Up to that time, DeVoto and Matthiessen had been polite acquaintances, though too many temperamental and intellectual differences existed between them for friendship. After the Frost episode, Matthiessen was an enemy—an enemy, moreover, in the place where DeVoto least wanted to cultivate enemies, and at a time when enemies in that place would have the power to do him ill.
4 · “An Incumbrance for His Lively Spirit”
For months it had been clear that the Saturday Review was not rallying financially under DeVoto’s editorship. Though it had achieved some improvement in circulation (15 per cent, according to his own statement) it was a long way from edging into the black. Staff morale was not good and was probably not improved by DeVoto’s announcement when he left for Vermont in June 1937 that next year Christopher Morley’s The Bowling Green, Amy Loveman’s Clearing House, Carl Purington Rollins’ The Compleat Collector, and George Jean Nathan’s nighttime column would all be eliminated. He may himself have offered at that point to resign.1 Whether he did or did not, he left New York to stew in its summer heat and escaped to Vermont, where he intended to write three short stories for money. To keep the editorial presence apparent, he left behind him, to be run serially through the summer, his articulated class lectures on the art of fiction, to be entitled “English 37.”2
But once he settled down in Bennington, the will and capacity to work were not in him. His Harvard friends, visiting, brought him tales of dissension and unrest and resistance to President Conant, tales that half distressed and half gratified him. But when Mr. Conant invited him to deliver three lectures, at some time convenient to him during the next academic year, on some subject related to American literature and American history, he accepted with almost precipitate promptness.3
Stories would not come; his days were unproductive and his nights restless. He tried tennis, he tried his old therapy of motoring through the countryside, he tried girl-watching, for Bennington was conducting a dance school and the place was full of leotards. Nothing availed. A tentative proposal that he become editor of the American Mercury reminded him of the uncertainty and unsatisfactoriness of his condition.4 From her imprisonment in Poughkeepsie, which had now stretched out through three and a half years, Kate Sterne wrote him miserably, apologizing for the dull poverty of her letters and telling him not to let noblesse oblige keep him answering them.5 Uncharacteristically, he responded with a letter as gloomy as her own:
You certainly know by this time that writing to you and hearing from you are indispensable to my spiritual equilibrium. You know too that it doesn’t much matter what either half of the correspondence says, and that I squirm with the frequent knowledge that what I write to you is dull as clabber in an August drouth. But you will have to be patient.… It develops that, after all, I am forty and have driven myself harder than I should have for more years than seem reasonable, and I’ve run into a streak—I trust not a long one—of paying for it.6
His spirits were low, his health uncertain, his confidence shaky. Of the three stories he had projected for the summer, he would be lucky to finish one, and would end the year fifteen hundred dollars in the red. “In short my soul is becalmed in the shallows and seaweed beyond Sargasso.”
That was on July 16. He had a month of the doldrums before Bread Loaf and Edith Mirrielees rescued him—and how could that gentle, inexperienced, Victorian maiden lady ever have developed the understanding she had of the black caves of the spirit? Yet she had, she knew. Bread Loaf itself, “the best club I’ve ever belonged to,”7 was a good session, without Episodes or Incidents or hysterics, and he left it refreshed, to give his spirit a final buffing on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. From there, improved in everything but his eyes, which had been bad all summer, he returned to New York on September 13 to find the morale of the Review office lower than ever. The place reeked of failure and imminent collapse, the air was thick with blame. Conversations, it seemed to him, stopped when he entered a room. It seemed that he was the goat—he had gone off for three full months, letting the magazine down, not carrying out his proper duties, not even writing regular editorials, but leaving the Review to groan under eleven dull installments of the art of fiction, leftovers from the classroom.8
His feeling that they blamed him begot in him a defensive sense of grievance. He thought that when he took the editorship the Review had agreed to three conditions: that he would have his summers off, that there would be a promotional campaign, and that he would be given three years to get the magazine on its feet. But those terms had never been written down, and now it developed that others did not remember them as he did.9 Neither Stevens nor Cathcart had heard of any three-year trial; in fact, Stevens had gathered from remarks of the DeVotos themselves, when they first moved down, that they expected to stay only a year or two. The promotional campaign appeared to have been the sort of soothing assurance one makes to a man he is attempting to hire; even if it had been promised, there were not resources to carry it out. As for the summers off, that expectation might have arisen out of a casual remark of Cathcart’s that nothing much went on during the summer months.10
No matter whose memory was correct, and even if all memories were wrong, some of the staff thought DeVoto might have slowed or reversed the Review’s decline if he had stayed on the job. There was a fundamental difference in the way they looked upon the magazine. To the staff, many of whom had been there from the beginning, it was the life job, the career, an entity made up of shared experience, responsibility, dependence, and affection. To DeVoto it was, subconsciously or consciously, an interlude—as Canby puts it in his memoirs, “an incumbrance for his lively spirit.”11 He had married it on the bounce. Given his choice, he would have chosen Harvard. Untroubled by the problem of money, he would have preferred writing.
And yet his obscure desire for some institutional justification would feel the loss of the Review if he did lose it. And he did not relish the notion of having failed at it. His sensitive and hypochondriacal spirit resented the fact that others seemed to blame him. For his own part, he blamed the Depression and the business office, in that order, for the Review’s troubles. The Depression no one could help, but an efficient business office might have made it possible for the magazine to survive it. Instead, in DeVoto’s view, it was a department of utter confusion, without an ABC rating, without an advertising rating, without a rate card, without a circulation manager. Its payment to reviewers was meager and always slow. Its subscription list was so full of deadheads and lapsed subscribers that if it were closely examined its announced twenty-six thousand might shrink to as few as sixteen thousand. And no promotional campaign, no move to take advantage of the publicity his forays and rebuttals had generated.12
I have found no documentary evidence from Cathcart’s side of the affair, but it seems clear that he felt himself every bit as much on trial as DeVoto, and was badly shattered by his failure to pull the Saturday Review out. In retrospect, the Depression seems the villain, not any individual’s shortcomings.
Shortly after his return in September, DeVoto seems to have once again offered to resign. If he did, he was dissuaded. In mid-November Thomas Lamont summoned the staff to a luncheon and told them that he could no longer absorb the losses. The Saturday Review would have to close. But during the talk that followed, there was so much real regret, the affection and loyalty of the staff were so apparent, that Lamont eventually said he would underwrite one third of the deficit for another year if a buyer could be found who would take over the magazine and renovate it.
Under the circumstances, renovation suggested a housecleaning that would include the present editor. During the last weeks of 1937 and the first weeks of 1938, while Harry Scherman of the Book of the Month Club toyed with the idea of putting money into the magazine, there were rumors that he was sounding out several potential replacements for DeVoto: Elmer Davis,13 Frederick Lewis Allen of Harper’s, Clifton Fadiman.
During those weeks DeVoto was doing his best to make the Saturday Rev
iew a lively magazine, partly for the sake of his pride, partly perhaps because a good magazine might sell more readily and he be rid of it faster. He was also conducting his own conversations outside. Harper & Brothers, as Mark Twain’s publishers, were hinting that he might be asked to replace Albert Bigelow Paine, recently dead, as curator of the Mark Twain papers, and some Cambridge friends, anticipating DeVoto’s week of lectures in December, wrote confidentially asking for a statement covering the circumstances of his leaving Harvard, to be used as data in a move to get him restored there.14 With that hope revived in him, he worked hard over his three lectures and over the address he was to give the Modern Language Association in Chicago between Christmas and New Year’s.
That is to say, even when he poured his energetic efforts into the Saturday Review, he was still divided. He ended the year more an academic than an editor, following the Harvard week with a lecture at Connecticut College for Women and taking off for Chicago immediately after Christmas. He left with his hopes enhanced for a Harvard appointment. For even though Murdock, Schlesinger, Frankfurter, William Scott Ferguson, and Ralph Barton Perry were all on the Committee of Nine and hence inhibited from becoming his overt champions, they were all working for him behind the scenes, and apparently getting somewhere. While DeVoto was lecturing at Harvard, President Conant, who in the past had demonstrated himself something less than graceful in his handling of distinguished visitors, went out of his way to invite him to tea and to converse amiably for three quarters of an hour. Thus encouraged, DeVoto went to Chicago and gave the MLA a talk that left their ears buzzing, and returned to New York glum about the Saturday Review but with hopes of an escape from it and back to the more privileged earth of Cambridge.15
Others were more cheerful too. One afternoon in January the staff sat around the office and told each other that the magazine was the best it had ever been. A week or so later Lamont summoned them to another business meal. The negotiations with Scherman had come to nothing. DeVoto should consider himself on three months’ notice and free to look for another job. For the time being, and on the desperate outside chance that a buyer might still be found, Noble Cathcart and George Stevens would run the magazine with the help of Mary Ellen Whelpley, once Devoto’s secretary on the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, who had replaced Rosamond Chapman in March 1937. Anything DeVoto wrote for the Review after April 1 would be paid for at space rates, $4.50 a column.16
That was the way his editorship of the Saturday Review ended—definitely not with a bang.
5 · Cambridge Regained
Of the several proposals made to him after word of the Saturday Review’s troubles got around, only two interested him. As he had written to Copey in January, he was “fed up with editing, with New York, and especially with writing about books instead of writing books,”1 but he listened with attention to the tentative proposal about the Mark Twain papers. In fact, he coveted the job. Another Harper’s suggestion, that he take over the Harper’s book section, he did not covet but found hard to refuse.2 It was what he had asked of Lee Hartman when the Easy Chair was offered him, on the grounds that he preferred being a book critic to being a public thinker. Now the criticism business had left scars on him, and he had found public thinking sometimes exhilarating, and so he stalled Hartman without saying either yes or no, while he waited for word from his friends at Harvard and for the decision of Clara Gabrilowitsch, whose edition of her father’s letters he had panned, and Charles Lark, the lawyer for the Mark Twain Estate, who had not much liked his comments on the unhelpfulness of Albert Bigelow Paine.
Even if they overcame their dislike and agreed with Harper’s that he was better qualified than anyone else to edit the papers, he would have solved none of his financial problems. He had set a fee of one thousand dollars for reading and evaluating the manuscripts. There would be nothing else in the curatorship for him except secretarial help and perhaps some fees or royalties from the purely hypothetical books he might assemble from the papers. His income had shrunk to the twenty-four hundred dollars from the Easy Chair. Characteristically, he did not apply for help to any foundation or fellowship; he was used to paying his own way. And though he might get out and dust off the failed novel Mountain Time and the notes for the frontier book, those were not what he could expect to earn a living from. They demanded a subvention: teaching, editing, or the assistance of Mr. John August, or since he was who he was, perhaps all three.
The day after the Lamont decision, he wrote Kenneth Murdock, then Master of Leverett House, one of his closest friends at Harvard and certainly the most powerful. He had been the Dean of the Faculty, he had been Mr. Conant’s chief rival for the presidency when A. Lawrence Lowell retired, and he was the champion of the humanities which the Murdock faction felt Mr. Conant had systematically undersupported. There were those who insisted that the only sensible decisions Mr. Conant had made as president had been made at the urging of Murdock. DeVoto felt that it was Murdock who had made the strongest effort to keep him at Harvard, and that it was Murdock, along with Henderson, Zinsser, and the American historians, who was most anxious to bring him back. Trying to give him information to work with, DeVoto put his desire bluntly:
My feeling is that the case for me at Harvard is simple. I am a fairly prominent man of letters who happens to be a proved scholar and a proved teacher. The conspiracy cannot, of course, let it go at that. It will be necessary to list assets and arguments in detail. For all my reputation, I hate both bragging and the appearance of bragging, but I’m not going to pull a bushel over myself at the decisive crisis. I’d rather teach at Harvard than do anything else on earth. So, when the time comes, I’m going to draw up a brief for you. It will not be modest.3
The brief was on Murdock’s desk within ten days, and it was what its author had promised. If, as rumor said, Mr. Conant had been told DeVoto’s scholarship was deficient, then rumor had to be spiked. He did not have the orthodox academic degrees, but he had competences that were his alone, or nearly alone. One recent development was in his favor. The program in American Civilization that had been planned in many conversations among DeVoto, Murdock, Samuel Morison, Schlesinger, Frederick Merk, and Perry Miller had been formally announced in April 1937, and DeVoto had written a strongly favorable editorial about it in the Saturday Review.4 DeVoto hoped that under its rubric some special position could be created for him, some roving professorship out of the jealous departmental winds. In his brief he listed his total qualifications, just in case.
What was he qualified to teach? Composition? He thought he was probably the best teacher of composition that Harvard had had since Copey. Contemporary literature? The success of his English 70 could be ascertained from students. Moreover, a year and a half as editor of the Saturday Review had vastly increased his competence in that area. He planned a book about the whole poetic outburst after 1912, using Frost as a focus, that he was sure would force a revision of much critical opinion. “I know something about modern poetry that no one has bothered to put into print.” Mark Twain? “I’m the authority.” American humor? “Franklin Meine knows more about the field than I do and Walter Blair knows fully as much … but I know of no one else who is as well qualified as I am.” Frontier literature? “So far as I can learn there has been only one course in the American colleges on frontier literature: it consisted of my Mark Twain book, Meine’s book, and Constance Rourke’s.… This is, of course, my culminating field.…”
Hope wrote the brief, and hope waited out the results. But not long. Murdock and Henderson both talked with President Conant and got nowhere. DeVoto heard that Murdock, pressing too hard, had received a “ferocious” rebuff. The “red bible” which had formalized Mr. Conant’s policy of fixed faculty positions was hard to crack, and some of DeVoto’s strongest supporters were in the awkward position of having helped write it. None of them in the circumstances was likely to be particularly effective in getting a variance in DeVoto’s behalf. Murdock had been a rival and in some ways a leader of the
opposition. Zinsser, a maverick, was not persona grata. Cambridge rumor, as indefatigable as a ferret in a maze of rat holes, said that once in a committee meeting he had shouted at Conant, “For God’s sake, forget for a minute that you’re President of Harvard College!” All felt that too strong advocacy, unless their advice was asked for, might do more harm than good.5
The departments were locked into their budgets and their grid of fixed appointments. English as well as History and Literature contained some DeVoto enemies, especially F. O. Matthiessen. History, when Zinsser suggested that it appoint DeVoto, had no overt enemies but no open positions, either.
Eventually, Cambridge being Cambridge, rumor got around to the Crimson, which with the usual undergraduate willingness to embarrass the administration began a campaign for DeVoto’s return that Murdock made an effort to squash, explaining to DeVoto that he feared it would harden the opposition irremediably.
For so skinless a man, DeVoto had shown singularly little rancor against the university that had rejected him. He had written a hymn to its community of free minds in his Tercentenary Easy Chair,6 had editorialized in praise of the American Civilization program, had celebrated Boston as a living place and the New Englander as a human type, and had come back eagerly for the three lectures in December. He now suggested to Murdock that if, as seemed likely, he was put in charge of the Mark Twain papers, he would ask that they be deposited in Widener Library.7
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 27