The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  That fantasy of mutual dependence Skinny herself does not remember—she remembers only the amused friendship. But, like a lot of fictions and fantasies, it ought to have been true. DeVoto’s platonic friendship with that Ogden girl (“an absolute darling,” say all the people who remember her), and its combination with a certain fatherly watchfulness, an understanding of fear and distress, a comprehension of what it means to have the horrors and an absolute dependability as a refuge from them, was the sort of relationship that he established with several women during his life, and brought to a kind of perfection with the tubercular girl Kate Sterne. He liked and admired women, and wanted to be liked by them; and he respected trouble and sympathized with panic. His fictions, both serious and slick, are full of situations involving older, wiser, fatherly-but-not-too-fatherly men and irreverent, tomboy girls who in a crisis are absolute bricks and in the end are absolute darlings. When he wrote about Skinny to Kate Sterne he was outlining a sort of friendship he deeply desired and needed—reporting it as experience and perhaps establishing it as a pattern for his friendship with Kate Sterne herself.18

  It does not much matter that the story of Skinny as he told it to Kate Sterne was mostly fiction. It was true as wish fulfillment, as romantic daydream. He reports a night when they were driving home from a dance in the canyon, presumably from the Hermitage, a mountain resort that catered to several generations of Ogden young. They were in a topless touring car, the night was mild, Skinny in some filmy sort of dress was sitting quietly, smiling, looking up at the canyon walls. Asked what she was smiling about, she said she had had a silly sort of thought—how nice it was that they could be such good friends, and mean so much to one another, without having to fall in love. A dependable part of the fantasy of admiring young girl and protective older man, but a demoralizing thing to say to the young man who (he told Kate Sterne) had just looked at her and been knocked groggy with the realization that for months he had been fathomlessly in love with her and did not want to be merely her friend and her defense against the horrors.

  It is just as well to carry on this story of Skinny as fantasy remade it. His defenses were weak and his options few. He was “a young ass of intense ambition and an even intenser inferiority complex, jobless and hopeless. I regarded my disease, whatever it was, as incurable. I thought I was certain to die of it, or kill myself, or go crazy. It seemed inconceivable that I should ever get out of Utah, and still more inconceivable that I should ever be a sound man or ever do anything to justify my existence. And now in love with Skinny who, besides being all the unutterable things that girls are when you are in love with them, was the daughter of the richest man in Utah.”19

  Well, he said, he determined upon rehabilitation and took a job as a ranch hand on Tom Keogh’s desert ranch in the Raft River Valley, in Idaho. Several months before that, in February 1922, he had written Dean Briggs to ask help in finding a teaching job somewhere—anywhere but Utah, somewhere back in the United States. If there were even the most menial job at Harvard, he would take it before anything else, for the Yard and the Square were the most congenial places in the world, and the best places for him to get through his year or two of trial, error, and investigation of his own possibilities.20

  That letter, like his romantic fantasy of Skinny, stated a major theme, one on which he played variations all his life. He needed no Paris or Left Bank; Cambridge satisfied all his cultural, intellectual, and emotional needs. But he had to escape his village: he could not sit like a snake-charmed rat through another year of it. And he had to prove himself to Skinny as well as to himself. Eastward, therefore, to more privileged earth; but first, a purging through hard outdoor labor.

  The night before he was to leave for Idaho, he told Kate Sterne, he and Skinny were again driving, this time with a companion couple. They kept saying, “Aw, Benny, don’t go.” Skinny said it too, several times. At last he leaned over and said, “All right, I’ll stay if you’ll marry me.”

  “Where can we?” said Skinny, with the misleading promptness of dreams.

  “Try Brigham City.”

  She spun the car around and started north up the state road, while the two in the back seat chortled at the idea that Benny was being kidnapped so that he would miss his train.

  “Shut up,” said the dream Skinny over her shoulder. “I’m not kidnapping Benny, I’m marrying him.”

  But the county clerk in Brigham City, waked from his first sleep, refused to get dressed and go downtown and issue a license. The elopement was a bust. In the sober morning Benny went off to the Raft River, up among the lava beds, leaving his love behind.

  That was the way he remembered it in the late 1930s, when he was being autobioloquacious at the request of Kate Sterne. The original of Skinny writes me that not much of it is true.21 There were other things in his memory, some of them pretty firmly fixed, that were likewise not true. Many times throughout his life DeVoto, speaking as if from within the guild, cited his experiences as a cowpuncher. He specifically mentioned the Raft River Valley, and at least once he said he had worked cattle somewhere on the Platte.22 The assiduous biographer finds no evidence that he ever worked on the Platte in any capacity, though it is possible that some high school summer might have been spent there. The biographer also has to conclude that if his cowpunching experience was limited to Tom Keogh’s ranch on the Raft River, he was no such hardhanded waddy as he claimed to be. For one thing, Keogh seems to have run sheep, not cattle. For another, DeVoto stayed there hardly long enough to unpack his Levis. His lifelong distaste for horses could have come more plausibly from his never having learned to ride than from wearing out the end of his spine in lonely communion with any little dogies. The fact is, though he had many skills, they were not the skills of a working man, cowboy or other.23 He was an intellectual driven to pretend that he had all the frontier competences he admired in the mountain men. He had only one: he was a good shot. And though he knew a great deal about cowboys from books, and understood them better than they understood themselves, he knew them from life very little.

  He said he barely arrived on the Raft River before the thought of Skinny yanked him back to Ogden. Much more probably, what yanked him back to Ogden was a letter from Northwestern University offering him an instructorship in English. Reprieve. But also exposure and a renewal of panic.

  Skinny saw him off on the Overland Limited. His depression had never been deeper, and it was not all due to leaving Skinny. A conviction grew in him that he would never get off the train alive. Watching in still fear out the window as Weber Canyon and then Echo Canyon went by and the train leveled out onto the barren Wyoming Plateau, he felt that he was leaving everything safe. After a long time he took a card out of his pocket and wrote on it his name and address and the name and address of his father, and put it back in the side pocket, where it would be easily found.

  And yet there had been a decision made—by him or for him did not much matter. Later, he would conclude that he left his adolescence behind, and began to grow up, somewhere around Thousand Mile Tree.24

  One thing remained to be done before he committed himself to the chaos of a new life. Perhaps he conceived it, in the slyness of his unconscious, as an alternative or an evasion. What faced him as he forced himself out of Ogden’s sluggish safety was a test that melted the joints of his knees and chilled his skin with the sweat of a hopeless inadequacy. Yet to fail it would be to go down for good. So when he arranged to visit the Haglers in Springfield before going on to Northwestern, he might have been preparing an escape. He was fully aware that Clarissa Hagler had transferred to him some of the dependence she had had on her brother Kent. He knew, or persuaded himself, that Kent’s mother, literary, charming, imprisoned in downstate Illinois, thought of him as a gifted young man, inheritor and continuer of her son’s promise. His imagination told him that she would not discourage a romance between her daughter and her son’s friend.

  This is guesswork, mainly DeVoto’s own, and guesswork, moreove
r, that is complicated by his fictionizing fantasy—for this, too, is part of the autobiography he wrote for Kate Sterne. In Springfield, he said, he found all as he had half anticipated. Clarissa watched him with suffused eyes, blushed easily, was all but abject in her desire to please. Mrs. Hagler, the most gracefully intelligent and charming woman he had ever met, made her hopes, it seemed to him, perfectly clear. But he had just parted from Skinny, whose friendship was far from abject, and whose loss was part of his desolation. He had the desperate sense that anything except the abrasive life of ambition and achievement would be fatal, that he must not succumb to what he thought a plain invitation. Perhaps he kept in mind the image of his father, his talents rotted away in that undemanding title-abstract office and his nature gone sour and murky with self-contempt that emerged as a compulsion to insult everyone he talked to.

  From the Haglers’ affectionate household and from their perhaps fictional invitation he escaped, with promises and half promises, and faced the door that opened on both hope and dread.25 Everything he told Kate Sterne about Skinny and about the Haglers might have been sugared with self-protective fantasy, but his neurosis was real. He didn’t leave it in Springfield any more than he had left it in Ogden. It got off the train with him in Chicago, and it was compounded during the first weeks of his teaching by a loneliness and isolation against which he had no defenses. In December he wrote to Byron Hurlbut back at Harvard, humbly recalling himself to his former teacher, who he was afraid might not remember him. He talked about his eighteen-month breakdown and depression, his inability to write his friends. The Northwestern job that Dean Briggs had found him was, he said, pleasant enough but only a way-station on the road East. “Cambridge and the winter Yard, evenings at your house, the Symphony, talk about a half dozen fireplaces, twilights over the Charles—those things have lined the darkest hours I ever spent with a half-intolerable beauty of reminiscence.” Rather vaguely, he proposed sometime to come back and work for an M.A. under Hurlbut’s direction. And “Please,” he said in closing, writing from his half-furnished little apartment through whose walls leaked the vicious Lake Michigan wind, “please think well of me!”26

  * DeVoto’s count, probably exaggerated.

  II

  NORTHWESTERN

  1 · Students and Epworth Leaguers

  Helen Avis MacVicar is a person both fictional and real. In the collegiate novel I Lived This Story,1 written by her Northwestern classmate Betty White, she appears as a young faculty wife sympathetic to student emotional storms—“a minor benevolent character,” as she herself says. Within the complexities of a plot that is only remotely referable to her own life, she is unmistakable as Libby Grayson in Bernard DeVoto’s 1934 novel We Accept with Pleasure. A caricature of her, a not entirely friendly one, figures largely in Helen Howe’s Cantabridgian roman à clef, We Happy Few.2 Even in real life she struck many people as a “character.” Some thought she deliberately tried for shock effects, some thought her so uninhibitedly honest that she produced them without trying. One of her husband’s Harvard students, describing her as she appeared to him at the beginning of the thirties, remembers her as “very good looking” and “very sexy-seeming, like Tallulah Bankhead whom she resembled,” and as “the only faculty wife who might have said ‘horseshit’ even to President Lowell.”3

  But that was after her transplantation from the Middle West, and after six or seven years of being married to Benny DeVoto.

  In September 1922 she was a Northwestern freshman of eighteen, a girl from Houghton, Michigan, up in the Copper Range. Her good looks were softer then than later, still overlaid with a little baby fat, which was in turn overlaid with a bright layer of sophistication. Making the assertions of her times, she bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, wore cloche hats, rolled her stockings below her knees, and spoke her full mind. She had a disconcerting habit of sitting on desks, tables, bookcases, any high perch, with her legs crossed and her nose in a book. In class she favored the front row, making up part of what DeVoto, writing of his educational experiences, referred to as the chorus line.4

  It may have been her legs he noticed first, without too much distinguishing them from the legs to right and left. But when he gave all his freshmen a test designed to humble them by revealing how little they knew of literature, history, philosophy, and related mysteries, Helen Avis MacVicar came up with the highest score among them.5 A mind, then. She wasn’t reading those books for nothing. He noticed her.

  She had already been noticing him.

  What she saw, when she first showed up for Freshman English, was an ugly, interesting-looking young man about five feet nine or ten, neither thin nor fat, but rounded-looking and solid. He had a round head, short dark hair parted a little to the right of center, round glasses, round brown eyes that when he smiled were squeezed up into half moons. He smiled much of the time. “Oddly oriental, somehow amphibian,”6 he sat hunched at his desk and watched them indifferently from between his collarbones until they were assembled. Then he slouched to his feet and addressed them. Betty White, in her novel, describes what she heard and saw from the front row that also contained Helen Avis MacVicar:

  “This is Section 27 of English 1,” he said in a deliberate voice, “where presumably you will increase in wisdom by cultivating an aversion to the comma fault. Any wandering souls who have erred are invited to leave.” He sat on the desk with a magnificent nonchalance of manner, and put one foot in a chair.

  “If you were the matured and eager minds your high school certificates make you out to be, we would concern ourselves with writing. Since you are neither adult nor prepared, and since you are here in reluctant obedience to a requirement, we will confine our efforts to learning the rudiments of primary-school grammar. It will be a very tiresome class for you. You will perhaps better understand the world’s capacity for dullness.” He paused delicately. “On my part, your presence here will fill my life with joy.”7

  And so on. Miss White’s freshman heroine, and presumably Miss White herself, thought him a sarcastic and insufferable smart alec, and was sure she was going to hate that class. Perhaps Helen Avis MacVicar thought the same thing. Both changed their minds. For though DeVoto inhabited the classroom with what George Ball, who sat under him four years later, calls “obtrusive informality,”8 though he roamed around the room, kidded the girls, wisecracked, sat on the desk and swung his leg, they discovered that he took teaching seriously. They had no way of knowing that his sarcasm was not contempt for them, but some aspect of his show-off compulsion, some variant of his cry to Byron Hurlbut: Please think well of me! But they did find him fair in his grades and genuinely enthusiastic when he could give his infrequent A’s. His air of supreme, swashbuckling confidence was backed by an apparent familiarity with every book ever written. He had been around, he was in the swim of things, he was rumored to be a writer himself. His opinions were prompt, vehement, and profane, full of great scorns and unexpected admirations. If he baited them and called them halfwits, he also made himself available, in and out of hours. At twenty-five he was not much older than they, but he seemed to them, as he had seemed to Dick Quintana at Harvard, possessed of great worldly knowledge and sophistication, and he was one with the campus rebels in their aversion to the prevailing Methodism of the university, the snoopings of the Dean of Women, and the inhibiting conventions of the campus. He was fond of referring to Evanston as the home base of the W.C.T.U., which it was.

  Even before the end of his first year, he had got himself noticed, and by more than his students, for his outspoken contempt for the “big business bigger stadiums” state of mind. He was caustic about the fund-raising campaigns and the willingness, as he saw it, to sell out intellectual standards.9 He openly doubted that certain highly regarded scholars and administrators could read without their forefingers. Before too long—and it is difficult to date such things, because the memories of those who participated tend to telescope the years, and what they remember may have occurred at any time between
1922 and 1927—there was developing a “DeVoto way of thinking,” which alarmed some administrators and exhilarated some students, especially some of the good students and most especially the students interested in writing. These last were capable of relishing a colorful phrase; they were also capable of quoting, stealing, or imitating it. Those who found him most exciting aped even his mannerisms, his way of lighting a cigarette, his wicked and ribald way of exposing hypocrisy. They hung around his apartment, they boxed or played tennis with him, they walked with him by the lake, and they talked, talked, talked. Toward the end of his Northwestern stay the rumor got around that DeVoto was serving liquor to undergraduates, and President Walter Dill Scott, whom DeVoto did not admire, called him in to discuss it. DeVoto in turn demanded that he be allowed to confront and question his accusers, and the charges were quietly dropped.10 (But liquor? says Helen Avis MacVicar, who by that time was Mrs. Bernard DeVoto, and should know. Liquor to students, on a salary of seventeen hundred dollars?)

  Lewis Ford, in Betty White’s novel, is a somewhat idealized version of the Bernard DeVoto who was an English instructor at Northwestern. She makes him close to omniscient in a sardonic way, and endows him with more influence in faculty circles than he actually possessed; but she also makes him the truest intellectual guide her heroine finds at the university, as well as the truest friend. For those whose minds he respected, he was undoubtedly both. Never mind that many, both students and faculty, found him offensive, abrasive, arrogant, profane, and boorish. Those were the conventional and the timid; those were not of the elect.