The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  The more society changed, in fact, the more it was the same thing. DeVoto saw the perfectionism and reformist zeal of the Brooks group as simply another variant of the old American search for New Jerusalem and the perfected society. Perhaps he had already learned from his friend Hans Zinsser to look upon it as a sort of disease as well, a contagion shifting from endemic to epidemic in response to some change in the personal relations between infectious agent and host.8

  In any event, he had never believed a word of it. He thought its devotees ideologues imprisoned in their system of assumptions and deductions, and blind to plain facts, especially the facts of history. The moment he found himself with a forum in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, he used it to attack the Young Intellectuals as lustily as he attacked the dinosaurs of Watch and Ward. He disagreed violently with all systematizing, all a priori thinking, all deductive logic, all New Jerusalem fervors whether religious, political, economic, or literary. He asserted—with passion—fact and the inductive method which built on it. Orthodoxies, which blinded people to facts, maddened him as the sight of a uniform used to madden a poolroom tough I knew in Salt Lake Qty. The minute a fight started, he looked around for the nearest soldier or policeman.

  It is also true that DeVoto looked upon the Young Intellectuals as the “in” crowd, the aesthetes, the expatriates, the ambulance drivers, the effete Easterners. “The boys,” he liked to call them in disdain, a phrase that he later applied just as disdainfully to the proletarians, the Marxists, the academic historians, the teachers of English, and the spokesmen for western cattlemen. It meant “those with whom I disagree.” But when he disagreed with anybody, he made use of more than logic or rhetoric or his genius for rambunctious dissent. A journalist, he called himself, and he prided himself on looking up the facts. Generally he had.

  He had been born in the West in the twilight between barbarism and vulgarity, or if you want, between the fading of New Jerusalem and the commercial present. He had been studying the frontier intensively for a decade, and had published three novels and many essays about it. He knew about the perfected society—he had been born in one, and learned skepticism therein. And though his own flight from Ogden might seem to cast doubt on his profrontier position, in Mark Twain’s America it was actually not damaging to his present argument, for the Ogden he had fled from had only residual resemblances to the frontier that in Brooks’s view had maimed Mark Twain; and neither he nor Mark Twain had sustained the specific damages that Brooks said the frontier inflicted. Above all, the West was DeVoto’s country, especially the frontier West. When anyone from outside, anyone condescending and uninformed, challenged it, he was tempermentally bound to mount a counterattack.

  Mark Twain’s America was dedicated to Robert S. Forsythe, his old Northwestern colleague, one of the Americana Deserta editors, and author of the first and at that time the only critical appraisal of Bernard DeVoto. In his foreword, addressed to Forsythe, DeVoto took occasion to spank A. B. Paine for refusing him assistance and declaring that nothing more needed to be written about Mark Twain.9 He offered his services to the Mark Twain Estate for the editing of the manuscripts that Paine kept locked up (an irony, but a prophetic one). And he went to some pains to describe and justify his book. It was not literary criticism, nor was it biography, nor was it what Arthur Schlesinger suggested, the social history of Mark Twain. It was “an essay in the correction of ideas,” though he was not naïve enough to suppose that literary ideas were really susceptible to correction. So call it simply “the kind of book I have wanted to write about Mark Twain.” Actually he could have relied on his title, which was precise. The book is about Mark Twain’s America, especially the America he knew before he came East and accepted instruction: the America that had formed him, the Mississippi River and the Sierra Nevada and San Francisco.

  That frontier America, DeVoto said, had been misrepresented by “the lay popes of our thinking,” and so had Mark Twain. “The criticism of literature in America is so frail, so capricious, so immature a force, that discussion has moved away from what a great man wrote, to what he was or was not, what he should have been, what America failed to be, and what the reformation of society might achieve if the world were amenable to pretty thoughts.” And finally, “I have no theory about Mark Twain. It is harder to conform one’s book to ascertainable facts than to ignore them. In literature, beautiful simplicities usually result from the easier method.”10

  The stance is absolutely characteristic, a stance he adopted at the beginning of his career and maintained to the end. Facts. The ad hoc approach. Suspicion of theories, of systems, of absolutes, of beautiful thinking and beautiful simplicities. Having stated his intentions, he set out to demolish The Ordeal of Mark Twain as a theory based on false facts, inadequate facts, misunderstood facts, and sometimes no facts at all.

  No purpose would be served by a point-for-point discussion of that demolishment. It is a landmark of sorts in the history of intellectual controversy in America. The books exist, and may be read, and Mark Twain scholars as well as American social historians have read them. Most have elected to follow DeVoto most of the way. For though he was guilty of overstatement in asserting that Brooks knew no American history, was helpless to deal with humor, and was ignorant of the frontier, the most superficial reading of the two books makes it clear that Brooks knew less about all three than his corrector did. Clearly he had, as DeVoto charged, discovered some of his conclusions before he had assembled his evidence. His Puritanical and vulgar frontier society without art or folklore or aspiration was a straw man, his notion of the “artist” that was thwarted in Mark Twain was the figment of an eastern and European-oriented and overliterary imagination; his psychoanalytic portrait based on literary evidence was a caricature.

  Step by step, DeVoto traced Mark Twain through the societies and the influences that had shaped him. In place of Brooks’s theoretical Hannibal, created mainly out of a selective reading of Paine’s biography and Mark Twain’s late (and unreliable) reminiscences, he substituted the few sure facts then known about Sam Clemens’ boyhood and youth, pointing out, among other things, that the apprenticing to Ament came not immediately after the death of Sam’s father, but fifteen months after; that Sam’s boyhood was not inhibited by Calvinist rigors, but marvelously free; that his imagination was not constricted, but enlarged by the violence, turmoil, and change of his boyhood town; that the superstitions of slaves and the humor of frontier newspapers were shaping forces to which he responded with awe and delight, and by which he was exhilarated and emancipated. What emerged from the crude but in certain ways idyllic society of the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific slope was not a maimed artist, a man devoured by inward guilts and shames, but the first truly American writer, precisely what Emerson’s “American Scholar” had called for, but in a form so new that the literary did not recognize him for what he was. The literary tradition he represented was native, as was the tradition of humor that he practiced. He raised both to the level of art. He was actually the triumphant climax of a native subliterary tradition, and not the frustrated end of an imported one.

  In 1973 these opinions are commonplaces; in 1932 they were a striking refutation of accepted literary opinion. Subsequent scholars have opened and cultivated the territory of the tall tale and newspaper humor that DeVoto, Franklin Meine, Walter Blair, and Constance Rourke explored at the beginning of the 1930s. The reputation of Mark Twain, who had always been read but seldom taken with full seriousness, has undergone a shift and an enlargement in conformity with the figure that emerged at the end of Mark Twain’s America: a figure often called for, often heralded, a form of the creature Crèvecoeur had in mind when he asked, “Who is this new man, the American?”11 What emerged was the American as artist, the development that Brooks and the literary Sanhedrin had denied and gone on calling for. Around him was the America that had created him without being understood or much investigated: the forming society given its native quality and its extravagant and ex
hilarating energy, as well as its idyllic freedom, by the fact of the frontier, which the Brooks view held to be deadly to art.

  To get this said, DeVoto attacked Brooks frontally and by name as the most intelligent and influential of the Young Intellectuals. He went for the quarterback, and he was not gentle. Brooks was upset; his friends were furious; several reviewers, including Mark Van Doren in The Nation,12 objected to DeVoto’s “anger” and “loudness”; Lewis Mumford privately planned to give DeVoto “a few medicinal pellets” and wrote Brooks asking for a list of DeVoto’s errors.13 Though the reviews in many quarters were enthusiastic, even jubilant, the hives of the Young Intellectuals hummed as angrily as Utah had hummed when it opened The American Mercury for March 1926. The Mark Twain Estate hummed too. A. B. Paine was annoyed to find himself represented in the Foreword as a dog in the manger, and wrote, both personally and through the estate lawyer, Charles Tressler Lark, to complain and threaten suit.14 Growing more truculent on being reproached, DeVoto said in reply that if Paine felt wronged, DeVoto was willing in the next edition to print the relevant passages from Paine’s letter refusing his co-operation. Having deliberately set out to stir up the lions, he took some pleasure in their roaring.

  Many years later Lawrence Kubie, the distinguished analyst who for a time had DeVoto as a patient, told him that his method of argument was too vituperative. “When you get roused to written argument, when you hear the clarion call of your own words, there is often a touch of the fishwife about your argufying. It is a curious thing, Benny, that this is never true of you in face-to-face argument; or at least I have never seen it. It discolors your argument when you are hurling words from a distance. Then it is as if you were jumping up and down with glee on the prostrate form of the opponent with whom you are disagreeing, not trying to find a common ground, but rather enjoying the opportunity to use a divergence of viewpoints to point out what a damn fool the other man is.”15

  Beyond any question, there is that tone in Mark Twain’s America and in a good many of DeVoto’s subsequent writings. Though he objected to being called the “volcanic” Mr. DeVoto by Time-Life journalists, volcanism was a habit that he either cultivated or could not avoid. Personal malice was not a significant part of it; he did not know Brooks personally, nor many of the other Young Intellectuals. He took them simply as representative of ideas to which he strongly objected, and ideas that struck him as false or misguided raised his blood pressure and reddened his eye. Often, he seems to have been surprised when people he lambasted took the attack personally instead of assuming it to be all in the heat of controversy,16 to be reconciled with a convivial postgame drink in the locker room.

  Nevertheless, Brooks and his friends were aggrieved and offended, for what they thought more than adequate cause. DeVoto himself, perhaps instructed by reviewers who intensely admired Mark Twain’s America but regretted its frequently railing tone,17 came very shortly to feel that he had been too vehement. His facts alone, it was clear, would have demolished Brooks’s theory. Within months of the publication of his book, he was planning a new edition that would reduce and moderate the attacks on Brooks. That edition did not become a fact until 1951, and then it had no corrections or changes, which was something of a pity, for revisions might have effected a reconciliation between men who had much to learn from one another. What DeVoto did not know was that Brooks, too, was planning a revision—had done a good deal of it before Mark Twain’s America appeared—and that this revision would take care of a good many of the errors of fact or judgment that DeVoto charged against him. Brooks admitted to Mumford, while still smarting over the tongue-lashing he had taken, that he had benefited from DeVoto’s book to the extent of “about a dozen corrections” that he had not already made.18

  But in so far as literary ideas are ever corrected, the ordeal of Mark Twain was a discredited theory as soon as Mark Twain’s America appeared, and no amount of revision and modification could fully reinstate it. America was at least partially vindicated; the great gas-lighted barbarity was demonstrated to have been a bogey to scare children and console the unrobust. As for Bernard DeVoto, he had become someone of importance, almost a personage, by his singlehanded raid against the intellectuals. And the public image of him was ambivalent, as he was himself. He was not simply a red Indian dancing the scalp dance and striking the pole and boasting of his exploits against the effete. He was a sort of champion of the West, a yea sayer where there had previously been a chorus of scornful nays. Fully as much as “New England: There She Stands,” Mark Twain’s America was a hymn of praise, not only a corrective report on the West and the frontier, but a celebration. And that was prophetic.

  5 · On Bread Loaf Mountain

  I never see a dinosaur

  So patient and so mute

  But that a song of pity springs

  Unbidden to my lute—

  He stayed a lizard, but he wished

  To be a bird, poor brute.

  Don Marquis, Reverie

  With the publication of Mark Twain’s America DeVoto completed a decade of scrambling and climbing. He had made it from deprivation to a sort of fulfillment, had established himself in the place and among the people he most desired to be part of, had stated many of his major themes, had acquired a degree of authority over an area of knowledge that was distinctly his own. A compulsive self-tester, he had tried out his ability to support himself by writing, and found that he could do it. This Sir Gareth from the Utah backlands had won his way from the scullery to the fellowship of the Table Round. He had challenged the dragon Error and come home with one of its heads. He held a guest card in the Harvard community, and with many of its finest minds he was on terms of intimacy and mutual respect. Through George Homans and Charles Curtis1 he was even welcomed at the thawed edges of Boston’s frozen and wellborn center. That he was a stimulating teacher, many students attested. That he was a provocative and challenging mind, informed, quick in comprehension, tenacious in his grasp of fact, tough in controversy, his Mark Twain book had made plain. That he sometimes overstated himself, and that he made his living as a hack writer of slick magazine stories, were eccentricities that Cambridge could indulge with a smile.

  Nevertheless, almost at home, almost secure, a roaring mouse somewhere in the walls of that quaint city, he needed something more than Cambridge could give him. Cambridge was Academia. He could still look upon it with an outsider’s eye, and he knew that though it might be the hub of the universe and the intellectual engine room of America, it was not any longer the center of America’s literary life or of the American publishing business. And he was a pro. If he had followed the path beaten by hundreds of his contemporaries, he would have headed toward New York, driven by the sheer economics of his profession. Instead, he got most of what he needed of New York at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and he got much else besides.

  On July 14, 1949, debating in his mind whether or not to accept Theodore Morrison’s invitation to be once again a member of the Conference staff, DeVoto expressed himself with vehement ambivalence to William Sloane:

  It is still an absolutely dead sure thing that I will not go but other pressures as powerful as yours are being applied to me.… Probably I will still be unalterably refusing to go when I drive into the yard of Treman and start bellyaching about Fletcher’s martinis.… The truth is I mortally hate the place, its hysterias, its psychoses, its doublebitted axes, its miasmas, blights, poisons, obsessions, shuck mattresses, dining room regulations, Ophelias, Lady Macbeths … Pistols, Olsens, Johnsons, somnambulists, insomniacs, and most of all, by Christ, its glee-clubbers. The truth is, further, that it terrifies me and infects me with manias, depressions, and blue funks. Beyond that is the further truth that there are increasingly acute reasons why I should not come, and beyond that is the concentric truth that I always have the best time of the year when I am there.2

  The visit that in the summer of 1949 he dreaded, resisted, and eventually made was his twelfth tour of duty at Bread Loa
f. It was his last as a regular staff member. Through the 1940s his relations with some of the regulars, especially Robert Frost, had been growing increasingly acrid and uncomfortable. His last stay on the mountain, when he stole two days from an automobile tour designed to produce travel articles for Holiday and Ford Times, occurred in August 1955, and it was bitter with ill health, fatigue, and old quarrels. Nevertheless, from 1932 until the haunted weekend a few months before his death, Bread Loaf was something special in DeVoto’s life—a focus, a trying-ground for ideas, a vacation, a reunion, an annual renewal of acquaintance and energy. No other places except Ogden, which shaped him, Cambridge, which he often affected to loathe but refused to leave, and the office of Harper’s Magazine at 49 East 33rd Street, which gave him loyalty, affection, and a national forum during his last twenty years, had a comparable influence on his life.

  Though the fee it paid him was minuscule to begin with and never got much better, he could justify the loss of two weeks of writing time as a sort of working vacation, the Sunday rodeo of a weekday cowhand. The fact that the Conference was held in Vermont had a lot to do with its continued attraction. As a bonus, during the first four years, when he was still teaching at Harvard, he found it useful to be forced to boil down his lecture notes to fit the demonic concentration of Bread Loaf, for often these boiled-down notes could be thriftily published as essays. And finally, as important as any of these, after his departure from Harvard in 1936 the Conference permitted a satisfying annual return to the teaching platform from which he had been untimely ripped. Professional writer he might be, but teacher he could not help being also.