Mrs. Souvaine could not pay what the big slicks paid. Her usual price for a DeVoto or Hewes piece was $750. But she loyally published practically everything that either one sent her, even conservation polemics; thus she singlehandedly financed a good part of The Course of Empire.
Until October 1951, when, with the book drafted and in process of revision, DeVoto set out to broaden his economic base and renew his status as a highly paid free lance. Long ago he had parted from Curtis Brown to act as his own agent, because so much of his stuff went into Harper’s that there was no point in paying an agent 10 per cent for handling it. For a time he had had an informal arrangement with Rae Everitt, the daughter of Raymond and Helen, who worked with Music Corporation of America, but that had produced nothing except one commission from Reader’s Digest and had been amicably ended. Now he felt the need of an agent who could rebuild his name in the editorial offices.
The National Parks Advisory Board was to meet at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, on October 25 and 26. On the way to the meeting, DeVoto stopped off in New York for a conference with Carl Brandt, head of the Brandt & Brandt agency. He was broke and he was tired. One guesses that his failures with Look, Life, and Collier’s, all of which had commissioned travel or conservation articles and then had not published them, were troubling to the pride of a self-proclaimed pro. His depression, deepest in 1949, was seeping back; he was half afraid he might be washed up.2 He worried about old age and the security of his family, and he saw no more books ahead except the Lewis and Clark Journals, which would pay few bills. His overture to Brandt was rather like his old habit of taking jobs to hedge his troubling independence.
Brandt himself was an old pro, a storytelling, Coke-drinking, warmhearted regular who had been around the publishing world all his life. His brother and former partner Erdmann had left to become an editor of The Saturday Evening Post, but he still had in his office two people besides himself—his wife Carol and Bernice Baumgarten, the wife of James Gould Cozzens—who were as respected as anybody in the business. Brandt had friendly relations with editors at all levels, and he had as high-powered a stable of authors as any agency. He was always threatening to write his memoirs and call them What I have Done for Ten Percent. In 1951 he knew DeVoto only by reputation, but he liked him at once for his commonsensical attitude toward professional writing and for the unexpected humility he discovered in the celebrated human volcano. He had no doubt in the world that with a little work DeVoto could be brought back as one of the highest-priced names in the magazine world.
The Brandt & Brandt file on DeVoto,3 which covers the period from their first conversation until DeVoto’s death, is a short course in the economics of authorship. It is also the record of a friendship that was warm and constant. And it is finally, especially during the first fifteen months, when Brandt was working very hard to re-establish his client with the magazines and when nothing seemed to avail, a sort of psychograph, an index of DeVoto’s mental state, a graph whose curve was steeply up and steeply down.
At the outset, Brandt had nothing to offer except a frivolous little series in This Week, which would pay $250 for six-to-seven-hundred-word essayettes called “Words to Live By,” explicating some notable quotation. There would be more and better things as soon as editorial offices heard that DeVoto was again in the market. Meantime DeVoto had a couple of suggestions of his own. He thought that the whole Lewis and Clark section of Across the Wide Missouri might make a serial for somebody, or that certain chapters might be lifted out as articles; and he thought he might capitalize on his intimacy with the National Park Service and the scenic and historic areas it administered. He was prepared to do travel-and-history articles on any number of places he thought too little known: the Shenandoah Valley, the old forts around Washington and Richmond, Hopewell Village in Pennsylvania, Kitty Hawk, the Cumberland Gap. He did not propose doing any fiction,4 nor did he suggest many western subjects. He seems to have had the feeling that the West had been his specialty too long, and that for commercial purposes he might have worn it out.
Hopefully and energetically, he entered into an arrangement with Carl Brandt. On November 4, when he sent in outlines for several proposed articles, he thought the auspices were all favorable. The Hour, his hymn to alcohol collected out of Easy Chairs and other articles, was being published on the eleventh, and he was to mix ceremonial martinis for the office staff at Houghton Mifflin, with most of literary Boston and Cambridge standing in line. That would start his new money-making career with a modest clinking of the cash register.
From there on, it can be read like a malaria chart, with more spells of chills than of fever, or like the record of a lot of fishing with few fish.
At first there seemed to be numerous rises, and several strikes. Holiday, though it found nothing in The Course of Empire to make into an article, was interested in a piece on the birch-bark canoe and the voyageurs who adopted it. Could DeVoto do it? He could. Mademoiselle took an article, “The Seventh Pocketbook,” but that hardly counted, because it had been half commissioned before DeVoto went to Brandt. This Week approved, for its “Words to Live By” series, a gloss on Hamlet’s words: “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” DeVoto said he thought the final phrase the greatest statement in English. And he was prepared to live by it. He was ready to do anything the editors of America could think up. While they were doing their thinking, maybe Brandt could sell the enclosed article, “Topic One,” which he had written for Mabel Souvaine and which she had found a little sexy for her audience.
Two weeks later, hearing no good word from Brandt and growing anxious for one solid assignment to be done during the spring lecture tour he planned for the West Coast, he sent in a précis for a piece on Donner Pass, and a week after that he asked Brandt to try out the Post on an article blasting the Bureau of Reclamation’s plans for the Green River. But the third month of Brandt’s efforts went by with nothing to show except the canoe piece for Holiday and the “Words to Live By” squib for This Week, neither of which DeVoto had yet written. His situation was still that he had a sure-fire market at Woman’s Day and practically no market anywhere else.
On January 30, 1952, Mabel Souvaine took “Women in the Military Services,” paying him double her usual fee because he had put everything aside to write it for her in a hurry. Lewis and Clark, Donner Pass, the conservation piece, the travel articles, went begging through New York’s editorial offices, but then on February 5 American Magazine bit on an essay celebrating the peace and solitude of the Rocky Mountain high country.
Not much, but something. DeVoto tore into the canoe article, finished it, and started on the high country, drawing solace for his fatigue and brainfag from the memory of Ogden’s Hole and the mountain meadows in the Wind Rivers and Bitterroots. With that and the canoe article in the mail, he had nailed down $2,500, and on March 5 Mabel Souvaine, staunch as a paladin, bucked him up by taking with enthusiasm a Cady Hewes piece, “The Impatient Patient.” Another $750. He was too much a pro to be discouraged by the continued rejections of Lewis and Clark and the others, though he was anxious for the fish to start biting.
Instead of biting, they sulked on the bottom. On March 10 Holiday sent back the canoe article, dissatisfied with its lead. He bowed his neck and revised it, barely looking up to observe that Look and other places had said no to Donner Pass, and “Topic One” had bounced promptly from every office it had been sent to. But he did look up when American came back with four pages of suggestions and directives for the emasculation of “High Country.” What they asked involved more than patience or a willingness to revise. It involved his professional pride.
Needy or not, he waited hardly long enough to finish reading American’s letter before he fired back his reply: “No doubt there are writers who would be willing to attempt the piece you outline, but I am not one of them.” To sympathetic Carl Brandt he blew sky high:
Go easy
about sleeping on the ground—Jesus Christ! Don’t mention the fact that the slopes are steep, if you’re writing about mountain climbing; don’t mention the fact that you sometimes sweat, if you’re writing about playing tennis. “Alluring vacation resort”—God damn! I’m telling them what this country is like. Give us some gemütlich family stuff. Don’t say I don’t fish—presumably some trout-hunter’s feelings will be riled, or those of an advertiser who makes fishing rods. And as the ultimate payoff, maybe I’d be bright to stop off and refresh my memory when I go west in April. There will be thirty feet of snow on every inch of the country I’m talking about in April.… Why doesn’t the crazy bastard get some copywriter from his advertising department to write the piece he wants? It would cost a hell of a lot less than a thousand dollars, and the advertising manager could sit by the boy’s shoulder and see that he worked in a lot of trade names that would bring in some nice ads.
As if disgust had overwhelmed him, DeVoto that same day refused a travel-article request from the New York Times Magazine on the ground that the price, two hundred dollars, would be “an eighty percent discount from my usual fee.” Better to rise stark naked than fall in calico.
On March 24 Mabel Souvaine, the old reliable, fell heir to “High Country,” unbowdlerized. But also on March 24, Carl Brandt discovered that the canoe article, which Holiday now liked, was going to be used as a front-of-the-book piece, for which the price was only five hundred dollars, not the fifteen hundred he and DeVoto had expected. In great distress Brandt wrote Ted Patrick, Holiday’s editor, taking the blame for the misunderstanding and asking if, in this single instance, the price could not be raised. It couldn’t. So Brandt wrote a shamed letter to DeVoto advising him to accept Holiday’s terms and take out the difference in kicks at his agent’s backside.
Depressed and overworked, DeVoto accepted; he had no other option. But this disappointment, added to the American fiasco, left him with only one fifth of the money he had counted on. He thought he might have to cancel his trip West, which involved a lot of travel, long stopovers, and no high fees. And he was gloomy about his prospects:
What about it, Carl? I can’t write for magazines like the American. I can’t seem to impress Patrick. The Post isn’t much interested. What’s your honest opinion?… Are there enough places and chances for the kind of stuff I write to make it sensible to try, or should I stick to books? Don’t spare my feelings.
That was mid-March 1952. They had then been playing the magazine market hard for six months. Apart from the Mademoiselle article and several to Woman’s Day, which had not been Carl Brandt’s doing, their success amounted to one cut-rate Holiday article, one American article that Mabel Souvaine had taken on the bounce, and the squib for This Week that even yet DeVoto had not got around to writing.
Scribbling on a yellow pad, at home in his apartment on a Sunday, Brandt replied that he couldn’t be pessimistic but didn’t want to be unrealistic either. DeVoto had been out of the market a long time. Magazines and editors had changed. But DeVoto was a fine and wonderful and respected name, and sooner or later the magazines would want him, if only for his “g.d. circulation value.” The problem was simply to find the subjects that would make them jump up and down. He blamed himself for not yet finding them, but he did not despair.
All right, then. Forward. Plug the old ideas and peddle the unwanted articles and try to find the topics for new ones better fitted to the demand. While Brandt worked at it, DeVoto went off on his lecture tour to Oregon, California, Utah, and Colorado, and when he got back he went to the hospital for tests to determine the causes for his fatigue, depression, and gastric discomfort. The tests were inconclusive. Gloomily he came out and went to work on the Lewis and Clark Journals.
That was in June. Through the summer, Brandt worked doggedly, trying to sell DeVoto’s articles and ideas and especially to establish him solidly in certain places, especially Holiday and Reader’s Digest, while DeVoto fought the conservation wars and worked for Stevenson and kept one eye on the possibilities of money-making. It began to be a year since Brandt had confidently started to re-establish DeVoto as a big magazine name. None of DeVoto’s ideas for pieces on conservation, scenery, historic sites, forest fires, and the national forests had been picked up. Lewis and Clark had gone begging, though DeVoto had himself put a piece of it into Harper’s. “Topic One” had been rejected by everybody between 33rd and 60th streets, and had finally gone back to Mabel Souvaine, who had turned it down in the first place. This time she took it, and she also took the Donner Pass article that no one else wanted, and asked for two more. She was, as before, his one, lonely market. In desperation he had even turned back to fiction and written a story called “The Link,” which he sent out under the name of Frank Gilbert, because both Bernard DeVoto and John August had foresworn fiction. Nobody wanted that either, apparently.
By October, DeVoto was discouraged enough about his future as a magazine free lance to let Brandt start negotiating a lecture contract with the W. Colston Leigh agency. He refused to let Brandt get him into writing on speculation for the Reader’s Digest, for, as he said, the deal was always a big fee if they used it and $250 if they didn’t, and the fee always turned out to be $250. But he offered to do a monthly column for the Digest, either on books or on slang, gobbledegook, jargon, and the vagaries of language.
And just then the luck began to change. Ford Times wanted an article on Ogden as a boyhood home (and there he went back to his starting point, in nostalgia instead of in derision). Fred Ware Smith, the editor, was so delighted to catch DeVoto that he listened when DeVoto, through Brandt, proposed writing him four to six articles in exchange for a Ford station wagon in which to make a trip West. On November 17 True, acknowledging DeVoto’s bartending reputation, asked for an article on the martini, for a fee of $750. Three days later, DeWitt Wallace of Reader’s Digest rejected DeVoto’s ideas for monthly columns, but commissioned a one-shot piece on Indian contributions to the American language, guaranteeing one thousand dollars whether he used it or not, and more if he did. About the same time, DeVoto finally wrote his “Words to Live By” theme for This Week. And just after mid-December, when Ford Times had him out to Dearborn, Michigan, to do an article on Henry Ford’s home town, the love feast with Fred Ware Smith was consummated and the station wagon assured. To pay for it, DeVoto would do, in addition to the Dearborn article, the article on Ogden as a boyhood home, an article on the Great Lakes ore boats, and one other. And just after Christmas, Carl Brandt wrote that Collier’s, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, wanted a long article on the purchase and the historical events that led up to it, for which it would pay at least twenty-five hundred dollars, and perhaps twice that much.
On the next to last day of 1952, after fifteen months of difficulty and recurrent disappointment, Brandt was finally able to feel that his efforts had brought results. Acknowledging on that day the receipt of the Dearborn article, he reminded DeVoto of his pending chores: revision of the Reader’s Digest article on Indian words, the writing of the big Louisiana Purchase essay, an Easy Chair, the martini piece for True, two articles immediately and one somewhat later for Ford Times, and one more for Mabel Souvaine. “You have quite a little spate of work for the minute, haven’t you, my friend?” he said, with some satisfaction.
Quite a spate of work. None of it, apart from the Louisiana Purchase article, which derived from his research for The Course of Empire, was work that he particularly wanted to do. But all of it was work that he had been able, with great effort and many disappointments, to sell.
7 · Collection of Clowns and Cowards
No one of DeVoto’s temperament and beliefs could have inhabited the Easy Chair through the late 1940s and early 1950s without using it to denounce the witch hunts of the time. His entrance into those battles was progressive; he became more active as the atmosphere of fear and repression thickened. The enemies he challenged, in the order of their appearance if not of their importan
ce, were the book censors both private and public; the security policies of the United States as interpreted, administered, or initiated by the FBI; and the politics of thought control and character assassination as practiced by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Reece Committee, the Gathings Committee, and most spectacularly Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
In a time when a humiliatingly small number of intellectual and political leaders dared openly to defy the inquisition, the Easy Chair spoke out loud, blunt, and often. DeVoto was no more ready to think America in need of police-state methods at mid-century than he had been to think it must go either right or left in the 1930s. He would have concurred with Robert Frost’s judgment. Just before he went to Russia with Stewart Udall in 1962, I asked Frost what he was going to say to Khrushchev. He said, “I’m going to tell him America has a ramshackle government. The harder you ram it, the firmer it shackles.” That was DeVoto’s faith, too. His knowledge of history gave him a perspective on crises that in their time had seemed fatal but that had somehow been survived. Though his temperament made him suffer more from crisis than most, he had a basic confidence that no matter how long it took in the ramshackle democratic system to get a wrong righted or an ill amended, in the end the worst wrongs and the most drastic ills got dealt with. It took a long time for a demagogue to hang himself, but history showed him no demagogue who had not wound up on the end of the rope the system gave him. He loathed, and spoke contemptuously of, the “unspeakable” McCarthy, but from the beginning he insisted that the junior Senator from Wisconsin was bush league, and would not last. Would not last, that is, if the country was kept open to the oxygen of discussion and dissent. The germs of McCarthyism, like those of botulism, are anaerobic.
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 47