, a grown man leading a child!" One day in August he told me the news of a terrible war just beginning in Europe. "Let’s get inside fast and forget it," Charley said. "I want to go in somewhere and hide." I remember the plot of one movie, "The Secret" (with Bessie Love? Alice Lake?), because of a brief conversation between us as we walked away from the theater. The story concerned an unfortunate young girl who gave birth to a baby and later tried to keep her secret hidden from the man she married. I followed it with wide-eyed interest. "Did you catch on?" Charley asked when it was over. "Did you get the point what the poor girl’s secret was?" "No," I said. That was the end of that. No wonder he thought me simpleminded. He must have looked in vain to find anything of himself in me. I wasn’t bright enough to use my head and figure things out. If we happened to reach home before Addie came from work, we rushed wildly to the front door to greet her, her arms full of groceries, her face lit up in eager, wondering delight. You would think she had been ten years away. Charley rapturously embraced her, packages and all, as if she had come just in time to save his life, sweeping her into the house with loud fervent cries of rejoicing. "Thank God, oh thank God, you’re home at last! Oh, Adeline, my only love, I’ve missed you something fierce, absolutely the longest day of my life. Oh, dear God, I’m hungry!" Over his shoulder she laughed as he kissed her face and held her tightly in his arms. When she escaped, she gave me too her love. "My dearest girl," she would say, "it makes your father and me so happy to have you here!" All was well and all manner of thing was well with Addie home. She seemed a haven compared to Charley; she was calm and steady and sensible, she was loving, she was always the same. In her plain blouse and skirt, her shining braids pinned one over each ear, she moved quickly about her housework – we two tagging after her – answering Charley in Czech as he recited the words he had learned that morning, praising the neat pages of shorthand notes he showed her. After all, he was learning both languages to please her, because she knew them. Sometimes he wrote her comical messages in shorthand. Sometimes I think he spoke his love in Czech, for she would stop correcting his pronunciation to listen raptly with an adoring smile. I talked freely to Addie, confiding to her in the kitchen all the day’s occupations. Her eyes were an intense blue that looked devotedly at me. She seemed another girl to play with. After supper we sat on the floor for a game of jacks or sewed doll’s clothes, while Charley pumped away at the old harmonium, his body swaying back and forth as he played and sang Methodist hymns and gospel songs. Sooner or later in the evening he turned toward me and in his tremendous voice, pulling out all the stops, sang the one song I waited for: My father is rich in houses and land, He holds all the wealth of the world in his hand. With rubies and diamonds, with silver and gold, His coffers are full, he has riches untold. I’m the child of a king, the child of a king. With Jesus my Saviour, I’m the child of a king. My father was rich. Addie was unquestionably the right wife for him, the only wife, and at such moments with her in the house he was happy, her presence brought him peace. The wealth she gave him shone like rubies and diamonds; for she gave him complete love. She had the rare gift, the greatest gift of all, of accepting him as he was, never trying to change his ways but taking her marriage as it had to be, his way – keeping whatever sad misgivings she felt to herself.

Along Came the Witch: A Journal in the 1960s. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Beautiful Lofty People. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

A Book & A Love Affair. NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

A Change of Sky, and Other Poems. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Charley Smith’s Girl: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.

Dr. Johnson’s Waterfall, and Other Poems. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

The Journey Is Everything: A Journal of the Seventies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983.

Nineteen Million Elephants, and Other Poems. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1950.

The Third and Only Way: Reflections on Staying Alive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

When Found, Make a Verse of. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

The World and the Bo Tree. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Ms. Bevington was also a frequent contributor of poetry to numerous periodicals, including the American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Carolina Quarterly, Georgia Review, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Saturday Review of Literature, and Times Literary Supplement.

North Carolina Awards, 1973. Raleigh: North Carolina Awards Commission, 1973.