The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  2 · In Print

  With an impatience not unknown among young novelists, he was trying to sell his book before he had written it. As yet he had no literary contacts in Chicago—in fact he never did become closely associated with any of the literary community there except Llewellyn Jones of the Chicago Post book page.1 The only publisher he knew even by mail was E. H. Balch, the man who had rejected Cock Crow. So in July he wrote Balch that he had another novel nearly done. Balch replied that he would be delighted to read it either for Putnam’s or for the new firm he was then organizing, to be called Minton, Balch & Co. But he waited a good while for the manuscript. It was the beginning of January before DeVoto put it in the mail.

  A writer who has submitted his book to a publisher is like a Victorian maiden exposing herself to the marriage market. The slightest hint of interest becomes a matter of speculation. Does he? Doesn’t he? Will he? Won’t he? And what did he mean by that lifted hat, that slight bow, that enigmatic smile? For a man of DeVoto’s temperament the suspense of waiting can be excruciating, especially when all the clues must come by mail. The sound of the postman’s steps, the tinny clink of the mailbox, bring him alertly out of his chair; the moment of searching through the envelopes for the one that never seems to come is suspense followed by letdown. The very first letter about Mirage demoralized them. Balch found the book overlong (How could I have said it any shorter?) and puzzling (Can’t the fool read?). He was going to try it on other readers.2

  For a solid month they waited, disgusted with the days when the mailman left nothing or dropped into their box no more than a letter from Michigan or Utah, and touched with stubborn gloom when he brought back unwanted one of the stories that Bernard kept sending around to the magazines. On February 23 they got the crusher: Putnam’s was rejecting the novel. But one glint of hope was in the final paragraph. Balch himself was not ready to give up on Mirage and was now having it read for his new firm. Almost abjectly, DeVoto wrote saying that he was very willing to revise. If they found something specifically wrong, he was confident he could fix it.

  But each new communication from Balch contained only another version of uncertainty. Some readers liked it, some did not. Some liked parts but not the whole. Some liked the dialogue, some found it strained and overelaborate. Some found the sexy passages too outspoken, some thought them a superb capturing of the modern mood. Most liked the historical and sociological solidity, some disliked the intrusions of John Gale. Balch had never known a novel to stir such contradictory responses. Have patience; he would try yet another reader.

  They had patience, or did their best to have, but they had less and less hope. DeVoto taught his classes and went two evenings a week into Chicago for his School of Commerce class, and wrote late and read later, and suffered from insomnia and sinusitis and migraines, and feared them as the precursors of something worse. It was two months, and then three, since Balch’s first, puzzled acknowledgment of the manuscript. Hope had died and mummified. And then a telegram. Minton, Balch was taking Mirage, with revisions. Letter followed.

  A decade or so later, instructing Catherine Drinker Bowen in the art of biography, in how to deal with events that the biographer is pretty sure of but can’t document, and in how to move from verifiable fact to imagination, DeVoto had a characteristically positive piece of advice: Put it in the subjunctive. Instead of writing, “He discussed the whole matter with his wife and came to his decision,” write, “He would have discussed the whole matter with his wife and come to his decision.” Easy.3 One may borrow the suggestion here. There would have been a party at the DeVoto apartment. Word would have got around by grapevine; young faculty friends such as Arthur Nethercot, Garrett Mattingly, Robert S. Forsythe, Ney McMinn, Bob Almy, would have dropped in with cheers and maybe with bottles of bathtub gin and hoarded pseudo bourbon. Favorite students would have got the news and come around. If there was ever liquor served to undergraduates at the DeVotos’ it would have been served that night. And if Bernard DeVoto ever felt the sweetness of justification and success and the support of true friends he would have felt it then.

  Two things in his immediate letters to Balch are interesting to his biographer. One is his query whether or not Balch would be embarrassed if DeVoto wrote some stories for The Saturday Evening Post.4 He still needed money, and he still hadn’t passed that test he had so confidently announced to Hurlbut. Later he would tell a lot of young writers that if they wanted to be writers of stories for the big slicks they had better make up their minds to devote about two years to learning the trade.5 In the spring of 1924 he was, by his own timetable, only halfway there, but the euphoria brought on by Balch’s telegram told him that sooner or later he would make it.

  The second interesting item in his letters is the confession that he was growing a mustache, an endeavor that Balch gravely encouraged. From here we may view the little Frenchified mustache that resulted as an effort by DeVoto, who had always thought himself unattractive but hoped he wasn’t, to meet his first public with his best face forward. There would have to be publicity photographs, and these would have made him uneasy, to put it subjunctively. Through the summer, which they again spent on Washington Island, he made the revisions Balch wanted, read the proofs, wrote some stories, and nourished the growth under his nose. He had some photographs taken, and sent them with self-depreciating words to Balch, who wrote back saying that DeVoto was too hard on his own appearance. None of us was a model of beauty; the photographs were fine.6 They were there on the jacket flap when Mirage, rechristened The Crooked Mile, came out in October. (“My God!” somebody reported Avis DeVoto as saying, studying years later those photographs in which Benny’s lip is jauntily screened. “He looks like an Armenian Jew!” She denies she ever said such a thing. “Matter of fact, I rather liked that mustache.”)

  What mattered more than youthful self-consciousness about his appearance was the fact that, for the first time, this young man intensely in search of an audience had found one and could consult its responses. He could take pleasure in the Boston Transcript,7 which thought his account of “the senseless round of pleasure that has ceased to be pleasure” excelled Fitzgerald’s, which praised his unswerving representation of reality both past and present, which commended his rejection of the sentimental myth of the pioneer, which valued the “new understanding of the West” that he provided. He could argue in his mind with the New York Times,8 which found his novel too long and its focus blurred, and agreed with some of Balch’s readers that the dialogue was too witty and tried too often for a “crushing finality.” It thought the novel “somewhat adolescent in its overwhelming cynicism,” but it gave him billing ahead of Aldous Huxley, Harry Leon Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris, and credited him with “acute penetration and virile creative ability,” certain to make before long a valuable contribution to American literature.

  When he looked closer to home, he found the Chicago papers praising him less cautiously, and he would not have cared if their judgment was impaired by a mild regional chauvinism. The Tribune9 said The Crooked Mile stood at the top of the fall novels, a book beside which “the novels of those bright young men, the Messrs. Fitzgerald, Benét, Hume et al., seem but the work of schoolboys.” And Llewellyn Jones of the Chicago Post Literary Review,10 making a bad guess, thought that DeVoto’s novel, if it was as successful as it deserved to be, might mark the end of the fashion that said all first novels must be autobiographical.

  All in all, he could not have thought the reception anything but encouraging. He got fan mail, he was denounced by Ogden readers who recognized their town, he achieved the grudging or respectful attention of some Northwestern people who had noticed him previously only because he was rumored to be radical. He was asked to autograph copies of his book at Lord’s, and he and Avis were invited to Janet Fairbank’s annual New Year’s party among writers, opera singers, artists, musicians, wealthy patrons, and influential press. DeVoto had to buy a dinner jacket for some function, that or another, for his old
Harvard tails (in his day Harvard men did have tails) were both too shabby and too formal.

  3 · The Mercury Mood

  The taste of a modest success doubled DeVoto’s addiction to work. What had been his defense against dread and depression was also the natural road for his ambition. His stories had had no luck with the Post or with any of the other national magazines he had sent them to, but he had placed one in a new Philadelphia little magazine called The Guardian, which brought it out in December 1924.1 At almost the same time, he became book editor for the Evanston News-Index, and in it published the first of the scores of book reviews he would write for that paper during the next three years. Other book-review editors had done their usual type-casting, and on the strength of The Crooked Mile he found himself an instant authority on the West. Llewellyn Jones had him review for the Chicago Post Frederic L. Paxson’s History of the American Frontier, and Henry Seidel Canby’s new magazine, The Saturday Review of Literature, sent him Stewart Edward White’s The Glory Hole. Both reviews appeared in December.2 Envious junior colleagues, stuck in the publish-or-perish treadmill of the university, must have commented on how one break could create others. Four bibliography items in a month! And a novel only two months ago! If they were thinking that way, and they probably were, why, so was Benny DeVoto.

  He had already begun a new novel. His ribald, askance view of Mormonism had not prevented him from indulging an interest in the pentecostal faiths. He had read a good deal about the Millerites, the Cumberland Baptists, the Shakers and the Methodist revivalists, the “burnt-over ground” of upper New York State where prophets and St. Johns and Messiahs had passed. He had pondered Joseph Smith, and he had met the descendants of revealed religion in person. He had also read William Dean Howells’ last novel, The Leatherwood God, which appeared in 1916, when DeVoto was a junior at Harvard, and he had felt that it did not do justice to a rich and most American theme. So this new novel reached back into the midwestern past to follow the career of a religious zealot with echoes of Joseph Dylkes and reminiscent of Peter Cartwright and not unlike Joseph Smith3 and with a family resemblance to a half dozen others whose lips had been touched with the hot coal of God’s message and who had galvanized frontier America’s apparently inexhaustible capacity for belief. Consciously or unconsciously, there had been a lot of Bernard DeVoto in The Crooked Mile. There was going to be less of him in this, and more of John Gale, the objective historian of the frontier.

  But a published book is a stone that its author throws ahead of him as he wades; his next step is often compelled by it, if only because editors in their restless search for talent do type-cast new writers and make snap judgments. In January 1925 DeVoto had a letter from Duncan Aikman, an editorial writer and book-review editor for the El Paso Times, inviting him to do, for a book that Aikman was editing, a chapter on the transformation of some frontier town from its original exuberance to its present Rotary dullness.4

  Theme and slant were predetermined. They had been in the making ever since Ed Howe had begun looking glumly about him in Atchison, Kansas, at the beginning of the 1880s, and they were reaching some sort of expression as gospel in The American Mercury, in 1925 less than a year old. DeVoto was in a mood to accept any commission offered him, but this was specially fitted to his hand. He accepted with pleasure. His home town, in which his father reported that John Spargo had sold a hundred copies of The Crooked Mile, not always to satisfied customers, was going to get it again.

  His essay, entitled “Ogden: The Underwriters of Salvation,”5 made specific what had been half disguised in The Crooked Mile, and brought into the open the Mormon-Gentile tensions that had had no place in the novel. DeVoto played no favorites: he knocked Mormon and Gentile indiscriminately. Ogden, which had once “shouted its maleness to the peaks,” had become a place of culture clubs and chiropractors and Keep Kool Kamps. Polygamy, which he thought had been overdiscussed, was breaking down before it was suppressed, but other things broke down just as fast. The color and power and authority of Brigham Young had declined to petty commercialism. Hostility toward the Gentiles had been dropped—it didn’t pay. The Homeric conflicts between the railroaders and the Mormons were over. No more of the rowdy and illicit elections by which the Irish had wrested a degree of power from the Church. In their place, conformity, dullness, and a concern for good business. Meanwhile the Mormon people, recruited from the dregs, remained artless, without refinements, afraid of ideas, without appreciation of the glorious mountains they lived among and polluted with their presence. Their smugness as a self-appointed Chosen People was insufferable. Their religion, which, however ridiculous, had once been a burning faith, had become a commercial system, and their President and his Apostles directors in a vast conglomerate corporation.

  Bald scorn and name-calling, with enough fact in it to make it uncomfortable. Aikman loved it; so did Balch, who was going to publish Aikman’s book. They sent DeVoto’s essay to Mencken, thinking he might want it for the Mercury. Mencken admired it but found it too long. Nevertheless, that contact would shortly open a door.

  Acceleration fed on itself; the harder he worked the harder he was driven to work. Outlining his standard week to Melville Smith early in 1925—four classes, each meeting three days a week, with lectures, papers, conferences, and examinations; two evenings a week at the School of Commerce; five evenings a week on his novel; two book reviews so far this week and another to be written as soon as he signed this letter—he reported with pride what some would have thought Grub Street drudgery. The reviews, most of them for the Evanston News-index and meagerly paid, were surely no part of his obligation to publish. They were by-products of his insomnia and his unexpended energy. During 1925 alone he wrote thirty-three for the News-Index besides ten for the Chicago Post and three for The Saturday Review of Literature.6 In all, between the end of 1924 and June 1927, he wrote seventy-nine identifiable reviews for the News-Index, many of them involving two or more titles. If the print shop was college for Howells, Mark Twain, and other frontier Americans whom he admired, the book-review page was graduate school for Bernard DeVoto. At odd moments, sliding in to his desk between the novel and some review, he worked on stories and essays.

  Yet, for all the frenzy of his effort, he worked against disappointment. His stories did not sell. No editor would take his Ogden essay for magazine publication. Despite its encouraging notices, The Crooked Mile was not a commercial success. Balch had optimistically run three small printings. Of these, twelve hundred copies had to be remaindered. Total sales were about three thousand, total earnings only a little more than five hundred dollars.7 And on May 5 Balch rejected unequivocally DeVoto’s second novel, The Burning Bush.

  Those humiliating failures made ambiguous and unsatisfying his return to Ogden in the summer of 1925, when he went back to claim the small inheritance that his grandfather Dye had left each of the grandchildren.8 He would have liked to go back—he who had left as a ridiculed nobody and a nervous wreck—on a note of triumph, able to let it be known that in three years he had become a successful college teacher and a published writer, a man spoken of respectfully in cities that made Ogden look like a prairie-dog town. He would have liked to show himself around town in his white feathers, with a beautiful young wife on his wing. Instead, though he did indeed have trophies to show off, he went with the rejected novel like a buried rebuke in his suitcase, and in his mind a compulsion, more burning than ever, to demonstrate himself, prove the indifferent wrong, produce something that could not be overlooked or ignored.

  His young wife had an uncomfortable few weeks of living in the house on Monroe Avenue among the eccentricities and half-exasperating, half-lovable contrarieties of Florian DeVoto. She met the Dye tribe, including Bernard’s favorite aunts, Mattie and Grace. She was shown off up and down the little city where they could not walk a block without encountering someone who remembered Benny with friendliness, curiosity, dislike, or derision. He would have (subjunctively) nursed in his heart the thought of wh
at the town would say when Aikman’s book came out in the fall, and regretted things that he had forgotten to mention, and thought of new ways to lay powder to the foundation of Ogden’s imperviousness. For the latter weeks of their stay they took a cottage up Ogden Canyon, and there, while Avis went walking with a pistol for fear of rattlesnakes, Bernard tinkered with The Burning Bush, now called The Great God Boggs, and brooded about another, the middle volume of the trilogy in which the unpublished Cock Crow was the first and The Crooked Mile the third. And he made notes for articles about the western past, which exhilarated him as much as the western present depressed him.

  One article he wrote as soon as they got back to Evanston. It arose out of Mencken’s interest in “Ogden: The Underwriters of Salvation,” and it said many of the same things in shorter and blunter terms. This time he took not Ogden but the whole state of Utah for his target. This time he was not going to blow up a sentry post, he was going to bring the whole fortification down. He finished it and sent it to Mencken, and Mencken took it with yells of delight. The booboisie had never been so vigorously thumped. Utah was fresh stuff, a far-flung and more comic version of the Bible Belt. His acceptance made it certain that DeVoto’s first substantial contribution to a national magazine, like his first novel and his first essay, would be an uninhibited attack on his amniotic home.