The Uneasy Chair
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10. Mattingly to BDV, December 15, 1950. SUL.
11. Mattingly to Helen Everitt, April 10, 1951. SUL.
12. BDV to Mattingly, April 17, 1951. SUL.
13. Mattingly to BDV, March 1 or 2, 1952. SUL.
14. Commager’s review appeared in the New York Herald Tribune Books for November 23, 1952; Webb’s in the Saturday Review of Literature XXXV (November 22, 1952); and Smith’s in the New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1952.
Chapter 6 ·
1. The first Cady Hewes piece appeared in Woman’s Day in August 1949. Between then and the end of DeVoto’s life, twelve more under that nom de plume were published. In 1956 Houghton Mifflin collected them into a volume, Women and Children First.
2. The death of Joseph Kinsey Howard, shortly after the Montana Writers’ Conference, depressed him. On December 27, 1951, he did something totally uncharacteristic: he begged off writing an article he had promised Mattingly, remarking incidentally how strange it was to be without book.
3. Apart from the dating in the text, I have not bothered to locate the details of the negotiations between Brandt and certain editors. The Brandt & Brandt file is intact and chronological.
4. He did, however, try one last story, “The Link,” which exploited the emotional relationship stemming from one of the Cambridge divorces with which he was familiar. He asked Brandt to try it on Harper’s or Atlantic under a pseudonym, perhaps hoping to prove that he could make those pages as a total unknown. Brandt tried to make him some bigger money with it, and after several rejections sold it to Esquire, which published it in July 1954 under the name of Frank Gilbert. It comes closer to being an “uncommercial” story than any of his stories except perhaps the early “Search for Bergamot,” and it contains not one remaining shred of the sensitive show-off named Bernard DeVoto.
Chapter 7 ·
1. BDV to Mina Curtiss, October 14, 1946. SUL.
2. “Year-End Megrims,” The Easy Chair, Harper’s, CC (February 1950), pp. 27–30.
3. Easy Chair, Harper’s, CXCIX (September 1949), pp. 76–79.
4. There is no point in multiplying instances beyond those contained in R. H. S. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed, Harper & Brothers, 1950.
5. “And the D.A.R.,” letter to the editor, Harper’s CCXI (September 1955).
6. Easy Chair, Harper’s CXCIX (July 1949), pp. 62–65.
7. In the issue of December 1949.
8. BDV to Carey McWilliams, March 27, 1950. SUL.
9. “The Ex-Communists,” Atlantic CLXXXVII (February 1951), pp. 61–65.
10. The two attacks by McCarthy, both in October 1952, were mainly attributable to DeVoto’s involvement in the Stevenson campaign. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others were attacked at the same time.
11. BDV to Mattingly, February(?), 1954. SUL.
Chapter 8 ·
1. In particularly busy times, Avis might answer some of the fan mail, but even if she did, and even though he learned to utilize most of one day of the week dictating to a secretary and cleaning up the accumulation of letters, there was rarely a day without a number of letters to deal with by typewriter or by application of his favorite Estabrook #313 pen nib. And he had no gift for writing brief notes. If he was involved at all, he was involved totally, and total involvement often meant a letter of four, five, or six single-spaced pages. Sometimes, in replying to an argumentative or challenging letter, he wrote what amounted to an essay—four or five thousand words. One of his secretaries, Parian Temple, saved her shorthand books, and after DeVoto’s death, retyped all the letters in them for the Stanford library, so that for a period in the late 1940s we have every letter he dictated. Samplings indicate the bulk: On January 22, 1947, twenty-two letters, all a page or more in length; on March 31, sixteen, several of them long, on July 14, ten; on September 25, twenty-two. There is hardly a day without several—and these notebooks tell nothing of the letters he knocked off by himself, or the cards he scribbled on trains and airplanes, or the quick notes he wrote from the Harvard Club or the Century when he was in New York.
2. To Alfred McIntyre, before leaving on that trip, he had promised a “travel” book about the West as well as an anthology of western writings; neither ever got put together. After the completion of The Course of Empire and the Lewis and Clark Journals, DeVoto began to think seriously about a book that would tell all about the West: geography, climate, resources, myths, enough history to make the myths intelligible, delusions, character, prognosis. Some of it was to be cannibalized from Easy Chairs and other essays, and other parts would have been used as Easy Chairs, as “Birth of an Art” was, if he had got them written. It is possible that if he had lived he might have made it into a powerful book, for the bite came into his prose and the precision into his organization on the second or third time through the typewriter. But it seems to me more likely that it would have been a kind of omnium gatherum, a collection of things already said, and better, when the heat was on him.
3. I am indebted to Dr. Scheinberg for the loan of his personal and medical files on DeVoto, as well as for a reminiscent and explanatory tape and a look at the movie footage he shot while on the western trip with DeVoto and Stevenson in 1954. All details of their association come from one or another of those sources.
4. DeVoto became increasingly convinced that the 160-acre limitation of the Reclamation Act—the clause that limits individual benefits from any reclamation dam to the water that will serve 160 acres—was obsolete and unworkable, partly because the competing bureau, the Corps of Engineers, was bound by no such limitation and partly because the 160-acre homestead was not viable under modern farming conditions. The limitation was a survival of the effort of Major Powell (and through Major Powell, of W J McGee and other early conservationists) to prevent monopoly of land through monopolization of water. In his last year, feeling that monopoly was not being prevented, DeVoto began to urge that the Democratic Party convene a meeting or series of meetings in the West to reconsider all the assumptions of reclamation and land and water use in the West, especially the Bureau of Reclamation’s linking of power sales to water conservation. This was the theme of “One-Way Partnership Derailed,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CCX (January 1955).
5. DeVoto proposed some such excursion in a letter to Adlai Stevenson on May 19, 1954 (SUL)—a letter in which he enclosed a carbon of his forthcoming article “Conservation—Down and on the Way Out” and proposed conservation as a great opportunity for the Democratic Party. Stevenson tentatively accepted on June 11, and DeVoto then put his Missoula Forest Service friends to work on the preparations.
6. Dr. Herbert Scheinberg to WS, tape.
7. A carbon of these, with a note promising more later, is among the DeVoto papers.
8. After their somewhat stiff-legged co-operation on Americana Deserta from 1929 to 1931, DeVoto and Knopf saw little of one another for some years. They seem to have met personally when DeVoto was editing the Saturday Review. By the early 1940s Knopf had formed the habit of calling on DeVoto for advice about western books, as well as for western travel tips. By the end of the 1940s Knopf was a confirmed western enthusiast and DeVoto his mentor. Early in 1949, by virtue of his recent appointment to the National Parks Advisory Board, DeVoto was able to give Knopf introductions to numerous informed Westerners, and in 1950 he was instrumental in getting Knopf appointed to the Board, of which he later became chairman. Their terms overlapped by nearly four years, and they worked together effectively on conservation issues.
9. When on a tour, DeVoto much preferred to travel by car. When he went lecturing, he flew if he had to, but went by train if he could. Though he frequently grumbled about deteriorating rail service, he grumbled profitably: train travel is the subject of several Easy Chairs.
10. This was the prestigious Penrose Memorial Lecture, which he delivered before the American Philosophical Society on April 21, 1954. It was published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 99 (August 30, 1955), pp. 185
–94. Its thesis is one of the “historical ideas” of which he had written to Mattingly: that the Lewis and Clark expedition was an act of conscious imperialism on Jefferson’s part—that he was “playing for the continent” from the beginning.
11. Some of the titles: “The Easy Chair,” “The Professional Writer,” “Some American Symbols,” “Safeguarding Our National Wealth.” Reactions, as reported to the Leigh agency, varied from enthusiasm to a sour request from Dallas to “spare us any more of these aging smarties.”
12. The Easy Chairs for April 1951, December 1949, and March 1948, plus “Listen, Sister,” by Fairley Blake, Atlantic CLXXXVIII (July 1951), pp. 90–92.
13. The Hour, pp. 21–22.
14. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
15. Ibid.
16. For remembrances of the Sunday Evenings I am indebted to Dr. Gregory Rochlin, Dr. Molly Brazier, Paul Buck, Kenneth and Eleanor Murdock, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the late Elizabeth Kennedy, and, of course, Avis.
17. In the DeVoto papers there are a few letters on conservation issues to Congressman John F. Kennedy. In one bilious aside, he once called him “as handsome a baby-kisser as Nixon, but less dangerous.”
18. “Freud’s Influence on Literature,” Saturday Review of Literature XX (October 7, 1939), pp. 10–11.
Chapter 9 ·
1. The medical details are from Dr. Scheinberg’s file.
2. BDV to Dr. Scheinberg, May 5, 1954. HS.
3. Kay Morrison reports him as having been extremely gloomy during his visit.
4. William Sloane to WS, December 4, 1972.
5. Theodore Morrison to WS, October 5, 1972.
6. Because of the twentieth anniversary of his occupancy of the Easy Chair, and the celebration that friends organized about it, the weeks preceding his death were the weeks when he experienced the warmest praise of his life. In the Personal and Otherwise column, Harper’s eulogized him in “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Bear.” They said his coronary melting point was considerably under that of maple sugar; they said he was less bear than armadillo or porcupine—shy, and therefore armored or prickly; they said “he collects underdogs the way a blue serge suit collects lint—all the while emitting roars of exasperation.”
7. Boston Herald, November 16, 1955.
8. Samuel Eliot Morison to Avis DeVoto, December 18, 1955. SUL.
WALLACE STEGNER
The Uneasy Chair
Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize 1972); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.