The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  She did so because she was literary. For the same reason, Lewis Mumford selected the boundaries of his Golden Day to match his preconceptions. Others, with different preconceptions, outlined other Golden Days. For the same reason, Ludwig Lewisohn chased the Puritan through all American experience and found him behind every tree and in every buffalo wallow. For the same reason, V. F. Calverton had recently hunted the Class Struggle through the same territory, and found it as infallibly. None of them had been right about the American past, because they simplified it, nor about the frontier, because instead of being the personified thing they said it was, it had been forty different frontiers spread across three centuries and inhabited by hundreds of different kinds of people, with different levels of education and culture and with contradictory aims and impulses. “The past of America,” said DeVoto, “is immensely complex and immensely at war with itself. No unity exists in it. Its discords and contradictions cannot be harmonized. It cannot be made simple. No one can form it into a system, and any formula that explains it is an hallucination.”

  Those opinions, perhaps Paretian as to source, would seem to raise impossible difficulties in the path of the historian. If you cannot reduce historical events to some kind of system or order, how do you write about them? You cannot have a bag of marbles without a bag. And you cannot handle them loose. In his later historical works, DeVoto struggled with the difficulty of representing complex and interrelated variables in an effort to approximate the complexity of truth. He had already experimented with the method he called “history by synecdoche” in “Footnote on the West” and in the opening chapter of Mark Twain’s America, utilizing symbolic unifications and conducting narratives meant to appear simultaneous. He would try something of the same sort in the novel We Accept with Pleasure.

  But full achievement of history by synecdoche and the method of multiple focus was still in the future. During the Lincoln years he contented himself with announcing what biography and history should not be, with denouncing those who he thought approached them irresponsibly, and with praising a few books (Schlesinger’s The Rise of the City, Constance Rourke’s American Humor, Forsythe on Melville, C. Hartley Grattan on Henry James, and surprisingly, F. O. Matthiessen on Sarah Orne Jewett) that he thought gave historical facts and historical personages the respect they deserved. In his review of Schlesinger6 as well as in a Forum essay called “The Rocking Chair in History and Criticism,”7 he applauded the patient devotion to facts that marked the best historians, and cheered the social historians’ recognition of the interdependence of forces, the interpenetration of change and stability.

  Complexity, he kept saying. Facts. Relationships. Hypotheses. Contradictions. Tentative synthesis kept open to modification or reversal. Not the honeypots of assumption and doctrine. Not “must have been,” but “was.”

  While he was asserting, perhaps more stringently than he himself was prepared to follow them, the general principles of the historian’s creed, he was busy examining the complexities of the West that he had known. He did this, during the Lincoln period, in three principal essays: “Jonathan Dyer, Frontiersman,”8 “The West: A Plundered Province,”9 and “Fossil Remnants of the Frontier.”10 Recapitulations and reconsiderations of material that he had written in acid in his first published essays, they are of a different tone and a higher stature than those early efforts. They have lost the compulsion to get even with his birthplace for personal humiliations. If they contain corrections about western stereotypes, they make them without rancor. If they stress the complexity, diversity, and contradictions of frontier society, they do so without the need to ridicule the ignorant. If they involve DeVoto himself, as two of them do, they do so without bitterness or self-assertion, and they make his personal experience brilliantly illuminate the ways in which a place and a society, even a half-formed one, can influence and mold individuals.

  Of those three essays, the first is an affectionate and respectful biography of his Mormon grandfather, Samuel Dye, under the pseudonym of Jonathan Dyer. The second is an economic analysis of the West as a colonial dependency of the East. The third is an examination of residual frontier influences in DeVoto’s boyhood surroundings. Together, they do in non-fictional (and much more persuasive) terms the portrait of Ogden that he attempted fictionally in The Crooked Mile and The House of Sun-Goes-Down. They point out how much co-operation was absolutely necessary for survival in the arid West that the stereotype called ruggedly individualistic, how much curious learning lay around in any frontier and postfrontier community, how the frontier that convention called a safety valve was actually the source of much American radicalism and unrest, how it was not to be considered separately from the civilization whose fringe it was, because it was that heterogeneous civilization randomly transported to the wilderness. Those essays are eloquent, persuasive, and good-humored. In them, more than in his fiction, DeVoto went home again and made his peace.

  Closely examined, he was not unlike the aesthetes and exiles of whom Malcolm Cowley wrote. Though he had not overtly espoused the religion of art, he had harbored an acute literary ambition. If he had not escaped from America, he had surely escaped from Ogden, and not without the castration complex and fugue that he attributed to the aesthetes. If he hadn’t hunted the ampler life in Paris, he had hunted and found it in Cambridge. He had achieved his stability, such as it was, by the same means he had called attention to in his review of Cowley: by a spiritual return to the place fled from, and by affiliation with a group. In DeVoto’s case it was neither the workers nor the Communist Party that gave him sanctuary and security. It was the American system, including the American past, seen as steadily and whole as he could see it. The affiliation would condition all his future writing. The four essays in which he indirectly announced it, essays as good as anything he ever wrote, were an index of his growing security in Cambridge as well as of the maturing of his mind.

  9 · Pen Pal

  In the summer of 1933, just before the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the mail brought DeVoto a fan letter praising one of his potboilers, “The Home Town Mind,” in the April Post, a story about a newspaper reporter in a western town. The lady who praised it had until recently been writing art criticism for the New York Times, and she thought she could spot a real newspaperman when she read about one.

  Ordinarily DeVoto would have acknowledged the communication with a polite, humorous note. He always acknowledged such letters, all his life, even when they came in at the rate of a dozen or two a day. This time, because the Katharine Sterne who liked his story introduced herself as a tuberculosis patient in a Saranac sanitarium, he answered with one of the impulsive generous gestures that trouble so often evoked from him. From Bread Loaf, on August 23, he sent her a copy of Mark Twain’s America, saying she was entitled, if she was going to read him, to read his best instead of his Post stories. She read the book promptly and wrote him about it. He replied from Lincoln on September 7. She replied to his reply the day she received it. Before their correspondence was over, something more than six hundred letters would pass between them.1

  Everything about her as she revealed herself in her letters, attracted him. For one thing, she was young—only twenty-five. For another, she was desperately ill. For still another, she fronted her illness and its gloomy prospects and all the grisly details of the Saranac hospital with a spirit that was bright, gay, playful, humorous, and unfailingly intelligent. She was a Wellesley graduate, she had had some years in New York galleries and magazines and on the Times, she was a city girl but she had spent winters in Phoenix as a child. She was Catholic and had attended a nuns’ school. She was sophisticated, irreverent, plain-spoken, modern, a nice girl who was nice out of character and not out of ignorance. Though she never said so in her letters, she sounded pretty; a homely girl could not have written that way.

  And she was imprisoned, seriously ill, starved for talk. She adopted him, expressed an interest in his writings and his friends and his reputation. She wondere
d why John Chamberlain, a friend of hers, should have compared him with Gustavus Myers,2 and DeVoto replied, with a sardonic glance at his public reputation as an ogre, that Myers’ book on the great American fortunes “would have been so much better if I’d done it, for Myers suffers from chronic indignation and sometimes the facts don’t come through the blood pressure.”3 He sent her a copy of MacLeish’s Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City; he took her advice about what artists to look at, and where to catch an exhibit of the photographs of Paul Strand. When she asked him why he had been kicked out of Northwestern, as she had heard, he said he had not been kicked out, he had been appalled out, and went into detail,4 thus beginning the habit of autobiographical narrative that runs through the letters of the next eleven years.

  Up to that point, their correspondence was still casual and amused, like the conversation of a couple of people thrown together at a cocktail party, and might have been broken off by any slight event or by the pressures of a busy schedule. But in mid-October Kate Sterne wrote him a letter from the depths,5 a letter full of dissatisfaction with herself for her “intellectual floppiness” and for a character that had been misformed by unmarried aunts, her father’s indifference to her, the lesbian atmosphere of a Catholic girls’ school, the aggressive broad-mindedness of her father’s mistress. Into the chatty inconsequentiality of their correspondence, that confessional, self-critical letter intruded like a cry. It obviously embarrassed its writer, who at the end scrawled an apology and an explanation: she was going to New York in the morning to have eleven ribs cut out and a lung collapsed.

  His response was immediate, and of a delicacy that would have been unbelievable to readers of the bellicose DeVoto. He sat down and wrote her a long letter, many pages.6 It did not mention her operation, in which the chances of death were high. It did not buck her up or express any of the banalities of cheer and comfort. It talked about the madnesses of Cambridge, which in its way was worse than Greenwich Village. It discussed at length the Kaufman and Hart show Let ’Em Eat Cake, which had just opened in Boston and which he said would get brickbats in New York because it kidded the revolutionaries, a sacred cow. He told her about the novel he had just begun, his first gesture in that direction in five years, and remarked on what advance he had requested from Little, Brown, and what revisions the Post had suggested for his last story. Pages of soothing shoptalk, gossip, chatter. But reassuringly prompt, and skillfully calculated to divert Kate Sterne’s mind from pain and the danger of death.

  The moment he heard that personal, lonely cry from out of a sick girl’s trouble, he was hooked. At a distance, by remote control as it were, he found himself in the relationship that fantasy had long wanted. By the time the long crisis in New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital was over and Kate had been sent to the Bowne Hospital in Poughkeepsie, they were on a basis that was father-daughter, that was Leatherstocking and the Colonel’s daughters, that was Prince and peasant girl. At her request he wrote her long fragments of his autobiography, and both fantasy and the desire to entertain had a part in the ornamentation that he put in. He was her guide to books, her teacher and adviser, her confessor, sometimes her gossip, sometimes her analyst. She was the beautiful and fragile and perhaps doomed girl (she said she had gone into Mount Sinai looking like a slightly desiccated Hepburn and come out looking like Mae West) who looked up to him as wise and wonderful and to whom he could occasionally come for comfort when his own hide was smarting from the world’s nettles. Absolutely chaste and safe, their friendship could play (because it was safe) along the edge of sexuality. The jokes they wrote each other were not always the kind you would tell your Sunday-school teacher. But what most shows in DeVoto’s letters to Kate Sterne is protectiveness. Here was Skinny all over again; here was the mutual dependence of two people who liked and respected each other and asked of each other nothing but friendship. In DeVoto’s life he had often felt the need of someone who admired him uncritically, someone to whom he could appear the confident man he had always wished he was.

  To Kate Sterne he was kindness itself, generosity personified, thoughtfulness incarnate. He was the best thing in her doomed life, and the long midnight letters he wrote her came to have an importance that nothing in her imprisoned sickness approached. She lived in his world more than in Bowne Hospital, but she was by no means inert or helpless. She could not have been better for the role she played in DeVoto’s imagination if he had invented her. She was daughter, mistress, sister, child bride, and the Virgin. She was the emancipated, scrappy, good-sport flapper who answered to the need he had once thought Skinny served. In fact, it was in several of his long autobiographical letters that he told Kate the story of Skinny—and perhaps invented it.7

  If there is truth in the notion that men who remarry tend to marry the same woman over again, there is probably truth in the corollary that when men fantasize about women they create versions of the same image. The image, for DeVoto, was always younger than he, but outwardly undeferential, sassy, competitive, bright, uninhibited in talk but fastidious and even chaste in action and idea. And capable of the deepest and most self-sacrificing devotion, which she characteristically covered up with flippancy and the comedy of insult. This coltish creature had her pretenses and her ways of protecting herself, but when the chips were down she gave her trust absolutely to the DeVoto figure. She submitted to being instructed, guided, informed, adored, and above all protected. When DeVoto described Skinny to Kate Sterne, he might just as well have been describing Avis or a half dozen of his fictional heroines. Or he might have been suggesting the role Kate might play, the character she might assume.

  If that was it, he succeeded. The whole friendship was astonishingly safe from any shattering realities; it could not be soured by the all-too-human consequences of propinquity. Both recognized it very early for what it was, and understood the conditions. In the letters of the first year DeVoto suggested several times that when he was passing through Poughkeepsie on his way to or from some lecture or other, he might pay her a visit. Kate Sterne did not encourage that visit. When it seemed imminent, she asked him not to come, pleading that she had been particularly unwell, with hemorrhaging, and was too emaciated to be seen. She never sent him any picture of herself except one, and that was a picture taken when she was a child; but she did send him, at least twice, pictures of other women, clipped from magazines or newspapers, with the note, “This is what people say I look like.”

  Before long, he quit offering to come by. What both pretended to desire, neither quite dared. They went on writing one another for eleven years, until Kate Sterne, without ever having been released from her hospital room, finally died, on August 31, 1944. During those years DeVoto did not much talk about her or about their correspondence. He kept her private, in her niche, and once or twice a week, generally at the midnight end of a long day, he sat down and wrote her his full mind and full feelings, let down his hair, expressed himself more intimately than in any other writings8

  Kate Sterne was probably DeVoto’s best fiction as well as his most personal correspondent. She gave him the titles for two of his books,9 and he tried for many years, unsuccessfully, to write one of them, a novel, which he had promised to dedicate to her. She was dead before he finally succeeded in writing it, but in the meantime he had kept his promise of a dedication by substituting another book. When he sent her, at the beginning of 1943, the galley proofs for The Year of Decision: 1846, he sent her also a paragraph he had written expressly for her:

  Dear Kate:

  While I was writing this book you sometimes asked me what it was about. Reading it now, you will see that, though it is about a good many things, one theme that recurs is the basic courage and honor in the face of adversity which we call gallantry. It is always good to remember human gallantry, and it is especially good in times like the present. So I want to dedicate a book about the American past written in a time of national danger to a very gallant woman.10

  10 · We Accept with Pleasure

&n
bsp; Near the beginning of his epistolary friendship with Kate Sterne, DeVoto mentioned that he was at work on a novel, tentatively called Second Gentleman. Perhaps influenced by his own exhortations to the hopeful, he began it immediately after returning from Bread Loaf, at the beginning of September, 1933. By the Yale game, at the end of October, he had written a hundred thousand words. “I had forgotten,” he told Kate Sterne, “that it’s fun to write fiction.”1 A month later, he was already circulating a partial manuscript among Hans Zinsser, Don Born, Edith Mirrielees, and Arthur D. Hill, the Back Bay lawyer who had been one of the defense team for Sacco and Vanzetti, and he promised to send it to Kate as soon as the typist got up to page 200. He said he could afford to give the book only six months (one sees him calculating how much of this unprofitable diversion the budget will stand). Since it would have to appear practically in first draft, he wanted criticism as he went.

  He sent Kate the two hundred pages around Christmas, as promised, but she did not see the second half until the following June. One reason for the delay was that he had to turn aside to write some magazine pieces; another was that he had got involved in Second Gentleman, it had begun to matter to him, and as soon as it did he was unable to grind it out like a serial. Two functions and two personalities were at work in him. Just here, when he dared once more to take himself seriously as a novelist, he divided himself formally in two. Hereafter, most of the slick fiction appears under the pseudonym “John August,” the name he had invented for Mencken to disguise the author of the never-published article on sex and the co-ed. Hereafter Bernard DeVoto, Harvard lecturer and man of letters, will not have to be embarrassed by what John August does for a living.2

  Not all the people to whom he showed the novel encouraged him. At the beginning of July, after a visit to Henderson in Morgan Center, he dropped by Barnard, Vermont, to see Sinclair Lewis, and in exchange for reading Lewis’ play Brother Burdett, got Lewis to sample a chapter of Second Gentleman. Boozy, vehement, and incessant, Lewis spent the evening and the next morning telling DeVoto that he was the greatest critic in America but should not try to write novels.3