The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  4 · A Spiritual War

  Ricardo Quintana, who served through the summer of 1917 in the Harvard ROTC regiment, recalls DeVoto as the one member of the outfit with whom he could discuss books and ideas.1 They did not always agree. In fact they rather seldom agreed, and they had a particularly bitter running argument about the reputation and prose style of Henry James, to whom Quintana was addicted and whom DeVoto could not read. Also, there was the characteristic DeVoto aggressiveness and belligerence, and there was that smashed nose “about which one did not inquire.” DeVoto seems to have intimidated Quintana somewhat, and probably neither was temperamentally designed for intimate friendship with the other. But they were companions, almost friends, of an accidental kind, and they were brought even closer together after the war. And so one must pay some attention to Quintana’s hearsay evidence that in the regular Army, after their paths had diverged, DeVoto was sometimes referred to as “the Chinese bastard.”

  The “Chinese” is understandable as a not-very-perceptive reference to his face. The “bastard” is enigmatic, and might be read as indicating either an offensive personality or a stiff-backed, drill-sergeant rigor. There is no evidence that either reading is sound. His letters reflect no sense of being hated; and his military service, which is recapturable mainly through his letters to his parents,2 was remarkable for quite different things from Prussian discipline: for the passion of his dedication, his determination to think well of the democratic, civilian Army, his pride in being a nameless unit among democracy’s defenders, the humility with which he accepted basic training and OTC as personal testings and rites of passage that would permit him ultimately to call himself a man. Those who had thought him brash, crude, arrogant, and disagreeable would have been astonished to read his intimate letters.

  Whatever he was in the Harvard ROTC, where he was at home among people against whom he knew he could hold his own and to whom he could even feel superior, his attitude as a raw recruit was marked by as much insecurity as cockiness, though now and then the old cockiness comes through his humility like a rocket through a tent roof. His letters to his parents reveal an extraordinary filial tenderness, an affection essentially boyish and dependent, a frequent humble doubt of his own capacities, a reiterated resolve to do well and not disgrace himself or them. He sounds like anything but a Chinese bastard, or any other sort of bastard. If Quintana’s hearsay had any basis whatever in fact, and did indeed reflect the response to DeVoto of some of his fellows, then we may take it as a partial explanation of why he went through much of his life with his quills erected. He was never, in the Army or elsewhere, quite safe from the casual, almost anonymous sneer.

  But he encountered friendship too, and a comradeship that he valued, and among his old friends an affection that touched him. Once, on a pass, he visited Cambridge and ran into Charles Townsend Copeland in the Yard, and the Copey who had called him yellow put his arms around him, with tears in his eyes, to wish him well as a soldier. He had never quite lost touch with Cambridge, for his cousin Rose now lived there with her husband, the Belgian painter Jean-Marie Guislain. In June 1918 he wrote his parents about one visit:

  Last night I walked along the river bank with Jean-Marie, my first night walk along the old familiar path for over a year. You have not known the nights I wrestled with the angels of a thousand faiths, wrestled with them all night long, in the deep shadow of the river, in sight of the steady lights of Anderson Bridge. Those old nights of doubt, of fear, of self-distrust! We needed just this great national peril to bring back the faith and confidence in ourselves we had so surely lost. Last night there was no thought of abnegation, it was sure, certain confidence. The cause has come, and with it the courage which had died.

  But oh! the memories came thick. ‘Say could that lad be I?’—that gloomy, melancholy, aspiring young chump … I must think of myself of those days very tenderly, though, ludicrous as I must have been. Never, I think, has there been greater sincerity, more genuine aspiration. The pity of all things—it used to shake me to the depths till I was one with the night, in tune with the world’s sorrow.… I now perceive in myself the truth of what my intuition discerned more than a year ago—that finally and most far-reaching the war is a spiritual war, and will in the end have given us a new and lasting gospel.3

  As a mature man he would have been embarrassed to be called a patriot; he would have scorned being called an idealist. He sounds defenselessly like both, and neither of them much older than the sophomore who used to write love-in-the-moonlight poems to Helen Hunter. Twenty-one he was when he wrote that letter—a very young twenty-one, badly in need of the advice ex-Dean Gay of Harvard later gave him, not to take himself too seriously. But not unattractive. Touching, even.

  At Devens, which with its weekend passes to Cambridge was like an overorganized summer camp, Bernard took himself seriously indeed. In the draftees around him he discovered the true heart of America, often disparaged but in the crisis sound. He was not greatly strained by the training, and in rests and off hours he began writing a novel—his second attempt in that direction—in his head. “And what a book it is!” he wrote his parents. “It is the novel of my own country, the wide and ample theatre of the hills, the peaks and valleys, the mountain streams, the railroad, above all the people. Labor amoris.”4

  Labor of love? Above all the people? Something has happened to Ogden since he kissed it good-by, for in this non-book about it, unwritten on the wind of nostalgia, he thinks he touches “depths of feeling which I had not know[n],” and feels that “through it I have somewhat realized myself.… Though the book [may] be done away with forever [by] my death in France, still I have made the beginning of my lifelong devotion.”

  Reading these letters in 1973 one finds it hard to believe that even the young could ever have attitudinized so, with such sad-sweet relinquishment and such willingness to be sacrificed, and with such a blend of elevated patriotism and literary fustian. It is necessary to remember back to such literary warriors as Willa Cather’s Pulitzer-prize hero Claude Wheeler, in One of Ours. To stand up in a bullet-swept trench and Give All for Civilization with an inspiring word on one’s lips—that was the sort of gesture that Bernard DeVoto of 1918 would have found greatly moving, though it would move the college student of 1973 to incredulous snickers. It was the kind of gesture imagined by the literary and the non-combatant. Actual combat had a way of erasing such posing swiftly and for good, along with all those high-sounding phrases that Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry gagged on, words such as “noble” and “in vain.”

  “What sort of man do these letters show me to be, I wonder?” Bernard asked himself or his parents, with Posterity waiting breathless for a reply.5 Posterity can now answer. They show him to have been a young literary man of a dewy, prelapsarian time when self-sacrificing devotion was still possible in the United States, and some causes were held worthy of it.

  From Devens, at the end of June 1918, he was shipped south to OTC at Camp Lee, Virginia, and there he set world records for taking himself seriously. The winds of Civil War history around him rippled him like a flag; he vibrated to the news of the fighting in France as the American offensive began near Soissons; he grew stern and resolute about the dedication demanded of an officer in the Army of the United States; he yearned to win his commission, presumably so that he might serve his country to the utmost but also because a piece of paper and a bar on each shoulder would be gratification to his ambition and his unsleeping need to be proved worthy.

  Finding that he stood up better than many to the grueling routines of Camp Lee, he exerted himself to help others and talk them out of discouragement. When the thermometer, at least according to his report to his parents, rose to 130° one week, and men wilted like miller moths in a gas jet, and one insane captain double-timed his men for ten minutes in the full glare, to make them tough, and brought on a dozen prostrations, eight sunstrokes, and six deaths in his single company,* Bernard DeVoto got through the ordeal on resolution an
d nerve, and went off to Richmond on a pass, and from the YMCA there wrote home that only his mind, “the glory of my past years,” had enabled him to survive. “Thank God for Harvard,” he said: it had given him a trained mind, and men with trained minds came through this brutal sort of punishment better than the strongest physical specimens. But almost in the same paragraph he was flexing his muscles with pleasure in their hard fitness, and congratulating himself that he had now proved himself no weakling, “despite the sneers I have experienced in the past.”6

  All these trials, he said, had knocked out of him the cocksureness which had till then been his dominant trait—and shortly was bragging how self-sufficient the army had made him, how he could be sent into the wilderness and create a new civilization with nothing but some iodine and an entrenching tool. And keep my manuscript novel out of the hands of Fitz’s sister, he said. Hereafter show my writing to nobody without a written order from me.

  In August he graduated seventh out of his class of one hundred fifty, apologizing to his father for not being first. His commission literally thrilled him; his dress uniform preoccupied him as her first formal gown might preoccupy a girl. He had to wire his family for a loan to put together Sam Browne belt, leather puttees, garrison cap, insignia, and the rest. He instructed them severely to address him henceforth as Bernard A. DeVoto, 2nd Lieut. Inf., and warned them that at any time now he could expect to be ordered overseas.

  But in his boyhood he had improved to too good purpose the canyons of the Wasatch and the National Guard firing range in Ogden. He was too good a shot to be wasted on a war. With uncharacteristic wisdom in the utilization of talent, the Army ordered him to Camp Perry, Ohio, as a musketry instructor.

  Some would have thought it a reprieve. Most of his companions envied him the prize assignment. To DeVoto, geared up for heroism and self-sacrifice, ready to go forth to battle and death with his puttees shined, his dress uniform immaculate, and his great books unwritten, it was anticlimactic and vaguely sour. He liked the look of the bars on his shoulders, and he tried to feel glad and successful and vindicated, but one conceives him as a little aggrieved, as a man with his head on the block might feel if the headsman suddenly yanked off the blindfold and leaned back smiling upon his axe. God damn it, what did you stop for? I wanted to see if I could take it without flinching!

  Camp Perry, he hoped, would not hold him long. He did not want to become a Battalion Range Officer. He wanted to train his own outfit (perhaps vaguely visualized as Rough Riders) and lead it to France and do his duty in the final offensive expected next spring. He did not like Camp Perry, or Ohio, or the Middle West, and he was run-down and underweight and trained to a dangerous edge. The Army sent him to Ohio at the beginning of September. On October 5 it ordered him back to the one place in all America where he did not want to go—Camp Lee—and he arrived just in time for the flu epidemic. He said he was the only officer in his unit to stay on his feet through it. On November 11 the Armistice cut short any remaining dreams of military self-sacrifice. On December 8 he was honorably discharged.

  Honorably but not quite satisfactorily. Ever after, he obscurely envied those who had made it overseas. He craved that ultimate testing, and envy may have contributed to his distaste for the Lost Generation and the returned aesthetes of the Ambulance Service. In his Harvard dossier he took care to describe his military experience accurately: “Second Lieutenant of Infantry. Domestic service only—not on account of disability.”7

  5 · Harvard ’20—as of ’18

  Ogden was deep in snow, its raw wind smelling of cinders and coal smoke, its citizens looking and sounding provincial and out of touch and limited to their beyond-the-mountains myopias, their eternal Mormon-Gentile sparrings. Its intellectual tundra was relieved only by the igloo from which bookseller John Spargo dispensed literary handouts to the literate and lost. And his mother, badly hit by the flu, was slowly dying of the pernicious anemia that seemed to be one of its sequelae.

  Even if his mother had not been ill, there was no returning to Harvard for nine months, until the following September, but DeVoto was writing the Secretary of the College by January 8. He wanted to know the requirements for returning; he said he needed a scholarship to return at all; he wondered if his last year’s grades—four A’s and three B’s—might earn him one. He requested, almost demanded, that “inasmuch as my course was interrupted only by my desire for national service in the emergency, I should be allowed to finish it as I most desire.” What he most desired was to take Dean Briggs’s English 5, the most advanced course in writing at Harvard, though he had already taken all the writing courses the letter of the law allowed. Also, wearing a chip on his shoulder against the place he most revered, he complained that he had not received one of the certificates given to Harvard men who left college to join the Army. “I rendered the best national service I was capable of rendering, and I feel that I am fully entitled to such a certificate.”1

  The tone is strained, faintly paranoid, the tone of a sensitive young man touchy about being overlooked or ignored or forgotten. Probably he was still run-down from the Camp Lee experience and smarting from the disappointment of not getting overseas. Or perhaps he only wanted the certificate for his mother.

  She was a simple woman, hard-working, ill-educated, intelligent beyond her training, with a lot of her father’s stubborn endurance in her. She had escaped the Uinta farm by “working out” in Ogden, had made a bad marriage that ended in divorce in 1885, and had met and married Florian DeVoto when he was a freight agent on the Union Pacific and she was running a boardinghouse that supported her, her half-grown son Cleveland de Wolfe, and three of her sisters. “Their married life,” Bernard wrote some years after her death, “was really noble, which is a word that sits strangely on my lips, and the only happy thing in the life of either one. She lived to be very proud of me, for, of course, a boy in Harvard who was also a lieutenant in the army symbolized dizzy grandeurs to her. She always thought that the poverty in which my dad supported her was the wildest kind of affluence.”2

  She gave her brilliant, captious failure of a husband the kind of steady affection that let him live with his own cynicism and misanthropy, and she gave her brilliant, ambivalent, anxiously cocky son an adoration that could hardly have been greater. Through her lingering illness he helped take care of her, bitterly watching her strength wane and her skin go yellow and her hold on life slip. When she died, on August 3, 1919, she left her husband distraught, gloomy, and burdened with the care of numerous members of her family whom he was too generous not to help and too contentious not to complain about. She left her son exhausted, drained, and bereft of the softest, strongest tie that had bound him to Ogden.

  But not the most fervent one. In March, at rehearsals for a play called Under Cover, he had met an Ogden High School senior of seventeen—blonde, beautiful, rich, a heartbreaker—who found the returned officer, the interrupted Harvard man, the aspiring writer, more interesting than the Ogden youths she had known. The whole spring and summer while his mother was dying, young DeVoto had been torn between the demands of death and the attractions of life, between grief and adoration. He and this girl, Katharine, had taken a lot of walks and sat out a lot of waning moons, and he had written her more elevated nonsense than even Helen Hunter had inspired,3 and under the disguise of literary clowning had offered his heart, humbly, on a platter. (“Do I make an egregious ass of myself when I try to tell you how or what I feel? You see, I am not used to letting people see the deeper recesses of my nature. I cannot tell if it be pride or fear that keeps me from sharing myself with more people.”) Solemnly he tried to direct her inexperience away from schoolgirl frivolity, he tried to be her guide to great books and high thinking. At times, fairly clearly, he made her impatient; but when they had had a spat he took it so seriously, he wrote her such agonized, exposed midnight letters, he assumed such stances of tragic renunciation and humility, that out of sheer astonishment at such a man, as much as out of affection, she
was won back. And they were to be parted soon, he to go back to Harvard, she to attend a finishing school in Yonkers, New York. That parting hung over him in prospect, as fatal as if he had been Aeneas and she Dido. One night before they were to be parted he slept under her window, holding a string whose other end was tied around Katharine’s finger. At dawn he pulled the string, awakening her to see the sun rise over the Wasatch.

  In September, in a mood somewhere between desolation and exultation, he watched her train pull out of Ogden, and shortly afterward took his own train East.

  “A good year, the last year of youth as such,” he later called his last Harvard year. He was more mature, had been for sixteen months in abrasive contact with the army of the democracy, had held command and been in responsible charge of men and materials, and had pondered the possibility of death. And he had watched his mother die. “So a lot of the oaf was gone from me.… I got more from Harvard in that one year than ever before—or since.” Unexpectedly, as one of three hundred returned veterans, he found himself looked up to. The literary climate had changed, the “trance-ecstasy-shrine” mood of prewar Harvard had given way to more hard-boiled attitudes. He and his “advanced” literary contemporaries were onto Huxley, Lawrence, Anatole France, Mencken, O’Neill. “The year I graduated, 1920, was the year of Main Street, Moon Calf, This Side of Paradise, Smoke and Steel, A Few Figs from Thistles, The Sacred Wood.”4