The Uneasy Chair

by Wallace Stegner

  4. BDV reported the uproar to Kate Sterne with delight. He loved to stir up that particular breed of lions. BDV to Kate Sterne, September 11, 1939.

  5. BDV to Kate Sterne, no date, but from context end of January 1940.

  6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By Mark Twain. The text edited and with an introduction by Bernard DeVoto. Limited Editions Club, 1939.

  7. Bernard DeVoto, Minority Report, Little, Brown, 1940.

  8. Mark Twain in Eruption. Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events. By Mark Twain. Edited, and with an introduction, by Bernard DeVoto. Harpers, 1940.

  9. It was published serially in Collier’s CV (May 25 to July 27, 1940) and issued as a book by Little, Brown in the fall of 1940.

  10. Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1942.

  11. “Anabasis in Buckskin,” Harper’s CLXXX (March 1940) pp. 400–10.

  12. “The Engulfed Cathedral,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXX (March 1940), pp. 445–48.

  Chapter 3 ·

  1. These were, in the order of their publication, “Letter from Santa Fe,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXI (August 1940), pp. 333–36; “Notes from a Wayside Inn,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXI (September 1940), pp. 445–48; “Road Test,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXI (October 1940), pp. 557–60; “All Quiet Along the Huron,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXI (November 1940), pp. 669–72; and “Main Street Twenty Years After,” Harper’s CLXXXI (November 1940), pp. 580-87.

  2. Granville Hicks, with Richard M. Bennett, The First to Awaken, Modern Age Books, 1940.

  Chapter 4 ·

  1. BDV to William Briggs, July 11, 1940, and BDV to Eugene Saxton, same date. SUL. These were written in hot reply to Briggs (Briggs to BDV, July 11, 1940), who had forwarded Clara’s objections and her derogatory comments about DeVoto.

  2. Saxton to BDV, July 12, 1940. SUL.

  3. Briggs to BDV, September 26, 1940, SUL, enclosed Clara’s letter modifying her earlier stand, and indicated that he thought it covered all future publications from the manuscripts. Unfortunately, relations between Clara and DeVoto never became cordial, and when she removed Charles Lark as lawyer for the Estate, they deteriorated still further. See Section VII, Chapter 2.

  4. BDV to Kate Sterne, July 14, 1940.

  5. BDV to Kate Sterne, August 5, 1940.

  6. BDV to Mattingly, June 15, 1938. SUL.

  7. BDV to Kate Sterne, August 28, September 13, and September 29, 1940.

  8. BDV to Kate Sterne, undated, but from context end of October 1940.

  9. John August, Advance Agent, Little, Brown, 1942. It ran in Collier’s CVIII (July 5 to August 30, 1941). A double-agent story, it is without much question the liveliest and best of the John August serials.

  10. BDV to Kate Sterne, June 12, 1941.

  11. BDV to Kate Sterne, June 30, 1941. For a discussion of the Phi Beta Kappa speech and its later repercussions, see Section VI, Chapter 2, “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”

  12. BDV to Kate Sterne, September 13, 1940. DeVoto did not at first take to the title. In his letters he continues to refer to the book as “Empire.” This he appears to have thought somehow more expressive of its subject, “a cross section of western expansion at the moment of its highest potential,” “the beginning of the process by which the American nation was created.” BDV to Kate Sterne, September 29, 1940. Though he yielded to persuasion on this book, he returned to the “Empire” notion in his third history, The Course of Empire.

  13. These had been discovered by one of his former students and colleagues, Mason Wade, and were edited and published by Wade with considerable advice from DeVoto. Mason Wade, ed., The Journals of Francis Parkman, Harper & Brothers, 1947.

  14. On September 30 DeVoto sent in his pro-forma resignation from the Easy Chair to Harper’s new editor, Frederick Lewis Allen, on the theory that a new editor should have the chance to start clean. Allen promptly rejected it.

  Chapter 5 ·

  1. In a letter commenting on DeVoto’s rebuke to Dorothy Thompson, “a lady sort of like Boadicea,” Davis, at the end of 1942, urged DeVoto to start including Washington in his social commentary. “Little they know of Washington who only Cambridge know.” Davis to BDV, November 24, 1942. SUL. By March of the next year, when he had left CBS News to become a bureaucrat, the two were exchanging long letters that indicated a singular and happy agreement on matters of civil rights, politics, literature and the literary, and the (dubious) future of democracy. In discussing the suppression and distortion of war information, DeVoto either made himself available to air some of Davis’ uneasinesses or supplied the public cues that Davis could then take advantage of. Crippled by political infighting, overzealous security, Congressional stinginess, and the hostility of much of the press, the OWI was a thankless job from which Davis ultimately escaped into the American Broadcasting Company. His ironic and disillusioned and yet stoutly democratic views were expressed even before the United States entered the war: “… Those who call on God at present seem to me to be making a big mistake; it would be just as well not to attract the divine attention to this planet.” Davis to BDV, July 23, 1943. SUL. Though their personal contacts were intermittent and limited to DeVoto’s trips to New York and Washington, Davis was intellectually and temperamentally closer to him than most of his friends.

  2. In all these negotiations Davis was his confidential adviser and at times go-between.

  3. DeVoto reported the final blowup to Kate Sterne on April 25, 1944.

  4. Buck defused any possible faculty opposition by hooking the marriage of the two schools to a pay raise for all but a handful of the highest-paid professors.

  5. By accident rather than design—or by reason of the uneasiness that his reported truculence aroused in bureaucrats—he ended up with the absolute independence of mind and pen that would have been impossible if he had succeeded in getting a wartime job in Washington.

  6. “What to Tell the Young,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXII (May 1941), pp. 669–72.

  7. “Wait a Minute, Dorothy,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXVI (December 1942), pp. 109–12.

  8. “Toward Chancellorsville,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXIV (April 1942), pp. 557–60; “Lincoln to the 164th Ohio,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXIV (May 1942), pp. 669–72; “Sedition’s General Staff,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXV (June 1942), pp. 109–12; and, on the question of full and frank war information, especially “Give It to Us Straight,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXV (August 1942), pp. 333–36.

  9. Willkie quoted the Easy Chair in a Concord speech in March 1944. Later he wrote requesting historical information on news policies in earlier wars. “Fear of the Coming Peace,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXXVIII (March 1944), pp. 344–47, gave Willkie another campaign issue: the fear that America would fall into totalitarian methods of dealing with postwar problems.

  10. Among them his friend and former pupil Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who kept him informed about doings beyond the front office.

  11. The Easy Chair, Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

  Chapter 6 ·

  1. Considerably cut and patched, these appeared in the issues of July through November 1942 and immediately involved DeVoto in a stiff exchange of letters with Oliver LaFarge, who accused him of being a Manifest Destinarian and imperialist.

  2. BDV to Kate Sterne, May 9, 1943. Repeating Cambridge gossip, DeVoto told Kate that one footnote on the historical dispute between Webb and Shannon (in which DeVoto took Webb’s side, Schlesinger Shannon’s), had cost him Schlesinger’s vote for the Pultizer prize.

  3. Paxson’s review appeared in The American Historical Review for October 1943; Gabriel’s in the New York Times Book Review, March 28, 1943; Hofstadter’s in the New Republic, May 3, 1943; and Smith’s in the New England Quarterly, Spring 1943.

  4. In selecting The Year of Decision: 1846 as a Book of the Month, Henry Seidel Canby asked that the first chapter, which he thought complex and confusing, be rewritten. DeVoto rewrote it g
ladly enough, but could not entirely eliminate the difficulty. Many years later, writing to his friend and physician Herbert Scheinberg, he remarked, “I wrote the book deliberately with the technique you will soon perceive. The technique forfeits nine out of ten readers. My theory is, however, that the tenth will get much more out of it than he would if I had used a different and easier technique. I was trying to suggest, as well as prose enables a writer to suggest, that all these actions were occurring at the same time.” BDV to Dr. Herbert Scheinberg, April 26, 1955. HS.

  5. The Year of Decision: 1846, p. 4.

  6. Explaining himself to his Ogden librarian friend Madeline McQuown, DeVoto pointed out that his histories (he had then published only two) were literary histories, conceived and executed like novels, and that they made use of two techniques, the test boring and simultaneousness, that other historians were going to learn and borrow. BDV to Madeline McQuown, January 3, 1947. SUL.

  7. BDV to Mattingly, June 15, 1938. SUL.

  8. Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, the Years of Triumph, p. 730.

  9. BDV to Mattingly, summer (?) 1933. SUL.

  10. The Year of Decision: 1846, pp. 7–8.

  11. Compare his advice to Mattingly (BDV to Mattingly, June 15, 1938. SUL) never to forget that the reader was in there working too: “In narrative fewest is best, and you don’t have to tell everything, for if anyone is with you at all, he is half a yard ahead of you.”

  12. Dale L. Morgan to WS, May 10, 1970.

  VI BLOWS GIVEN AND TAKEN

  Chapter 1 ·

  1. Under the will of Mr. Will Patten of Indianapolis, an endowment was provided to support an annual visiting professor who would spend several weeks on the Bloomington campus. “The purpose of this prescription is to provide an opportunity for members and friends of the University to enjoy the privilege and advantage of personal acquaintance with the Visiting Professor.” In the event, not many at Indiana found DeVoto’s acquaintance a privilege that they much enjoyed. Detail about DeVoto’s feelings during his stay comes from his letters to Kate Sterne and from the notebook jottings he made at the time of Frost’s visit. The notebook is in the Stanford Library safe, with the Sterne letters.

  2. Kay Morrison, who would have been the first to know if Frost contemplated a change of biographers, never heard a hint of such an intention (Kathleen Morrison to WS, May 13, 1972). On the other hand, considering the way he encouraged DeVoto’s essay “The Critics and Robert Frost,” Frost may well have hoped that DeVoto would write a critical book about him.

  3. BDV to Robert Frost, June 7, 1943. DCL.

  4. Robert Frost to BDV, marked in Frost’s hand: “To DeVoto—rough draft—date lost.” DCL. A letter from BDV to Kate Sterne indicates that by June 24 DeVoto had received no answer, and so it is clear that Frost waited three weeks, perhaps longer, to reply.

  Chapter 2 ·

  1. The Phi Beta Kappa address, never published, exists as a typescript among the DeVoto papers at Stanford.

  2. Van Wyck Brooks, On Literature Today.

  3. Sinclair Lewis, “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto,” Saturday Review of Literature XXVII (April 15, 1944), pp. 9–12. In reprinting the exchange as “The Great Feud” in The Saturday Review Treasury, Simon & Schuster, 1957, John Haverstick and the Saturday Review editors call the argument “a classic in the annals of the magazine.” One is not quite sure what “classic” means in that context. It sounds perilously as if the editors thought the spectacle of one eminent literary man vilifying another was good for business.

  4. BDV to Norman Cousins, May 8, 1944, and again May 19, 1944. SUL.

  5. Malcolm Cowley to BDV, April 15, 1944. SUL.

  6. BDV to Cowley, April 22, 1944. SUL. The story that DeVoto tells about his visit to Hans Zinsser he had already told to Kate Sterne on December 14, 1942, nearly a year and a half before the controversy over The Literary Fallacy erupted.

  Chapter 3 ·

  1. DeVoto’s more official accounts of the progress of the Strange Fruit case (the Easy Chairs for May and July 1944 and February 1945, and “The Decision in the Strange Fruit Case; and the Obscenity Statute in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly XIX [June 1946], pp. 147–83) are supplemented by a saltier and less objective running account in his letters to Kate Sterne. In this last series of indignations, he is considerably more infuriated at the Booksellers Association than at the Watch and Ward and the outright censors.

  2. Boston Traveler, April 4, 1944.

  3. Malcolm Cowley, “In Defense of the 1920’s,” New Republic CX (April 24, 1944), pp. 564–65.

  Chapter 4 ·

  1. BDV to Kate Sterne, January 5, 1944.

  2. BDV to Elmer Davis, March 28, 1944. SUL. The tone of this letter is sour and disillusioned. DeVoto indicates that Davis is to the left of where he himself is, but that the New Deal is away off to the right of both, and cynical and self-serving to boot, playing cynical games with Davis and the OWI, pretending that the OWI is responsible for war news and then not permitting it to be. He offers Davis a program: “The way to get an informed public opinion … is to inform the public.”

  3. From November 1943 onward, DeVoto’s letters to Chamberlain show an increasing frustration, beginning with the letter of November 30, when he explained why Rosy Chapman’s list of Mark Twain papers could not be absolutely precise because thousands of pages were illegible scraps; proceeding through the December 17 letter in which he offered to resign if Chamberlain held him to legalistic permissions in quoting from the papers; and reaching a climax in his letter of May 27, 1944, in which he again asked to be released, but agreed to a New York meeting if everything could be settled in that one session. His letter to William Briggs of Harper’s, dated May 28, repeats with brass and percussion his complaints against the administration of Chamberlain and against Henry Hoynes of Harper’s, whom he blamed for some of the difficulty. One gets the impression that throughout this period, while he was impatiently waiting some definite word from the Army or Navy, and later, while he was up to his neck in the Strange Fruit and Lewis controversies, the Mark Twain Estate was simply a pest, a cloud of gnats that kept distracting him from his more vital concerns.

  4. BDV to Commager, April 30, 1944. SUL.

  Chapter 5 ·

  1. My account of this episode is taken from the extensive correspondence on the subject among the DeVoto papers at Stanford, and from the recollections of Lovell Thompson and Paul Brooks, who represented Houghton Mifflin in this negotiation and who had dealings with Reves both before and after it.

  2. DeVoto often adopted the pose of being an amateur, not a member of the historians’ guild, untrained in the mysteries and without an official badge; and sometimes he used his amateur standing as the base for attacks on the professionals, and sometimes he seems to have felt a real inferiority in the presence of their trained competence. Actually, as he admitted in his letter to Commager, he knew as much as anybody about the areas where he admitted knowing anything; and in all the areas around these areas of expertise he had one indispensable qualification: he knew who the real experts were, and did not hesitate to ask their guidance. So here, on the spur of the moment, in the first days of his enthusiasm, he went infallibly to the people who could tell him most: Dale Morgan, Charles Camp, Robert Cleland, and the Missouri Historical Society, which held many records of the fur trade. In the course of his research he discovered another indispensable source, Professor Robert Taft of the University of Kansas, who knew more about the painters and illustrators of the early West than anybody alive. With Taft’s considerable assistance, gratefully acknowledged, he turned the Appendix on “The First Illustrators of the West” into a seminal essay and emphasized what too many historians had ignored: the historical value of representational art. Professor Taft himself in 1953 made a monumental contribution to that field with his Artists and Illustrators of the Old West.

  3. BDV to Charles Curtis, November 1, 1944. SUL.

  4. If Reves had no legal agreement with Mrs. Porte
r, he could not make one with DeVoto to write a partial text for a book composed of Miller’s paintings, Mrs. Porter’s biographical essay on Miller, and her account of how she happened to acquire the Miller paintings. Charles Curtis to BDV, December 6, 1944. SUL.

  5. Once the arrangements were finally made, and DeVoto settled down to writing what would become Across the Wide Missouri, Mrs. Porter’s contribution was revealed to have been minimal, and she began to resent being, as she thought, pushed aside. When Across the Wide Missouri received the Pulitzer prize, in the spring of 1948, she sent DeVoto a little note—“Am I entitled to a small slice?”—and was distressed by the fact that he acknowledged McGill James of the Peale Museum, who had put on the first Alfred Miller show before Mrs. Porter saw the paintings, as Miller’s discoverer. Still later, in lectures before women’s clubs, she referred to the book as a “collaboration” between herself and DeVoto, and by implication took the small slice she thought she was entitled to. It was one such statement, in Kansas City on August 13, 1951, that Houghton Mifflin objected to. The Kansas City Star on October 6 printed a correction of its report of Mrs. Porter’s August 13 talk.

  6. Across the Wide Missouri, p. 384.

  7. DeVoto suspected that Bonneville was probably an American agent, just as he had earlier (correctly) suspected that the British traveler Frederick Ruxton was a British agent, and just as he suspected that Sir William Drummond Stewart was in the West in the 1830s for something besides sport.

  8. BDV to Edward Ely Curtis, June 10, 1944. SUL.

  9. Across the Wide Missouri, p. 363.