The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  1 · “So Goes Another of My Fathers”

  During March 1943, just when The Year of Decision: 1846 was being reviewed, DeVoto delivered the Patten Lectures at the University of Indiana.1 His month in Bloomington was not the love feast he had enjoyed at Ames in the fall of 1941. It seemed to him that his lectures went badly and that the audiences were either unfriendly or inert: “It’s like talking into a featherbed.” He was exasperated by what he felt to be a prevailing midwestern complacency about the war. He grew tired of Hoosier jokes and the provincial smugness from which it seemed to him they derived. Depressed by his failure to catch and hold his hosts and hearers, he committed some social gaucheries that he regretted. Though he found a few kindred spirits such as R. C. Buley, the historian, he felt generally disliked and ignored, and he wrote Kate Sterne that he could hardly wait until Robert Frost, who was coming to Indiana during DeVoto’s last week there, tried to work his usual crowd magic on those people.

  But he did not mean he could hardly wait. He meant he dreaded Frost’s coming, for as parallel attractions they would be thrown much together, and even (he does not say this) put into a kind of competition for attention, a competition that in the circumstances DeVoto was sure to lose.

  As during all their contacts since the night in Treman Cottage in the summer of 1938, the suspicion and resistance seemed to be all DeVoto’s. Frost sought his company and talked as freely as ever, with the autobiographical openness that had once been so flattering and that now filled DeVoto with suspicion and alarm. Frost was living with his dead, and gnawing the choices that seemed to compose his future. For three consecutive nights, according to DeVoto’s account, he delivered himself of a monologue whose intimacy fascinated and repelled his onetime friend. More strongly than ever, he felt that Frost must be a little mad. More than ever, he feared that Frost was trying to “ingest” him, that he had to defend his integrity against a kind of incubus. And yet he was baffled to find a motive either for the intimacy that Frost assumed or for the malice that he thought it concealed.

  It was possible that all the revealing talk might be part of a renewed, indirect campaign to get DeVoto to write the biography that they had apparently discussed in Florida in 1936, for Newdick, once approved as official biographer, had died, and his tentative successor, Lawrance Thompson of Princeton, had recently published a critical book, Fire and Ice, with which Frost was not fully satisfied. But if there was any such intention in Frost’s mind, it was not an intention that he had shared with any of his intimates or, apparently, with his publisher.2 So far as anyone knew, Thompson was the biographer, and there had never been any suggestion that he would be replaced. DeVoto had told Kenneth Murdock, when his friends were trying to get him invited back to Harvard, that he planned a book on the poetic outburst from 1912 onward, with Frost as its unifying figure; but in 1943 that, too, had long since been put aside. The 1938 incident at Bread Loaf had completely soured him, and there was neither forgiveness nor friendliness in him. He listened, wary and uneasy, while Frost assumed the old intimacy, or pretended to, and wondered what sly purpose, what masked and destructive design impelled him.

  He did not believe at all in Frost’s apparent friendship. He thought it hatred. He feared being sucked like an orange and thrown away an empty rind. From every walk, for those three consecutive nights, he went home and made incredulous, nearly horrified notes on what Frost had said. He had no way of telling how much of it was true, how much false, for if part of it was lies, they were “the lies of genius.”

  One hesitates to accept more than partially DeVoto’s interpretation of that brief overlapping in Bloomington. It is possible that what Frost offered him was indeed the old friendship, and that the personal exposures Frost made came out of his loneliness, sorrow, and sense of guilt—wrenched out of him, as it were, by the savagery of his own conflicting impulses. DeVoto, moreover, had a history of anxiety and formless fears, and a further history of attachment to and resistance against a series of surrogate fathers. He could have imagined Frost’s emotional excitement, which to DeVoto seemed almost diabolic, and his will to dominate or destroy. He could (though this is less likely) have been envious, for they were celebrities in something like competition, and Frost was far more successful with the Bloomington audience than DeVoto had been and was lionized where DeVoto had felt half ignored. All those speculations about Frost’s desire to secure him as his biographer were speculations only; and though there is no way of knowing what the two may have said to one another on that subject during their seven-year acquaintance, one remembers that DeVoto’s version of the Saturday Review agreement did not match the version of a perfectly friendly participant, George Stevens.

  He did not want to hear revelations of Robert Frost’s emotional life. He did not want to feel compelled, as by some Ancient Mariner, to listen for hours to confidences whose purpose he suspected. The moment his lecture obligations were over, he got away and returned to Cambridge—though that was not exactly sanctuary from what he feared, for as if to indicate that you did not cast off a father that easily, Frost had bought a house on Brewster Street, a five-minute walk from 8 Berkeley Street, and showed every sign of settling down as a permanent neighbor. Moreover, DeVoto had been home only a little while when a letter from Bloomington confirmed his feeling that underneath all of Frost’s behavior there had been some obscure destructive intent. Frost was reported as having said at a faculty dinner, “DeVoto, you know, has been under the care of a psychiatrist, who has told him that I am not good for him, that if he is ever to succeed, he must not cultivate my company; I am too strong for him, and have a bad effect upon him.”

  If DeVoto had taken Frost’s friendliness with an almost paranoid suspicion, he took this overt jibe even harder, because it seemed a knife-thrust at the very vitals of his shaky security. He was not under a psychiatrist’s care, even for supportive therapy, and had not been since he left New York and Lawrence Kubie in 1938. He thought Frost knew that. Then, how should his remark be taken? Was it Frost trying to get even, backhandedly, for DeVoto’s obviously cooled friendship? Was it simply one of his usual digs at psychiatry and those who were enslaved by it? Or was it (DeVoto thought it was) a destructive, devious, hurtful diminishment of a sort of son by a sort of father who could not tolerate independence?

  Cambridge gossip had brought to DeVoto’s ears rumors of similar remarks by Frost in other places and at other times. He brooded about what sort of reply to make, how to confront and challenge him. He talked to Kay Morrison and to Lawrance Thompson, then just about to go to sea as a Navy lieutenant, but it was early June before he finally wrote Frost a letter. Delay had not lessened his sense of injury. He quoted the story that had come to him, from two sources, out of Bloomington. He said he did not like it, and had not liked others of the same kind that had come back to him in the recent past:

  The statement is altogether false.… I think you know that. What satisfaction you get from circulating a false and damaging statement about me I don’t know or care, but I have made no earlier protest out of respect to years of friendship with you. I have decided, however, that I no longer care to submit to it. I do not want to hear of your making that statement again in public or in private. Please see to it that I do not have to act any farther in the matter than thus calling it to your attention.3

  As blunt as a blow, that letter announced the end of all friendship between them, and perhaps of all association. There went another of his fathers, the biggest one. But Frost did not accept DeVoto’s note as a termination, and he did not reply to anger with anger. In his version, that dinner-table remark was a joke. But he was incapable of direct and forthright apology, even if he regretted the remark. Among his papers at Dartmouth College is the undated draft of his reply, as ambiguous and confusing as the motivation of his original jibe:

  Benny Benny!

  The first thing Kay did when she got here was to give me what you in your unconventional Western way would call Hell for talking about you too
much in company. (She did not say in public.) And now comes your letter to give me more Hell for the same thing. I feel injured and misunderstood. You bring up an evening in Bloomington when the conversation not unnaturally got round more than once to your lectures there and to your latest book. In any “faithful” report of that evening I should have ranked second to none in praise of both the lectures and the book. When never mind who said the book might be something better than history but it wasn’t history I asked if he meant in the sense that Herodotus Plutarch and Tacitus weren’t history or had he in mind the sense in which Frude [sic] didn’t seem history to the partisans of Freeman. When somebody else said he had stayed away from your lectures because in your book you hadn’t found anything nice to say about life on the Mississippi I answered neither had Mark Twain himself. I said I had to laugh at your being shunned as a disparager of anything American: my admiration for you had begun in an article you wrote in admiration of life on submarginal Vermont farms where the cash income was something like three hundred dollars a year. What was more your lectures had been one hammering denunciation of disparagers in general. I never speak of you but to praise. I have been mentioning you for membership in the Academy. I have predicted that you would have to be called back to Harvard. But I am nobody’s propagandist. You know my danger. I am prone to think more things are funny than you would. I suppose it may have been in self defense but the disappointed novelist pent up in me started to play with the idea the minute I heard that your doctor had advised you not to associate with me. You say the story isn’t true and I take your word for it but I had it on the best authority and your attitude toward me for the last two years had tended to make it seem plausible. I don’t see why you want to spoil it. By changing your name to John August you can write a twenty thousand dollar novel for Collier’s any time you please. An Italian Catholic English Mormon blend in birth you are neither a Catholic nor a Mormon in religion but a Freudian in philosophy. I don’t think these facts take away from your greatness as a writer. They do add to your interest as a character. Just so with this story you so much object to. I wouldn’t have thought it hurt either of us and it makes us both more amusing. Get it straight from me though. I forever played up the absurdity of your letting extraneous analysts come between us to tell you I was too strong for you. A gentle versifier like me too strong for a powerful prose man like you? Rah. But true or not true I wouldn’t for the world go on repeating the story if it bothers you or anybody else. Now lets forget all this and get something written. You want to be friends, I could tell by your manner in Bloomington. I want to be friends as you can tell by my manner in this letter.…4

  The draft ends in crossed-out, repetitious adjurations: you want to be friends, let’s forget all this and get back to work. But whether to take the letter at its face value, there was the rub for DeVoto. Whether this was sane Hamlet, or mad Hamlet, or mad Hamlet in a sane moment, or sane Hamlet mad only north-northwest; whether it was as close as Frost could come to frank apology or whether it was an attempt to deny the unfriendliness of what DeVoto considered a clearly malicious piece of gossip; whether it concealed the fixed egotistic purpose of coercing talents he admired toward the writing of a biography that would insure him immortality; whether it was all a complicated jeer—who could tell? Whom was Frost deriding in that remark about “a gentle versifier like me too strong for a powerful prose man like you”? Was he kidding the analyst who could suggest such an absurdity, or the powerful prose man who let himself be confused by witch doctors? Or was he slyly asserting that he was too strong for DeVoto?

  DeVoto thought he knew, and his resentment and estrangement were too strong and of too long duration to be cured by an ambiguous letter. If he wanted to be friends, as Frost said, then it seems clear he didn’t dare—a fact that suggests some truth in the notion of Frost’s dominance. So as surely as Thomas Wolfe cast off Maxwell Perkins, DeVoto cast off Frost. Simple disillusionment in the sanity and magnanimity of genius was not enough to explain the emotional intensity of the repudiation. A remark at a dinner party, malicious or otherwise, did not explain it. An alarming autobiographical frankness which to DeVoto’s ears revealed a monstrous egotism and ruthlessness did not explain it. Rightly or wrongly, he felt endangered, he feared being devoured, and those feelings had been with him for nearly five years. Whether he was right about Frost’s dominating malice, or whether he misread a humorous poet as badly as he had said the Marxist critics did, or whether the hypothetical psychoanalyst (if anybody ever made that remark to DeVoto it had to be either William Barrett or Lawrence Kubie, and either might have) was right, and DeVoto couldn’t stand association with a father figure so potent as Frost, DeVoto himself insisted on the break. He made it, hardened himself to it, suffered from it, and out of resentment or in self-defense made it permanent.

  Once already he had attempted to write his complicated filial feelings into a novel: with him, serious fiction was always to some degree thaumaturgy and exorcism. The overt break with Frost insured that sometime he would have to try to exorcise his demon again. For it was a demon; if it hadn’t been, he would not have felt so strong a need to put it down. What he felt on breaking off relations with Frost was perhaps not unlike the panic he had felt on the Union Pacific train headed East from Ogden in 1922., when as a shaky young man of twenty-five, fearful that he would never get off the train alive, he had written his name and his father’s address on a card and put the card in the side pocket of his coat, where it would be easily found.

  2 · “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”

  When Frost called DeVoto’s Indiana lectures “one hammering denunciation of disparagers in general,” he meant the literary disparagers on whom the two had long before agreed. The Patten Lectures were an amplified final statement of his argument against the Young Intellectuals and the literary Marxists and all the other divisions of the “superior caste” who had scorned, condemned, and despaired of the American people and American democracy. They were the testament of a cultural patriot, an indignant one, and it should not be forgotten that they were made in wartime.

  DeVoto’s attention had been drawn back to the subject even before America became involved in the fighting. Crisis, culminating in the fall of France and the desperate Battle of Britain, had brought many a former expatriate to some sober second thoughts. In the spring of 1941 one of them, Archibald MacLeish, had published an essay, “The Irresponsibles,” in which he blamed the writers of his time, including himself, for having been too “objective,” for having failed to fulfill the writer’s true “office,” which was to be a priest of democracy, and for having by these delinquencies contributed to democracy’s dark time. DeVoto had begun his Phi Beta Kappa address of June 1941 with a discussion of MacLeish’s essay, which he thought an expression of crisis patriotism, and his address had scorched the crisis patriots and deathbed converts almost as hotly as “A Generation Beside the Limpopo” had scorched the same people before national emergency or the United Front had brought them to the defense of their country and culture.

  Their trouble was not, he had said to the Sanders Theater audience on the day before graduation day 1941, that they had been too objective or had failed to live up to the mystical obligations of their priestly calling. Their trouble was what he had been telling them it was since the end of the twenties. It was that, pretending to describe American life, they had persistently misrepresented it.

  In Bloomington, in the spring of 1943, he set out to document that thesis once and for all. It was not a simple thesis, and he granted many exceptions, and began by admitting the absurdity of trying to characterize a whole generation of writers in an hour, or even in six. He deplored the simplifications forced upon him by circumstance. Nevertheless it was the simplifications that most of his hearers heard, partly because DeVoto’s gift for phrasemaking in the heat of combat made his castigation of the literature approved by the intellectual critics sound like an indictment of the entire literature of the period. For another thin
g, he perhaps underestimated the extent to which the “approved” literature had consolidated its position within such academies as the University of Indiana—the extent to which the academy and the Young Intellectuals had fused. The tradition had already set and hardened, and it resounded with the solidity of stone when he attacked it. His hearers thought him, not without reason, anti-literary, and many resented his vehemence. They had not learned the trick of discounting him 20 per cent for rhetoric; they did not hear the qualifications, because they were all but drowned out in the impetuousness of attack. Both in the Phi Beta Kappa address and in the Patten Lectures, DeVoto thought he was speaking of the fashionable or accepted literature, that which the critics had granted validity for its time. What he said, more often than not, was “the literature of the nineteen twenties.”

  The literature of the nineteen twenties [he had said in the Phi Beta Kappa address] was rooted in ignorance and contempt. It did not challenge or summon. It asserted that the bud had been winterkilled, that the planting was unworthy and there could be no harvest, that the people had no greatness.… But we may remember that while literature repudiated America as the waste land, the American mind pushed back the limits of the unknown, advanced the frontiers of knowledge, carried science and invention farther than they had ever gone before, tremendously extended and improved the educational system, grappled with the problems of a postwar world, made over transportation and communication, made over commerce and manufacture and distribution and finance, remade the face of the continent, progressively, even in depression, raised the living standards of the American people, educated them, lengthened their span of life, increased their health, refined their taste, and filled the world with a plenitude of goods never dreamed of in all history before. Here at least was a spectacle. But what literature saw in it was the waste land, peopled by the contemptible typist home at teatime and the young man carbuncular.1