The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  He and Avis planned to spend the summer in Conway, New Hampshire, in the New England mountains that he could simultaneously enjoy for their beauty and disparage for their dinkiness. As usual, he expected the summer to result in a year’s work. He took with him the Mark Twain manuscript, a chunk of which was published in the Mercury at the beginning of June,24 the Beckwourth, and all the busywork of the general editorship, plus plans for enough stories to support them. Even before they left, he knew it was too much. And he was resisting the necessity of the slick stories, for his mind was set on what involved his training and inclination far more. Casting about, he tried to extract from Little, Brown a twenty-five-hundred-dollar advance against the Mark Twain. For a sample, he could point to the “Brave Days in Washoe” chapter in the current Mercury. But Little, Brown hung back. In the end DeVoto had to borrow five hundred dollars to get them to Conway.

  The Conway house was unattractive, and right on the road. He did not work well there. Before the end of June he was in a state of panic. He had let what interested him take up too much of his attention and had neglected what supported him, and now that he had to write something profitable he got the shakes, wrote badly, couldn’t produce. What he most wanted to do would pay him nothing for a long time, and then only a pittance. He tried and failed, tried again and failed, to write something he dared send out. In a week he wrote thirty thousand words, all of them futile and bad. On July 2 he sent an abject, humiliated letter to Byron Hurlbut saying that he was desperate, that he had sold nothing since February, that he was having to dispose of his AT&T stock to pay the Cambridge rent, that he could see no way of getting through the summer. Would Hurbut lend him five hundred dollars at the highest interest rate charged in Massachusetts?25

  Promptly, without question and at no interest, Hurlbut sent him the money, and that act of friendship, as much as the money itself, steadied him. He was able to grind out a story that Redbook bought.26 Then, with the reassurance of what the banks sometimes call a “peace of mind savings account,” he could settle down and work effectively through the rest of the summer.

  In the end, it was a good summer and a healthy one. Meine, who was a sort of advance man or John the Baptist in the frontier research, discovered, and DeVoto authenticated, the earliest known publication by Mark Twain, a sketch called “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter.”27 That promised well not only for Meine’s collection, but for DeVoto’s critical book. He got ahead with the writing, he kept up a drumfire of letters to his editors and to Knopf, he made progress with the editing of Beckwourth, the loud and lying mountaineer whose adventures encapsulated the life of a frontier a little earlier and a little farther west than the one that produced Mark Twain.

  To a compulsive worker, the details of routine editing can be restful. The questions an editor is faced with are questions that have answers, and finding the answers gives a man a sense of accomplishment without putting him through the strain that creative work entails. He can turn to them when brainfag and exhaustion have blurred his capacity to make something out of nothing, and he does not have to feel that the change has markedly cheapened his effort or wasted his time. To turn from the hardest kind of work to an easier kind is not an added burden, but a refreshment, and your compulsive worker has his soul more gladdened by it than by recreation, which comes to seem frivolous. The summer of 1929, once he put to rest his fear of starvation, was that kind of summer for DeVoto. He had been a “burst” worker. By now he was well on the way to being a burst worker with no letdown between bursts.

  In the fall, they returned only for a few weeks to 64 Oxford Street. Beginning on October 1, they had taken a lease on to Mason Street, one of four row houses just off Brattle, within minutes of the Yard.28 The Mark Twain manuscript had gone ahead, Americana Deserta would be launched in the spring with Forsythe’s Pierre and Meine’s Tall Tales, both of which were in press. He was about to begin an important article, “The Centennial of Mormonism,” for the Mercury.29 His financial condition was still precarious, but the worst time was past; his confidence was up. He could be assured that his last year, however harrowing to his spirit and unprofitable in money, had enhanced him among men he respected. And he could congratulate himself that he was past the necessity of scratching frantically for every dollar in the marketplace that he had to defend because he had chosen it, but that he deplored because it ate too much of his time. He had also escaped from the demoralizing insecurity of total independence. For, beginning with the fall term of the academic year 1929–30, he was a part-time instructor and tutor at Harvard College. His emancipation from pedagogy had lasted exactly two years.30

  “I know of no more delightful spot on the footstool,” he had written to Melville Smith when Smith was spending his postgraduation summer in Concord. “The charm of New England country, a deeply peaceful calm with the assurance of fertility and virtue; contact with a settled civilization; the inertia of a community which has discovered what few American communities have discovered or, I fear, will ever discover—that there is a richness of life in leisure and quiet passing all the fictitiousness and factitiousness of vim and vigor; intelligent people, and even a ripened sunlight.…”31 And in February 1922, when Dean Briggs was trying to find him some menial position at Harvard, he had expressed his determination to get back to New England somehow, if he had to join the Knights of Columbus and work for Mayor Curley.32

  That particular sacrifice had not been demanded of him, but he had had to get back by his own efforts, and he had found little enough of the richness of life in leisure and quiet that his youthful fantasy had conceived. He had had to struggle with all the fictitiousness and factitiousness of vim and vigor. But he had made it, and now he had finally made it in the terms he had always wanted: an official affiliation with Harvard, a ratified position as one of the elect.

  Not inappropriately, his first tutee was as blue-blooded and blue-stockinged as all of Boston could produce: George Homans, the son of Henry Adams’ favorite niece. I imagine DeVoto feeling as I felt when, a frontier boy born without history, I accepted a Fulbright appointment to Greece and carried culture back to Athens.

  2 · “Functional Justification as Part of an Institution”

  In any career there are periods of consolidation, when, as literally as a mountain climber, a man digs in and makes secure what he has won, before starting up again. In the three years after the autumn of 1929 DeVoto was not less busy than he had been during his first two years in Cambridge; he was simply less dispersed and less harassed, though his bibliography still reflects the necessities of his life. During 1930 he published five stories in the Post and Redbook; during 1931, when there were heavy drains on him because of the illness of his father back in Ogden, seven; during 1932, three. By now he was a thorough professional. When he needed money he could grind out a story, knowing in advance what it would cost him but knowing he could pay the price. In some stories he returned to Custis/Windsor and his leathery frontier heroine, Mrs. Yancey. More often, he set his stories on Vineyard Sound, at “Olympus University” in the Midwest, in Greater Boston, or at Harvard. He developed a new set of fashionables among whom to continue the romantic formulas of “Front Page Ellen.” He created a new set of student characters led by a parody of Bob Bailey called Robeson Ballou, and put them through a lot of Fitzgerald-like high jinks at Boston debutante parties. Material existed all around him; he could convert it when the need arose, and he was visited by no such deep depression as had afflicted him in 1928 and the summer of 1929.

  Part of his emotional stability can be laid to the fact of a small, steady paycheck, part to the psychological reassurance of being a functioning member of an institution he respected, part to his satisfaction in his serious writing. The Mark Twain book moved, however slowly, and he was able now and then to cannibalize a chapter for a magazine. In 1931 and 1932 four chapters were published, in Harper’s, The Bookman, The Saturday Review of Literature, and the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine,1 and each of those enhanced
him as a scholar with a field, an accepted authority as legitimate as any Ph.D.

  Re-established as a teacher, he brought forth a couple more essays on education.2 He busied himself with the editorial duties of the Americana Deserta series and with the job of finding new titles and new editors. His visibility helped consolidate his position not only in Cambridge and among the professors of American literature scattered across the country, but in the peculiarly intimate world of Boston publishers, who surrounded the Common on three sides and saw each other every weekday noon at the Tavern or St. Botolph’s. (When New York publishers came to town, they took you to the Ritz.)

  The stock market crash of October 1929 went by him, if one may judge by his writings and correspondence, without making any impression at all—indeed, it was an event that most Americans comprehended only in retrospect, by its trickle-down consequences. That was the way DeVoto comprehended it over a period of two years and more. His first intimation that it might affect his life came when Alfred Knopf, on January 20, 1930, wrote rather brusquely telling him to go slow on signing up any more new editors in Americana Deserta as he had just signed Hartley Grattan to do Timothy Flint’s Recollections of the Last Ten Years. DeVoto, offended, cited what he thought was Knopf’s authorization to go ahead up to ten titles and huffily tendered his resignation as general editor.3 He was placated and the Grattan commitment honored, but a certain chastening of his first optimism and enthusiasm resulted. The chastening was continued by the reception of the first two titles in April. Forsythe’s Pierre, whose introduction challenged some theories of Lewis Mumford’s about Melville, he had hoped would precipitate a critical controversy. It was born dead. And Meine’s Tall Tales of the Southwest, for all its reprinting of the first known publication of Mark Twain, its vigorous preface by DeVoto, and its indisputable importance as a piece of Americana, did little better. In May, Miss Manley Aaron of Knopf wrote DeVoto advising him not to hold his breath until the book passed the twenty-five-hundred-copy mark, at which point it would earn him a doubled fee. Tall Tales at that point had just passed five hundred copies, and its daily sales were all but invisible.4

  Furness’ collection from the ladies’ books, called The Genteel Female, did no better. The Depression hit the book business almost as soon and as hard as it hit the stock market and the banks. In May 1931, Knopf reported to DeVoto that the first three titles in Americana Deserta had cost him two thousand dollars and he was disinclined to lose any more than the other, already-contracted-for titles would certainly lose. DeVoto’s Beckwourth appeared that month, Mencken’s edition of Cooper’s The American Democrat was scheduled for autumn 1931, Grattan’s Timothy Flint would appear in spring 1932, and Carl Bridenbaugh’s Partisan Leader in fall 1932. And that would be it. Instead of a shelf of important books, a library that would be indispensable to every student of America, there would be seven random titles, each useful in its way, but collectively nothing like what DeVoto had dreamed of.5

  “Certain moments in history,” he wrote much later, about much more important moments, “are like a man waking at night and counting the strokes wrong when he hears a clock strike.”6 Americana Deserta’s brief career was such a moment. Every book published in it, and nearly every book whose incorporation into it was discussed through two years and more, was a book useful to American-literature scholars and potentially interesting to American readers. The study of American literature and history was unquestionably due for a great enlargement and expansion. Publishers would unquestionably make money, and editors would make scholary reputations, from books exactly like those proposed for Americana Deserta, and since the 1930s they have. But DeVoto had counted the strokes wrong. He had mistaken his own intense interest, and the interest of a few friends, for a popular demand that in fact did not yet exist. And there was no way in which he could have predicted the Depression.

  Well before the last volume in the series made its obscure debut in the fall of 1932, he knew the whole thing was a bust, another disappointment. Everything now rode on the Mark Twain book, tentatively scheduled for the fall of 1932.

  Meantime, more personal matters occupied him, among them two deaths.

  One of the casualties was Gordon King, his old friend of Harvard undergraduate days, the man who had once said DeVoto had “the most extraordinary case of ambition I’ve ever bumped into.” As literary as DeVoto, he had introduced DeVoto to Copey’s Monday Evenings. In the decade since their graduation he had written assiduously, at home and abroad, and had produced articles, plays, one novel, a child’s history of Rome—but without marked success. If there is a real pain in the loss of a friend and contemporary, a person in whom something of one’s younger self has remained alive, there is also a guilty comfort in being a survivor, talented enough to succeed where the friend has not, tough enough to endure where the friend has succumbed.7 In pity and humility DeVoto named his first son, born on August 7, 1930, Gordon King DeVoto.

  The second casualty, also in the winter of 1929–30, was Byron Hurlbut, one of his three Harvard champions. DeVoto wrote a touched and respectful obituary for the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, praising Hurlbut as one of the great teachers of writing, one of those who taught by delight rather than by the rules of scholarship and gave of themselves as freely as they gave of their wisdom. As it happened, Hurlbut’s death affected him in another way than loss. In July 1930, DeVoto had fled to Conway to escape the heat, which was somehow associated with his nervous symptoms and affected him drastically. He had left Avis and Betty White inhabiting 10 Mason Street and reading books of arctic exploration to keep cool. When DeVoto was called back at the beginning of August by the imminence of fatherhood, he found that Hurlbut had left him an inheritance. He was asked to take over English 31, Hurlbut’s writing course.

  And one further development. At the same time he resumed teaching and moved from the anonymity of a tutor’s office to a classroom podium, he assumed the editorship of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, “a dignified little old lady of a periodical,” as Mattingly calls it, “designed to gather dust in Harvard Clubs and to share an occasional living room table with the Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Evening Transcript.”8

  It was more than that to DeVoto, for as its editor he was not merely an obscure member of the Harvard family, minimally certified and approved, but a man with a forum and an audience. However inattentive it had been in the past, he intended to arouse that audience to attention. A residual Mencken still dwelt in him. He was the sort of Harry Pollett, who, as soon as he got to Heaven, would organize the angels and bring them out on strike. Readers of the Graduates’ Magazine who were used to glancing through it and tossing it aside were going to read it from here on, some of them in dismay and fury.

  He announced his accession mildly enough in the editorial column, “From a Graduate’s Window.” The former editor, Arthur S. Pier, had left to become a master at St. Paul’s. The magazine had been near death but was temporarily resuscitated by gifts. It had two thousand subscribers and needed another thousand if it was to survive and pay its way. Though its new editor did not say so, he had insured harmony on the staff by inducing friends to serve—Kenneth Murdock as University Editor, and one issue later, his tutee George Homans as Undergraduate Editor. The policy of the magazine, as always, would be to provide a window on Harvard interests and accomplishments and a forum for Harvard men’s “enthusiasms and resentments.”9

  The last word was significant. In an essay entitled “Literary Censorship in Boston” the new editor illustrated what he meant by it and forecast the tone of his editorship.10 He leveled pointblank against one of Boston’s untouchable institutions, the Watch and Ward Society, and pulled the lanyard.

  The occasion was the arrest and conviction of the proprietor of the Dunster House Bookshop, James A. (“Al”) DeLacey, for selling a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Defending the novel’s strong language as a sincere if unsuccessful attempt to “purify the language of love” by frankness, DeVoto attacked the statu
te under which the arrest was made, which forbade the sale of books containing obscene language or any matter tending to corrupt the morals of youth. Since there was no criterion by which corrupting matter could be judged, it generally turned out to be anything that had sexually excited some member of Watch and Ward, for whom morality was always sexual. He charged that DeLacey, a fastidious man, had actually been incited to sell the book by the snoops who had managed the banning of seventy-three other books in Boston in recent years, and that his eight-hundred-dollar fine and four months in jail were a grotesque distortion of justice and a monument to Boston’s hatred of literature. In their “benignantly strabismatic innocence” the reformers had achieved another result, unlooked for: some of their own directors had resigned in embarrassment, and the whole of the Boston intellectual community was divided between indignation and laughter.

  That stoutly civil-libertarian essay, which launched DeVoto on a career of resistance to censorship and censors of all kinds, would have found few objectors among the alumni who read the Graduates’ Magazine. But in the December issue the editor turned his guns on Harvard itself, or rather on the Alumni Bulletin, which had suggested some “mature” adviser to curb expressions of undergraduate opinion: the Crimson had gone out of bounds in an editorial against the American Legion. The ex-chaplain of Herman Baker Post did not defend the Legion; he defended the Crimson’s right to say what it thought of it. He wanted no censors, self-appointed or Harvard-appointed. “Alas, freedom of speech implies freedom of bad taste.” One of President Eliot’s greatest glories, he suggested, had been his consistent championing of freedom of speech and opinion, and he ended his editorial on tiptoe, spread-eagled against a text from Areopagitica: “Possessing that freedom and a few men to exercise it, Harvard would still be rich, though some depression annihilated its funds tomorrow. Lacking it, we should be poverty-stricken, though undreamed-of prosperity laid its increase at our feet.”11