The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  For it was frankly an elite that he sponsored and encouraged, an elite of knockers and grumblers and iconoclasts and rebels against fraternities and football. “I shall always be grateful to Benny for teaching me to look down at the bastards surrounding me with a sense of great disdain,” says George Ball. “I was preoccupied with my own problems of adolescence. I felt quite detached from the life of the campus and could have been morbidly unhappy if Benny had not provided me with the sturdy defense of intellectual snobbery. No doubt it made me insufferable, but it was helpful at the time.”11

  Other students testify that he gave them more than a defense against herd pressures and a contempt for the collegiate inanities that were perhaps the silliest aspect of the revolution of the twenties. For instance, Sarah Margaret Brown.12

  She was a redheaded, freckled, bright, gaminish journalism student with a disrespectful sense of humor and an ambition to be a writer. She had taken writing courses before, and was used to top grades and terse comments such as “Not bad, but I think your motivation of Charlie’s ‘organization’ is a little inadequate.” In the fall of 1923, DeVoto’s second year at Northwestern, she signed up for his English D-6 and at once, to establish status, handed him a chunk of the novel she had been writing during the summer. It came back next day, well marked up and with its whole last page covered by the teacher’s large, legible scrawl:

  Excellent and distinguished in detail, this work makes me wonder whether your quality may not betray you when the long story of which this is a part is finally assembled. In effect, you are in for some severe self-criticism, and if you value the total effect more than the individual instance, will have to go over this ruthlessly, compressing, always compressing, which means that most of your individual jewels will have to go into the wastebasket. A style so deliberately jeweled would be unendurable at ninety thousand words. All this, however, I will take up with you in conference when I have read the rest of your earlier work.

  Sarah Margaret was not used to professors who requested or demanded conferences, nor to professors who wanted to read all her earlier work, nor to professors who read papers so promptly and with such obvious care and wrote comments of such length and specificity. Also, she was a little piqued at the way he shot down the beauties of her prose. She handed him another section. Back it came, plentifully scribbled upon:

  Between your first paragraph and the passage beginning at the middle of p. 5 and running to the next page is a distinct cleavage and a fundamental difference. The difference is one between literature and nonsense. The spanking passage is literature—of a high sort. The clamorous dishes and the quaking words are nonsense. A difference, of course, of origin. The first paragraph is a pose—however ornate, however elaborated and dressed up—a pose compounded of K. Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Walter de la Mare, a bastard-poetic prose which can be brought fully into neither category and is out of place in both, a pseudo-form which has never been genuine from Baudelaire to F. Scott Fitzgerald, or in Wilde or Fiona Macleod or anywhere else in between. Infinitely careful your words are, I have no doubt, infinitely emotive and suggestive—and infinitely artificial. The spanking, however, is true. I mean more than that lamentable word usually says nowadays. I mean that this section is veracious, veritistic—that the emotion of Deborah is given life in words—whereas the other was as dead as it was precious. By all means suppress your tendency toward the first, and nourish your tendency toward the second.

  Sarah Margaret had no way of knowing that she had caught the tail end of an Ogden outlander’s distaste for a generation of Harvard aesthetes. And she was not quite sure whether she was flattered or annoyed. She took one more chance, and handed him another section. It came back promptly, with her spelling of bacchante and Leander aggressively corrected on its face. On the back page her teacher came at her still-standing literary pretensions like a bowling ball:

  If it is quite clear in your mind that this is Deborah’s illusion, and if you treat it as such, all right. If, however, it is your illusion, if you see anything of classic mythology in the ordinary young man of this generation—any pagan rapture or Grecian grace—anything at all of a parallel’ or an analogy—then you are deceiving yourself, and rather conventionally. See things in terms of themselves. The so-called pagan joy never existed on earth apart from the pages of Walter Pater and his disciples. Read Frazer.

  Overmatched, Sarah Margaret succumbed. She tried to tame her fin de siècle style, she found out who Frazer was, and read him (and De la Mare, Fitzgerald, Mansfield, Pater, and all the others he mentioned, even the ones he knocked). His caustic teaching did for her what Mrs. F.’s hushed devotion had done for him: it guided her reading and her mind. She became one of the Devotees. As campus correspondent for Hearst’s Chicago American, she was always in hot water with the authorities, who were more interested in a good public image than in good news coverage, and that endeared her to DeVoto. So did her unconventional and imaginative ways of following a story. To cover a circus, she once rode in a cart hitched behind a hippopotamus down Michigan Avenue. To do a feature on the Chicago visit of Queen Marie of Romania she got a job as a chambermaid in the queen’s hotel and reported gleefully that the queen, like other mortals, left a ring in the tub.

  In that sort of japery DeVoto encouraged her and others. Self-consciously against all herd pressures, he also encouraged campus editors in sly or open violations of the campus code. As he began to publish things, his consciousness of being before an audience led him to indulge his gift for a Menckenesque indiscriminateness of satire and a Menckenesque pungency of phrase. As a writer, he began by showing off. As a teacher, he seems to have been trying to do what he felt Harvard had not quite done for him—to give his students guidance among the contradictions, virtues, pretensions, and shams of the new literary freedom. Those who revered him and hung around him looked upon him as invulnerable, a culture hero.

  But a lot of that confidence was false. He lived within his defenses and made sorties. When he lounged around the classroom looking wise and uttering sardonic and picturesque wisdoms, neither those who liked him nor those who found him offensive knew that much of the time he was in a clammy, soul-clutching panic, that he taught not from confidence but from demoralizing and nearly constant fear.

  Only Helen Avis MacVicar knew that, and she didn’t find it out for a long time after she began to go out with DeVoto, in October 1922. Once she knew what he was going through, her somewhat ribald and concealed admiration became a sort of awe. Nearly a half century later, fifteen years after his death, she could still speak of him feelingly as “the bravest damn man I ever knew.”

  “It seems that my nature requires some object of adoration,” he had written Melville Smith from Ogden’s Slough of Despond.13 It also required friends, respect, admiration, the stimulation of good minds, the drama of intellectual attack and defense. Helen MacVicar (who was called Scotty by her friends but whom he preferred to call Avis), being extremely attractive, would do to worship; being intelligent, she was stimulating; being aggressively unconventional, she delighted him; being young, she enlisted his protectiveness; and being his student and disciple, respectful of his authority, she gave him, not deference (“I never deferred very well,” she says) but corroboration and support. Especially after she learned about his migraines, sleeplessness, dreads, panics, and fits of suicidal depression, she helped hold him up. And she had enough shakes and uncertainties of her own so that he could feel the support was not all one-sided.

  It was part of his curse that when he was not down he was likely to be sky-high. Toward the end of the spring of 1923 he wrote to Byron Hurlbut again—this time not haunted and begging, but manic and full of brag:14 “Both faculty and students are lyric about me,” he told his old teacher, and added, as if he had noticed his own swagger, “Modesty has never been a vice of mine.… My mind is as good as there is.” He was full of plans. He was going to write all summer, finish his novel, and then write a half dozen short stories to try to suppl
ement his Northwestern salary and the five hundred dollars he could make by teaching an evening class in the School of Commerce. “If I can sell just one to the S.E.P. most of my uncertainties will disappear.”

  To the unpublished writer it always seems that the first acceptance will prove the rightness of his gamble. Since almost all unpublished writers have to earn their living at some backlog job, the first acceptance looks in anticipation like the brakeman who will uncouple them from drudgery. In the early twenties most American novelists broke in as journalists, and wrote their way out of the city room. As a teacher, DeVoto had one advantage over them: he got a three-month vacation, from which in his manic moods he expected the impossible. By sheer logomancy, now, he converted into certainty what should have been stated as a hesitant possibility. “I have not yet put myself to a test that I did not pass,” he told Hurlbut. “I remember how I was assured beforehand that I would never make good at Harvard, in the Army, as a teacher, and that I made good in all three. So, unfamiliar and dubious as the idea is, I begin writing for publication with confidence if not assurance.” His aim, he said, was to write his way free of both teaching and the Midwest, and settle down to full-time writing in some New England town.

  He confessed (Confessed? He held Hurlbut with his skinny hand) that the reason for these plans was a girl, one he was engaged to marry. She was everything his heart had ever sought or his imagination given shape, everything his mind in its moments of highest aspiration had learned to admire. He admitted that he had come to Evanston with suicide very close to the surface of his thoughts; but from the time he had first begun to know her, back in October, he had moved steadily toward greater stability and self-possession. Beautiful, intelligent, a splendid pianist, she was possessed of the subtlest mind he had ever known, and she wrote better prose than he did. They had been shaped by many of the same experiences: family failure, literary ambition, isolation in soulless backward towns. They wanted the same things. They would gladly subsist on high thinking, literature, music, and a Crust.

  So skinless a letter, one that so helplessly and trustingly exposed its author’s insides, could have embarrassed Hurlbut, a New Englander. It would probably embarrass Avis DeVoto if she read it now—embarrass her or bring her to tears, or both.

  They could not be married at once, DeVoto said, because he had set aside the summer as a proving time. He couldn’t ask that superb girl to share a life without accomplishments or assured future. He must first demonstrate that he was capable of being and doing what she believed him capable of. In three months he could do it. They would be married sometime between September and February.

  But Avis MacVicar demanded no such proof. However he might feel, she could not see herself setting her Rocky Mountain knight such a batch of tests—so many sword-edge bridges crossed, so many castles taken, so many damsels rescued, so many giants and ogres and dragons slain. She was in love with him and had total faith in him. If he was going up into Wisconsin or Michigan and live in a log cabin and write, why should she not go along? Summer, and shirt-sleeve nights, and the sound of Lake Michigan lipping its shore, and the shadows of the elms that then lined many of Evanston’s streets, were on her side. They were married as soon as classes ended, and bought a secondhand Ford and a back seat full of secondhand tires, and took off for a place some colleague had told them about: Washington Island, off the tip of Wisconsin’s Door County, in Lake Michigan. The summer of testing got combined with honeymoon.15

  In Detroit Harbor they boarded in a clean, bare hotel run by clean, bare Icelanders, paying twelve dollars a week apiece. They walked, swam, fished, played tennis, lived a healthy outdoor life. DeVoto taught his bride to shoot a .22. There is a photograph that shows him in his pegged officers’ breeches and leather puttees, carrying on his shoulders an exuberant girl who wears a men’s white shirt and checkered knickers. They look extremely contented and unhaunted. While Avis walked the beach or talked with fishermen or sat under a tree with a book, Bernard wrote with the dedication of an acolyte saying his offices. For the first time since Dean Briggs’s class, he felt that he was writing well.

  “A neurosis,” he told Kate Sterne years later, “is a psychobiological adaptation. Ogden, though agonizing, was an amniotic home. When I finally, God knows how, probably by way of Skinny, found resolution to act, to get out, to go about my business, I took the indispensable step.” By shedding his adolescence, he said, he had made it possible to begin shedding his infancy.16

  A Chicago neurologist, though “eighty percent faith healer,” had helped him to understand what was the matter with him. Success at teaching had given him the beginning of control over the enemy or coward within. His marriage had steadied him. Now, as if performing a self-prescribed rite of exorcism or therapeutic magic, he was working out of his emotional labyrinth under an assumed identity. He was writing about Ogden—not the historical frontier Ogden of the failed novel Cock Crow, but the Ogden of his own experience.

  At Harvard, DeVoto had thrown in his lot with the tribe of the moderns; he had opted for the American and the vernacular and the new. So it is not surprising that The Crooked Mile,17 which at this preliminary stage was called Mirage, incorporates themes and subject matters that his contemporaries found compelling.

  It belongs with the whole literature of the revolt from the village, the repudiation of the puritanical, commercialized, sleazy mean-spiritedness that two generations ago seemed to the literary to mark the small town in America. “Dullness made God,” Sinclair Lewis called it. Years before Lewis, paraphrasing a famous theory of the anthropologist Morgan, Clarence King had characterized the course of American civilization as a progress from savagery through barbarism to vulgarity. The phrase accurately describes Bernard DeVoto’s intention in his projected trilogy. He was one who like Willa Cather saw the pioneer period as a more heroic time, though he was less inclined than she to glorify the pioneers. But in The Crooked Mile all the frontier vigor has been worn out. We are left with the vulgarity.

  Other dust from the winds of the twenties blows through the novel too. If its protagonist, Gordon Abbey, is a sibling of Claude Wheeler and Carol Kennicott and George Willard and Krebs and Alwyn Tower, he is also a somewhat remoter kinsman of Jake Barnes, a sensitive young man made impotent by the nihilism of war and its aftermath and driven to pointless hedonism. And when Abbey joins the revelries of the country-club set in the town of Windsor, he is not unrelated to Fitzgerald’s anguished butterflies. Windsor/Ogden is both Gopher Prairie and a sort of parochial Rocky Mountain Babylon.

  But Gordon Abbey, however much he may resemble some of the fictional types of the twenties, resembles Bernard DeVoto rather more. He is a Harvard-educated man buried in a provincial town he hates. He in unlike DeVoto in that the town had been made by his driving father and grandfather, but he has the same problem of reconciling the cheap, weak, pleasure-loving present with the more-than-life-sized past, the crude but heroic pioneers with their degenerated grandchildren. Like DeVoto, Abbey is afflicted with a vague anomie, an enervating paralysis of will. He tries to rescue himself by working with his hands, on the railroad. He sinks himself in the vicious pleasures of the “gang.” He is tied for a while to a sexy, mindless woman suspiciously like his injured memory of the brewer’s daughter. He is brought back to sanity by another young woman, one for whom he had thought he had no amorous feeling. There is a coltish girl who, though she is not given a major part, is reminiscent of Skinny. There are many secondary characters whom Ogdenites recognized, or thought they recognized.

  By the end of the novel, Gordon Abbey, saved both by his education and by the rediscovery of his “Abbey blood,” has pulled his feet out of the quicksand and is slapping down some Windsor weaklings in a dreams-of-glory fantasy. The elaborate, epigrammatic, overwitty tone of many of the conversations is the tone that Betty White heard from the front row of a Northwestern Freshman English class. And the hatred that Gordon Abbey feels for Windsor is also a reflection of DeVoto, justified more by h
is emotional state than by anything the commonplace, dull town has been guilty of. One can feel the author’s compulsion to despise the womb from which at great pain he has finally expelled himself, transferring to it, as hatred, the fear and self-doubt that are still his abiding emotions.

  Yet The Crooked Mile was an attempt at understanding, too, as well as a compulsive exorcism and self-justification. It not only contains a version of the Ogden-hating Bernard DeVoto, warped and disguised; it contains also a raisonneur, a somewhat cynical historian of the frontier named John Gale, whose quoted comments link western past and western present and suggest the degeneration from pirate pioneers to weakling Windsor. Windsor is no part of the mythic West, absolved from time and change. It is, despite its exaggerations, a real town, the product of a real historical development. Its pioneer miners, farmers, and railroad men are not glorified, except in terms of their energy. In Gale’s view, most of them were only one jump ahead of the sheriff. Yet their vitality lifts them above their descendants, as the clean spaciousness of the country they raped makes them and their motives seem mean and shoddy. The great shadows of Gordon Abbey’s arrogant grandfather and piratical father lie over the present. They have a masculine capacity for violence that Bernard DeVoto, aspiring to be a writer and afraid that writers were sissy, had always more than half admired and been tempted to imitate.

  A mixed book, more personal than it appeared to be, one that without being confessional was still revealing. It marked the beginning of a career that would be built upon experience in and knowledge of the West, and it contained the contradictory elements of impartial historical observation and personal emotional involvement that would first divide and finally enlarge his work. In The Crooked Mile, and indeed in all the fiction he ever wrote, DeVoto totally obliterated the Mormon issue. He saw the West largely, as the final act of a great continental drama, and he saw it through time, and he had a clear eye for distinguishing fact from myth. Knowing and understanding it was the task he had set himself at the beginning of his Ogden exile, in the summer of 1920. But the “God-awful emulsion” that was himself was still cloudy, it still stained what he poured it into, and would go on doing so whenever he essayed fiction. It would take him many years and a shift to another medium before he would bring himself fully to bear upon his chosen subject. That is to say, his work would remain murky so long as he himself was any part of his subject matter, even in disguise. But he did not know that yet; perhaps he never knew it.