Through 1953, swimming upstream, ironically an adviser to a Secretary of the Interior with whom he would not even sit down to lunch,12 he helped his Congressional allies and an increasing number of conservation groups resist what he had correctly foreseen. In that year he wrote four Easy Chairs on public-lands problems,13 in the last of which he shocked his readers with the proposal that we close our National Parks and keep them closed until Congress appropriated the money to run them properly. He finally crowded Collier’s into action with an article called “Our Great West, Boom or Bust?” in the issue of December 1953. The year 1954 produced three more conservation Easy Chairs,14 a Holiday article,15 and a gloomy summary in Harper’s called “Conservation—Down and on the Way Out.”16 In 1955, three years deep in the Eisenhower administration and growing gloomier as he went, he still had enough left to write two more public-lands Easy Chairs,17 besides two others that moved the conservation battle into New England.18
He lived to see the conservationists lose the tidelands oil controversy. He lived to see Douglas McKay turn public power out of the Snake River canyons and let the private Idaho Power Company in—and then, apparently throwing a sop to the Bureau of Reclamation, permit the dusting off of the Upper Colorado River Storage Project that wanted to build a dam in Dinosaur National Monument. He did not live to see that project stopped by a massive uprising of conservation force, though he had started the uprising with his 1950 article in the Post.
There have been many developments, some of them deriving straight from fights he engaged in, that he did not live to see. He did not live to hail the Wilderness Act or any of the major conservation legislation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations under the leadership of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Nor did he live to see his favorite bureau, the National Forest Service, embroiled in bureaucratic rivalry with the National Park Service, which was expanding mainly at the expense of Forest Service lands. He did not live to see conservation groups almost as harshly at war with the Forest Service as they have traditionally been with the Corps of Engineers and the Reclamation Bureau. But even though his career ended short of victory in a good many controversies, he still came close to being what Senator Neuberger of Oregon called him,19 the greatest (if by greatest we mean “most effective”) conservationist of the twentieth century.
The heated, repetitive struggles between exploitation and conservation are an aspect of life in America in the twentieth century that historians will have to deal with in general and in particular. Within a single generation the environmental sickness that Secretary Udall called “the quiet crisis” has revealed itself to be a threat as deadly as the Bomb. DeVoto did more than his share in building the public sentiment that climaxed in the Dinosaur National Monument struggle in 1955–56 and has since developed into something like a religion of Nature, shared by hippies, housewives, mountain climbers, river runners, fishermen, and many other kinds of Americans. The function of journalism that he served in his half a hundred articles and Easy Chairs was a function DeVoto was proud of. It validated him as a professional journalist and as a controversialist, and it gave his reforming impulse a purpose and a cause. His wars with the literary had been ambiguous and entangled, because he never freed his emotions from envying and desiring what he attacked. His conservation writings record a continuing controversy unmarred by any scramble for personal advantage or any impulse toward self-justification, a controversy in every way dignified by concern for the public good and for the future of the West from which he had exiled himself in anger as a young man.
His crusade had not pleased everybody in the West, not by a good deal, though he was always getting letters from people in Montana or Idaho or Colorado, letters almost tearful with gratitude that someone had finally said, powerfully and well, what these correspondents had always wanted to hear said. The state university of a state neighbor to his own might defy the anger of miners, stockmen, and resource exploiters at large and honor itself and him with a degree. People the length and breadth of the West, people in Congress, people in the Izaak Walton League and the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society and the National Parks Association might trust him and depend on him as they depended on no other. The Sierra Club might make him an honorary life member for his services to conservation. But the fact remained that he had over and over again, and perhaps mortally, offended the powers of his native region.
He had begun his career by offending them, injudiciously and in exaggerated ways, and Utah has not even yet forgiven him. The most distinguished writer who ever came out of the state, he is not recognized in his own country. Dislike and mistrust have overgrown his name because of those early articles and because of his vigorous and persistent opposition to the exploiters; and ordinary people have not taken him up as a champion of their submerged interests, because he ridiculed the mythology by which many of them live. To many kinds of people in the West he has looked like a traitor to his home place, and there are ironies in that.
One irony is that this rationalist, this heated defender of common sense and the skeptical, ad hoc approach, should have ended his career as a crusader nearly as single-minded, if not so simpleminded, as the Boy Orator of the Platte, William Jennings Bryan. Another is that his crusade should have been made in behalf of the West, which he had done his best to scorn; not until he had cured himself of being literary could he give himself back to it. And still another is that the feeling against him in his native region should have demonstrated the truth of one of his earliest generalizations about the West, that the only true individualists there eventually found themselves on one end of a rope whose other end was in the hands of a bunch of vigilantes.
4 · The Lost World of Fiction
The temporary lull in the conservation wars that followed Truman’s 1948 victory over Dewey brought DeVoto not relaxation but a letdown. It exposed him to himself, gave him time to work on the Cambridge novel and convince himself that he couldn’t write it, and confirmed the death of John August. August had not published a short story since 1939, or a novel since The Woman in the Picture, in 1944, the one that had been ridiculed by Sinclair Lewis. After the 1946 western trip, August had worked at a new serial, sharing the desk with the novelist who struggled over the complicated wiring of the Cambridge novel, but that effort had gone dead in the typewriter. Doubly frustrated, physically and emotionally unwell, overtaken by the exhaustion of years of overwork, and no longer sustained by the excitement of the landgrab controversy, DeVoto wrote Struthers Burt in April 1949 that he was having “a dark queer time,” and found it hard to leave familiar surroundings.
Part of the darkness and queerness was either cause or effect of his having come to his end as a writer of fiction—as a “writer” at all in the terms that he had spent so many years trying to be. His effort to come out of his depression now involved the effort to resolve in his mind the question of what fiction meant, both in general and to him personally.
A week after his confessional letter to Burt, he sent off to Garrett Mattingly, for comment, a bundle of his correspondence with Lawrence Kubie,1 whose patient he had been during his months with the Saturday Review and whom he had found intelligent, provocative, and exasperating. He told Mattingly that ever since the September 1948 Easy Chair, called “Sigmund Freud and W. H. Auden,” in which DeVoto had distinguished art from psychiatry, Kubie had been accusing him of “parricidal transferences.” He said irritably that Kubie thought himself coextensive with psychiatry and felt that his views were objective truth and that all conflicting views were symptoms. In their long argument about art and literature, Kubie had seemed to DeVoto to support the notion that the emotions aroused by art in viewers or readers were ephemeral, a mere discharge, and that art and literature succeeded only in so far as they increased their creator’s area of conscious control and decreased the area of unconscious control—that is, they succeeded only in so far as they were effective self-therapy.
In his state of dissatisfaction a
nd failure, that was not a position with which DeVoto wanted to agree; to do him justice, he had never agreed with it. He did not write to heal himself, or did not admit that he did. He wrote to make emotional contact with an audience, and he could only justify his effort if he did make contact—as, from the evidence, it seemed he had not. So now, having wasted a year trying to write a serial and eighteen months trying to write a novel, he found himself (he told Mattingly) involved in a book on the art of fiction. He was going to straighten Kubie out (so goes another of my fathers). But there is a strong implication in his letter to Mattingly that he needed to straighten himself out as well. He had to find out, if possible, what fiction was, now that it had become impossible for him. One guesses that he had to find out that he was right about it, that it was not self-therapy, for if it was self-therapy and he had failed at it, where was he left?
Much of the book that rapidly took shape during the summer of 1949 had already been written as Harvard and Bread Loaf lectures, as Easy Chairs and random essays, and as “English 37” in the Saturday Review.2 Over the years, as he had written them out, discussed them with Kubie and with Beata Rank (to whom he would dedicate the book when it was finished), and elaborated them in a hundred book reviews, his ideas had been refined but had not substantially changed. Once begun, the book went fast; he finished it by August. In September he described it to Mattingly as “a purely therapeutic effort,” thus accepting for criticism the function that he denied to art. It was “a book about how to write novels by a man who lately proved himself unable to write a novel.” He declared that, having used it to bring himself out of a tailspin, he had already forgotten it.3
That statement was either not quite candid or was self-deceiving. It was a statement of intention, not necessarily of fact. Though he might embalm the body of what had been dear to him, and bury it in his deepest basement, its ghost would walk now and then and his floors would creak and his corridors breathe with its troubling presence. One does not forget such a defeat as brought on The World of Fiction, one only elects henceforth to ignore it. And if the book was not quite effective exorcism, neither was it quite a book about how to write novels. It was a book about why people write novels and why other people read them. It was a philosophical and psychological justification of fiction, not as the novelist’s self-therapy but as an art. The World of Fiction was “an analysis of the relationship between the person who writes a novel and the person who reads it.”4
He said it was not reality that novelists reported in their fictions, and not reality that readers sought in them. Novelists were seldom good observers, because the reality that was before their eyes was constantly being dissolved in reverie. “A stream of reverie flows beside the main channel of consciousness and at all times floods over into it. When psychologists speak of the stream of consciousness, in fact, they mean the river in which the streams have joined. The Mississippi of the mind is always below the mouth of the Missouri.”5
His very metaphor demonstrated the kind of merging that he asserted. And what floated on the river was not entirely helpless. It was to some small extent maneuverable, like a raft with a sweep oar. For though the pattern of a novelist’s books was probably fixed in his childhood, and though each novelist probably had only one essential story to tell, the triumphant novel was not the one that went helplessly with the current but the one that navigated it and steered a way across or down it. True fiction, fiction at the level of art, was “a victory for the reality principle, for the faculty of control, for the human will.”6
It was something that he desperately needed to believe. He had staked his life on it and used his faculty of control to keep desperation and panic at arm’s length, and when he came to state the principle he perhaps overstated it. Part of the novelist’s gift is surely the ability to direct fantasy and to order the disorderly. But his own experience as a novelist had demonstrated the inefficacy of the will in the absence of some vital and elusive knack. Or had it demonstrated the opposite? Several of his friends, at various times, told him that he didn’t fantasize well; I have suggested that his fictions failed partly because he never got the hang of ventriloquism, of the disguising of his own voice. Either judgment would suggest that the failure lay not in the strength of his unconscious fantasies but in the aesthetic distance he was able to achieve. And if that is true, then his novels failed for a reason not unlike the reasons for Thomas Wolfe’s partial failure.
That conclusion, though he would have found it unpalatable and perhaps infuriating, does not damage his point about the importance of the shaping will in literature, nor does it invalidate his further point about the reciprocity between writer and reader. “A reader always writes the greater part of any novel,” he wrote; “the skill of the novelist is to make him write the novel intended.”7 (Frost had said it a little differently: A writer is entitled to anything the reader can find in him.) And since fiction was inescapably a collaboration, it could not be charged with telling lies—the most persuasive version of that charge having been made, as DeVoto pointed out, in a roman à clef by Plato, who was at the time invoking the aid of fiction to describe the Perfect State. The fear that readers might mistake fiction for reality was an empty fear, for fiction was a temporary relief that the reader always knew was temporary. In that sense, all novels were “escape” novels, open falsehoods that the reader accepted and participated in and that inoculated him against other and more private and more injurious fantasies. The point was crucial. Fiction was not a substitute for reality, either for writer or reader. It was a substitute for more dangerous fictions. Its virtue lay in the fact that it had been molded into order. If chaos was the law of nature, as Henry Adams said, and order the dream of man, then the dream expressed as literary art might persuade readers drowning in irrelevant experience that there was a meaning in their lives. The therapy involved in fiction was more for the reader than for the writer.
Once he has stated that theme, the rest of The World of Fiction is tactics. Since the basic fable is unconscious, fixed by temperament and experience, “the largest part of the creative process is the determination of necessity.” But it is the novel that is determined, not the novelist. If the novelist does not efface himself, an essential transformation has been left incomplete, though it is sometimes possible, as in Mark Twain’s “Great Dark” manuscripts, to see a deep personal trouble trying, through successive versions, to impose order and meaning on itself.8 “Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate”; but only when it transforms experience into symbols appropriate to the fiction being attempted, when it acknowledges the essential substance but exercises discretion and choice in the finding of means, is art true to itself or to life.
But if fiction is not unsteered compulsion, neither is it exemplum. It cannot be bent by its creator to demonstrate something and still remain itself. It is not “about” anything—the westward movement, the genetics of Lamarck, the oedipal relationship, anything. The novelist is neither the “spellbound” man of Kubie’s heresy nor a man making fully logical choices and combinations and directing everything to an expository end. Fiction is not philosophy, uplift, reform, morality, or ideas of healing. It is art. It is people in action, a created illusion that a reader willingly accepts—for the time.
The people who read novels will continue to ask of fiction what they have always asked. They want for a moment to breach the walls of loneliness and look into other lives and find confirmations and perhaps some slight fulfillment of their own, some order and significance, something life has granted to these people that it has denied them. Beyond that there is the strangeness of things happening to others that becomes a strangeness to them. Still farther out are the edges of the dark, and the voices that whisper so terrifyingly there may be appeased or silenced—for a moment. There is the need that the knife be taken from one’s hand and the much greater need that, even if only for a moment and even if only in imagination, one’s life and destiny, and with them destiny itself, seem composed to an in
telligible end.9
If the novelist is his own patient, he is also the reader’s doctor—his position is in fact, though DeVoto does not say this, singularly like the relation that DeVoto himself had to all sorts of troubled friends. The novelist is in control, though the control is barely enough to keep him from collapse: He is like Frost’s farmer mending wall and using a spell to keep his rocks balanced. “Stay where you are until our backs are turned.”
“A purely therapeutic effort,” he called The World of Fiction, and in making that remark he did not have in mind the effect of the book on readers. He was clearing his emotional house. The book was a compulsive act, begun in a fit of depression and concluded within a few weeks. It compensated for the double failure of Bernard DeVoto and John August to write their novels, even while it realistically admitted their defeat. Apologia and swan song were blended in it; the validity of art was asserted into the teeth of diminishment and reality. The novelist he had started out to be ended as a philosopher of fiction, an analyst of the creative process; and fiction turned out to be—had always been for him, and on reexamination looked more than ever to be—only one of several possible stays against chaos, loneliness, and fear.
The Uneasy Chair Page 44