The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto
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Again Mattingly had to play teacher. He approved the explicit statement of the process by which Europeans were made over into Americans. He gave at least tentative approval to the theory that Jefferson had had conscious continental aims that contradicted his public statements. And he reassured his floundering amateur friend about the legitimacy of his present enterprise:
This is a different kind of history from anything you have written so far, but it’s been implicit (you know as well as I do) in practically everything you’ve ever written, and you’d got to the point where it had to be explicit. For your temperament, or mine for that matter, striding across the centuries, hitting the high spots, isn’t nearly so satisfactory as concentrating on a shorter time span. Hard as it is for anyone to know even a very little about North America in 1846 or Western Europe in 1588, it isn’t downright impossible; but nobody can cover a line of development over two or three centuries … without feeling oppressed by the weight of his own ignorance and the absurdity of trying to write anything that makes sense, sounds like English, and tells approximately the truth.… But both kinds of work are history, both are necessary and each implies the other.10
Four months later, writing to Helen Everitt, Mattingly was more explicit. DeVoto’s new book, he said,
gives linear historical narrative an extra dimension, and perspectives as wide as the continent. Every historian has to grapple with the problem that any significant action occurs in a frame of space, and that the more significant the action the more it is implicated with other actions, antecedent, contemporary, and subsequent.… Tackling anything like the L&C expedition in those terms (something I had no idea Benny meant to do when he started—I don’t suppose he quite knew himself) is a pretty heroic enterprise.… After all, “long book” is the wrong term. It’s a big book.11
Long or big, it tormented its author with problems he had had no experience in solving. Big or long, it deprived him of his favorite device of synecdoche, for how did you find a part that would represent so massive and multiple a whole? And it presented him with such an extended time span that he could not practice simultaneity, and could only rarely develop any scene at length and with novelistic vividness. By its size and scope, it limited his use of original sources and made him more dependent upon the historians, whom he did not always trust. It made him seem to plod, and he hated plodding. It raised questions of scale and proportion that his previous histories had avoided by being so consistently immediate. He worried about producing something in which “the birth of Christ got a dangling participle and Rome rose and fell in a paragraph.”
“Okay, she’s dull,” he said resignedly in April 1951. But he was growing a little cocky, too, as he put the backgrounds behind him and advanced toward the climactic expedition. He thought he had made it forever impossible for historians to overlook the political and diplomatic implications of Lewis and Clark. He thought he had put into the book, here and there, some touches of original historical scholarship that would let him look the elder Schlesinger in the eye and belch modestly behind a deprecative hand. Almost with astonishment, he noted that the book was going to peak right where he had guessed it might, all English, French, Spanish, and American exploration converging on the upper Missouri, ignorance and dream and fable and hearsay and growing knowledge coming together as if to await the two captains who would dissolve most of the fables, begin the substitution of systematic knowledge for ignorance, and start the American dominance that would succeed the free-for-all. He was heading into the stretch. “If she don’t write herself from here in, I don’t know how to write,” he told Mattingly. “Downhill all the way.”12
But if downhill, then down as long a hill as led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific from the crest of the Continental Divide. It took nearly another year.
Once he finally got Mr. Jefferson’s ambiguous expedition afloat on the Missouri, on page 435 of his book, he could at least enjoy the trip more—could, in fact, write the last 120 pages in one sustained narrative burst. He moved his little company of Americans across the map that had been made of guess and wish and fable and the blankness of total ignorance, and beyond the last cleanly drawn lines of knowledge, and through the twilight zone of hearsay, and what they looked at as they passed became clear, as the world becomes clear when the oculist drops the right lens into the testing frame. The fuzzy and out-of-focus moved out ahead. The Welsh Indians, who for a time had seemed to DeVoto to be everywhere and account for everything (he wanted to run one for President), turned out not to be the Mandans, as rumored. The real Welsh Indians were farther on somewhere, like other fables, just beyond the range of vision, along with the water connection to the Saskatchewan for which they earnestly searched.
Past the Great Falls, through the Gates of the Mountains, up the diminishing streams until the streams gave out, the captains went expecting any day to be past the single range that they conceived the Rockies to be, and on their way down the easy slope to the Pacific via the Oregon, or the Multnomah, or the Buenaventura, or some other fabled river. When there was no water for the boats they went on foot until they encountered Sacajawea’s relatives—that part of the real-life script was written by a historian even more romantic than Bernard DeVoto—and then on horseback over the Lolo Trail to the Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia, real rivers in a real and discovered geography. DeVoto followed them only as far as Fort Clatsop and Tillamook Head, where a party made salt at the place where the beach resort of Seaside now offends the shore, and he left them with the inscription that Clark carved in a tree during the interminable winter rain: “William Clark. December 3rd 1805. By land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.” There was no need to follow them farther. They had completed what Columbus had announced in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, they had asserted history in its transition from an Atlantic to a Pacific phase, they had opened the Northwest Passage that had been the dream of navigators since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Writing his response to the whole manuscript, in March 1952, Mattingly summed it up for him:
And so we come to the Pacific with a sense of having crossed a continent, and a foreknowledge of getting back again, and a premonition of the nation that would cross after us, and the feeling of history shaping us and being shaped by us and emerging from the fluidity of dream or myth into concrete, ineluctable reality. It was an exhilarating experience.13
So the reviewers found it when it was published in the fall. There would be a little carping in the quarterlies later, but the daily, weekly, and monthly reviewers reporting to the lay audience found The Course of Empire superb. Henry Steele Commager, who had had a glimpse of it when it was no bigger than a man’s hand, thought it “the best book that has been written about the West since Webb’s The Great Plains” and “the best written book about the West since Parkman.”14 He praised its feeling for western geography, accepted what he felt was an inescapable selectivity and a legitimate proportioning of its parts, admired the informed treatment of the Indians as members of different tribes, linguistic groups, and even cultures, and expressed, not for the first time, his respect for DeVoto’s grasp of frontier social history and knowledge of frontier skills and occupations. Walter Webb, in the Saturday Review, went out of his way to join DeVoto in his quarrel with the academic historians who “tell their students, thereby taking away their courage, that no man should undertake a big task in history,” and he found entirely legitimate DeVoto’s way of selecting, suppressing, and emphasizing in order to make his point about the emergence of the West as a geographical reality and a force in world polity. Henry Nash Smith, in the New York Times Book Review, liked the reach of the history, the way in which American exploration was linked with the imperial quarrels of Europe, and the clear exposition of the impact of fact upon a fabric of legendry and the impact of a technological invasion upon the native tribes. He, too, found himself comparing DeVoto with Parkman in the breadth of his canvas, the romantic largeness of the chosen action, and the immediacy o
f the writing.
But if there was great satisfaction in having put between covers the body of human experience that he had always found most significant and moving to his western perceptions; and if there was a cumulative fulfillment in having completed, backward it was true, and half accidentally, but still in full measure, the trilogy of histories that expressed his continental vision, there was something obscurely and demoralizingly final about it, too. He had told an acquaintance in 1949 that once he put away fiction he had solved his life. As we have seen, that was a consummation more desired than achieved. Putting away fiction, he had to some degree impoverished himself. His right hand had failed him and he had cut it off, but that did not mean he was whole. During the hard three years when he was writing The Course of Empire he had not felt the lack of fiction in his life, for the history drew on all his capacities and kept his mind and imagination fully occupied. Then, for one year more, he could keep himself green by editing and shortening Lewis and Clark’s Journals, a job made inevitable by The Course of Empire. And then he was done.
The Course of Empire brought him the National Book Award for history in 1953. He was now possessed of all the obvious medals of his borrowed trade—Pulitzer prize, Bancroft prize, National Book Award, membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And it began to dawn on him that the moment he wrote the last words of The Course of Empire he was as empty as a dry gourd. For the first time in his life he was without book, and for him that meant being without motivation, goal, safety, life. What promptly set in was panic, and it never fully went away.
6 · The Perils of Paul Pro
Virtually all the historians whom DeVoto knew, as well as a lot of the novelists, poets, conservationists, and civil libertarians, were subsidized by a job, more often than not in a university. Many of them were given periodic working time by sabbaticals or by the foundation grants that DeVoto’s overdeveloped self-reliance forbade him to accept or seek. Since 1936, when Mr. Conant had failed to see a permanent place for him at Harvard, DeVoto had had to subsidize all his serious work by journalism, and for ten years before that, beginning with his later years at Northwestern, the major part of his income had been produced by his free-lancing for the magazines. His 1927 brag to Byron Hurlbut, “I am getting near the place where I can sell everything I write,” had not been idle, nor had he. He had worked like the pump of an oil well, and with predictable consequences.
More than occasionally, his need, his facility, and his capacity to sell whatever he wrote had led him to write what he could sell. This he justified as professionalism, and in the academic precincts that were inclined to look down on such professionalism he affected and perhaps felt a belligerent pride in it. He had elected independence, and independence had its necessities and professionalism its rules. You played the game within those rules and on the prescribed field. He never resented editorial suggestions as such; and even in his most serious work, where he might have felt he had no one to please but himself, he maintained an almost moral concern for the reader, who had to be interested and entertained and enlisted.
But there was a consequence, one he should have been able to anticipate from his study of the Public Domain and his knowledge of western history. A resource could be raided, depleted, liquidated; and for such resources as lay hidden in a free-lance historian and journalist there was no depletion allowance. There was only so much oil in the hole—or if you conceived these as renewable resources there was such a thing as overgrazing and clear-cutting what with decent conservation might have been made to go on healthily reproducing itself. He could take his choice among metaphors—dry hole or eroded watershed—but he could do nothing about the fact that he had applied the economics of liquidation to his own energies as surely as the cattlemen had applied them to the grass.
Fatigue, eyestrain, vague symptoms of physical and nervous distress were his constant companions through working days that started immediately after breakfast, halted for a weight-watching cheese-and-salad lunch and perhaps a walk to Harvard Square during the noon break, resumed until the clock told him it was virtuous to get out the martini pitcher and summon wife, secretary, friends, whoever was around, and resumed again after dinner to run until midnight, or, if he was sleepless, much later. The only one of his chronic ailments that he ever got over was his migraines, which he had eventually learned to forestall with ergotamine tartrate at the first symptoms, and which sometime in the 1940s simply stopped occurring. There was no room for migraines in his schedule.
The work that he took seriously—the late-lamented novels, the histories, the conservation and civil-liberties articles—had its intrinsic satisfactions, and could sometimes be combined with the need for making money. But for the strains and uncertainties and constantly renewed effort of his less vital journalism there was only the satisfaction of money and of demonstrated professional skill. No one who has not lived by it can imagine the nervous exhaustion that can come from having to make things in which one is only half interested bundle themselves neatly into beginning and ending, premise and conclusion. A professional writer cannot, like a teacher, be dull and be protected in his dullness. He must recapture his audience with every new start. He must be fascinating, bright, or pontifical, he must impress, charm, amuse, inform. No wonder that sometimes, when the pump sucked air, when the grazing mind found only shad scale and the unpalatable weeds that had replaced the grass, DeVoto felt dread, to which his only response could be redoubled effort, aggravated fatigue, and a more frantic depletion.
In September 1951, after two driving years, he had completed a rough first draft of The Course of Empire and was revising the manuscript, which he would deliver to Houghton Mifflin in March 1952. But his concentrated attention had been partially diverted as soon as he saw the end in sight. He was like William Clark at the mouth of the Columbia: “Ocian in view. O! the joy!” And with the traveling over for the time being, he turned his mind toward security. He started to build Fort Clatsop, he went to boil salt down toward Tillamook Head. For months he had been complaining to Mattingly that history had left him broke. The moment he foresaw the end of what had seemed endless, he told himself he had to make some money.
History got the blame for his flat purse, but more than history was responsible, and history was responsible in more than one way. From October 1, 1946, to the end of March 1948, the reading and correspondence demanded by the History Book Club had eaten out of every week time that he might have spent much more profitably writing for the magazines. Moreover, for the last ten months of his History Book Club service he had been the editor, in fact if not in name, of its little monthly publication America in Books and had written an editorial and one or more reviews for each issue. For all this his stipend had been little more than his stipend from the Easy Chair. And he had an expensive life style, with a big and hospitable house, a part-time secretary, two boys in private schools, considerable travel and research costs, and large medical bills. It was the need to put in his time more profitably, as well as exasperation with what he thought inefficiency and procrastination in the club’s New York office, that led him to resign, in March 1948. As seemed expedient or necessary, he supplemented his income by lecturing, but the involvements of his life from 1947 on had limited that, too.
One of those involvements, the landgrab controversy, had in fact taken the bulk of his time from his opening move in January 1947 to the end of the 1948 election. Despite his strenuous efforts to do so, he had been unable to put many of his conservation articles into mass-circulation magazines, where they would at once educate more people and pay him more money. Most of them wound up in Harper’s, either as Easy Chairs or articles, or in other magazines of small circulation and low fees. Part of 1949 had gone into the making of The World of Fiction and the decent interment of his fictional ambitions. Once past the depression that had initiated and accompanied that purgative act, he had dived into Lewis and Clark and the people and events that led bac
kward from them toward Atlantis and the Ice Age.
None of that left him much time to write for pay, and because he had so little time, he couldn’t afford to gamble; he had to be sure of his market. That was how he came to rely heavily on Mabel Hill Souvaine, of Woman’s Day. She was a pleasant and intelligent woman, equally admiring of DeVoto’s intellectual vigor and of his reliability as a contributor. The magazine she edited was owned by The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company and distributed through A&P stores. It was read by women who picked it up at the checkout counter, who were more likely to be interested in the recipes, the advertisements, and the woman-oriented departments than in its text articles. Thus Mabel Souvaine found herself in the position that editors of women’s fashion magazines sometimes enjoyed: she could put into her pages material that pleased herself, she could run a magazine with a higher IQ than she might have been supposed to be able to. Under her editorship, though Woman’s Day was such a magazine as its name suggested, it did not devote itself exclusively to the domestic female mind. A good many of its articles on history, geography, and general ideas were by Bernard DeVoto. And also, once he found the formula and the tone, a good many of the articles that did cater to the domestic female mind were by Bernard DeVoto’s alter ego Cady Hewes.1