The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  As usual, DeVoto could not defend without attacking; he could not celebrate Pareto without denouncing those who were ignorant of him or resisted his teachings. It seemed odd, he told the opposition in that first article,6 that when everybody was busy remaking society nobody bothered to examine the only study of society that made any sense, the one that superseded Marx and all other social thinkers. Nobody except himself and Henderson, DeVoto said, had mentioned in print this book that Henderson as a historian of science called one of the most important books of the twentieth century. No one read the book that did for sociology what Newton’s Principia had done for mechanics. Sociologists rejected Pareto’s work because it invalidated most sociology that preceded it. Marxists and others with a cause could not read it at all, because to Pareto’s cool view society was not an imperfect approximation on its inevitable way to becoming the classless society, or the New Jerusalem, or the Community of Just Men Made Perfect, but an unstable equilibrium among ignorance, prejudice, protective thinking, inertia, fear, habit, innovation that was as likely as not something old under a new label, and a thousand other energies, most of them irrational, an overwhelming proportion of them persistent, and almost none of them susceptible to the revisionism of idealists and do-gooders.

  He got a good deal of irritated response to that article, some of it from leftist writers who called Pareto “the Karl Marx of Fascism”7 and cited his influence on Mussolini and his acceptance of an award from Il Duce; some of it from Lewis Mumford, who caught him in a factual slip or two and used these errors to depreciate his attacks on Van Wyck Brooks8; and some of it from within the seminar itself.9 Having, as he admitted to Mattingly, written his piece before he was really ready,10 he had no alternatives but to back off or go forward. Characteristically, he went forward. He could explain Pareto’s acceptance of an award from Mussolini as the act of an old man living under Fascism who had no options, and he could easily enough dispose of the notion of blaming Pareto for the uses Mussolini had put his analysis to—you did not blame the inventor of gunpowder for the World War. But he could not excuse his oversimplification of Pareto’s thought, nor his implication that Pareto was totally unknown in the United States. He was a man who prided himself on working from facts. Now that he had, through haste and enthusiasm, embarrassed himself in public, he got back on the horse that had piled him and wrote a second, more considered explication of Pareto’s sociology, which Harper’s published in October 1933.11

  This is not the place to explicate Pareto, even if one could. As several of his disciples, including DeVoto, have testified, it is difficult to summarize him without distorting him into simplicity, and simple he is not. A horseback definition of his method, about as accurate as the horseback version of the second law of thermodynamics—“Anything left to itself deteriorates”—is perhaps as good as one can do. The following summary is not guaranteed against defects, and should be kept out of the hands of children.

  Basic to Pareto’s method is the analysis of society through its non-rational “residues,” which are persistent and unquestioned social habits, beliefs, and assumptions, and its “derivations,” which are the explanations, justifications, and rationalizations we make of them. One of the commonest errors of social thinkers is to assume rationality and logic in social attitudes and structures; another is to confuse residues and derivations. Pareto, seeking to approach society inductively, looked first for the fundamental, non-rational actions of men. Next he looked for uniformities by which these could be arranged in classes, for classification is “a halfway house between the immediate concreteness of the individual thing and the complete abstraction of mathematical notions.”12 By classification we approach scientific “laws.” Classification, generalization, hypothesis, and testing give us a means of describing or explaining the relations of men in society in approximately the way we understand the relations of particles and electrical charges in physics. But in society cause and effect are delusory; we must search instead for ways of interdependency among many variables, the machinery of dynamic equilibrium.

  Residues are the sentiments out of which social actions arise. The six tentative classes into which Pareto divides them provide a way of seeing the discrepancy between actions and the reasons that are commonly given for those actions, which often express a sentiment not related to the act. The art of government, says Pareto, consists not in altering residues, which are often astonishingly persistent over centuries of apparent change, and which stubbornly resist alteration, but in manipulating derivations, finding new ways of rationalizing actions that are totally non-rational and non-experimental. We do not take action to defend our class, or promote egalitarianism, or defend underdogs, or cry for law and order, because we think. We are compelled to these actions and attitudes by persistent residues. None of these actions is the observable effect of an observed cause; all are the product of “an intricate interdependence of phenomena.” Nevertheless we characteristically try to develop rational reasons for them, derivations in Pareto’s terms, of which he finds four types: affirmation, reference to authority, accord with sentiments or “principles,” and verbal proof. If we call for avoidance of entangling alliances, we are making an affirmation based on nothing we are able to verify. If we quote Edmund Burke, we are passing on to him the burden of proof for an action taken more often than not without reference to any rational or experimental process.

  Habit, in fact, is for Pareto far more significant in social organization than experiment or logic. He does not denigrate the sentiments and folkways underlying our actions, and here he diverges dramatically from all revolutionaries, reformers, and uplifters. Folkways he sees as the cement of society; the only way to eradicate them is to exterminate all people who conform to them. They are absolutely essential for social stability. “No one can think experimentally in every department of life. A skilled workman, and in a greater or lesser degree everyone else, thinks experimentally within the limits of his job, but outside that is guided by a non-logical discipline, by the uniformities of action inculcated by society. If he were required to use his own unaided logic over a wider field of action, he would be at a loss and become panic-stricken. Indeed, there is reason to believe that people cannot develop an adequate logic even within a limited field unless they are subject to the wider, non-logical, social discipline.”13 Whitehead says, “Unless society is permeated, through and through, with routine, civilization vanishes.”

  No doctrine could be more stiffly set against Perfectibility, unless Perfection is conceived as the end product of millenniums of evolution, mainly non-rational and non-experimental. To a Paretian, blueprints for perfection, whether those of Joseph Smith, Karl Marx, Van Wyck Brooks, or any other, ignore the absolutely fundamental fact of all society, its predominantly non-rational basis. An impartial scientist, Pareto takes no side, he is neither for nor against reform. He grants the value, indeed the necessity, of innovation and experiment, for to subside upon the residues means acceptance of an insect society or one frozen in a rigid elitism, and “history is the graveyard of aristocracies.”14 The ideal society, one with the possibilities of liveliness and growth in it, is one in a state of dynamic equilibrium between change, which constantly challenges the static non-rational, and conservative resistance, which constantly tries to bring the society back to balance whenever change disrupts it. Residues act as counterweights to innovation and experiment. People who do not acknowledge that fact, who look upon society as indefinitely manipulable and perfectible, often produce by their well-intentioned reforms consequences that astound them, as when the Prohibitionists, by passage of the Volstead Act, vastly increased drunkenness and crime.

  Thus the Henderson seminar, and especially DeVoto, on the Paretian teachings. They reinforced his proscientific bias, his skepticism, his faith in facts and common sense, his suspicion of the theoretical and the ideal, his interest in folkways, even his ingrained belief in human irrationality and cussedness and the persistence in the world of some principle o
f evil or imperfection. He had never expected too much of people, governments, or movements of reform, and Pareto, whose cool impartiality reminded him of Machiavelli’s, gave intellectual support to his skepticism. When he defended the democracy, as he was always inclined to do, he acknowledged its violence, credulity, and frequent lapses from taste and decorum. He acknowledged the adamantine resistance it offered to change, the glacial slowness with which it was modified, the mulish persistence with which it clung to beliefs and sentiments indefensible by any reasonable standard. And when he defended his own role as gadfly to that society, he did not assume that he could sting it into sweet reason, much less perfection. A little; that was all, that was the hope. He was one member of the freely circulating elite that Pareto thought salutary. He did not despise the democracy when he stung it; it was as essential to him as a horse is to a horsefly, and he respected it. He always had; he had represented it, even, in the halls of effete learning. The democracy was a fact, a complex fact, and you did not despise facts. He came closer to despising “the idea boys.” But whatever he attacked—professors of education, the Harvard House System, the intellectuals, the Marxists, the Ogden Chamber of Commerce—he was part of an essential counterpoise of social and intellectual forces.

  The period of his addiction to Pareto lasted from 1928 to 1934. By the time he wrote his Harper’s article he was already warning against the adoption of Pareto’s thought as gospel, and he admitted to Mattingly that his interest had waned. He was not by nature susceptible to the jargon that sociologists have thought necessary for rigorous thought, the aseptic vocabulary as meticulously denotative as mathematical symbols; and Pareto’s vocabulary must have put strains on his patience, for his own habit in language was metaphorical to a degree. He thought by trope and analogy.

  Pareto had been a handy stick to beat the intellectuals with, and he had used it. The response of the intellectuals had been to call both him and Pareto Fascists, thereby (said DeVoto) demonstrating their willingness to leap to push-button conclusions about things they had not even read. But Pareto had also been involved with DeVoto’s full acceptance in Cambridge. The seminar had provided, as much as any other single association, the fellowship of stimulating minds that had always been his need and his ambition. After the seminar ceased to meet, his interest in Pareto per se waned. But he never repudiated what the Trattato had taught him. It conditioned and confirmed his view of society as a nexus of energies in uneasy balance, and confirmed his view of American history as the working out of persistent drives that shifted and changed and took on different colorations and terminologies and explained themselves differently and sought different ends, but that worked almost like Fate toward large resolutions demanded by the unconscious, irrational national will. Only the surface changed; the residues did not change and were not susceptible to manipulation.

  When Mattingly wrote him that American history was history in transition from an Atlantic to a Pacific phase,15 DeVoto seized upon the phrase as the expression of something he had long been groping for. It was the Paretian in him, as well as the student of westward expansion, who found the phrase meaningful.

  8 · The Literary and the Left

  As we have plentifully observed, DeVoto had had it in for the ideas of the Young Intellectuals ever since he had begun to think, and had achieved a sort of manhood status by taking a scalp or two from their camp. He was not one to sit at home among the women, rusting on his laurels. From time to time, during the four years in Lincoln, he prayed and fasted and sang his medicine song and tied up his scalp lock and painted himself for war and slipped out on raids. To Brooks and his friends, the persistence of his antagonism must have looked obsessive, a persecution. To DeVoto it probably seemed a form of knight-errantry. But the literary critics were not the only enemies he elected.

  As the Depression stretched out in bread lines, and Fascism fastened itself on Italy and Nazism on Germany, and many Americans began to say that American democracy was done for and that the country must choose between Right and Left, he had other doctrinaires to make war on, and he made it the more willingly because many of the aesthetes and expatriates, returning in some disarray and disillusion, had embraced the Left. So far as DeVoto was concerned, they displayed all the gullibility, susceptibility to dogma, insulation from history, and coterie solidarity that had annoyed him when they were exclusively literary. So, though he might as of old go out hunting Assiniboin scalps, he had no objection to picking up a little Shoshone hair along the way, and perhaps a few Arapaho horses.

  In that spirit he reviewed Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return.1 It was not, he said, the history of a generation that it purported to be; it was “the apologia of a coterie.” On the one hand it assumed that a small group of expatriates represented American writers of the period, and on the other it repeated Van Wyck Brooks’s error of overestimating the importance of literary people and literary ideas. What Cowley thought was the voice of the nation was only the manifesto of a house organ. DeVoto did not believe any generation had been lost, and he offered to explain this small group’s uprooting in terms of the castration complex and to equate its flight with fugue. Even if one read Cowley’s book with a sociological rather than a psychological bias, the facts were wrong. Assaying literature in terms of the belly and members—something he had learned from Mark Twain—he said this group was neither representative nor important. Its members had “escaped,” and some of them had broken down or perished, and some of them had returned to make themselves whole by alliance with, generally, the workers and the Marxists. Meantime, other writers, who had not conceived themselves to be lost and so had not needed to escape (we are to imagine the figure of Bernard DeVoto among them), stayed home and wrote their books without agitating themselves about the religion of art. And while they were doing their job, laboratory scientists and politicians and other people with real power to affect the social equilibrium were doing work that (he suggested) was infinitely more important than that of any writer.

  There was the anti-literary stance that Van Wyck Brooks had already noted.2 Amplified and documented, it would crop up again in The Literary Fallacy, a decade later. In a way it was a foreshadowing of C. P. Snow’s celebrated 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures,” for it pinned a “vocational neurosis” on the literary, while observing that “the actual possessors of power show no sense of frustration.” It is a puzzling state of mind for a man whose earliest aptitudes and inclinations had been literary, who still yearned above all else to be a serious novelist, and whose career as a novelist had been a sequence of frustrations. At the same time, the respect for science and fact and history and the experimental method were just as real a part of his God-awful emulsion; and as his hopes of being recognized as a major novelist waned, these scientific leanings, augmented by Pareto, increasingly dominated his thought. He became not merely antagonistic to coteries and dogmas, but actively anti-literary. To the literary, that translated as “philistine.”

  In “The Skeptical Biographer,” in January 1933,3 he had suggested that the literary be prevented from writing biography. “The literary mind may be adequately described as the mind least adapted to the utilization of fact,” and literary criticism was “an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility is almost impossible.” The strengths of the literary—intuitiveness, sensibility, imagination, the sense of wonder—disqualified them from biography, whose purpose was to report what had actually occurred in a man’s life. The recent tricks developed by literary biographers, the psychoanalysis, exegesis, incorporation of documentary materials as if they were dialogue or introspection, and the invention of whole scenes and conversations, might be brilliant but were not biography, and it was as reprehensible to call their product biography as to mislabel packaged foods. “Biography,” DeVoto said, “is the wrong field for the mystical, and for the wishful, the tender-minded, the hopeful, and the passionate. It enforces an unremitting skepticism—toward its material, toward the subject, most o
f all toward the biographer. He cannot permit himself one guess or one moment of credulity, no matter how brilliantly it may illuminate the darkness he deals with or how much it may solace his ignorance.”

  That was hard doctrine, which his own practice had sometimes transgressed. But he left it as a challenging moccasin track where the Brooks tribe would find it (they did) and went on to other things. A year later he was on the warpath again. In “How Not to Write History,”4 he took after those who attempted history without either the tools or the responsibilities of the historian. Appealing to sentiments and preconceptions instead of facts, he said, they generalized and then personified such large, yeasty notions as “the American mind,” and “the frontier,” which, once created, could be treated as substantive.5 The Brooks crowd, as usual, was guilty, but not alone. The poetic and the mystical were also guilty, as when Mary Austin found in the Gettysburg Address the rhythm of a man walking through woods with an axe on his shoulder, and so derived a theory of how the land and its occupants spoke through the man. Why the axe? DeVoto asked, more or less in the spirit of Bob Ingersoll. Where did one feel it in the rhythm? And why through woods? Was the rhythm of walking through woods different from the rhythm of other walking? And why should the rail-splitting portion of Lincoln’s life have affected that speech? Why not his experience as a flatboatman or soldier? Also, had Mrs. Austin tried to walk that rhythm she had arrived at by breaking up the Gettysburg Address into blank-verse lines? It couldn’t be walked. And finally, why did she twice have to misquote the speech, including the most famous sentence ever written by an American?