The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  For several years beginning with 1938, The Crumb’s final issue, called The Last Crumb, contained a portfolio of caricatures by Inga Pratt, Fletcher’s wife. They are amused and amusing, witty, done with affectionate malice whose intent was to rib, not to wound. Yet in DeVoto’s case they may have unintentionally wounded. For one thing, no one could caricature DeVoto’s face without drawing attention to features about which he was sensitive. For another, those cartoons inevitably emphasized and exaggerated the vehemence of his public image. In one he steams and erupts and throws up rocks as “the only live volcano in Vermont.”39 In another he glowers from a pile of bones as “Ferocious Utah mountain lion, ‘Ad Hoc,’ tearing an author to bits.”40

  The role was one he rather cultivated, but he really, as often as not, felt friendly toward those he destroyed. It was only ideas that aroused his rage, and his public rage was therefore half theatrical, a show to make the safe and uninjured and even some of the victims twitter with half-scared pleasure. He expected his hearers to observe the heart of gold the ogre had sewn on his sleeve. Sometimes they did not. Occasional clients left the mountain full of bitterness, destroyed in their self-love and nursing a grudge at some staff member, more often than not DeVoto. There were the occasional Gladys Hasty Carrolls, who looked with distaste upon his Beowulfian revelry. And when these could not be observed, they could be imagined. In his down periods there were always DeVoto-haters off in the penumbra where he could not quite see. In the 1940s, when his friendship with Frost deteriorated into grievance and suspicion, “the bloody membrane of personalities” became so unbearable to him that from 1942 to 1946 he did not go at all.

  In his way, he had tried to make Bread Loaf into a literary New Jerusalem, a perfected society of writers and teachers, with appropriate numbers of admirers and learners, and like other New Jerusalems it fell short of the dream. The admiration and applause of the great majority of the customers, and the consistent loyalty of the fiction team, could not quite drown out the hiss of someone’s hurt feelings or the heard or suspected mutter of malice in some corner where he had expected a friend. Nor could it drown out the weary, honest inward voice that told him he was himself sometimes to blame. Without intending to, he went on alienating people. Myself am hell. He brought the worm with him to the Bread Loaf Eden, hidden in the apple—the same old troubling, troubled worm.

  But disenchantment was a long way in the future, not even dreamed of or feared, during the years from 1932 to 1936, when DeVoto, from his three New England bases, in Lincoln, Cambridge, and Bread Loaf, was harrying the retreating literary faddists of the twenties, assaulting the literary and political faddists of the thirties head on, and trying to teach the Americans something about America.

  6 · Lincoln, Mass.

  In We Accept with Pleasure, DeVoto has his character Ted Grayson, an assistant professor of American history at Northwestern, rage against the shabby Evanston flat entered by way of the kitchen, the meals out of tin cans, the threadbare clothes, the absence of any gaiety and diversion in the life he is able to offer his wife, Libby. Since the Graysons are in some ways closely modeled on the young Bernard DeVotos, that discontent with shabbiness, that wistful envy of colleagues who have private incomes or more secure jobs, whose wives wear silk and new warm coats, and whose houses contain paneled studies lined with books and equipped with cabinets stocked with good bourbon and distinguished brandy, may be taken as a reasonably precise statement of the DeVoto state of mind during his midwestern years. But when DeVoto had written Hurlbut in 1922, expressing his hope that someday he would be able to live and write in a small New England community, he had had in mind no such place as the house in Lincoln. A fairy godmother could not have provided better.

  It had exactly the right combination of amplitude and casualness; living in it, DeVoto could feel like a country squire, prominent, openhanded, a good provider, capable of hospitality, without the least necessity for side. A great, white, green-shuttered square with seventeen rooms, five bathrooms, eight fireplaces, two great living rooms, a study as large as either, a huge kitchen with a maid’s sitting room off it, an acre of land with fruit trees, a huge barn, and a little concrete swimming pool, it sat across the street from the Pierce House, now a National Landmark—a contemporary copy of the Longfellow House in Cambridge. On every side were open fields, lanes, stone walls, space; right next door was a toboggan hill; all winter the snow stayed white, all summer they had openness, fresh air, the coolness of lawns and swimming pool. There was no longer the need for a summer escape to the country: they lived in the midst of escape.

  Almost without their perceiving it, a degree of affluence had sneaked up on them. Because the bad summer of 1929 had used up their only securities, the stock market crash meant little to them except that the cost of living dropped and kept dropping. DeVoto had established dependable markets and a high pay scale, and he had no trouble writing enough to keep them in comparative luxury. Their house cost one hundred dollars a month—a single Post story would pay the rent for more than a year.1 In the best tradition of the Yankee squire, they had an Irish maid and a man who came every week to keep up the yard and fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Though he was not, and never had been, a man of hobbies and handicrafts, DeVoto in his euphoria generated a desire for the hobbies appropriate to his condition, with results that might have been foretold. The personal garden that he planted and cultivated and guarded from the woodchucks with a .22 grew some radishes that he allowed no one to pick until they were woody and inedible. The raccoons got the sweet corn, the cutworms enjoyed the carrots. No matter. Pleasure is not measured by its edible fruits. Similarly the workbench in the basement (he had a carpenter come in and build it) was there not for the construction of bookcases and end tables but for the contentment of having it there.

  His real work, as always, was done in the study. His relaxation came not from any craftsy hobby (though he became a proficient photographer) but from a social life that was various and incessant.

  Their Lincoln neighbors tended toward aloofness and Republicanism, but their Cambridge friends made neighbors unnecessary. They came out by the carload—Ted and Kay Morrison, Robert and Dorothy Hillyer, Kenneth and Laurette Murdock, Hans and Ruby Zinsser (Zinsser sometimes rode over on a retired circus horse), MacLeish, Charles Curtis, the Schlesingers, once in a while Henderson. Students and ex-students made the place a country headquarters and refuge. George Homans, Bob Bailey, aspiring writers, Advocate and Signet boys, student historians, gravitated to this newest version of the DeVoto Academy, so much ampler and gayer than ever before. Henry Reck, whose sister had been Avis’ friend back in Michigan and whose brother had married Sarah Margaret Brown of the Northwestern crowd, came down often from Dartmouth, where he was an undergraduate.

  Because there was a child in the house, their entertainment ran sometimes to blowing soap bubbles, roasting marshmallows and chestnuts in the fireplaces, and parlor tricks like trying to sit on a milk bottle. Often when Gordon was handed over to Hannah, the maid, they sang around the grand piano that someone had loaned Avis. Ballads, Gilbert and Sullivan, Tin Pan Alley, they sang their heads off, even Benny, who was tone deaf and hesitant about raising his voice in a crowd unless there was someone in it with a voice like George Homans’ that drowned out all harmony and disharmony together. If they sang too late or drank too much, there were plenty of bedrooms. And if argument sometimes ran hot among them, so did friendliness and generosity. Henry Reck remembers a time when some lady guest unhappily knocked over and broke an expensive glass. She hardly had time to protest her chagrin before DeVoto threw his own glass down on the floor beside hers, mingling their fragments and absolving her sin.2 What a gesture! said awed young Reck.

  He would have opportunity to witness others, and to know the DeVotos more intimately than even their closest friends knew them. A house made for a large family is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It asks to be filled as naturally as water seeks its own level or freeways generate traffic. Flori
an DeVoto, sick, old, and alone, looked after by a housekeeper who he swore robbed him blind, had been a financial and emotional drain on them for several years. In the summer of 1933 they brought him east to Lincoln, and he lived with them until he died,3 generous, implacably contrary, likable in spite of himself, complaining all the time that the Ogden hospital had given him diabetes but refusing to stay on any diet, going around in coat and scarf in the hottest weather and wandering outside in his shirt sleeves in blizzards, refusing to shave for days and then suddenly wanting to be taken in to the barber, insisting crabbedly that his body had special properties, and that if he fell into the swimming pool he would sink like a stone. He was a handful, and wistful, and they felt he was often lonely, and so the next summer, when Henry Reck graduated from Dartmouth and found mid-Depression America bare of jobs, he too came to live with the DeVotos, acting as typist, driver, general factotum, and male nurse. Until Florian DeVoto’s death, on September 30, 1935, Reck conducted a running feud with the old man about baths, which he detested. Once, having got him down to his long underwear, drawn the bath, and shut the bathroom door on him, Reck listened outside to the obedient sounds of splashing until, growing suspicious, he opened the door again and found his patient, gimlet-eyed, truculent, and dourly amused, sitting on the edge of the tub, still in his underwear, paddling one hand in the water with intent to deceive.

  An active household. “Goodness, we had fun!” says Avis, remembering Lincoln as the best years of her life. And goodness they worked, and read, and talked. DeVoto’s enthusiasms and antipathies dominated them. He was no Socrates, slyly evoking error and fallacy in order to direct discussion to ultimate truth. He steered them, especially the young and impressionable among them, toward the matters that preoccupied him and the intellectual attitudes natural to him: toward realism, skepticism, and the inductive method, and the books and writers who were realistic, skeptical, and inductive; toward American social history, frontier folkways, the continental energies of the westward movement; toward Pareto, on whom L. J. Henderson that winter began leading a seminar that lasted for two years, and that included, of the Lincoln regulars, DeVoto, Zinsser, Homans, and Curtis. Not even DeVoto challenged Henderson, whose prejudices were untouchable; but anyone else who came at DeVoto smelling of intellectual systems, a priori conclusions, aestheticism, proletarianism, literary Marxism, or the deductive certainties of the Young Intellectuals got his feet knocked from under him.

  As usual, he wrote, most of the time with confidence, a good part of the time for money, a certain amount of the time for the purpose of proving up on areas he had already homesteaded. Between the publication of Mark Twain’s America and September 1936, when his life turned an abrupt corner, he produced eighteen stories, all but three for the Post and Collier’s, and one ten-part Collier’s serial. For purposes other than money he wrote one serious novel, eighteen serious articles and one story for Harper’s, plus three essays for other magazines, and seventeen reviews, most of them on books central to his interests.4 Not an inordinately productive four years, as DeVoto years went. He was teaching half time (the second semester of 1935–36 full time) and giving a chunk of every summer to Bread Loaf. Besides, he was diverted in a hundred ways by the seethe of the Harvard mind and the bubble of Harvard gossip, and he was living the good life in Lincoln. Such as they are—and they would have strained most full-time writers—the productions of those years express him. They were a part, some of them an important part, of his consolidation of personality and field and status and place.

  The popular fiction we may ignore, as he did himself except when belligerently asserting the legitimacy of professionalism. But several aspects of his activity during those four years are worth at least a brief look. These were his flirtation with Pareto, his related ruminations about the West, his novel We Accept with Pleasure, and the beginning of his correspondence with Kate Sterne.

  7 · Seminar on Pareto

  As early as March 1928 DeVoto was expressing enthusiasm for Vilfredo Pareto’s Traité de Sociologie Générale, “the hardest boiled book I have ever read.” “Three times, since I passed my puberty, has my mind been made over. Once by a nexus of which Henry Adams was the center, once by a matrix of which Frazer burned brightest, and once by a long study of genetics and evolution. Pareto is doing the job a fourth time, and far more vitally than any of the others.”1

  It is not clear just where or when he discovered Pareto, but in view of L. J. Henderson’s later prominence in the Pareto group at Harvard, it is a fair guess that DeVoto either encountered him in Henderson’s history-of-science course in 1919–20 or was encouraged to read him by Henderson after the DeVotos moved to Cambridge in the fall of 1927. The French version of the Trattato, the only really available edition until the English translation by Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston was published in 1935,2 appeared in 1917, and so could have been an item on Henderson’s reading list. But the freshness of DeVoto’s enthusiasm in the spring of 1928 (“Pareto is doing the job a fourth time”) makes it seem likely that he had then just recently come across him. It does not matter. Whoever introduced him to Pareto was pander to an intellectual crush that burned hotly for several years, at least until late in 1934, before it moderated into an influence. In the Italian engineer-turned-economist-turned-sociologist, DeVoto thought he found a method that did not war with common sense and that allowed a degree of scientific precision in the study of society. He never called it a gospel; it was a method only, a tool, and it resulted not in ultimate truths but in approximations subject to correction. That was precisely the reason for its persuasiveness. It avoided the ex-cathedra certainties that he objected to in the Young Intellectuals. It made the Marxists look like children fascinated by shadows and ignorant of what cast them. When applied to the study of American history it clarified many things and reconciled apparent contradictions.

  It might not be a gospel—it was an enthusiasm in the direction of skepticism rather than in the direction of belief—but he felt about it the zeal of a discoverer. It is permissible to guess that he was drawn to it all the more strongly because the literary had neglected it—it came from the scientific line, not the literary—and because it confuted them. He did his best to compensate for others’ neglect: he urged Pareto upon his Harvard tutees and promoted him among his friends. He wrote labeled Paretian doctrines into Mark Twain’s America, asserting frontier America as a dynamic equilibrium among complex energies including such irrational energies as Manifest Destiny; and he found in Brooks’s yearning for a perfected cultural life only an old American lust for perfection rationalized and given a different terminology—a “residue,” as Pareto would have called it, rationalized into a “derivation.”

  It was probably Henderson who suggested the Pareto seminar that began in the fall of 1932 and ran for two academic years.3 Certainly it was he who organized and dominated it. But it was DeVoto’s immediate circle that provided many of its participants and much of its enthusiasm. Zinsser, Homans, and Curtis were close friends and members of the DeVoto Academy—a bacteriologist, a sociologist, and a lawyer temporarily lecturing on sociology at Harvard. In addition, the group that met every week in the Common Room of Winthrop House included Crane Brinton, another historian friend of DeVoto’s; Elton Mayo, then a professor in the business school; Talcott Parsons, then an instructor in sociology; Robert Merton, then a graduate student, later, like Parsons, a distinguished professor of social science; and Joseph Schumpeter, then newly transplanted to the Harvard Economics Department from the University of Bonn.

  They were a bunch of Harvard professors playing, out of working hours, a characteristic Cambridge intellectual game. But they played it with more than casual interest and persistence; these were, we should remember, Depression years, and every thinking mind from Harvard professors such as these to the “bughouse intellectuals” of the blue-shirted classes was in the library reading books and trying to determine what had happened to America. On many members of the seminar Pareto e
xercised an enduring influence. Talcott Parsons’ career as a sociologist took direction from those meetings, in which Henderson, pink-bearded, weak-chinned, reedy-voiced, and strong-minded, expounded sections of Pareto’s vast treatise, and the group discussed them. In 1934 Curtis and Homans published an Introduction to Pareto, dedicated to Henderson.4 Henderson himself, a year later, produced Pareto’s General Sociology.5 And DeVoto, beginning with the April 22, 1933, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, flung Pareto as a challenge into the teeth of the New York intellectuals, many of them criers of doomsday, some of them New Dealers frantically tinkering with the social and economic machinery to make it run, some of them Depression Marxists clamoring for thoroughgoing change and denying that it could be achieved through democratic means.