The Uneasy Chair

by Wallace Stegner

  In 1837 the fur trade might have been dying, but the life it enforced showed no signs of weariness or decay. It might have been a form of slavery, trappers the bond servants of the Company, never out of debt, always in danger of losing furs or life, but the trappers themselves did not know it—or, knowing it, still chose that life above all others. They knew their life to be as free as the wind or the wandering herds of the buffalo, as savage and free as the tribes from whom they took squaws and with whom they felt more at home than among whites.

  This was the life that DeVoto set out in his third book about the West to render as personal experience. In June 1944 he referred to it as “a small job on the fur trade.”8 A year later he was so involved in it that he canceled the trip West that he had been planning for several years. No finger and no dike could have held back the flood that wanted to pour out onto paper. Being an apprentice Vermonter, he knew about Runaway Pond, not too far from Morgan Center, where nineteenth-century farmers had dug a little diversion ditch to get water from the lake and seen the whole lake rush out the gap they started. That was the way Across the Wide Missouri wrote itself once it started to flow.

  On every page, we hear the sound that history makes when it is written by a spoiled novelist in love with what he writes about:

  Something moves in the willows and the Manton is cocked and Sir William stands up in his stirrups—Ephraim is there, Old Caleb, the white bear of the mountains, so terrible that to kill one is a coup as glorious as striking with your bare hand an enemy in his own tipi. For half a mile mules and wagons are stretched out in flat light, dust above the caravan like an opening umbrella, emptiness everywhere, the earth flowing like water at its edges, a false lake hung with groves that have no reality. Here are the braves riding in from the hunt; their faces are like a sorcerer’s mask, they are naked to a g-string, the blood of buffalo has soaked their moccasins and dyed their forearms and calves, the squaws wait for them with basins of clear cold water from the Siskadee.…9

  A romantic wrote that, the same romantic who took long, solitary hikes armed with a .32 automatic or a .22 rifle in the Wasatch back of his home town, imagining dangers and driving himself to great endurances and playing survival in a world gone tame. The same romantic who climbed Mount Ogden to look over the salt lake that Jim Bridger and his companions had explored in a bull-boat, the same who slept outside the window of an Ogden girl with a string tied from his finger to hers, and at first light pulled the string to awaken her to shared sunrise. He could not have written as he did of the fur trade, of the dreams that pulled westward all sorts of men as various as James Dickson and Jedediah Smith and Henry Harmon Spalding, of the intimate contents of the “possible sack” that every trapper carried, of the campfires and the rendezvous, of the lore and gear of beaver trapping, of the hunting of buffalo and the stealing of horses, of the sudden raids and the long pursuits, if he had not dreamed those dreams himself and imagined those hardships and those freedoms with himself in the hero’s role—if he had not waked many times in the same mountain light to the blue wetness on the grass and the smell of a cold campfire, if he had not seen through the Freudian notch-and-tower of his sights targets that imagination could transform into Old Caleb or a dodging Blackfoot, to be brought down while dependent and trustful female eyes watched.

  Is it literary extravagance to believe that some of the silliest, most half-baked experiences of an adolescent full of hormones and wish fulfillment may on occasion find an ultimate expression that proves them both true and profound, and that links their victim/author with the imaginary fulfillments of a race, a place, and a time?

  Sure you’re romantic about American history [he wrote to Kitty Bowen while Across the Wide Missouri was still in his typewriter]. What your professor left out of account was the fact that it’s the most romantic of all histories. It began in myth and has developed through three centuries of fairy stories. Whatever the time is in America it is always, at every moment, the mad and wayward hour when the prince is finding the little foot that alone fits into the slipper of glass. It is a little hard to know what romantic means to those who use the word umbrageously. But if the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or LaSalle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln or the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has continued as dream down to the last headline you read in a newspaper, and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to—and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true. The simplest truth you can ever write about our history will be charged and surcharged with romanticism, and if you are afraid of the word you had better start practicing seriously on your fiddle.10

  In his preface to Across the Wide Missouri he denies any intention of writing a comprehensive history.

  … Instead I have tried to describe the mountain fur trade as a business and as a way of life: what its characteristic experiences were, what conditions governed them, how it helped to shape our heritage, what its relation was to the western expansion of the United States, most of all how the mountain men lived.… I shall have succeeded if the reader gets from the book a sense of time hurrying on while between the Missouri and the Pacific a thousand or so men of no moment whatever are living an exciting and singularly uncertain life, hurrying one era of our history to a close, and thereby making possible another one, one which began with the almost seismic enlargement of our boundaries and consciousness of which I have written elsewhere.11

  Had written of elsewhere and would write of again, approaching it at its beginning, with the Louisiana Purchase and the expedition of Lewis and Clark, to complete a trilogy of histories of which Across the Wide Missouri was the middle one. In the opinion of most lay readers and of those historians who can accept his method as legitimate history, the middle book is the best, a re-creation that turns an intimately known historical period into fable and the heart’s desire. It brought the Pulitzer prize into his trophy case, and at ten dollars a copy, a very high price in 1947, it sold thirteen thousand copies in its first year and a half and has gone on selling steadily since.12 It is a standard work, as essential to an understanding of the fur trade as Chittenden, and a great deal more exciting to read. The Miller watercolors and the care that Houghton Mifflin lavished on its production made it one of the handsomest books of 1947 or any other year, and the Appendix called “The First Illustrators of the West” was an excursion into an important area that few professional historians had ever touched.

  It was a pity that his loyal audience in Bowne Hospital in Poughkeepsie died when he was just beginning to think about it. She would have responded to the romantic richness that he hung on the line of Stewart’s western expeditions. It is not out of the question to think of her as another girl with a string tied to her finger, waiting to be awakened to wonder. She would have been useful to DeVoto too, for in the unfamiliar territory of art and art history she would have functioned as a guide and might have saved him much wasted motion as well as some disputes with art critics.

  It says something about a career which has crested and is running at the flood that Kate Sterne’s death, though it deprived him of one of his closest and warmest friendships and dried up one of the springs of his fantasy life, probably did not slow him down by more than one sad evening. One thing, however, it did do. It insured that the novel he had begun away back in the spring of 1936 when he was being repudiated by Harvard, the novel he had begun with the intention of dedicating it to Kate, the novel whose title she had given him, the novel he had wrestled with twice and twice been thrown by, would have to be finished somehow. It was a promise he had made her and not kept. All t
he time he was writing Across the Wide Missouri he was also trying to make that novel Mountain Time come around.

  6 · Dog to His Vomit

  Nobody is entitled to call himself a novelist until he has written five novels, DeVoto was accustomed to say at Bread Loaf. There was a certain amount of self-encouragement in the remark, whether he conceived of himself as Bernard DeVoto, who had published four novels up to 1934, or as John August, who had published four since.1 Either way, that fifth one was hard to come by. There was evidence, too, that he didn’t quite know which writer he was. Siamese twins, August and DeVoto walked webbed together, and sometimes one answered to the other’s name.

  When he resumed work on the shelved manuscript of Mountain Time, near the end of 1943, he did so mainly out of boredom, to give his mind something to do while he waited for the Army to decide whether or not it wanted him to write up any part of the war. But he had been thinking about it ever since the brush with Frost in Bloomington, and the outright break a few months later had convinced him that he now knew where the novel wanted to go. From its beginning, it had had in it both the struggle against a father (brought to a head by the death of Florian DeVoto, in the fall of 1935), and the fantasies clustered around the Skinny figure, whom he had been remembering and half inventing for Kate Sterne. It had also contained, in ways that he could not quite tie down, the West-East conflict, the problems of Westerners who came East toward enlargement and opportunity and were never quite satisfied, were always eaten by the desire to return.

  The break with Frost crystallized at least the father conflict for him, and he very quickly rewrote Part I of Mountain Time, and sent it off to Kate Sterne for an opinion in early March 1944. In that section Cy Kinsman, a young surgeon from the West, a man with gifted hands and a talent for offending people with his bluntness and honesty, declares his independence from his medical superior Dr. McAllister, an older surgeon who “thinks with his fingers” and combines enormous skill with a certain ruthlessness and a strong instinct for the grandstand. Kate Sterne would know that she was supposed to substitute literature for medicine, that for Dr. McAllister she was supposed to read Robert Frost, and for Cy Kinsman Bernard DeVoto. She would also know how to read symbolically Cy Kinsman’s decision to go back West, where he came from, and sort out his life.2

  Many things combined to slow and hinder the completion of the novel: the time-consuming controversies of the spring of 1944, the housebound, gasolineless summer at Annisquam, the complicated negotiations that would lead eventually to Across the Wide Missouri, his inability to say no when Irita Van Doren asked him to take over Lewis Gannet’s daily book column in the New York Herald Tribune during October, and not least, the pleasures of research on both Lewis and Clark and the fur trade. Through the summer he could give the novel only now-and-then effort. But it is also clear that he did not know quite what to do with it; the fight with Frost that had carried him in one burst through Part I would not carry him further.

  At the end of August Kate Sterne died, and her death both relieved him of an obligation and permitted him an evasion. He put on his false face and walked past himself unrecognized. Just after Christmas, he decided that Mountain Time was not a serious novel, or at least that he could not write it in those terms, and that the only way he could salvage all the work he had put into it was to turn it into a Collier’s serial. Its title became Everybody Got to Walk, and its author was said to be John August. Its purpose became not the cauterizing of emotional wounds and the exploration of what happened in the caves of the soul, but the fattening of the bank account in order to subsidize what promised to be a long period of unprofitable historical research.

  On the day after Christmas, he sent in his proposal to Collier’s, along with sample installments from Part I. He said he wanted to get it out of the way in a hurry to free himself for Lewis and Clark (nothing said about the fur trade, which was still no more than hypothetical captions). On February 5, 1945, Collier’s bought Everybody Got to Walk as a four-part serial.

  But DeVoto did not finish it promptly, as he had intended. The serial gave him as much trouble as the novel had. He simply could not sit down, grit his teeth, and grind it out. Whatever he said to himself and to Collier’s, it was still fretting him as a book that was very personal to himself, and hence difficult. He remarked to Garrett Mattingly that he would have to tack a bitter ending on it, to make it respectable, before he sent it to Alfred McIntyre at Little, Brown for publication.3 And as if unwilling to face it fully, as if wanting to evade and delay it, he kept filling his days with other activities. He signed up for a fall lecture tour with a New York agent, Charles Pearson. Though in March 1945 he said he was still working on “a serial and a history.”4 he should have said that history had all but crowded the serial out, for by that time the negotiations that led to Across the Wide Missouri had been completed, and without quite giving up Lewis and Clark he was deep in the fur trade.

  By June, when he again retreated to Annisquam to escape the summer heat, he was still not done with Everybody Got to Walk. By the time he returned to Cambridge, in September, he had added to his job list the Viking Portable Mark Twain, whose text and introduction he delivered in December.5 November was killed by his lecture tour, December by his participation in “Invitation to Learning” and other New York radio shows. He was during the same months conducting a campaign among the magazine editors, seeking assignments that would pay his expenses West along the Lewis and Clark route the following summer. It was not until December 1945, almost exactly a year after he had sent in his hurry-up prospectus to Collier’s, that he could tell Mattingly, “John August has written something like a novel.” Collier’s ran it between February 2 and March 2, 1946.

  But at the last minute an odd transformation occurred. Though it was as Everybody Got to Walk that he had finished the book at last, it appeared in Collier’s with its old title, Mountain Time, restored, and almost as if in defiance he had signed it not “John August” but “Bernard DeVoto.”

  Moreover, he was still not through with it. Through the early months of 1946, between attacks on the revisionist historians of the Civil War,6 bursts of extraordinary productiveness on the fur-trade book, and correspondence with magazines, federal bureaus, and western friends setting up his coming trip, he was still tinkering with the manuscript in an attempt to improve it for book publication—that is, to completely reconvert John August into DeVoto. His always oversubscribed time had to be stretched for discussions with the promoters of the new History Book Club, which wanted him to act as chairman of its panel of judges. When he finally, reluctantly, let go of the manuscript of Mountain Time, finishing it in a dead heat with Across the Wide Missouri, he was on the eve of departing for the West. Little, Brown did not publish the novel until January 1947, almost a year after its appearance as a Collier’s serial and eleven years after Kate Sterne had given it a title.

  Wait for the book, he kept telling correspondents who wrote in after reading Collier’s. Don’t judge it by the serial version. He anticipated the critical and popular response with an anxiety that he could not disguise. To Kitty Bowen he wrote that “the boys” would think it was Arrowsmith, Little, Brown would advertise it as Arrowsmith, and the reviewers would review The Literary Fallacy.7 But when the book appeared, and the reviewers did not like it, he felt a frustration and exasperation that emerged often in his correspondence as defensiveness.

  To those friends who loyally said they liked it—a handful including the Mattinglys and Anne Barrett, the former wife of his former analyst, he felt almost unduly grateful, admitting, “Mountain Time means a good deal more to me psychologically than as a novel,” because “it was the one that threw me twice, the one I couldn’t write.”8 Against those who did not like it—Avis, Josephine Johnson, the dedicatee Ted Morrison, his Ogden librarian friend Madeline McQuown, Fletcher Pratt who asked plaintively why it was written in shorthand—he defended it with a stubbornness that gave away how deep his psychological involvement was.
The fact that the novel sold better than any of his earlier ones he realistically attributed to his expanded reputation and not to any special popularity of the book. But the fact that so many reviewers and so many friends found it opaque and unsatisfying puzzled and troubled him. As he wrote to Madeline McQuown:

  There are things I’m interested in doing in fiction. There is a part of me that finds expression in fiction and can’t find it in anything else. There are things I think I know about life and reality for which fiction is the only possible vehicle.… The things I set out to do in history are enormously, almost incomparably, easier than the things I try to do in novels.… As a writer of fiction I am interested only in the subtleties, ambiguities, and colorations of personal relationships, of love and marriage and friendship.… My dissatisfaction with Mountain Time … is confined mostly to the conclusion I’ve reached reluctantly, that I made the ellipses and lacunae rather greater than was right, even in the terms I’d set myself. Only about one percent of the book is printed on the page; I calculated wrong, I ought to have made it, maybe, one and a half percent.9