The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  Utah, it should be remembered, was founded by a people fleeing persecution. It repudiated the United States wholesale, denied its jurisdiction, denounced its political system, scorned its representatives, sneered at its opinion, and upset its institutions even unto the institution of monogamous marriage. But following the Church’s renunciation of polygamy, which was in turn followed by amnesty and statehood, Utahns developed a desire to be just like everybody else. Mormons didn’t wear horns; they were people like you and me. They were, moreover, diligent, faithful, law-abiding, hospitable, and much else. All true. But because Mormonism’s commentary upon itself had for so long been an instrument of solidarity because Mormon history was faith promotion and Mormon biography was hero worship and mythology, there existed in many Mormon minds a suspicion that in this chorus of self-praise there was a certain implausibility. Mormons wanted the praise of non-Mormons, if only as corroboration. That is a simplified explanation of why Utah has been until very recently, and certainly was in 1926, extremely sensitive to unfriendly criticism in national magazines. Besides, as DeVoto would have been the first to say, unfriendly criticism was bad for business. Utah wanted boosters, not knockers.

  Those were the corned and bunioned toes that Bernard DeVoto, a renegade if there ever was one, deliberately trod on in his essay in The Taming of the Frontier and returned to jump up and down on in the essay called “Utah” in the American Mercury for March 1926.9

  It was written as if in answer to a Cambridge lady who had once asked him, “in derision and incredulity,” how people lived in Utah. Well, madam, he had said in effect, if you’re a run-of-the-mill Mormon you live like a pious cowherd. If you’re a Gentile you “spew out a farrago of lies about polygamy.” If you’re a businessman of either side you break your neck walking soft to avoid hurting business. Peace with profit has been possible between Mormons and Gentiles ever since 1906, when Reed Smoot, an ex-polygamist, was assured his seat in the United States Senate. If you’re a cattleman or other rancher in Utah, you belong to a better race of men, and live a good life.10 If you’re one of the newly rich, you “lead the most swinish life now possible in the United States.” Do not take seriously Edgar Lee Masters’ theory that Utah fosters the arts, and that an artist would do better to head for Salt Lake than to go to Paris. Utah artists such as Cyrus Dallin and Maude Adams are to be accounted for by the “mere accident of birth.” Beauregard, the only Utah painter worth looking at, is unknown in his home town of Ogden. There has never been a Utah writer above the Mutual Improvement11 level; for most Utahns it is a trial to sign their names. Artistically the state is a desert. “Civilized life does not exist in Utah. It has never existed there. It will never exist there.”

  As an essay, “Utah” did not amount to much—a few minutes of adolescent yawp, the sort of thing that a bright Northwestern sophomore might publish in the Purple Parrot and get put on probation for. But it came on the heels of the unflattering portrait of Ogden in The Taming of the Frontier, which had closely followed the thinly disguised portrait in The Crooked Mile. And it came in a national magazine, the national magazine that the godless most read and quoted. The three together marked DeVoto as Utah Enemy Number One, the contemporary avatar of all the Missouri Pukes and Illinois mobbers who had attained immortality in the Mormon memory for their persecution of the Saints.

  From Ogden, Florian DeVoto wrote happily that many people were furious and some were tickled, most of all Father Cushnahan, whom Bernard had used to assist in the mass. People kept calling up to tell him Bernard had better not come back to Utah. The newsstands were sold out and had hastily ordered several hundred more copies of the Mercury. They could have sold a thousand. And in Evanston Bernard heard that President George Thomas of the University of Utah had written President Scott of Northwestern demanding that DeVoto be fired. I have found no documentary evidence for that rumor, but in the heat of indignation, which was general all over the state of Utah, Thomas may easily have made the suggestion.12

  Why did DeVoto scourge his home place so immoderately? He knew better. He had once confessed to Melville Smith that it was himself, not his environment, that was to blame for his miseries. His true enemy, an enemy who was a compound of ambition, self-consciousness, envy, and a grinding sense of inferiority, was within. What was more, his vision of America made allowance for nearly everything that he excoriated in Ogden and Utah—made allowance for it and defended it as the inevitable condition of a developing democracy. From the very bottom of his depression, during his first week at Northwestern, in the fall of 1922, he had scolded Smith for taking a Mencken view of America. He had said, in fact, some astonishing things: That Smith and the whole intellectual hierarchy were making a serious mistake in denouncing America for its repressions, its legislated morality, and its prohibition of paganism, and in assuming that the country was necessarily and objectionably anti-art. Art, said DeVoto, had always been under the ban of respectability. In Shakespeare’s London the theaters were forbidden, and had to move out onto the riverbank between the brothels and the bear pits. “And if the worst of what you say is true, as it is not, what is the difference? Take this country of ours, of mine at least, with its hundred million people, every one a member of the human race, albeit of a lower species. Repressions, censorship, cramped, fear-ridden lives. Even so. There is your marble.… Here is ugliness, apparent everywhere—build with it. Here are beauties, no less genuine for being strange—build with them. Here is a whole continent stuffed with living things. Put your tongue in your pocket and get to work with them.”13

  It was an affirmation that might have come out of the Whitman of Democratic Vistas or out of the Lewis Mumford of The Golden Day. If DeVoto had been as impartial about his home state as he was about the nation at large, Utah would never have had cause to spit out his name as an abomination. But the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. In spite of what his mind told him, in spite of his reading and his thinking and his hard hold on history and fact, his material twisted in his hands when he himself was part of it, and his reporting acquired the tones of grievance and denunciation. Even Florian DeVoto, not notable for his impartiality, advised him to give up Utah for a while—he had already estranged all his boyhood friends.14

  Nearly twenty years later DeVoto admitted, in print and in a Utah publication, that his two early articles on Utah were “ignorant, brash, prejudiced, malicious, and what is worst of all, irresponsible.” He deplored his youthful tendency to yank out shirttails and set fire to them, and regretted his gift for burlesque and extravaganza, and wished that he had not yielded, for the only times in his life as he saw it, to the “Mercury mood.” He thought that a lot of what he had said in the twenties would have been legitimate if he had said it differently.15

  But that recantation came after time had callused over both his youthful intemperance and his sense of grievance. At the time, he relished the howls of the wounded, he relished the notoriety, he relished the sensation of being in the public eye even as a cinder. The outcry from Utah and the extraordinarily warm and encouraging letters from Mencken could persuade him that whether or not anyone took his pentecostal novel, he was beginning to reveal himself as a mind, as a writer, and as a force.

  4 · Stirring Up the Animals

  A writer’s mind is to a great extent made, or confirmed, by what he reads. DeVoto, who once described himself as a literary department store, was shaped by the extraordinary range and variety of the books he read, whether with some specific end in view or randomly. During 1926 and 1927 he was reading Civil War history, because his third novel, The House of Sun-Goes-Down, began in the defeated South and went West from there as so many ruined Southerners did, and also because he was fascinated by the Civil War as the great crisis in the forming of the American nation, a theme that was increasingly on his mind. Growing by what he fed on, and feeding largely on American history, he hoped sometime to write a history of the war as what he had not yet learned to call a geopolitical event.1 He had
acquired early, and retained, an admiration for Lincoln both as the architect of Union and as the highest political development of the native American mind, the homely and vernacular raised to the level of greatness in politics as Mark Twain raised it to greatness in literature. He was also reading everything he could lay his hands on about the westward movement, a climax of the continentalizing trend, and he was keeping his father busy in the libraries of historically minded friends in Ogden.2 This research, too, had an immediate purpose, since The House of Sun-Goes-Down went West by the Platte Valley route and settled down in the place called Windsor Springs City, which was Windsor, which was Ogden. Abandoning the trilogy organization, he was utilizing and condensing and correcting some of the material he had used before, in the failed novel Cock Crow.

  Other kinds of books came at him by way of the random sampling of the reviewer’s trade. At the end of 1925, Avis, restless for something to do, had taken over the job of book-review editor of the Evanston News-Index, and for a year and a half they wrote the book page together. He did all the books about the West and the frontier—history, fiction, poetry, ethnology, reminiscence, travel, folklore, whatever—plus all the books on American history, plus such fiction as he was interested in, mainly American.

  He had a faculty of making use of whatever came to hand, and now he was given opportunity. His pentecostal novel The Great God Boggs had finally been taken by Macmillan; the contract came through in April 1926, when he was still ducking the hornets his “Utah” article had stirred up. What was in some ways even more encouraging, Mencken’s interest turned out to be real, enthusiastic, and persistent. He was incredibly friendly. Obviously he recognized in DeVoto a kindred spirit, irreverent, ribald, and blessed with the vernacular gift of tongues. In February he had accepted an article called “Sex and the Co-Ed,” a topic so red hot that the author thought it best to protect himself and his job with a nom de plume, John August.3 Mencken guaranteed to announce Mr. August in his author’s note as “a practicing Christian with high academic dignity.”4 He was going to lead with “Sex and the Co-Ed” in the May 1926 issue, and he guessed it would “stir up the animals and set them to roaring.”5

  Meanwhile Mencken demanded ideas for other essays. His appetite was insatiable, and his exuberant demand generated an exuberant supply. By March 4, when the Utah animals were at their most stirred up and roaring their loudest, he had informally commissioned four more essays—one on the YMCA in the colleges, one on the mountain men, one on the Mormons, and one on the Icelanders of Washington Island, with their frugal virtues and what seemed to Mencken their delightful water access to an unwatchable Canadian border. Keep this last one discreet, Mencken said; it wouldn’t do to get the prohis after them.6

  Only a few days later, he approved an article on the teaching of English, which he expected would take off some skin, for, “saving only the faculty of education, the English faculty in the average American university contains the worst idiots in the place.”7 Receiving that hint, DeVoto immediately proposed, and had approved, yet another article, predictably destructive, on the Faculty of Pedagogy.8

  Mencken was a recurrent jackpot. He poured out dimes and quarters every time DeVoto pulled the handle. His openness to suggestion was exhilarating, his co-operativeness prompt, friendly, and humorous. When in March DeVoto got worried that his authorship of “Sex and the Co-Ed” might leak, Mencken wrote him saying, in effect, Be not dismayed. “If you are publicly accused and want to deny the fact, let me know and I’ll have my staff perjurer make all the necessary affidavits. He is a clergyman and hence talented.”9

  But baiting the booboisie had its dangers. On April 15 Mencken wrote that the Watch and Ward Society, angered at a Mercury article by A. L. S. Wood called “Keeping the Puritans Pure,” had been lying in wait for a chance and had now found it in “Hatrack,” an article about a small-town Missouri prostitute. It was out to shut off the Mercury’s mailing privileges. If it succeeded, if the Post Office Department closed the door, the Mercury would be dead. In the circumstances, and while Mencken fought the Watch and Ward on that front, it seemed best not to irritate them with a new offense. So “Sex and the Co-Ed” was being pulled from the May issue at the last minute. In its place would go a piece on learning to play the cello.10

  Well, DeVoto may or may not have said to himself, you win some and you lose some. “Sex and the Co-Ed,” which was only a piece of opportunist satire anyway, could wait. He had other things to do, plenty of other things. One of them, for which he signed a contract on April 23, was a book on Mark Twain that six years later would make his reputation.

  On Washington Island, in the summer of 1926, he was a one-man literary factory. Except when put down by his nervous illness, he had always been a prodigious worker. Now everything he worked on was all but guaranteed publication. He finished his part of the revision he and Arthur Nethercot were making of a freshman English text, W. F. Bryan’s The Writer’s Handbook.11 So much for the academic proprieties and expectations, which he disposed of in about a week. Then he finished a draft of The House of Sun-Goes-Down and read proofs on The Great God Boggs, now called The Chariot of Fire. Probably he read for the book on Mark Twain, a subject that he protested he knew nothing about but that was a logical outgrowth of his study of the frontier and his irritation with some of the things Easterners had said about it. And he worked steadily on his commitments to Mencken, with a cheering section to applaud every step of his advance upon literary notice. For from time to time some of his Northwestern students followed the DeVotos up to Washington Island and turned their room, the beaches, the woods, into a peripatetic Academy.

  It was an extension of their Evanston apartment, which was never entirely removed from the spirit of the classroom, but which made of the classroom a place of challenge, discussion, and debate. The DeVotos had established that relationship with chosen students at the very beginning of their marriage—in fact, their marriage had come out of it. It was not a policy or a duty; it simply happened that way. And they took the Academy principle with them wherever they lived. It was a condition of their life in Evanston, in Cambridge, in Lincoln, on Bread Loaf Mountain, in half a dozen little summer villages in Vermont and New Hampshire, and on the shore at Annisquam. The only place where it never developed, White Plains, was the place they most hated. A circle of friends was indispensable to DeVoto’s internal well-being. If they were equals and adversaries, fine; he never fled a fight. If they were young and admiring, fine; he never turned down admiration. If they were female and pretty, better yet. If they were young, admiring, female, pretty, and in some sort of nervous or emotional trouble, that was best of all, for then DeVoto could forget himself and become father, priest, and healer.

  At summer’s end, when the DeVotos returned to Evanston, he drove his accomplishments ahead of him like fat geese bound for market. The Chariot of Fire was due in October.12 In November the Mercury would run not only the essay on Washington Island,13 but the destructive piece on the YMCA, which he had discreetly signed with another pseudonym, Richard Dye.14 The December Mercury would run his prose hymn to the romantic and savage life of the mountain men,15 and the January Harper’s would return him to his role as the bad boy of the colleges, with an article called “College and the Exceptional Man,” which bluntly advised the exceptional man to drop out and get his education in a more likely place.16 Other essays were in the works. The contract for the Mark Twain book assured a corner of the future.

  To his friends, and some who were not his friends, he looked like the most explosive literary article in the Chicago area. Perhaps to himself as well, for, constantly examining himself as he did, he was capable of being periodically dazzled by the evidence in his favor. To Briggs and Hurlbut, toward the end of 1926, he wrote asking aid in finding a cottage on Cape Cod for the following summer, confiding incidentally that he could now sell everything he wrote and was close to that moment of decision when he would cut his bonds and head for the privileged earth of New England.17
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  He could sell everything he wrote. But in the next sentence he corrected himself. Everything but stories. The only stories the magazines wanted, he said, were the cheap and artificial kind, and he would not write below his own level in order to sell. That rationalization of his single consistent failure was self-protective—all the more so because fiction was what he most wanted to write. In his heart he perhaps agreed with Dean Briggs, who applauded his success with essays but regretted that they depended so much on Mencken and the Mencken tone.18 Briggs hadn’t liked the tone of The Crooked Mile either, saying that the cynicism which had begun as dramatic propriety had ended by tainting its author.19 Actually he had it upside down: the cynicism that had been generated in the author by his quarrel with Ogden, Utah, had ended by tainting his novel. But Briggs unwittingly laid a cold hand on DeVoto’s self-confidence when he said that The Crooked Mile had made him “question, in spite of fine passages and an underlying idea, whether the novel was your right medium.”20

  That was the judgment of a friendly and fatherly teacher, and could not be ignored or discounted. It had to be proved wrong. DeVoto sent Briggs an early copy of The Chariot of Fire, which Briggs found a marked improvement on the first one, more economical, better controlled, and without the cynical taint.21 But he didn’t fall all over himself to praise it, which is what its author would have liked; and as the weeks went by and the reviews came in DeVoto beat his head trying to understand where and how he had failed. He had gone out, as he wrote a Chicago newspaperman named Paul Ferris, “deliberately to wipe the eye of W. D. Howells, whose Leatherwood God has always seemed to me a ludicrous failure in one of the finest themes an American has ever had.”22 He knew the frontier, he knew the history and the spirit of revivalism, he thought he understood the psychology of an illiterate riverman who began in evangelical religious fervor and ended up believing himself God and by his martyrdom confirmed his church in the same belief. He thought he understood, from his study of Mormon history, how a community in backwoods Illinois would respond to such a New Jerusalem deity. And he had written, written, written since he was eighteen years old, and if he didn’t know how to write now, how could he ever? One part of him told him that the book was more profound and more American than any of the critics saw. Another part told him that it was the failure in fact that it was in the bookstores and among the reviewers. He had to adjust to that failure as he would have had to adjust to a personal humiliation.