The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  You began by selecting, through long experiment, a gin and a vermouth that were compatible with each other and with your taste, and having found them, you stuck with them. You proceeded with an accumulation of ice—five hundred pounds of ice. When you mixed, you measured, 3.7 to 1, for the martinis should not vary from round to round. You mixed quickly but not hastily, and you mixed only what you would immediately pour. When you mixed again, you dumped the dregs and renewed the ice and started from scratch.

  The goal is purification and that will begin after the first round has been poured, so I see no need for preliminary spiritual exercises. But it is best approached with a tranquil mind, lest the necessary speed become haste. Tranquility ought normally to come with sight of the familiar bottles. If it doesn’t, feel free to hum a simple tune as you go about your preparations; it should be nostalgic but not sentimental, neither barbershop nor jazz, between the choir and the glee club. Do not whistle, for your companions are sinking into the quiet of expectation. And you need not sing, for presently there will be singing in your heart.14

  The thaumaturge of The Hour was himself a more complex and difficult mixture than the potion whose secrets he revealed. Essences and elixirs of many kinds had gone into him: flavors from Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken, extracts squeezed from Sinclair Lewis in a manic and verbose mood, tinctures from Mormon preachers and frontier Methodist spellbinders, pauses and hyperboles caught from rivermen and mule skinners and tellers of tall yarns. What he produced was a most American performance, unmistakable and tall. And under it, through it, behind it, forcing its creation and threatening every minute to interrupt or destroy it, was the panic from which in his whole life DeVoto never escaped for long.

  May six o’clock never find you alone, for late afternoon finds all of us “with all lost but courage, fighting honor’s rear-guard action without hope.… That last shuddering half hour!—the soul shredded to excelsior, the heart deaf and blind, the nerves carrying the overload that will burn out the last fuse.…” And then the escape, the jaws that snap shut just as we go out the door, and the sudden sanctuary, the promise of peace, the nerves quivering into quiet. For

  This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.…15

  The Giant Killer, Ernest Hemingway called liquor, and in regard to it, as in regard to so much else in his life, he practiced rituals, observances, offices, skills, charms, magic formulas that are so close to the compulsions of a terrified and propitiatory child that psychologically there is probably no difference. He was a Catholic convert, DeVoto an apostate Catholic. Both found identical uses for identical magics.

  Like one that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round, walks on

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows a fearful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread,

  DeVoto went through a strenuous, productive, socially useful, sometimes heroic life working his head off so as not to notice what lurked just behind him. When he looked up as dusk gathered in the street, he went straight across the hall from the double study to the double parlor, from books to bottles. Writing humorous essays about it did not remove the necessity or quiet the inner trembling more than temporarily. That was why he so liked the company of friends, why his house had always been a hospitable house. That was why, through all the later years of his life, he and Avis designed and then found themselves dependent upon the Sunday Evening Hour.

  Expressing him, the Sunday Evenings sustained him. The participants changed over the years as young faculty friends were not promoted or moved away or took other jobs, as people faded from close friendship or were divided by divorce, as new Harvard or Boston or Cambridge members of the elect appeared and were confirmed, as old friends happened through town. The group was never large—rarely more than four or five couples, often fewer. Across the years, DeVoto had much to do with psychoanalysts, and though the strategy of the profession prohibited social relationships between the patient and his healer, there were other members of the profession whose friendship was not thus inhibited, and once analysis had been terminated, so-called “supportive treatment” did not call for social separateness. So there was generally an analyst in the inner circle—for a while William Barrett, during the Annisquam summers Beata Rank, still later Gregory Rochlin. DeVoto’s secretaries, too, became friends, handmaidens, admirers, dependents, and if not so often present at the more ritualistic Sunday Evenings, were almost always part of the similar gathering at the end of a working day. Rosie Chapman, Elaine Breed, Parian Temple, Julie Jeppson (who after DeVoto’s death married his last analyst, Alfred Ludwig), all moved as inevitably as DeVoto himself from study to parlor when the clock struck the hour. Mollie Brazier, an English physiologist who had been stranded in Boston by the war, was a regular. So, after her divorce, was Anne Barrett. So was Elizabeth Kennedy, who lived just through the lot, and less often her husband Sargent Kennedy, the Harvard registrar. Old Harvard friends like the Paul Bucks and the Murdocks, newer Harvard friends like John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife, old students like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., literary friends like Walter D. Edmonds, made up a circle that was singularly regular and faithful.16

  These were the people who saw Benny DeVoto with the masks off and the guard down. This was the time when he was at his best as a storyteller, an argufier, a laugher at the absurdities of the world or of some acquaintance or himself. He was never more earnest than when talking with this close group of friends about things that troubled or excited him. He was never less inhibited in expressing himself than after six on Sundays, unless perhaps in his letters to Kate Sterne. Sometimes he overspoke, sometimes his old habit of never knowing when enough was enough led him to say what one of his women friends referred to as “skunky things.” She forgave him, as others did, because in the whole scale of friendship the mouthiness of a moment, especially after two or three martinis, did not weigh heavily. In a way, that sort of remark revealed his own insecurity and made people protective about him, as he had once felt protective about the implacable prejudices of L. J. Henderson.

  In the later stages of the Sunday Evening development the regulars were the Kennedys, Rochlins, Galbraiths, and Schlesingers. A good deal of the political discussion and speculation that developed into Americans for Democratic Action and was a force in the two Stevenson campaigns and finally rode into Washington to usher in the new Augustan Age of John F. Kennedy was initiated in the double parlors at 8 Berkeley Street. The old DeVoto Academy eventually came to include some major intellectual movers and shakers, and all of them felt his influence, some very strongly. But it is not likely that he would have gone to Washington with the rest of Cambridge if he had lived to see Kennedy elected. For one thing, the close association of Robert Frost with the Kennedy victory would have been uncomfortable for him. For another, he never shared the admiration of his friends for John F. Kennedy, whom he knew primarily as his congressman.17

  Political, inevitably, the Sunday Evenings sometimes were. But the principal reason for the gatherings at 8 Berkeley Street, which usually ended with Avis getting together a supper for eight or ten people, was the same that had led the DeVotos to fill their Evanston apartment with the bright boys and pretty girls of Northwestern University thirty years before; the same that had led DeVoto to issue an invitation that was almost but not quite an appeal to an unknown Harvard undergraduate named Robeson Bailey; the same that had turned the Lincoln house into a weekend potlatch of friends—Bucks and Murdocks and Morrisons and, Zinssers, and always a changing stream of the young, and always a troubled neighbor, a blocked writer, a woman in emotional or nervous trouble, who had adopted DeVoto as father and lay psychiatrist, and by whom, in helping, he was helped.

  Once he had written about Sigmund Freud, “The
re is a noble and tragic poetry in his vision of man’s journey deathward from childhood, beset by terrors whose shape and import are disguised from him, striving to discipline a primitive inheritance of delusion and rebellion into a livable accord with reality, striving to establish mastery over disruptive instincts, striving to achieve a social adaptation of anarchic drives.”18 In writing that, he might have been writing a rubric for his life. Friendship and alcohol, like art, like work, were part of his effort to die sane. He was a long way from being an alcoholic, though he used alcohol regularly and largely. For reasons inextricable from his sense of where safety lay, he was the absolute opposite of a solitary drinker.

  May six o’clock never find you alone.

  9 · Deathward from Childhood

  Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

  trafitto da un raggio di sole:

  ed è subito sera.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  And suddenly it is evening.

  Fighting his wars, earning his living, worrying about the future and his health, pushing himself beyond his endurance and his rallying capacity, finding his safety in rituals of a King’s X hour and in friends whom he sometimes insulted even though he loved them, or perhaps because he did, he came finally to the place where neither body nor mind would quite obey his will. He sickened, and could not tell where, nor whether mind or body had sickened first. But he thought that the physiological ailments were the horse, and his anxieties the cart, rather than the other way around, when he allowed Herbert Scheinberg to hospitalize him for tests, in June 1952.

  Actually Scheinberg was not too worried about the symptoms that DeVoto described: an “empty soreness or sore emptiness” in the viscera, a general, undifferentiated, unfocused discomfort that might well have been only an expression of his hypochondria but that he was irritated to hear called a “nervous stomach.” Scheinberg, aware of his history of nervous trouble, thought his anxiety probably out of proportion to his symptoms, but he wanted to evaluate the hypertension that his medical record showed to be of long standing. Tests showed the hypertension to be consistent but asymptomatic. There was nothing wrong with his heart, kidneys, brain. There was nothing at all, in fact, except a smoker’s cough, not surprising in a man who smoked two packs a day, and a small hard spot on the prostate that X rays suggested did not mean anything.1

  Anxiety was the horse, then; the sensation of emptiness might come from the cavity where a new book should be. He began therapy sessions with Dr. Alfred “Dutch” Ludwig, complaining all the time about not being able to work and turning out work enough for four. Nothing assuaged the gnawing in him, not the Stevenson campaign, not the conservation and civil-liberties battles, not the satisfaction of winning the National Book Award for The Course of Empire. He was one of those whom the Buddha described, one of those who strive always toward fulfillment, and in fulfillment yearn to feel desire. The spoiled M.D. and the psychoanalyst manque who were part of him quarreled about his symptoms. There was a time when he was dismayed to find his beard perceptibly less heavy than it formerly was. He went to Boston doctors, but he fully trusted only Scheinberg, who was father and son as well as healer but who now lived in New York. A letter he wrote Scheinberg on May 5, 1954, is typical:

  Whenever I haven’t anything better to do I think up a hypochondria. I’ve thought up another one. Ludwig says so and I agree with him. It’s all mixed up with a recent exposure to a father image who had almost had lung cancer, with various other episodes in my incredible psychic life, and, so Ludwig says, to some extent with you. Anyway, besides my normal cigarette cough I’ve been having vague and quite indefinable, mild, changeable, and perhaps imaginary sensations here and there in my chest. On Ludwig’s word, not heart symptoms, not lung cancer symptoms, symptoms he gets three times a day from his couch.… but sometimes they are unmistakably carcinoma of the lungs and I was buried several weeks ago. Apparently Ludwig is in process of chasing them to their lair but since I’m going to be in New York anyway, he says, why not reassure myself with the chest x-ray you didn’t take last time.2

  Scheinberg took the chest X ray, which showed no carcinoma, but DeVoto was not reassured. He came back from New York still gnawed by nameless symptoms. In July, Dr. Richard Muellner, in Boston, took a closer look at the prostate and concluded that there was nothing there but a benign hypertrophy. He did not want to bring on a new wave of anxiety by proposing a biopsy, which in any case did not seem to be indicated. He assured Scheinberg that he would keep an eye on it. In August DeVoto took Scheinberg West with him, and during the two weeks of travel, during which he had all the pleasures of a paternal, filial, or magisterial demonstration of the West as it really was, he had no symptoms. But they returned as he returned, and by Christmas the sore emptiness or the empty soreness was with him steadily, and did not go away. He experimented with diet. Sourly, he even contemplated going on the wagon. As Cambridge emerged out of winter and the crocuses popped up through the blackened and sooty lawns on Berkeley Street, there was no ease in his body or peace in his mind. As before, he went on turning out work. He even seriously began the book he tentatively called Western Paradox.

  Carl Brandt by that time had him solidly lined up with editors who valued his contributions. His problem was not now to sell what he wrote but to write what he had already sold. Much of the summer of 1955 he spent driving around New England gathering material for travel articles, but even driving country roads in the region he loved, dining in good inns and filling his eyes with the evidence of a formed and shapely American civilization, could not relieve his symptoms or lift his depression. His visit to Bread Loaf in August was, for him at least, bleak. He knew he would not listen to Ted Morrison’s urging that he return as a staff member and do for non-fiction what he had used to do for fiction. In Treman’s crowded parlor there were too many strange faces; in the cold mountain dusk he could smell the oncoming of winter3

  He gave his lecture, aware that many in the audience had come to hear the volcano erupt and the ogre roar. But he couldn’t erupt and roar for them. He gave them a talk that he himself thought lame, though Bill Sloane remembers it as a splendid exposition of the technique of synecdoche—how one might write a social history of New England through consideration of a single town4—and Ted Morrison recalls it as “impressive to the point of brilliance.”5 But DeVoto thought it lame, and went lamely off toward Maine, where the vacationland blight so offended him that he did erupt. He belched up an Easy Chair, “Outdoor Metropolis,” in which he described the tourist promotions that had turned coastal Maine, and southern New Hampshire as well, into a “jerry-built, neon-lighted, overpopulated slum.” That Easy Chair in turn so offended the Maine Tourist Bureau that its director angrily announced the withdrawal of all Maine advertising from Harper’s. Harper’s then responded angrily to the boycott of a free and independent press, and demanded and extracted an apology from Governor Muskie for his subordinate’s words, and a restoration of the withdrawn advertising.

  A characteristic DeVoto performance. His exposure of an environmental disease and his recommendation for its cure—state controls over the spread of the resort business, controls as strict as those of the National Park Service if necessary—was reprinted with approval in Florida and California and Vermont. Editorials and letters cried, “Sic ’em, Tige!” to the Easy Chair. The old watchdog was still on the job. It might have occurred to some that “Easy Chair” was the wrong label for that column. “Fire Alarm” might have suited it better.

  Nevertheless, it was as The Easy Chair that DeVoto’s third collection of essays, all culled from that misnamed department, was published, in the first week of November 1955. It represented him, it contained all his causes and enthusiasms and angers, it summed him up, and he began to get early and prompt response from readers even before the book was officially out. He had spoken the minds of a lot of people who did not dare speak their own. Their communications touched him, as did the publication parties: the little incidental book was somethi
ng of an event, a milestone. Unknown to him, Harper’s had conspired with Louis Lyons, the bellwether of the Nieman Fellows who conducted a news-commentary program called “Backgrounds” on WGBH-TV, to present to Benny DeVoto over the air a bound volume of the November Harper’s containing the twentieth anniversary essay (“Number 241”) and an inscription from the editors. The inscription read:

  To Bernard DeVoto, seasoned practitioner of the journalistic craft, widely ranging in competence and punctual in deadlines, as resolute in his approvals as in his dislikes, partisan of sound sense and adversary of cant, friend of the public lands and enemy of the lukewarm martini, who in the twenty years he has occupied the Easy Chair has never learned to write a dull sentence.

  On November 13 he was supposed to be in New York to appear on the CBS show “Adventure,” a series in which he functioned as an authority and commentator on the West. As had become his habit, he had arranged to have dinner after the show with Herb Scheinberg and one or two other friends. But DeVoto’s heart was not in the trip. On November 3 he wrote Scheinberg:

  I’ve had a note from Shelby Gordon saying they’ll want me in N Y the 12th. So dinner is O K, and very swell. That is, provided.

  The real question is whether I can bring myself to go on down to Washington for a week, the next day, Monday I mean. The shabby truth is that either my gut or my neurosis has been giving me hell all fall, and is giving me particular hell now, & is building up a fine case why I shouldn’t go to Washington or for that matter anywhere. My drive is to run out on everything, including the Democratic Party & our old travelling companion.