The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  If Harvard should let him go, it would not be for colorlessness or inertia. Nevertheless Harvard did let him go, and in the end he went bitterly.

  There are all sorts of rumors, still remembered, about DeVoto’s leaving Harvard, and several explanations of why the university made a decision that on its face was close to incredible. Though he had asked James Munn to try for an associate professorship at six thousand dollars, DeVoto would have accepted an assistant professorship at less. What he was after was a place on the road that led to permanence. He thought he had the qualifications. In mere length of bibliography he would probably have lapped anyone on the Harvard faculty, for in the spring of 1936 his magazine publications alone, including book reviews, numbered more than 230.22 If asked for more solid accomplishments, he could have cited four novels (dubious, perhaps even damaging in some Harvard eyes), the textbook that he and Arthur Nethercot had revised (acceptable but minor), the editorship of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine (controversial), the general editorship of Americana Deserta and the personal editing of Jim Beckwourth (definitely a plus), the volume of essays to be brought out in the fall by Little, Brown (some quite solid things in that),23 and Mark Twain’s America. This last was a book that had already begun to revolutionize thinking about one of the greatest, and certainly the most American, of American writers. By itself it was a contribution as great as some professors made in a lifetime, and DeVoto and his Americanist friends knew it if Dean Birkhoff and President Conant did not.

  Ironically, that single seminal book might have impressed some Cambridge minds more if it had been more lonely, if it had not been surrounded by so many potboilers, reviews, and ephemera. Such diverse energy was not quite decorous. No wonder someone was rumored to have told President Conant that DeVoto’s scholarship wasn’t sound.24 A man who wrote so much about so many things must be shallow. And he did not, of course, have the Ph.D., he was not academically trained. Finally, though he had made firm friends, he had also made enemies—by his profanity, by his jeering attacks on Sacred Ideas, by his maverick intractability.

  In the end it was almost certainly the freezing of faculty positions—which was in turn a consequence of the Depression—that ruled DeVoto out. The English Department itself seems to have been divided, and even those who were his supporters were helpless. On May 2, Professor Lowes, whom DeVoto had asked to exert his influence on President Conant, wrote back saying that he did not feel he should offer advice to the President unless the President asked for it. He would like to serve DeVoto but could see no way.25 Four days later, after DeVoto had gone to President Conant himself, Mr. Conant put an end to the case in a letter that became famous.

  It was not a brusque or unkind letter. It was polite; it praised DeVoto’s services to Harvard. But it reiterated the decision previously communicated to Mr. DeVoto, that though the university would be glad to continue him as a lecturer, it could not look forward to giving him a permanent appointment at full salary. That meant he could stay on in a low-status position or on part time. But then came the touch for which Mr. Conant became famous, the all-but-infallible gift for the wrong emphasis, the wrong phrase, certain to madden someone like DeVoto, whose worth had been slighted and whose life was being uprooted from the place where with great difficulty and long labor he had established himself. “In view of this fact,” said President Conant at the conclusion of his note, “I feel that I must urge you strongly to accept the position which you said had been offered to you.”26

  “Which you said had been offered to you.” Hell and damnation, was the man accusing DeVoto of faking an offer in order to extort a raise? Later, DeVoto got it into his head that Dean Birkhoff had never believed the Saturday Review offer was real,27 and had told President Conant so. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Henry Canby might have been asked about the offer, and, knowing nothing about the negotiations for his successor, might have said that no such offer had been made. Whatever inspired it, whether his famous ineptitude at letter writing or his real doubt of the authenticity of the offer, the final sentence of Mr. Conant’s letter, repeated with all the shadings from mirth to disbelief to indignation, went through Cambridge like cholera through a western wagon train. And it acquired an addendum, an artistic touch, perhaps contributed by DeVoto himself, perhaps a slip of the tongue made by Mr. Conant in conversation, to complete and cap it. The way Cambridge heard the letter reported, it said, “the position which you said had been offered to you by The Saturday Evening Post.” It was a shrewd addendum, whoever made it, for it confirmed a widespread feeling among antagonists of the President that Mr. Conant knew nothing whatever about the humanities, including their slick fringes, and cared less. He couldn’t tell the difference between The Saturday Review of Literature and The Saturday Evening Post.

  During the time of waiting, DeVoto had taken his problem to several of his close friends. He took it, for example, to Zinsser, and that manic, intense, fierce, tormented man, who fouled his own scientific nest as DeVoto fouled his literary nest, told him to get out of Harvard before he got institutionalized. His job was to interpret the West, as essayist and controversialist, not to fiddle around in classrooms, and not to write novels. He took it to Henderson, who thought he had been wise in not inviting a Saturday Review offer.28 He took it to Kate Sterne, throwing himself on her distant but partial judgment. If he took the Saturday Review it would probably mean the “dictatorship of literary opinion in the U.S. for the next ten years.” But it would mean the loss of Harvard, and it would mean he would write no more history and probably no more novels. He knew he wrote novels badly, knew he wrote things like the Tom Wolfe essay easily; but he hated the literary life, disliked criticism, and both despised New York and was afraid of it. On the other hand, “decent people need a spokesman,” and he was a competent controversialist. There was also the fact that he couldn’t go on spending 60 per cent of his time on the teaching that provided only 20 per cent of his income. He intimated, not quite accurately, that if he didn’t accept the editorship, George Stevens would probably leave, and the one literary magazine that was inclined to support the middle against both ends would probably fold.29

  Jitters, backings and fillings, changes of mind, decisions and revisions. Between the decision and the act falls the shadow. He took his dilemma to Robert Frost, and Frost gave him an answer as hoarse as the cawing of a crow. Resign, Frost said. Keep your self-respect.30

  13 · A Hazard of New Fortunes

  There were certain proprieties, reticences, and delays. Henry Canby, for example, must not be told of the November and January negotiations, and must be led to think of DeVoto as his own discovery. That would take a little time. The change of editors would not be announced till June and would not take effect until September. There was the whole summer, which at first looked like an opportunity for some serious writing and for the locating of a country place in Vermont, accessible from either New York or Boston, which the DeVotos might buy with the money from the serial he started even before his last classes ended at Harvard. He was also expanding “The Centennial of Mormonism” from the essay length of the Mercury version, and that stretched and stretched until he wondered if it, too, wanted to be a book.1 And he had dug Mountain Time out of the desk, anticipating three months of happy productivity before he was led off in chains to New York.

  His last act at Harvard was, oddly, that of a peacemaker. Frost, who was scheduled to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem in June and a tercentenary address in September, threatened to abort both, because no one had officially thanked him for the Norton Lectures. DeVoto extracted a letter of thanks from the Secretary of the Corporation and mollified him.2

  But the summer was feckless, nothing went well. Their drives around Vermont and upper New York State gratified nostalgia but located no convenient country place that they wanted. Then the serial that was to supply the purchase price refused to go. From early June until after the middle of July he fought it, and it retaliated with insomnia and migraines. On J
uly 17 he blew up and threw it away. The insomnia and migraines went away, but he was left rueful and bruised, and the loss of the anticipated country place troubled him. “I am the boy who apprenticed himself to a Yankee and didn’t make good.”3 He turned to Mountain Time, and that wouldn’t go either. Nothing to show for the whole summer except Easy Chairs and the revised “Centennial of Mormonism.”

  One small success he managed: he persuaded Rosamond Chapman to go to New York as his secretary on the Review.

  Aware of himself as he was, DeVoto could not have missed the parallels between himself and William Dean Howells. Like Howells, he was a product and a defender of the natively American. Like Howells, he was a country boy who had brought the vigor of the hinterlands to the houses of the cultivated; like Howells, though less uncomplicatedly, he enormously admired the aristocracy of brains to which he aspired to belong. Without believing in local color as Howells had, he believed in the sections as the roots and tendrils of quintessential America growing into a continental plant, elements of the extravagant variety of the American experience. He accepted the e pluribus unum of the motto. In tone and style his writing was as unlike that of Howells as it could well be, and he had no sympathy for the squeamishness and gentlemanly reticence of Howells’ selective realism; but at the same time, he acknowledged the centrality of Howells’ vision, the influence of his example and teaching, and the precision and flexibility of his prose. He would have agreed with Frost: “We are eight or ten men already and one of them is Howells.”4

  “Nothing that God has made is contemptible,” Howells had said.5 In something like the same spirit, DeVoto had interested himself in the plain habits of plain lives, the social history of a crude, vigorous people on their way West. And if he did not accept Howells’ notion that the introduction of a dark, Dostoevskian note into American literature would be a false and mistaken act and that American writers should occupy themselves with “the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American,” still, in his own way, he asserted the native, the common, and the hopeful. He and Frost were on Howells’ side when they resisted the growing influence of the international and modernist strain, especially those aspects of it which presented American traditions as contemptible. It was not darkness DeVoto objected to—he believed in that as a condition of life—but a belittling theory; and he was very close to Howells when he demanded that pictures of American life be grounded in observation and fact, not in literary fashions made abroad.

  Quite as truly as Howells, DeVoto had found an intellectual and spiritual home in Boston and Cambridge. If he had not won the eminence that Howells had, he had at least dug out a foothold, and he wanted no other. His expatriation stopped at the Charles; his Left Bank extended only from MIT to Waltham, his France no farther than from Cape Cod to Bread Loaf Mountain. And finally, like Howells, DeVoto passed on from Boston to New York in pursuit of influence and distinction; he went, in fact, to occupy the same Easy Chair that Howells had occupied from 1900 to 1920.

  But there the comparison ends, for Howells went by choice, making his hazard of new fortunes, perceiving that New York had overtaken Boston as the place where ideas, books, power, and influence were generated. DeVoto went hating what he went to and determined to fight it, consumed by nostalgia for what he left behind.

  His thirteenth Easy Chair, which appeared in November after he had been editor of the Saturday Review for two months, expressed him fully, at the usual 200 per cent of parity. “Good-by to the Pops, to the worst newspapers and the best libraries in America, to twisting alleys and soft voices, to bad manners full of kindness, to a formalized ineptitude that thinks itself courtliness, to Adam paneling and Phyfe tables in the offices of executives.… Good-by to privacy, to suburbs of wide lawns and tall hedges within twenty minutes from Park Street, to family dinners and the last homes in the East. Good-by to the Athenaeum’s calfbound eighteenth-century books and the hidebound eighteenth-century people who read them. Good-by to all that is left of the eighteenth century, its last shimmer above the horizon of thought, its last habit and color maintaining the village still in the midst of the city. Good-by to simple dignity and simple quiet.…”6

  New York he saw as an enormous con game and side show, its first citizen P. T. Barnum. He supposed he could learn to live in it—he had managed to live in Chicago. But ah, the sentimental tug, the snapped connections, the dissolving friendships! “And good-by to Harvard. To L.J. and Hans, to Ted and George, to Kenneth and Perry, to Arthur and Fred, to the college that conscripts your energy and writes you doubtful letters, to the republic that no one knows except those who have held its citizenship, to the dedication admitted only with a jeer but never betrayed.… September, 1915, and the east wind bringing the sun-dazzle over the South Station; September, 1936, and tourists in the Yard and someone nods to me and when I see Harvard again I shall have no privilege there. Twenty-one years. No one, not President nor Dean nor department head, says, ‘Thanks, sorry you’re going, you did a pretty good job.’ Why should they? They are Bostonians and don’t know how. They are Harvard and take good jobs for granted. It was a long way, in 1915, from Utah to Harvard Square, but it’s a longer one, in 1936, from Harvard Square to New York.”

  That was a very different farewell to pedagogy than the one with which he had left Northwestern. He had left Northwestern expecting never to return; he left Cambridge hoping to be gone at most a few years. Meantime he took as much of the old life with him as he could arrange to. He had enlisted his friends to contribute essays, poems, and reviews to his journal. One principal way of enlivening the Saturday Review would be to give it a shot of Harvard. But he also took along a resolution that seemed as much from his western and midwestern experience as from Cambridge: Remember to keep the wires open beyond the Hudson. Never make the New Yorker’s mistake of taking New York for America.

  The literary, he believed, were more or less synonymous with the New Yorkers, and they were “annoyed by the Americans, a vigorous people, and terrified by their country.”7 He had long considered it his public duty to enlighten them, if necessary with a club, and to challenge their assumptions about America that were based on ignorance. He never learned to enjoy New York, he never thought Gotham for Cambridge was a fair exchange, his favorite New York hangout was the Harvard Club, he was exasperated by New Yorkers and daily offended by the literary Left, which extended from Anvil, the Daily Worker, and New Masses through Partisan Review to The Nation and the New Republic, and which in 1936 spoke with the confidence of a combine that has cornered the market.

  Before he ever loaded his last luggage and his son into the Buick, he knew that he had powerful weapons with which to fight them. He was no longer a maverick Harvard camp follower. He had in his hands a popular literary weekly that, though struggling, was at least as influential as any of the journals of the Left, and he had instructions to welcome controversy. At the same time, he occupied the oldest department in American journalism, in the most widely respected monthly magazine of opinion. Between them, Harper’s and the Saturday Review gave him power such as no other editor in the country possessed.

  So he set out to use it. The hope of being eventually restored to Harvard was still alive in him; the will to demonstrate President Conant’s blunder was a hot coal in his breast. And all the old whipping boys, all those whose ideas and ways of thinking he had been resisting since he was a schoolboy, were there before him in New York, stooped over, hands grasping ankles, backsides enticingly bared.

  Florian B. DeVoto, father of Bernard DeVoto.

  Bernard DeVoto.

  Kent Hagler.

  Bernard DeVoto, second from left, top row.

  Bernard DeVoto.

  Gordon King, 1929 or 1930.

  Hans Zinsser at Harvard Medical School animal lab in the early 1930s.

  L. J. Henderson cottage in Morgan Center, Vermont, where the DeVotos spent the summer of 1931.

  Avis DeVoto, George Homans, Al DeLacey at a picnic on Lake Memphremagog, Que
bec, 1931.

  DeVotos’ home on Weston Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where they lived from 1932 to 1936.

  Bernard DeVoto and Gordon, Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1932.

  One Sunday evening in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1935 or 1936; Avis DeVoto, Gordon DeVoto, and Florian DeVoto in background.

  Sinclair Lewis and Bernard DeVoto.

  Hervey Allen and Bernard DeVoto in Coral Gables.

  Bernard DeVoto, approximately 1934.

  The DeVotos at Bread Loaf in the 1930s.

  Victoria Lincoln and John Mason Brown at Bread Loaf in 1935.

  Bread Loaf, 1935. Top row: Gorham Munson, John Crowe Ransom, George Stevens, Ted Morrison, John Mason Brown; middle row: William Harris, Victor Lowe, Victoria Lincoln Lowe, (unidentified), Avis DeVoto, Julia Peterkin, Catherine Brown, Bernard DeVoto, Raymond Everitt, Helen Everitt; bottom row: Mrs. Gorham Munson, Isabel Wilder, Shirley Barker, Gladys Hasty Carroll, Kay Morrison.

  Bread Loaf. Kay Morrison.

  Perry Miller (wearing glasses) and Kenneth Murdock visiting DeVotos at Walpole, New Hampshire, summer 1938.

  Bread Loaf. Fletcher Pratt, Edith Mirrielees, Kathleen Morrison, Avis DeVoto, Lovell Thompson.

  Bread Loaf. Margaret Farrar, John Farrar, Alec Laing.

  Bread Loaf, 1938. Avis DeVoto and Robert Frost.

  Bread Loaf. Edith Mirrielees and Wyman Parker.

  * Editor of Publisher’s Weekly.