The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  For such a purpose as the defense of traditional American liberties, the Easy Chair was made to order. By the mid-1940s it was an opinion-making column of the first importance. When it defended civil liberties, its motives could not be seriously impugned or its loyalty seriously questioned, and neither could the motives and the loyalty of the magazine in which it appeared. Harper’s had no compulsion, like that, say, of the Democratic Party, to be hard on communism in order to prove it had never been soft on it; and DeVoto himself had earned a reputation not unlike the one he had read from history’s tea leaves when writing up James K. Polk in The Year of Decision: 1846. He might have certain limitations, but he could not be scared, manipulated, or brought to heel. During the time when the novelist in him was going down for the last time, and when the historian in him was writing his way through his one great theme, the controversialist in him remained unmodified and undiminished, a live wire, almost a short circuit, of pugnacious principle.

  He had used the Easy Chair repeatedly to publicize the Strange Fruit case. Coming back from his western tour in the fall of 1946, he was drawn into the defense of Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber, and within a few months also found himself publicly on the side of Edmund Wilson’s novel Memoirs of Hecate County, against which the Hearst press was fulminating and which was eventually declared obscene in New York and Los Angeles, though San Francisco gave it a clean bill of health. While that harassment of Wilson was in progress, the New York Board of Education withdrew from circulation among high school students one of Howard Fast’s novels, and so there were three books to fight the censors about.

  Though he thought Forever Amber vulgar trash, though Wilson was one of the literary intellectuals and an old antagonist, and though Fast’s books ran down the party line as if magnetized to the rails, DeVoto, unsympathetic to all three, insisted that suggestive vulgarity, literary arrogance, and party-line Stalinism all had the right to go as far as they could go in the free market of ideas. “The place to fight censorship is whatever place it appears in,” he said; for “anyone who denies us access to error by that act denies us access to truth as well.”1

  When Judge Frank J. Donahue ruled that Forever Amber was not obscene, DeVoto was so jubilant he asked the judge to dinner. In the Easy Chair for May 1947, he called Donahue’s decision “the first civilized judicial judgment in Massachusetts in fifty years”—the sort of decision which, if it held up on appeal, could make even a bad statute into a good one. He cheered the admission of literary and psychiatric testimony, and Donahue’s firm declaration that behavior, not provocation, must be the basis for any finding of corruption by books. He could not resist needling the Boston bluestockings with the fact that Donahue was a Catholic, a member of the church supposed to have been almost solely responsible for Boston censorship. And he noted the irony the case left behind it: Forever Amber, a silly and suggestive novel, could now be sold in Massachusetts, but Strange Fruit, a fine and serious one, could not.

  Irony or no irony, a great step had been taken. Two years later, in the Easy Chair for July 1949, he could report others that seemed to take literature almost into the clear. Judge Donahue’s decision on Forever Amber had been upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and on the strength of that sustaining vote Judge Fairhurst had thrown out obscenity charges against James M. Cain’s Serenade and Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. In discussing the Donahue decision, DeVoto had praised a Catholic for making a liberal and civilized judgment; in discussing this, he praised Judge Fairhurst for saying that no book was obscene simply because it was offensive to Catholics, and for warning against the censorious and repressive tendencies of racial and religious minorities. On that last point he grew more concerned as he grew older, characteristically assuming a position that would offend the embattled of all colorations. “We will have solved the racial problem,” he said toward the end of his life, “when, if a Negro is a son of a bitch, I can call him one.”2 In the 1970s it does not sound like the formula for peace, and it needs to be stated in reverse as well—something DeVoto would have done willingly. But it states a principle: the crucial matter is being a son of a bitch, not what color son of a bitch you are.

  The Easy Chair backed the principle, not the party, and so it was again elated when Judge Curtis Bok, in the Court of the Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia, cleared nine books that had been gang-swept from the bookstore shelves by the police. Judge Bok’s decision, said the same Easy Chair, of July 1949, was worthy to stand beside the great opinions on Ulysses by Judge John M. Woolsey and Judge Learned Hand, for it asserted the “unpardonable error and arbitrariness” of all definitions of obscenity. “We are so fearful for other people’s morals,” Judge Bok had said. “They so seldom have the courage of our own convictions.” When DeVoto, down in Philadelphia in November to make a speech and to hunt out Lewis and Clark materials in the American Philosophical Society, was asked to dinner by Judge Bok through the good offices of their mutual friend Kitty Bowen, DeVoto told Mrs. Bowen that he felt like one of the elect.

  But if writers had been liberated to speak frankly, and over-frankly, on some matters hitherto called obscene, there was no such loosening of political restraints. Thought control was no fading adversary, especially after Joseph McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1948, when the brief openness of American-Russian relations had already hardened into the cold war.

  One of Benny DeVoto’s most conspicuous gifts was viewing with alarm. A watchdog, he barked at burglars, murderers, Peeping Toms, voices, shadows, and ghosts. Sometimes he created an uproar when there was little to warrant it, and there were impatient neighbors who said he kept them awake all night with his yapping. But when a real threat developed, he was there on the porch to meet it, growling and showing his teeth. He had been growling at landgrabbers and censors for a long time, and he was in good voice when Chairman Wood of the House Un-American Activities Committee, during Commencement Week, 1949, sent out letters to seventy colleges and universities with government research contracts, requesting the reading lists for their courses in sociology, geography, economics, government, philosophy, history, political science, and Amerian literature.

  A few colleges co-operated, some ignored the request, some indicated their intention to resist it publicly. Under pressure from some members of his own committee, Chairman Wood sent a second letter, assuring the colleges that he had in mind no censorship of their curricula. Nevertheless, said the Easy Chair3 in a voice that carried across the country, that was exactly what he did have in mind, and he had been put up to it by the Sons of the American Revolution. In asking for the lists, Wood had assumed authority that he did not have; and in co-operating with the request, some colleges had half acceded to thought control. Behind Wood’s letter, DeVoto smelled the generals, and he feared the increasing leverage of federal research grants on academic freedom—an issue that would become explosive twenty years later. And if the colleges declared that they would not admit known Communists to their faculties, then they had already given up most of their fighting room, for determining who was Communist and who not would involve investigations that would in themselves be intolerable. Before long, the FBI would be passing on all appointments. A Communist or two on any faculty constituted a far smaller danger than the procedures that would be necessary to keep them off.

  This was the DeVoto whom the leftist intellectuals had been calling a Fascist in 1936. Most of them had by now retreated from their pro-Communist sympathies, either by conversion or out of caution. Few were anxious to have their past associations publicized, and hence few were eager to defend too vigorously the civil liberties of former comrades. Their experience with Stalinism had been shattering to some,4 and they had moved closer to the middle, where for years DeVoto had been taking on all corners. Or they had quietly blended with the liberals—though it became clearer every day that there was little more safety there than on the Left. Now the old Left found a champion in its former opponent.

  People who have the same
enemies do not necessarily believe alike, but it is fairly easy for their enemies to make it appear they do. Inevitably DeVoto got smeared. From 1949 on (in that year, he attacked the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, the censors of various colorations, the western stockgrowers’ associations, the United States Chamber of Commerce, Time, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Corps of Engineers, as well as sundry individuals), he was called a Red by some authoritative-sounding patriots, including Congressmen Kearns and Ellsworth, Senator McCarthy, and a spokeswoman for the Daughters of the American Revolution. He did not accept either charge or innuendo tamely, but made bristling demands for retractions, and at least in the Kearns affair he tried to force Kearns to publish a retraction in the Congressional Record, where he had made his charges. He took some pleasure in quoting an article in Pravda that had attacked him as a reactionary. When the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted a public airing of their differences of opinion, he refused to debate with them, saying that he had as little as possible to do with subversive societies, of which he considered the DAR one of the worst.5

  He was neither a Fascist nor a Communist, but something perhaps even more disliked by the Inquisition—a bona fide liberal, a small-d democrat who truly believed in the Bill of Rights even when it protected and was abused by his antagonists. His experience had taught him that “the right to speak out and act freely is always at a minimum in the area of the fighting faiths,”6 and in making a fighting faith of the right to speak out, he understood that he fought with one hand tied behind him, for he guaranteed his opponents the protection of the civil liberties they were determined to subvert. But when the witch hunts began to seem so ominous that, to use his own words, “we have to begin to make scenes,” he waded in, for in his view the only safety lay in freedom of inquiry, thought, and expression, complete and passionately defended. “There is no such thing as a partial virgin.”

  When he took on the House Un-American Activities Committee, in September 1949, he had just written his swan song as a novelist and had just said a final farewell to Bread Loaf, that best of all possible clubs, with everything that it had once meant in acceptance, friendship, and security. His emotions and his eyes were bothering him, not for the first time. He felt “winter in the air” as his inordinate energy began to run down and his maligned but quite remarkable health began to fail. The signs said to slow down—he was fifty-two and had been living on his reserves for a long time. So, being who he was, he licked the envelope that contained his attack on the House Un-American Activities Committee, sent off the manuscript of The World of Fiction, wrote the first few pages of The Course of Empire, and rushed out, growling, upon J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

  For months, Cambridge gossip had been full of security checks that for unstated reasons were being made upon all sorts of people: potential federal appointees, putative saboteurs, people mistrusted by some congressman. The well-groomed, Ivy League young men who appeared at doors and flipped their credential-bearing wallets and came inside and asked questions and made notes and went away were sometimes seen going straight next door to the house of the most notorious gossip on the block, or of one’s worst enemy, and imagination suggested very plausibly that the subject of interrogation might have changed, and that one was now under discussion over there, and that notes were being made, and would be carefully filed, for uses that the imagination boggled at, especially after Senator McCarthy introduced into the Coplon trial material from such a raw file, supposed to be available to no one except the FBI itself. It was DeVoto personally and Cambridge collectively that erupted into protest in the Easy Chair—but it was DeVoto who signed the complaint, personally.

  In “Due Notice to the FBI,” the Easy Chair for October 1949, he described the characteristic security investigation, the sorts of questions asked, the ways in which gossip, malice, paranoia, and worse got lumped with valid data in the raw files; and the way the raw files, in mysterious ways, sometimes fell into the hands of people who used them for character assassination. He said we were in danger of becoming “a nation of common informers.” He said he could see only one way of determining what elements of any such investigation were legitimate and of forcing the investigators to act responsibly. From here on he intended to take it.

  Representatives of the FBI and other official investigating bodies have questioned me, in the past, about a number of people and I have answered their questions. That’s over. From now on any representative of the government, properly identified, can count on a drink and perhaps informed talk about the Red (but non-communist) Sox at my house. But if he wants information from me about anyone whomsoever, no soap. If it is my duty as a citizen to tell what I know about someone, I will perform that duty under subpoena, in open court, before that person and his attorney.… I will not discuss it in private with any government investigator.

  I like a country where it’s nobody’s damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S–17 that I may have another wife in California. I like a country where no college-trained flatfeet collect memoranda about us and ask judicial protection for them, where when someone makes statements about us to officials he can be held to account. We had that kind of country only a little while ago and I’m for getting it back.

  It was a stout cudgeling, and though it brought some happy cheers from some Cambridge acquaintances and from correspondents all over America, it also scared some of DeVoto’s friends badly. They feared both for him and for themselves by association. And the mail brought poison pen letters, anonymous denunciations, and earnest arguments from people who wanted to know how else we were to be protected against subversion, conspiracy, and the Communist threat. For months he was “fighting bees,” as he said, over that essay, and for weeks he was trying to smoke out J. Edgar Hoover into a public discussion of the charges the essay had made.

  But Mr. Hoover was cagy—or perhaps he chose to take the line that DeVoto had taken with the DAR. He did not choose to dignify by denial, and he would not write to DeVoto directly, though, as DeVoto said, he was noble and lofty, “by the stickful” on every front page in the United States. The closest he came to answering DeVoto’s charges was to deny in a letter to Harper’s7 that DeVoto’s information was true and accurate and that investigators asked such questions as DeVoto asserted they asked. Hoover also wrote to Daniel Mebane of the New Republic denying that his operatives asked their informants if the person being investigated read, subscribed to, or quoted from the New Republic. Using Mebane as go-between, DeVoto offered to debate Hoover anywhere, in print or in person, and he encouraged friends at the Yale Law School to offer the two of them a forum. (Mr. Hoover did not choose to debate.) DeVoto even said he would write for the New Republic if Hoover would meet him in its columns—but he would debate only if the FBI would make public, as an exhibit and a reassurance and a testimonial to the purity of its methods, one single raw file, perhaps the Coplon file, which Senator McCarthy had already publicly quoted from and which he had obtained, by means as yet mysterious, from the FBI.

  But he never got J. Edgar Hoover into the ring, and in the end he had to be content with a restatement of his own position in a letter to the editor in the December Harper’s. He said that Mr. Hoover was simply not truthful in denying that his operatives asked the questions DeVoto said they asked. He had a questionnaire form on his desk and could get others. He denied that FBI security checks deserved the confidentiality of a grand-jury report, to which Hoover had compared them. A grand jury was an impaneled group of citizens; the FBI was a secret police force.

  Inquiries which I know the FBI has made and others which have been plentifully published in the press have suggested to me that it invades areas of thought and behavior which are entirely improper for it to inquire into, that it has great power to injure the reputations of innocent peo
ple without being held to account, and that it holds ideas about what constitutes dangerous or subversive activity that are unacceptable in our form of government. That is what my piece was about.

  Challenge offered, challenge evaded or ignored. His foray endeared him to anxious liberals and made him for the moment an ally of the New Republic and The Nation, magazines which in the months of his Manhattan captivity he had scorned and ridiculed and which had united in deploring his maverick intransigence. But the alliance was uneasy, more on their part than on his, and he did not welcome it. Some months following the appearance of “Due Notice to the FBI,” Carey McWilliams of The Nation asked DeVoto’s support for the Hollywood Ten. He would join nothing until he had the names of those he would be associated with, and he commented tartly that in the past The Nation had never mentioned him except as a Fascist or a fool. Why did they want his help now?8

  He professed to be more amused than annoyed by Hoover’s refusal to reply to specific charges, but he was not truly amused. His essay had been generated by moral and political indignation and the will to correct what struck him as a manifest tyranny. But, in something like the way the times were against him when he resisted the leftward stampede in the 1930s, they were against him now, when he resisted the stampede into repression on the one side and fear on the other. Circumstances outside his control combined to weaken his effort. The Alger Hiss trial, and the verdict against Hiss that followed soon after DeVoto’s sally against the FBI, convinced DeVoto that the activities of the snoop organizations would grow more virulent, not less, and that the secret-police methods of the FBI would seem to many people to be warranted by clear and present danger. Not very optimistically, he went on fighting them.