An Incident, one of those Bread Loaf incidents common enough toward the end of the session, when propinquity and intense stimulation and fatigue combined to produce explosions of temperament. It didn’t actually amount to much. But Noah had appeared drunk and naked before his sons, and one of the sons took it very seriously indeed. The only thing worse than being a parent, DeVoto used to say, is being a child.
Whatever form it took, a clash between those two was inevitable. They were both strong personalities, both prima donnas, both touchy. No such enthusiastic friendship as had developed between them in Florida in 1936 could possibly have lasted unchanged. Some people did worship Robert Frost all their lives, but they were more submissive people than Bernard DeVoto. Sooner or later Frost was bound to scoff at DeVoto’s desperate dependence on psychoanalysis, thinking it a failure of common sense and self-reliance. Sooner or later DeVoto was sure to resent what he felt was Frost’s malice, whether aimed at him or whether expressed in sly diminishments of other poets, or in the mocking anti-Semitic remarks he consistently made to Louis Untermeyer, or in an outrageous copperheadism in politics that went beyond DeVoto’s toleration. And sooner or later DeVoto’s most central admiration, his conviction that Frost demonstrated the highest poetry to be compatible with complete sanity, was bound to encounter one of Frost’s irrational and petulant outbursts, and be disillusioned. Nothing that ever happened between them diminished DeVoto’s opinion of the poetry; it was the man who shrank. Instead of confirming his Miltonic belief that a man who would write a great poem must first himself be a great poem, the incident in Treman brought DeVoto to the distasteful notion advanced by Oscar Wilde: the fact that a man is a poisoner has nothing to do with his prose. That is an altogether less comforting idea.
There were more than temperamental causes for friction, too. DeVoto’s closest friends were the Morrisons. Together they had shaped and steered the Conference, they were rack and pinion in the Bread Loaf machinery. Now Frost’s bereavement and his search for some anchor to replace Elinor had thrown him upon the Morrisons, especially upon Kay, who shortly after the Conference agreed to act as his secretary, and DeVoto felt that the responsibility Frost enforced upon them wedged them away from him. He was sensitive to apparent slights; he was always detecting in others the symptoms of cooling friendship. It is possible, also, that he had begun to feel—as he certainly felt later—that Frost had used him in the battle against the leftist critics, and that the hardening of the “conspiracy” which had shut him out of Harvard and installed Granville Hicks in Adams House was in some sense Frost’s fault. And it is further possible that his agitation and his rebuke were caused by sincere generosity of spirit. He was too magnanimous himself to sit quiet while the man he worshiped picked on a man he liked.
That is all speculation. But the rift was not, in DeVoto’s mind, a minor or temporary one, for according to Thompson he repeated his rebuke when they shook hands at the end of the Bread Loaf session. “You’re a good poet, Robert,” Thompson reports him as saying, “but you’re a bad man.7
Writing about all this to Kate Sterne a few days afterward,8 DeVoto guessed that the demon in Frost had always been controlled by Elinor, and that no one now, not even Kay Morrison, who handled him better than anyone, could fully control it. He admitted that the whole thing was shattering to him, for he had once thought Frost living proof that genius could be sane. He had been living in a blind migraine ever since that night in Treman. There would be hell to pay—hurt feelings, bruised sensibilities. Things would never be again as they once were.
But if DeVoto thought of the break as final, Frost evidently did not. Within a week he got the DeVotos to go over to Concord Corners with him to look at houses. They had been trying for two years to buy a place in Vermont. Here was a whole village for sale. They could take their pick. They could get a few friends to buy in with them; the village could be made over into a literary summer colony, a Bread Loaf closer to the heart’s desire. The outburst on the mountain might never have happened. Frost showed them around with the greatest friendliness, he urged Concord Corners upon them with eloquence, he estimated the authentic age of his own house by the pine wainscot, one single board four feet wide. In New England there had not been such a tree as would make that board for a hundred and fifty years.
But DeVoto was dubious. He and Avis had thought Peacham too far north to be convenient, and Concord Corners was farther yet, and not half so attractive. It was a dying village—no real village at all, only a cluster of survivors, poor whites, a Vermont Tobacco Road. And he did not now trust Frost, in whom he felt an ill-concealed desire to bind them to his future and use them. That came out, Avis says, before they parted in St. Johnsbury. He offered to buy the DeVotos a house in Cambridge if they would maintain a room or two for the old poet when loneliness got too much for him, or when he needed a moment to reflect.9
A month earlier, the request would have touched them, would have seemed a privilege of friendship. In September it found them suspicious, reluctant, in the end unwilling. They told him no, and returned to Walpole, where the celebrated 1938 hurricane marooned them for three days. On September 23, after the flooded Connecticut had receded and the roads somewhat cleared, they made their delayed way across lots and down back roads through the wreckage of century-old elms—as if New England itself had thrown a tantrum—to the house which, whatever its limitations, at least gave them sovereignty in their own place. Somewhat later, Kay Morrison found Frost an apartment on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, opposite Louisburg Square.
It is probable that Frost’s effort to ally them with him, either in Concord Corners or in Cambridge, was his way of making amends for his behavior at Bread Loaf, a way of indicating that he did not desire a break in their friendship, a way in fact of suggesting how real was his need of friends. Their evasion of his offers may have given him the idea that the trouble was more serious than he had thought, for in October, from Columbus, Ohio, he wrote DeVoto a letter that returned them to the moment of their parting after Bread Loaf, the moment of DeVoto’s reproachful, “You’re a good poet, Robert, but you’re a bad man.” In one sense the letter was an apology, in another an effort to joke away their difference, in still another a suggestion—or a warning—that he must be taken as he was, with all his faults about him. Like the birthmark on Hawthorne’s Georgiana, his faults were too entangled in the sources of his life to be tampered with. The letter asserted Frost’s badness, but whether as joke or brag, or even a sham demand for pity for what the loss of Elinor had done to him, only Frost himself could have told:
… it wouldn’t be fair to my flesh and temper to say that I am always tiresomely the same frost I was when winter came on last year. You must have marked changes coming over me this summer. Who cares whether they were for the worse or not. You may as a serious student of my works. But Avis and I don’t give a sigh. One of the greatest changes my nature has undergone is of record in To Earthward and indeed elsewhere for the discerning. In my school days I simply could not go on and do the best I could with a copy book I had once blotted. I began life wanting perfection and determined to have it. I got so I ceased to expect it and could do without it. Now I find I actually crave the flaws of human handiwork. I gloat over imperfection. Look out for me. You as critic and psychoanalyst [observe the half-hidden mockery] will know how to do that. Nevertheless I’m telling you something in a self conscious moment that may throw light on every page of my writing for what it is worth. I mean I am a bad bad man
But yours R.F.10
V
“PERIODIC ASSISTANCE FROM MR. JOHN AUGUST”
1 · Mostly Waste Motion
To move from the Saturday Review office into 98 Widener Library was to go underground. Here was no public place crowded with people making, dispensing, and resisting public opinion. It was a scholar’s cell deep in the stacks, as remote as a Pharaoh’s tomb in the heart of a pyramid. The furnishings were a desk, a typewriter, a couple of chairs, bookshelves, and three s
teel filing cabinets. The people who worked in it, besides DeVoto, were Rosamond Chapman, the perfect research assistant happily regained, and Henry Reck, rescued from an unproductive two years at the Divinity School.
They were in the office a good deal more than DeVoto himself was, for not even the Saturday Review had cured him of working at home; one of the complaints against him had been that he was not around the office enough. But he raided Widener’s rich collection of western Americana, which was one of the attractions that had brought him back to Cambridge in 1927 and brought him back again now. As voraciously as Wolfe’s Young Faustus, in Of Time and the River (a novel DeVoto deplored), he set out to read his way through it. Single volumes and whole sets, Parkman’s histories and Mormon diaries, British travelers, the memoirs of mule skinners and traders and Mexican War officers and pioneer wives, biographies of generals and religious leaders, Dickens and Mrs. Trollope and George Frederick Ruxton, Wah-To-Yah and Ashley and Jed Smith and The Commerce of the Prairies, Susan Magoffin and Tamsen Donner, Thoreau and Alcott and Brownson, Thwaites’s Western Travels and The Jesuit Relations, the papers of James K. Polk and The Journal History of the Mormon Church—he carried out and read and digested and returned. He wanted everything that had occurred in, or foreshadowed, or resulted from, or in any way cast light upon, the year 1846, which was going to be the focus of his many-times-put-off book on the frontier.
“The apparent diversity of my interests,” he had written to Kenneth Murdock in February, when there was still hope of a Harvard appointment, “is in fact a fully worked out set of objectives which support one another.”1 Now, relieved of all obligations except scholarship and subsistence, he expected to devote a good part of his enormous capacity for work to the historical study that had had only fitful attention since Mark Twain’s America. To be sure, he had to do a monthly Easy Chair. To be sure, his scholarship would be split between the frontier book and the Mark Twain manuscripts. To be sure, he still took on reviews and other literary jobs. But to one who had characteristically led a most frantic and disunited literary life, it seemed he had come into the cool quiet of woods after a run across a hot meadow.
Both controversy and popular fiction he put aside. The Collier’s serial Troubled Star2 had temporarily solved his financial problems. There was no need to write slick stories about young love in the city, young love at summer resorts, or young love in college, with plots that would offend no one by their relation to life, and no more sex than could be consummated by implication offstage, and with a touch of nakedness somewhere to give the illustrator a chance. The more he knew about those salable formulas the less he wanted to write them, at least in small and relatively unprofitable pieces. A John August serial every year or so would do it. He relaxed upon opulence, bought a new Buick and an expensive record player and piles of records, established Gordon in Shady Hill School, cobbled up a darkroom and renewed his vows to photography, and left open the door of his house (which he disliked and called a hencoop) for the friends who from Mason Street and Francis Avenue, from Lincoln and Concord, from the North Shore, from over on Chestnut Street and Joy Street and Louisburg Square, found their way quickly back to the old DeVoto Academy.3
He had no gift for living small or living dull. When he came out of his study he liked friends around him, and he liked the Cambridge gossip as a grayling likes fast water. It was his drama, his delight, his anxiety, his amusement, his consolation. It brought him confirmation of his belief that Harvard, a carbuncle of cab is and cliques, was deteriorating. Having had the chance to get both Frost and MacLeish (and for that matter DeVoto), it had fumbled them away. It was torn by dissension over the Walsh-Sweezy firings and their consequences. It backbit and conspired. A kind friend informed DeVoto that Murdock and Miller, supposedly his friends, had actually engineered his departure from Harvard and prevented his return. As he wrote Kate Sterne, you didn’t believe rumors like that, but they gave you an idea of what blew around in the Cambridge air.
MacLeish’s Air Raid, which had caused all the trouble at Bread Loaf, was broadcast and stimulated a lot of cocktail-hour talk. Hans Zinsser turned out to have leukemia, and it broke your heart to see how considerate and gentle he had become. And Frost was coming home from his lecture tour, and DeVoto would bet a month’s earnings that the attempt to anneal the DeVotos to him would not be remitted, that the notion of a Frost biography by DeVoto was going to be renewed, and that the first step would be to have DeVoto in some way destroy Robert Newdick, the authorized biographer at Ohio State University, with whom Frost had become dissatisfied.4
The Cambridge talk came through his house and was passed on to Kate Sterne, who, in her sixth year of imprisonment, reduced to eighty-five pounds, made use of it to compensate for a bitter birthday and a desolate Christmas and a hopeless New Year’s. She lived in Cambridge, through DeVoto’s letters, as surely as he did, and she shared the uneasy fluctuations of his relationship with Frost. After one five-hour evening with the poet, DeVoto wondered, not for the first time, if he was quite sane. For he confided in DeVoto more than in anyone, it seemed, and then hated him for it. He kept making offers equivalent to that house in Cambridge—the latest was an invitation to go to Laramie, Wyoming, with him in April—that DeVoto could not help seeing as subtle traps. He thought that Frost had solved his ambivalence, the clash of liking and rejection in himself, by concluding that DeVoto’s fiction was no good, and hence no threat, but that his essays were the best of their time, and hence effective for fighting Frost’s battles or writing his biography.5
From the complication of complexity trying to psychoanalyze complexity, the wise biographer had better keep aloof. No formula can explain the emotional relationship between those two; any explanation would be too simple. But the biographer may note a fact or two, if only to express DeVoto’s own explanation of himself.
When Florian DeVoto died, on September 30, 1935, after a life of persistent and as if deliberate failure, DeVoto had written to Kate Sterne about the mixed feelings induced in a son by the death of his father. From early in his career he had mythologized his pilgrimage eastward as a quest or trial, a journey designed to let him prove himself in the intellectual East from which his father had dropped out. He had proved himself after a fashion, and grown by the proving; but when his father died the son had a qualm of guilt for knowing himself the better man.
And meantime he had adopted other fathers, looking for one with the authority he craved and without the weaknesses visible in Florian DeVoto. L. J. Henderson, Mark Twain, Frost, had all played that role. Now, in the fall of 1938, stimulated by Frost’s return and by the renewal of their emotional struggle for dominance, DeVoto was swiftly chased out of historical scholarship and back to the manuscript of Mountain Time. He sent the first fifty pages of it to Kate Sterne just after Christmas, with the note that it was “about the death of the Old Man” as much as anything.6
The oblique glance at Frost was not accidental; and it expressed a determination rather than a fact. He had already told Kate that Frost was bent upon dominating him, that anyone he could not dominate he tried to break, and that DeVoto always felt that he was battling for his identity when he was with Frost. The Old Man was not really dead. He was very much alive, and must be resisted. In that way he was different from the other surrogate fathers. Mark Twain had been primarily a challenging example—Henry Reck reports a time when DeVoto came out of a spell of analysis in Lincoln feeling relaxed and writing better “now that I’m no longer trying to be Mark Twain.”7 And L. J. Henderson, as dominant and impressive intellectually as anyone in DeVoto’s experience, had so many preposterous prejudices that DeVoto ended by feeling protective about him. Frost was something else. The novel that DeVoto now tried to write involved him in devious and shape-shifting ways. It was, he told Kate, “markedly obsessional” and “full of symbols straight out of my Id.”8
Writing to Kate Sterne later, after the intimate excitement of creation had subsided, DeVoto wished that some good psycho
logist with literary taste, maybe Lawrence Kubie, would sometime analyze a novel from its first conception to its final typescript. “It would be something to follow ma and pa through all those dissolves, yes, and Mattie Guernsey too, and the Brewer’s Daughter, and Skinny.…”9 Fiction, like psychosis itself, was for him a psychological adaptation, “a means whereby its author adjusts the world as he must feel about it to the world as he is forced to think about it.”10 Its sources were the sources of dreams, its methods were the metaphor and metonymy and synecdoche of dreams. What one heard in art and literature was the tolling of bells from the sea-sunk Lyonesse of the soul.
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 29