The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

IV

  THE MANHATTAN CAPTIVITY

  a lightning bug got

  in here the other night a

  regular hick from

  the real country he was

  awful proud of himself you

  city insects may think

  you are some punkins

  but i dont see any

  of you flashing in the dark

  like we do in

  the country all right go

  to it says i mehitabel the

  cat and that green

  spider who lives in your locker

  and two or three cockroach

  friends of mine and a

  friendly rat all gathered

  around him and urged him on

  and he lightened and

  lightened and lightened you

  dont see anything like this

  in town often he says go to it

  we told him it is a

  real treat to us and

  we nicknamed him broadway

  which pleased him

  this is the life

  he said all i

  need is a harbor

  under me to be a

  statue of liberty and

  he got so vain of

  himself i had to take

  him down a peg youve

  made lightning for two hours

  little bug i told him

  but i dont hear

  any claps of thunder

  yet there are some men

  like that when he wore

  himself out mehitabel

  the cat ate him

  Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel

  1 · On Moving to New York

  Before he ever approached DeVoto, George Stevens had studied the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. He knew pretty accurately what sort of editor he was wooing: one who liked a fight, one who would impose his own tone, personality, and opinions upon any magazine he edited, one who would be more of a writing editor than a procuring one. He thought—and after a long dinner session at the Parker House, Noble Cathcart also came to believe—that the Saturday Review, struggling in the Depression doldrums, running deep in the red, grown somewhat dowdy and out of fashion, shouted down by the confident Left, needed just this vigorous personality in the editorial chair.1

  As it turned out, the Review needed something more, but the vigorous editor looked for a time like the answer. During the sixteen months of his effective editorship, DeVoto wrote for it eleven essays, twenty-five reviews, sixty-four editorials, and eleven serial installments of a book on the psychology of fiction. He gave the magazine all the writing energy that did not go into the Easy Chair. Mountain Time, which had grated to a dead stop anyway, went into the drawer. The only significant serious essay outside of those for the Saturday Review was “A Sagebrush Bookshelf,”2 which was a continuation of the autobiographical fit that Kate Sterne had stimulated during the spring.

  But if he wrote for it incessantly, he did not take the Review apart and put it back together in new patterns. It was nearly a year before he made any substantial changes in the departmental content, and he never did get to the point of redesigning or face-lifting the magazine. What he did was simply to take the old bottle and pour his own wine into it. The Saturday Review of Literature had always been what its name indicated, a literary journal. DeVoto did not alter its general direction, but because he himself was addicted to history, he broadened the word “literature” to include history, and such history as most interested himself. The Civil War, the westward movement, the frontier took precedence over other aspects of American history, and American history took decided preference over all others. The Harvard group of historians, especially Samuel Eliot Morison, Schlesinger, Buck, and Brinton, became members of the Saturday Review reviewing team.

  The war party that he brought with him into enemy country was, as a matter of fact, composed almost exclusively of his Harvard and Bread Loaf friends. He had little to lure them with except a forum for their ideas, for he could do nothing with the Review’s traditional, even notorious, practice of paying almost nothing for reviews and delaying the payment of even that pittance interminably.3 DeVoto’s reviewers reviewed for love, mainly, and the love was partly for DeVoto and partly for the value system whose spokesman he was. Essentially, the DeVoto team shook up the reviewing practice and gave more assertive expression to attitudes not too different from those of the pre-DeVoto Saturday Review. His historian team attacked historians of other tendencies, his reviewers of popular fiction (especially Frances Prentice, who had wandered into his ken at Bread Loaf along with Kitty Bowen, and who had recently married Charles Curtis) continued in the Review’s columns the sort of discussion that was standard on Bread Loaf Mountain. Judgment of books with a legal content fell to Curtis, Felix Frankfurter, Thomas Reed Powell, and other graduates or faculty of the Harvard Law School. Political commentary came from such people as Elmer Davis, who as novelist, journalist, drinker, and believer in the middle class even though he saw it through a screen of skepticism, was a man after DeVoto’s own heart. The Saturday Review’s favorite poets and reviewers of poetry were friends from Cambridge or Bread Loaf: Hillyer, MacLeish, Josephine Johnson, Frost, Ted Morrison.

  There is no question that the infusion of these people into the Review enlivened it. But DeVoto did not depend entirely on his friends. He imported his enemies as well. In his essays, reviews, and editorials he attacked all the old adversaries: the censors, the education-school pedagogues, the jargoneers, the historical establishment which ignored social historians, the English departments which deadened literature, the Pulitzer Prize Committee and its juries, most of all the Young Intellectuals and the literary Marxists. Having dependable allies in history, he could delegate chastisement there. When he dealt with the literary in any form he most often pulled on the gloves himself, and he exhilarated a good many people unaccustomed to seeing their ideas represented in a literary periodical. A month after he took over, Elmer Davis wrote him, “One gets used to the eternal spectacle of Truth on the scaffold and Wrong on the throne, but without liking it much; and it looks to me as if you might make a large contribution toward reversing their positions.”4

  That, in so far as DeVoto had an editorial policy, was precisely what he wanted to do. By February 1937, when he had been editor for four months, even an unfriendly critic, Edmund Wilson, admitted in print, “Mr. DeVoto has already succeeded in making The Saturday Review quite interesting. The whole magazine is coming to bear the stamp of the new editor’s point of view and special interests, with the result that it is acquiring a force and a definite personality which it never had before.”5

  He came, as he admitted privately to Kate Sterne, hunting scalps.6 But that was nothing new; he had never scrubbed off the war paint since his earliest articles for Mencken. Before he ever landed in New York, his July Easy Chair7 announced him. It was a sardonic piece of advice to the proletarian critics, telling them how to achieve the classless Millennium: 1) Quit calling everyone who dislikes a proletarian book a Fascist. 2) Confine wish fulfillment to poetry and drama and let criticism deal with facts. 3) Get rid of the neomaniacs. “Every literary movement that ever existed has been infested with such vegetarians, dew-walkers, numerologists, and swamis. They will get off anyway as soon as wave-mechanics or Zoroastrianism has provided a clue to the next fashion.” 4) Come to grips with the fact that every movement is conditioned by its opposition and may not expect the achievement of absolutes. The Marxists, he said, were too smug. They hailed every Guggenheim Fellowship as a step toward a total victory; they reveled in the cumulative triumph over what they conceived as the demo-plutocratic conspiracy against them. There was, in fact, no conspiracy, but just as soon as the Marxists became a real threat rather than a noisy nuisance the opposition would organize against them and either put them down or buy them out. And even if prophecy should be fulfilled and Marxist literature become dominant, the Millennium would not be at hand, for then the young and ambitious would have t
o attack the proletarians as the establishment, since that would be the way to notice.

  That Easy Chair repeats DeVoto’s old warning about theorizers, in the terms of Paretian skepticism. “Too much [of the Marxist critical system] is settled in advance of the facts, organized and elaborated in alien places in earlier times, separated from the phenomena it is asked to work with, in part prophetic and in greater part deductive, not easily adjustable and not willingly adjusted.” Those were fatal weaknesses. “For the decisive force in any revolution is not the theory of revolution but the social institutions along whose channels revolution must move.… If proletarian criticism is to do its job it must go native.” And going native, which meant acknowledging the basic irrationality and persistence of social structures, admitting the force of American habits and “residues,” would destroy the party line.8

  Good-natured as that was, it was a challenge. It appeared just a month after the announcement of his taking on the editorship of the Review, and it said, “Don’t forget about me, I’m on the way.”

  But not happily. The move was more like disorderly flight than a war party. Bread Loaf was a series of colds, accidents, personality clashes, and what in the folklore of the place were referred to as Incidents.9 Immediately after the Conference ended, he had to go through the distress of turning over the Lincoln house, which he loved, to Dumas Malone of the Harvard University Press, whom he did not. Because he had promised Samuel Morison to write up the celebration in an Easy Chair,10 he had to sit through the Harvard Tercentenary, at which his old companion Melville Smith played the organ and President Emeritus A. Lawrence Lowell twice quoted Pareto, and everything on every side, through every minute, reminded him of the three-hundred-year-long tradition from which he was now ejected.11 He drove down to White Plains, where Avis had gone to prepare the house, with a miserable nostalgia riding in the seat behind, and in the seat beside him his son, Gordon, obviously coming down with a cold. In White Plains the furniture had not arrived, but the cold, complete with fever and vomiting, had, as also had urgent communications from the Saturday Review reminding him that he was to write the leader for his first issue. He sat down to write it, without books or a desk, and in the midst of his labors the maid who had replaced their much-loved Hannah turned up with a positive Wassermann.

  The hypochondriac and the spoiled M.D. in DeVoto erupted like Old Faithful: there was a frenzy of tests for the family. The furniture arrived, there were five or six thousand books to be shelved, the lights burned very late at 333 Ridgeway, migraines and eyestrain perched on the plate rail and watched the quivering carcass. Out of all this, little by little, emerged a degree of order, a degree of health, the blessing of negative Wassermanns for all three of them, and the leader for the September 26 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature.12

  “A Generation Beside the Limpopo”13 he called it, and he told Kate Sterne that it was an Easy Chair that had been rejected as too rough.14 It may be read either as a continuation of Mark Twain’s America or as a forecast of The Literary Fallacy. Read either way, it is consistent with his many-times-stated convictions about the literary and the Left. Ostensibly a review of Carl Van Doren’s autobiography, Three Worlds, it took the self-appraisals of a self-conscious literary generation and used them as the excuse for a minority report.

  He said (again) that the literary rebels of the twentieth century had not known American experience and had misrepresented American society. They had admired abroad what they despised at home. They could not see America for their literary and cultural preconceptions. The period in which they throve, up to 1929 or some other arbitrary date, was indeed an interesting one; with a few absolutely first-rate figures, it had had a broader excellence than any other in our history, and it had brought American writing for the first time to international pre-eminence. But about America these literary rebels were always wrong, and some had by now begun to admit their error, as when Van Wyck Brooks, the finest critic among them, pointed out in The Flowering of New England things about the American past that in earlier books he had said did not exist there. Also, while these writers were denouncing and fleeing from the “puritan” and philistine America that destroyed its artists, America had been supporting its artists better than any civilization had ever done, to the extent that a lot of them had lost money in the stock-market crash.

  Nothing is so marked in that essay as its anti-literary tone. Writing to Mumford about Mark Twain’s America, Van Wyck Brooks had noted that it was not simply The Ordeal of Mark Twain that DeVoto objected to, it was the whole literary idea. He was right. Ostensibly a literary man, upholder of the literary mind in thunderous arguments with Hans Zinsser (who was a scientist with literary temptations), DeVoto had felt little grief at parting from the Harvard English Department, much at being torn from his historical and scientific friends.15 His mind had been hardened, and perhaps bent, by L. J. Henderson, a man of great brilliance, much assertion of objectivity, and inflexible prejudices. A romantic and most literary sensibility had had to digest the fact that it was never fiction, but essays and history, that brought notice and distinction to the DeVoto door. His own partial failures as a novelist were certainly involved in his attacks on the literary, and perhaps gave them some of their virulence.

  Which does not alter the fact that his intelligence was acutely aware of literary pretensions, even when his sensibility might sometimes be tempted. “Since 1912,” he said in his opening blast as editor, “it has always been 11:59 in America, and only a few heroic literary folk to fend doom away.” Their posturing was ridiculous; they attacked shadows and defended mist. While they complained about monotony and stereotype in American life, all around them lay bewildering variety, “a chaos of races, cultures, creeds, traditions, philosophies, political and economic systems that had only once or twice been a nation and then only in periods of danger.” Consistently wrong through much of its productive life, this generation had finally, by 1936, begun to circle back to the position “from which Robert Frost started in 1913.” Meanwhile the new literary generation substituted economic and political golden calves for cultural. Disenchanted with democracy, taught to condemn America, they yearned for the Utopia along the Neva and the Volga. Somebody needed to remind them that the cemeteries of Russia and Germany were full of the bodies of aesthetes and intellectuals who had tried to lead the intellectual life against real opposition.

  Raging champion of the real, passionate advocate of common sense, incautious preacher of skeptical caution, rationalist historian of the irrationality and imperfection of all human society, he jumped into midtown Manhattan, threw his coonskin on the ground, jumped on it, leaped into the air and cracked his heels together three times, and announced himself half horse, half alligator, ready to take on not only moderates like Van Doren but all the literary aesthetes and political idealists of a quarter century: Brooks again, Mumford again, Stearns and Frank again, Pound, Eliot, Seven Arts and the Dial and the old and new Masses, Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson and Granville Hicks, Emma Goldman and Mike Gold and all the faithful to leftward, poeticules and expatriates and theoreticians and fellow travelers. As usual, his challenge escaped into overstatement: it is hard to see where he got the notion, for instance, that Eliot, Lewis, Dreiser, Anderson, and their younger compatriots Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wescott knew neither the Middle West nor the middle class. But his essay contained a legitimate corrective of much excess on the other side, and in 1936 it was exhilaratingly bold. He crawled into a cave packed with bears, and shined his insolent flashlight around, and growled.

  2 · Beside the Limpopo

  A rousing leader, an auspicious beginning for the “new” Saturday Review—an announcement of its willingness to open its columns to controversy, an invitation to readers who liked to hear the victimized and scorned middle defended against both ends. But the challenge was not immediately taken up, and for a time the campaign was mild for lack of visible and newsworthy antagonists. Still, DeVoto continued to send out probing
patrols from both his outposts. The October Easy Chair1 called into question the Marxist assumption of the class structure of society. In America, DeVoto said, the sections were far more potent than the classes: a New Hampshire mill worker had more in common with a New Hampshire banker than he did with a mill worker from Carolina or Indiana. Simultaneously, a Saturday Review editorial2 scoffed at the notion that New York was America or could adequately represent it, and offered the Review’s columns to outlanders who felt that their views were unexpressed in so-called “national” magazines. In the same issue, DeVoto reviewed with enthusiasm Gilbert Seldes’ Mainland, which he took as a healthy refutation of the literary people who had been wrong about America for so long—“not wrong in part, in occasional detail … but always wrong about everything.”3

  When those patrols stirred up nothing beyond the barbed wire, he called on his artillery and dumped a barrage on quite another sector. It could have been predicted that a chorus of national self-congratulation over the award of the Nobel prize to Eugene O’Neill would stir him to bilious dissent, but he had another reason than mere captiousness or resistance to a coterie. He had been teaching O’Neill, and he thought him not a great dramatist but a master of tricks and devices whose significances, when he called on us to observe them, turned out to be trivial or stereotyped. His intentions were cosmic, but his results rudimentary. So, why the Nobel prize to this “Model T Euripides”? And while he was at it, DeVoto dropped a few rounds on the theater as a literary art form. It had, he said, its inescapable limitations, “especially the necessary conditions of people meeting together as an audience, the lowered intelligence, the lulled critical faculty, the enhanced emotionalism and suggestibility of a group, the substitution of emotional accord for the desire to experience and understand that is fed by other forms of literature.”4

  Spoken like a true maverick, anti-urban and a non-joiner, and within blocks of the heart of show business, into the teeth of the New York theater audience that had made O’Neill and was now cheering his prize. It made the Saturday Review very visible, especially since that November 21 issue scooped the world with Henry Canby’s review of T. E. Lawrence’s The Mint, a book published in an edition of twelve copies at a price of five hundred thousand dollars per copy.5 But apart from some enthusiastic letters such as that of Elmer Davis, no immediate results that could be capitalized were produced by even so lively an issue.