The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  Bread Loaf that year provided the usual frenzy of lectures and manuscripts, the usual hectic stimulation, the usual Conference madwoman, the usual bruised feelings, the usual Treman drinking, the usual clashes of temperament (that was the year that Gladys Hasty Carroll protested about DeVoto, Munson, and Everitt as roisterers). But it also held, unspoken, a further possibility for DeVoto’s future. One of the staff that summer was George Stevens, the managing editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, and the Bread Loaf friendship would prove to be important in the selection of the Review’s next editor.8 Henry Seidel Canby, the former Yale professor who had founded the Saturday Review in 1924 and had edited it ever since, was giving part of his time to his much more profitable preoccupation the Book of the Month Club. He had not said that he wanted to retire, but it seemed likely he soon would. The magazine was struggling—had never done anything but struggle—and if Canby retired it could obviously use a vigorous editor, a change of emphasis, a face-lift. Looking back years later Canby himself reflected, “It needed a mind seeking conflicts rather than trying to reconcile them; a younger mind with no compelling memories of an age of confidence.”9

  No one in search of a mind that liked conflict need look beyond Bernard Augustine DeVoto. During the fall, Stevens wrote a report on DeVoto for Noble Cathcart, the Review’s publisher, who with Thomas Lamont, the financial angel, had decided to start a search for an editor to replace Canby.10 At that point the proceedings were so confidential that Stevens typed his report at the Harvard Club to escape the attention of people in the office. His report was persuasive. In November he came to Cambridge, ostensibly for the Harvard-Yale game, and while there he sounded out DeVoto about his interest in the editorship of the Saturday Review. “How far the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine shines in a naughty world!”11 said DeVoto, completely aware of what they hoped for out of him.

  It was a job that would have solved his security problem, enhanced his image in some ways, and increased his public. But by then he was firmly settled into the Easy Chair (his first essay was in the November Harper’s, then on the newsstands) and had all the forum he wanted. He had contracted to teach full time, and presumably could continue to do so. But more important, he had solved the problem of the slick-magazine market. Before going to Bread Loaf, John August had written four sample installments of a serial for Collier’s, and Collier’s had subsequently bought it for twenty thousand dollars.12 “If some of those bastards now clamorous for my personal charm and dignity had made me offers say last June, when any maidenhood of mine could have been had for a nickel, & that mortgaged, I wouldn’t have had to write the damned thing,” he grumbled to Kate Sterne.13 But he had written it, or John August had, and Cosmopolitan had also bought a story for a high price. The divorce from the Post was no longer scary. DeVoto pondered Stevens’ inquiry only briefly, and indicated that he was not interested.

  But there was no reason not to let Harvard know he was wanted elsewhere. Before he went off on a lecture tour that would take him to Chicago, Evanston, Columbia, Missouri, and St. Louis, he passed on word of the offer, without indicating that he had refused it, to George D. Birkhoff, the Dean of the Faculty, and James B. Munn, Chairman of the English Department. He let them know that he thought an appropriate answer to the Saturday Review’s bid would be a Harvard appointment that had the assurance of permanence—say an associate professorship at six thousand dollars.14

  He reckoned without several things. One was the determination of President James Bryant Conant to pare away all but the absolutely essential faculty positions. To people in the humanities, most of whom had backed Kenneth Murdock for the presidency against Conant, it seemed that he was particularly bent on paring away jobs in their area, for which it was widely believed he had little sympathy. Another was the inferior status that orthodox academicians, and in this case pretty surely President Conant too, granted creative writing as an academic discipline. Another was the fact that DeVoto’s other field, American literature, was already staffed to the maximum number of people Mr. Conant seemed ready to allow, with Kenneth Murdock in the primary professorship and Perry Miller coming up, and F. O. Matthiessen established in the single slot in History and Literature. Finally, there was the dislike DeVoto had generated, to various degrees and for various causes, in some of his colleagues. One of these last was Matthiessen; another appears to have been Dean Birkhoff. Mr. Conant’s own feelings about DeVoto, if he had any at all, were inscrutable.15 In any event, when DeVoto returned from St. Louis in mid-December, he found an apologetic letter from Munn, passing on the word from the President’s office: Mr. Conant would approve Mr. DeVoto’s appointment for three years as a lecturer at an annual salary of four thousand dollars. He would not approve his appointment as an associate professor at six thousand dollars, nor as an assistant professor at four thousand dollars.16 That was to say, DeVoto was not to be admitted to the permanent faculty or put on the promotion ladder that might lead to permanence.

  DeVoto’s first impulse was indignation. He burned up the wires to New York and found out from Stevens that the Saturday Review job was still open.17 But then, as he talked the situation over with Murdock and his other friends, it seemed that the rejection might not be final, that some quiet inside work might produce a better offer from Harvard. So he turned away from the Saturday Review possibility for the second time and put his future in the hands of his friends. In his correspondence and conversation he treated the whole affair as an entangled bureaucratic joke.18 But a finger had been pointed at him. He stood revealed as no true member of the club, an outsider without proper qualifications, a mere journalist, unwanted where he most wanted to belong.

  That was where matters stood when he went off to Cincinnati in the week between Christmas and New Year’s to tell the Modern Language Association what was wrong with all the systematic critical approaches to Mark Twain.19 They still stood there on January 9, when he left to lecture at the University of Miami’s Winter Institute of Literature. It was a sort of southern Bread Loaf, and even contained one old Bread Loaf companion, in the person of Hervey Allen, who had plowed some of the take from Anthony Adverse into an expansive place at Coconut Grove, nearby. And on the evening of January 16, another man associated with Bread Loaf knocked on DeVoto’s door. This was one who was fated to be one of the strong influences, admirations, and emotional disturbances of his life: Robert Frost.20

  12 · “Keep Your Self-Respect”

  Frost, who was also lecturing at the Institute, was on an errand unusual for him—to praise another man’s work. He must, in fact, already have praised it in their previous meetings. Four years before, he had read “New England: There She Stands” and liked it for its celebration of the Vermont farmers who, on less than three hundred dollars cash a year, were making it through the Depression without government handouts and without self-pity, a sense of grievance, or loss of pride. In Harper’s for December he could have had his memory of that essay refreshed by a second on the same theme—DeVoto’s second Easy Chair, called “Solidarity at Alexandria,” praising a New Hampshire town that had rejected federal rehabilitation and relocation and stuck to its homes and its threadbare pride.

  As Lawrance Thompson has pointed out, Frost and DeVoto shared a maverick political position in a time when fashionable literary opinion was stampeding to the Left. They shared a contempt for doctrinaires and joiners; they found the tough-minded independence of New England countrymen admirable; they nursed a certain suspicion of Roosevelt, the New Deal, welfare, all “help” and those who cried for it.1 Frost, fond of announcing his “God-given right to be good for nothing,” was equally fond of remarking about Henry Wallace, whom he personally liked, “Henry will reform you whether you want to be reformed or not.” He was more conservative by far than DeVoto, but not more independent. It was exactly in Frost’s spirit that DeVoto deplored the Federal Writers’ Project and other artistic boondoggles.2 It was exactly in that spirit that he refused all his life to apply for a Guggenheim o
r any other fellowship, though he willingly wrote letters of recommendation for others. He preferred to earn his own way; it was part of the testing he set himself. The citizens of Alexandria, New Hampshire, refusing to be thrown on relief “so we can buy radios,” spoke a language his spirit applauded. He accepted the credo he took out of, or put into, the mouth of a housewife, that “it was good to respect yourself, to keep out of debt, to stay off relief, to expect that anything you got would have to be paid for, to hold onto what you were sure of, and not to mistake either a vision or a promise for a fact.”3 That second Easy Chair might have been read as a gloss on Frost’s remark that, if we ever got a benevolent dictatorship in the United States, he could stand the dictatorship easier than the benevolence.4

  The friendship between these two recalcitrants had been instantaneous; their mutual perception of shared opinions and shared antipathies was like a joyful shout. “You and I,” Frost wrote DeVoto somewhat later, “without collusion have arrived at so nearly the same conclusions about life and America that I can’t seem to figure out how we came to vote different tickets at the last election.”5 And in the same letter: “I can’t get over my not having realized you were on earth. You don’t know your own power. No one else has your natural sensible and at the same time embracing thoughts about life and America. And the way you lay into the writing with your whole body like an archer rather than a pistol man. Neither perverse precious nor international. I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yeats and Masters. Maybe that’s what’s the matter with me. There’s consolation in the thought that you weren’t marked off either.”6

  If Frost’s admiration for DeVoto was uncharacteristically open and generous, that of DeVoto for Frost was close to worship. To Kate Sterne he wrote that the one good thing about Florida was that he had “spent at least five hours a day with the greatest living American. And the more I see of Frost the more I’m convinced he’s just that. I go tearful whenever I talk about him.… He talks along, moderately, aimlessly, quietly, rather slowly, and you listen and pretty soon you notice some sparks, then a glow, then a blaze, then the incandescence of the interior of a new star. He is the quintessence of everything I respect and even love in the American heritage.… I am not an inordinately silent man, dear, but I hold my peace so long as Robert Frost is willing to so much as grunt.… One of my lectures was on Red Lewis. It griped Frost so hard that he couldn’t sleep for the ensuing eighteen hours and was constantly driving over or phoning over to make new rebuttals. He was like the sound of a horseshoe on iron. He was superb. And I got the lead I’ve been half-consciously looking for into my chapter on Frost when, if ever, I turn my English 70 notes into a book. Just this: Lewis, the Sauk Center boy, in flight to the metropolitan point of view, turning on Sauk Center the lens of his own insufficiencies and finding Main Street—and Frost, the San Francisco boy retiring of his own will to Salem Depot, New Hampshire, and finding—North of Boston. I can drive that point pretty deep into the literature of our times, or I’m not half so hot as I pretend to be.”7

  In one particular, at least, they were unlike: Frost had trouble brooking rivals or equals; DeVoto had a capacity for a filial reverence in the presence of minds he greatly respected. L. J. Henderson had been one of those. “So goes another of my fathers,” he remarked when Henderson died, in 1942.8 But of all the intellectual fathers he adopted during his lifetime, Frost came closest to being a crush. When DeVoto found that Frost was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard beginning March 1, 1936, he eagerly offered his services, promised to find the Frosts a house, and said he would act as their agent and information bureau and handyman.

  He did find them a house, at 56 Fayerweather Street, and he did appoint himself publicity man, greeter, and chef de protocol for the lectures. Since his own house in Lincoln was too far out to be convenient, he asked Ted and Kay Morrison to hold a small reception at 8 Mason Street after each talk.9 It was a gesture that would be full of consequences for all of them. Though the Morrisons had met Frost at the Bread Loaf School of English, and Kay had been one of a committee of undergraduates who had brought him to Bryn Mawr in 1920, DeVoto’s arrangement of those postlecture receptions was Frost’s reintroduction to the two people who after the death of Elinor Frost would become the intimate focus of his life.

  The Norton Lectures were in some ways a confrontation between Frost and his poetic enemies. His new volume, A Further Range, in which he had vented some political spleen and expressed some political views infuriating to the Left, had been greeted by bitterly negative reviews. Horace Gregory, Rolfe Humphries, Newton Arvin, R. P. Blackmur, Granville Hicks—the chorus had been all but unanimous. The selection of the volume by the Book of the Month Club only confirmed the opinion of the Left that it was reactionary capitalist garbage. There was, furthermore, a modernist, Eliot-Pound coterie at Harvard that thought Frost’s selection as Norton Lecturer a disgrace.10 But the coteries turned out to be no match for Frost’s gift of taking poetry to people. From the minute he came down the aisle of New Lecture Hall, flanked by DeVoto and John Livingston Lowes, he turned the lectures into a personal triumph. What might almost have been called the Bread Loaf point of view got expounded to capacity houses, and Frost’s poems got read to encore after encore. With that triumph DeVoto was closely associated from the beginning; in the confounding of the men of Gath he took a pleasure as great as Frost’s own. And his association with Frost made him even more visible in the Harvard community, and his uncertain status more a topic of conversation.

  He still did not know where he stood. The Saturday Review was still available, Henry Canby was still unaware of the planning that had been going on around him. The Harvard friends had generated nothing new. On February 11 DeVoto had written Kate Sterne in a mood of assumed amusement and indifference: “My recent maneuvers with Harvard did not quite reach a full stop, and I’ve been living in an atmosphere of sustained comedy. Or farce.… Not the least fantastic, nor the most, is a phone call from the President of Harvard, not knowing all the circumstances, to the editor whose job I was being offered, who did not know of the offer, to find out what an outside opinion of me might be. So far as I can see I, having refused the editorship, am now committed to leave Harvard at the end of next year, and Harvard being committed to a forthright rejection of my services, is now fully resolved that I shall not leave. It will probably work out as all Harvard revolutions do: in a change of names and the status quo.” He said he was half tempted to take the editorship just for the chance to break some heads.11

  Not that he withheld his club from deserving heads while he waited. Circumstances that might have immobilized some men with uncertainty simply galvanized him. In his December Easy Chair he had ridiculed the Absolute by pursuing its logic toward the perfect automobile.12 In January he compared the doomsday cries of Marxists and New Dealers with the jitters of the 1830s, when the world was also coming to an end and the Millerites were scampering up the hill to be ready for it.13 In February he defended the folk mind against those who said it had made a demigod of Abraham Lincoln: the folk mind was saner and more humorous than its critics.14 In March he doubled back and confused pursuit by asserting the legitimate, if limited, functions of little midwestern sectarian colleges. They might not be quite educational institutions, but, like Rotary, the Loyal Order of Moose, Sigma Chi, and the Browning Society, they helped people in a half-formed culture to find the place that Europeans knew by inheritance and habit.15 In April he took scalps from both the educators and the proletarians in a raid on Black Mountain College, the haven of the consociate mind in the Blue Ridge.16 And in the same month he finally published, in the Saturday Review, the long-contemplated essay on Thomas Wolfe, who, he said, tried to get by on genius alone and sinned against the art of literature by publishing raw or half-digested stuff, scenes of the greatest evocativeness mixed with “long, whirling discharges of words … raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, g
runts, and Tarzan-like screams.”17

  Those forays, plus the Frost association during the same period, kept him fairly spectacularly in the public eye while Harvard discussed his future. On March 22, while admitting that Conant was scaring everybody at Harvard stiff, he said he approved of that way of running the university even if it worked out badly for himself.18 But within a week he contradicted his overgenerous judgment by remarking with glee that Harvard’s attempt to woo the scientific great had come to nothing: Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had both refused the chair of physics Mr. Conant had offered them.19

  His future was on his mind, but so was much else. He spent a lot of time with Frost, drove him up to Derry to visit the old Frost farm, talked, consulted, argued, listened. He taught his writing class and read his papers and lectured three times a week in English 70. He wrote reviews, essays, Easy Chairs, long letters to Kate Sterne. He conducted a stiff and bristling correspondence with Lewis Gannett, who had accused him of boorishness in his Black Mountain article and challenged his information on millennial sects.20 He set his secretary and research helper, Rosamond Chapman, to getting together a collection of his essays for book publication. He read for the frontier book that had been in his mind for several years; he made notes for a novel and accepted Kate Sterne’s suggestion for a title: Mountain Time.21