The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  The Henderson place, composed of several cottages scattered through the edge of the woods along the lake shore, had every advantage. DeVoto could remove himself from the household during writing hours, and there were separate quarters for the students and Cambridge friends and New York editors who dropped in and created an intermittent but enthusiastic version of the DeVoto Academy. They dropped in in some numbers, and some of them returned several times, for Morgan Center was only ten miles from Canada, and just across the line, in the town of Rock Island, was a provincial bottle shop full of such things as Americans had not seen for years, or had seen only in cut and adulterated forms or at exorbitant prices.

  The summer of 1931 was one long, bibulous picnic, either legitimate, on the Canadian shore of Lake Memphremagog, or bootlegged, on the shore of Lake Seymour. To one born in the West, where grass does not make a turf except in high mountain meadows, the cropped sward of a Vermont or Quebec pasture has a touch of the paradisaical about it as well as a reminder of boyhood trips into the wilderness. Though rains are frequent and often torrential in that country, which lies under the St. Lawrence storm track, the good days are like the good days in the western mountains. The light is intense, the deep sky is crossed by navies of fair-weather, strato-cumulus clouds, the horizons are cut with a diamond, the air has never before been breathed. And those days come so infrequently, between days of cloud and rain and violent thunderstorms, and are spaced through such a brief and fragile summer, that a man believes he deserves them and has a right, because of what else he has put up with, to enjoy them utterly.

  All together, it was a difficult place to be a compulsive worker, and the anxiety that so much of the time accompanied DeVoto’s industry was absent. “A magnificent summer of work and play,” he reported it later.5 He quit Mark Twain, or Americana Deserta, or the current potboiler, when weather or the spirit or the presence of friends moved him, and he spent many an afternoon trying to sample every sort and kind and vintage on the bottle shop’s shelves. An education that had been aborted by Prohibition had to be crammed into a very short time; an affectation of a masculine, rip-roaring, frontier familiarity with firewater got a chance to edge closer to reality and true afición. The biographer who watches DeVoto acquire the expertise of an accomplished drinker is irresistibly reminded of a photograph in his files showing Benny with several companions in the uniform of the Ogden High School ROTC, sitting around a table on which are bottles and glasses. On their faces, especially on the round, smooth face of young Benny DeVoto, is the clear and aggressive intimation that the contents of the bottles and glasses are straight alcohol cut with a little branch water and flavored with plug tobacco and are never taken in smaller quantities than three fingers, tossed down the hatch with a curt “Here’s how.”

  Their bootlegging activities, at first limited to the bringing back of bottles wired under the chassis or concealed in the toolbox or under the seats, acquired finesse and the possibility of continuance.6 A Vermont farmer, whom in several Easy Chairs DeVoto later made into a shrewd rustic philosopher called Eli Potter, had a farm in Derby Line, right on the border. His sugarbush merged with Canadian woods a long way from the road and the customs officers. In his many-pocketed canvas hunting coat Eli could carry fourteen forty-ounce imperial quarts, the equivalent of nearly two cases of U.S. fifths. During the summer, he made a good many trips on behalf of the DeVoto establishment, and before they returned to Cambridge they made arrangements to have him make as many more as their needs required. A letter to Eli, a short wait while he made his little journey, a notification in code to Cambridge, and the Quebec and Southeast Transportation Company, composed usually of DeVoto and either George Homans or Emery Trott,7 would drive up and assume proprietorship of what Eli had gathered together.

  If he had calculated it, which he surely did not, DeVoto could have found no quicker way to certain Harvard hearts. Whenever he made a trip to Vermont, the word got around and he had more friends than Mayor Curley on the day after election. And he was generous; he gave of his substance and of Eli’s dependable services. A man with access to good, inexpensive liquor was a natural aristocrat, attended by the warmest and most admiring vibrations. Drama and mystery were his companions, good cheer his consequence. He made and inspired lively talk; he dispensed with a free hand. pœt wœs god cyning. He was as visible as a pillar of fire, and like a pillar of fire he came by night. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who would later be a favorite student of DeVoto’s and later still one of his most active allies and admirers and coadjutors, was in the fall of 1931 a high school boy of fourteen. He first saw DeVoto when on several occasions through that fall and the ensuing winter he brought packages to the door. Young Schlesinger thought for a good while that he was the family bootlegger.

  One further consequence of the summer in Morgan Center remained to be completed after DeVoto’s return. It was an essay that was less essay than hymn, its subject New England and New Englanders, especially Vermont and Vermonters. It appeared in Harper’s in March 1932, under the title “New England: There She Stands,”8 and it did DeVoto’s growing reputation no harm in Cambridge and Boston. What was perhaps more important, it caught the eye of Robert Frost, who found in it some of his own response to New England, and who particularly liked DeVoto’s celebration of the independent farmer, above welfare and the dole and government programs, keeping his family and his self-respect on three hundred hard-earned dollars a year.

  That was Frost’s first awareness of Bernard DeVoto. Their meeting, several years later, would lead to a quick and intense friendship, mutual admiration, an alliance of two notable dissenters against the welfare world. The friendship would end in a bitter and destructive quarrel.

  When “New England: There She Stands” appeared, DeVoto’s first meeting with Frost was still three years away. DeVoto did not need Frost to confirm his addiction. The summer of 1932, he and his family again spent in Vermont, this time in Peacham, and he closed out the summer with two weeks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, up the mountain from Middlebury. While he was still teaching there, Avis took young Gordon and went down-country to supervise the moving of their effects from 10 Mason Street to a big old house on Weston Road, in Lincoln. An eclipse of the sun accompanied the move—an omen that Benny, accustomed from a Utah boyhood to the importance of signs and wonders, might have made something dreadful of. He would have been wrong. There was never a more misleading omen. Lincoln brought the DeVotos to the realization of something long dreamed of.

  They arrived in the new house at almost the exact moment when Mark Twain’s America appeared in the bookstores: that is to say, they achieved the perfect place to live at precisely the moment when DeVoto finally broke through the literary barriers into a state of importance. His book, which was in many ways an amplified and documented version of his attack on the Young Intellectuals (though it was much more), was challenging, even truculent. It aroused an anticipated amount of indignation in the rooms where it had been wired to go off. But it aroused also real admiration, respectful discussion, serious consideration, frequent enthusiasm. He had struck out by himself, against the fashionable currents, and he had found an audience waiting.

  For him or against him, people did not ignore this one. They paid attention to it as they had paid attention to none of his novels.

  4 · Bernardo Furioso

  From Hell to Nome the blow went home where the cockroach struck his foe,

  From Nome to Hell the mongeese yell as they see the black blood flow;

  The hawsers snort from the firing port as the conning chains give way

  And the chukkers roar till they rouse the boar on the hills of Mandalay;—

  And the cockroach said as he tilted his head: Now luff, you beggars, luff!

  Begod, says he, it’s easy to see ye cannot swallow my duff!

  I have tickled ye, I have pickled ye, I have scotched your mizzen brace,

  And the charnel shark in the outer dark shall strip the nose from your face�
��

  Begod, says he, it’s easy to see that the Narrow Seas are mine,

  So creep ye home to your lair at Nome and patch your guts with twine!

  Begod (says he) it’s easy to see who rules this bloody bight—

  So come ye again, my merry men, whenever ye thirst for fight.

  Don Marquis, The Hero Cockroach

  To the skeptical eye of hindsight, much of what are called “critical opinion” and the history of ideas are records of fad and fashion. Intellectuals have a distressing tendency to run in pack like other mortals. Strange manias and fevers, caught sometimes from men of genius, sometimes from charlatans and mountebanks, infect them and are spread by them to the outermost edges of the society. And what arrives at their door humble often goes forth proud; what is caught as German measles is communicated as rubella, a disease to be treated with greater respect because the elite have dignified it with their infection and their terminology.

  Schools of thought can be as unanimous, and in their way as impressive, as schools of herring. Perhaps it is a demonstration of the open mind that the history of so many fads—phrenology, utopianism, Technocracy, the Back to Nature movement, ecology—so often begins with the conversion of an elite. Perhaps it was open-mindedness that drove Katherine Mansfield to Gurdjieff and the salutary exhalations of cows. Perhaps it is the open mind that welcomes onto contemporary college campuses and among the literary every sort of eccentricity from the New Left to glossolalia, from Encounter techniques to macrobiotic diets, from Skinner to Reich, from Ayn Rand to occultism. The observable fact is that the cultivated catch these drifting contagions about as readily as do the unlearned, whose open-mindedness is known among the intellectuals as gullibility.

  Which should not surprise us. Like the rest of us, intellectuals and literary people desire to be in, and being more aware than most, they have a lively eye for what it means to be in, and whom it is desirable to be in with. Sometimes, as among contemporary New York critical cliques, the motive is frankly the search for power and influence—“making it,” in the phrase of one of them. Sometimes it is a wistful search for conviction, certainty, and the security of an accepted system of belief. In either case, the seekers generally fasten upon a leader who is a system maker, and create a coterie around him. He is often a man of stature, larger than his followers, less doctrinaire, more flexible, but eventually he is likely to suffer from the reaction of those who rebel against the excesses of his followers. Robert Frost used to joke that he could stand the big Kittredge but not all the little ca’tridges. But the little ca’tridges cannot be dismissed without damaging the big Kittredge, for it is his convictions, reduced to absurdity or distorted out of proportion or clung to after he himself has outgrown them, that give the coterie and the movement its character.

  Van Wyck Brooks was that kind of intellectual leader. Though throughout his life he demonstrated an admirable capacity to learn and grow, a true open-mindedness that steadily enlarged his books and his opinions, it was his early, passionate, oversimplified and underdocumented convictions about America that created his following and made him an influence. He taught the young intellectuals of a whole generation not only that Puritanism and Commercialism had combined to degrade American aspiration and thwart American artists, but that critics with a message, leaders of thought, could halt or reverse that trend. In particular, the “great gas-lighted barbarity” that Baudelaire thought had killed Poe was very real to the early Brooks. In his view, it had killed many more than Poe; it had killed virtually everyone who had tried to be an artist in America.

  Neither in its view of the past nor in its view of the future, its confirmed distaste nor its implicit perfectionism, was the idea new. It is absolutely central to Tocqueville’s report on La Démocratie en Amérique. It fills the pages of a whole library of British travelers in America. From the Revolution onward, statesmen, critics, and apologists saw America devoting itself to the practical business of investing a new continent, and necessarily neglecting the arts.1

  What Brooks and his followers added, or emphasized, was that this neglect, often excused as temporary and necessary, was in fact the failure of a civilization, and that only leadership by the high-minded and culturally mature could save it. The American Dream thus far had been shoddy and a fake; we needed to redream democracy in more elevated forms. “It is nothing less than the effort to conceive a new world,” says Lewis Mumford at the end of The Golden Day. “Allons! the road is before us!”2 Meanwhile, looking backward, the Young Intellectuals were saddened by the stream of American artists maimed or thwarted or only half fulfilled, victims of a society without soul or spiritual aspiration and of a country with a distressing lack of cathedrals.

  The thesis of America’s previous social, cultural, and even political inadequacy had already been developed in America’s Coming-of-Age (1915) and Letters and Leadership (1918), and had been enthusiastically overstated in Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919), before Brooks undertook to psychoanalyze Mark Twain in search of the source of the black pessimism, the “deep malady of the soul … a malady common to many Americans,” that surfaced in his later years. Brooks felt that there was “a reason for that chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt.” He thought it was “an established fact … that these morbid feelings of sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one’s nature,” and that “that bitterness of his was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life.”3

  Hunting the root cause, Brooks found Jane Clemens. “Had she been catholic in her sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he could eventually have recovered his balance.”4 But instead, because she was “the embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved so favorable to the life of enterprising action,” she looked upon his mischievousness, imagination, and love of adventure (his creative nature) as manifestations of “sin.”5 And she put them all down firmly when, after the death of Sam’s father, she led the boy in beside his father’s coffin and in a dreadful, tearful scene made him promise to be a good boy. Then, having marked his soul, she apprenticed him to Ament, the printer, and started him on the road to conformity and mediocrity.

  For a brief while in Sam’s young manhood, the Brooks thesis went, he was whole, for his career as river pilot was an expression of his artistic aspiration of which, in that society, he need not be ashamed. But the division that Jane Clemens had started in him was widened by the experiences of Virginia City and San Francisco, where he was first lured to a frantic and vulgar scramble to get rich and was later reduced to taking a shameful job as newspaper reporter and frontier funny man.6 Then, having made his mark with a “barbarous backwoods anecdote,” he came East, and Olivia Langdon, William Dean Howells, Richard Watson Gilder, and the genteel conventionalities of Hartford completed what his mother and the frontier had made inevitable. Meekly he yielded up his artistic integrity (if Brooks had been just a little more Freudian he would have said his testicles); meekly he submitted to the cleaning up of his language and his ideas. He became the sort of success his mother could approve, and not the artist he had been meant to be. His bewildered soul was crucified between two thieves, Puritan frontier vulgarity and eastern gentility. Even his literary name, “Mark Twain,” in pilot’s language meant “safe water.”

  This capitalist and playboy of letters, this desperate amateur, never rose to the conception of literature “as a great impersonal social instrument.” His social indignation, evading American realities, was profitably diverted to safe targets—monarchy, seventh-century England, medieval France—or spent itself in silly attacks on
the Presbyterian Sunday School, or emerged as the sophomoric pessimism of “What Is Man?” an exposure of something already well exposed. Only when he found his way back to the river of his childhood, and could escape to that boyhood idyl, was he anything close to what he should have been.

  Thus Van Wyck Brooks, applying to America’s greatest writer the thesis developed by the Young Intellectuals in the years preceding World War I and made compulsory after the war, when, as Malcolm Cowley says, they seized power in the literary world precisely as the Bolsheviks had seized it in Russia.7

  Bernard DeVoto had been aware of that thesis throughout his thinking life—America’s Corning-of-Age had coincided with his transfer to Harvard College, and The Ordeal of Mark Twain had coincided with his graduation—and he had watched it through the war years, when its socialist and pacifist bias got it into trouble, and on into the postwar years, when it merged with and to some extent directed a many-sided revolt. Child of his times, DeVoto had been part of that revolt, had been as rabid a spurner of the soulless village, the W.C.T.U., the repression, conservatism, and censorship in American life as any Young Intellectual. His difference was that his rebellion was selective. He was truly a dissenter; he did not run in pack, even in revolt. He had the instincts of a middle linebacker who loves contact, and he had certain abiding convictions of his own. One was that the literary critics deluded themselves when they thought they could direct social change. They could only report it, and they had better learn to report more than the literary aspects of society if they wanted to avoid absurdity. Another of his convictions he had learned from Pareto: that any society exhibited continuities, which Pareto called “residues,” and that it was extremely easy to confuse a temporary modification or rationalization of one of these—a “derivation” in the Pareto jargon—with true change.