The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  That was not what DeVoto wanted to hear. He was as avid for approval as any Bread Loaf amateur, and as willing to take any criticism that did not seriously question his book’s matter or manner. Kate Sterne told him he had a tendency to be obscure and that he had an addiction to the words “slumbrous,” “almost,” and “utterly.” He denied the obscurity—his version was that he was so afraid of obscurity he was overexplicit4—but he granted her verbal objections. Hastily, as he wrote her, he struck out a thousand “almost’s” and two gross of “slumbrouses” and sent the book to press.

  He would have done well to listen to her hesitant comment. For what he did have was such a horror of seeming dull that he was constantly tempted to make his characters too clever, his dialogue too allusive, his sentences too elliptical. Like his personal relations, his fiction had a certain defensiveness and bravado in it.

  Second Gentleman, which made the bookstores under the title We Accept with Pleasure, came closer than any previous DeVoto novel to distinction. It is the story of a group of people, New Englanders and Midwesterners, over whom broods the figure of a brilliant friend untimely dead—a man on whom each of several other characters has conferred, each in his own way, unlimited possibility. The relations among these people are as complex as even Pareto might have prescribed if Pareto had prescribed for fiction. Attraction and repulsion, the threads of blood and passion that bind these people together and the forces of personality, opportunity, and history that drive them apart, are intricately conceived and elaborated. Isolated and analyzed, individual after individual is a persuasive portrait. The social and intellectual fabric is dense, the long scene of Boston on the night of the Sacco-Vanzetti execution is a virtuoso set piece. All through the novel are the stigmata of a major intelligence, a major organizing capacity, an acute observation of social and psychological detail.

  But it just misses. Virtuosity often encumbers the style, the compulsion to be clever blurs portraits otherwise cleanly drawn. Remembering DeVoto’s habit of writing his histories three times, working first through the organization and interrelation of parts and then combing and carding the text for proportion and style, one is tempted to guess that if he hadn’t hurried We Accept with Pleasure, if he had not been looking over his shoulder at the needs of the budget, if professionalism had not given him the habit of tossing off his fiction, if he had been willing to write as hard on it as he had written on Mark Twain’s America and would write on all the later histories, he might have made it into the book he hoped it was. The Bernard DeVoto who thrilled and scared Bread Loaf virgins could have told him what to do: Run it through the typewriter again.

  But it is interesting to the biographer, for though modification, control, and disguise are everywhere apparent, the materials themselves are personal to Bernard DeVoto, many of the events parallel events in his own life, many of the people are drawn from people close to him.

  Here is Ted Grayson, a young teacher at Northwestern University, a school at which his author also taught. His field is American history, in which his author had an interest. His rank is assistant professor, presumably because even in a disguised semi-portrait DeVoto could not bear to put himself as low on the academic totem pole as he had actually been. Grayson is interested in folksongs, as his creator was. He is a natural musician and sings to the guitar, as his creator would have liked to do if he could have carried a tune. His wife is his former student, whom he first noticed in the front row of a freshman class, and she has the honesty, forthrightness, resilience, and commonsensical loyalty of Helen Avis MacVicar. This Ted Grayson is subject to spells of neurotic dread, when he cannot cross a street, doesn’t dare go outside. In class he locks his legs around the legs of his chair so that he can’t flee in panic. He is not well liked by his superiors, some of whom he despises and who think him a dangerous radical. His apartment is on Orrington Avenue, the street where for a time the Bernard DeVotos lived. When he is fired because of a presumed (and quite false) sympathy for pacifism, Grayson is rescued by some former Harvard friends and carried off to Boston, where they can look after him. In Boston and at Harvard Ted and Libby Grayson experience the friendship, the decency, the intellectual stimulation, and the enlargement of life that were missing in Evanston, Illinois.

  What is more, Ted Grayson and his friends Loring Gale, Jonathan Gale, and Ric Barreda have had a brilliant friend, Julian Gale, who died of an obscure sort of polio just after the war and whose loss has affected all of them, and some of their women as well, in profound ways. He was in their opinion the best man among them; they are all haunted by his life-hungry ghost. Loring Gale is editing Julian’s war letters as an act of memorial friendship, just as Bernard DeVoto once set out to edit the war letters of a similarly brilliant dead friend, Kent Hagler. Loring, in fact, is one side of Bernard DeVoto, as Ted Grayson is another. He has an ambition to write the story of undiscovered America, and in preparation for this has knocked around the West through long Wanderjahre. He had also put in a term of exile as a liberal Chicago editor, and thus has the continental perspective.

  There are other parallels too. Unflattering portraits of Bernard DeVoto’s favorite enemies at Northwestern need not be identified, but the bacteriologist Gage Ewing, intricately related by blood and affection to the several Gales, who are in rum related to John Gale, the historical raisonneur of The Crooked Mile and The House of Sun-Goes-Down, is a composite based partly on Hans Zinsser and partly on Arthur Hill,5 whose Sacco-Vanzetti role is, however, here transferred to Jonathan Gale.

  A roman à clef, or nearly. During the heat of the writing, other things were poured in: Harvard memories, echoes of Kent Hagler’s war experiences, even the ersatz sheepskin of Harvard diplomas, even the characteristic DeVoto suspicion of self-conscious nobility and idealism. “It’s a toxin,” says cynical Gage Ewing, walking through Boston on the execution night and observing the self-immolating hysteria of one kind of Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizer. “It’s a toxin, and there’s no vaccine.” Various kinds of do-gooders move through the novel, the most extreme of them a deluded seeker after obscure martyrdoms, fighter of lost causes, modern descendant of the nineteenth-century men who had eaten Graham’s bread in a dozen consociate families or climbed the hills to await the Last Days.

  But an interesting thing has happened to Julian Gale, the dead friend based upon Kent Hagler and remembered in complex but powerful ways by so many people. The necessities of the story, and the shift in DeVoto’s values from earlier idealism to later skepticism, warp him into a facsimile of those devotees of the religion of art whom DeVoto despised. In his lust to encompass all experience, his Faustian (and too calculating) embracing of all heroism and all evil and all wonder as literary material, this Julian reveals himself to his cousin and chronicler Loring as a sort of monster. Among other things, it turns out that he has deliberately sought for and obtained command of a firing squad to execute a deserter. For the experience. The legend that has dominated the minds of all his living friends turns out to be tainted and obscene.

  We Accept with Pleasure came partly from the spirit’s subbasement. It was inextricably mixed with DeVoto’s persistent effort to define himself in relation to other people, to America, to Boston. While he was writing it, he wrote for Kate Sterne a long, semi-fictionalized draft of the Kent Hagler story and sent her extended character studies of Northwestern and Boston characters, most of whom can be recognized in the novel.6

  It would be a mistake to read We Accept with Pleasure as autobiography. But it would not do to overlook the personal elements in it, either. Fiction for DeVoto, whether serious or popular, was always going to be linked in some Rube Goldberg way with the author’s fantasies. “Art is man determined to die sane.” To write his anxiety neurosis into Ted Grayson was in some degree to control it. To chronicle the Graysons’ acceptance by Boston (however unworthy Ted Grayson turned out in the end) was in some sense to assert a place that his author had won.

  But note that Grayson, like his dead friend Julian,
does not turn out to be very admirable. He is spoiled by the success his wife and friends help him win. He is not the image of his author’s self-satisfaction or self-justification, no matter how closely his nervous troubles may resemble his author’s, or his wife resemble his author’s wife.

  Fiction was not public confession or exhibitionism. Control was of the essence. It was basic to the doctrines DeVoto expounded at Bread Loaf; it underlay all his objections to Thomas Wolfe, which he consolidated in the essay “Genius Is Not Enough,” a review of Wolfe’s Story of a Novel, in the April 25, 1936, issue of the Saturday Review. He felt it necessary to reject the raw autobiographical method of Wolfe—to Kate Sterne he commented sourly that Wolfe’s fiction was a sort of chyme, neither food nor feces.7 Without pressing that metaphor too far, we may remark that the subject was much on his mind, and that writing We Accept with Pleasure crystallized it. In the July 1936 Harper’s he published, anonymously, his own story of a novel, and it is not the story Wolfe told.8

  Novels, he said, are written to find out what novel one is writing. Every novel is in that sense a mystery story. It has its own inevitabilities; yet if a character “runs away” with a scene or a book, his author is a bad novelist. A real novelist writes in “full, if unconscious understanding” of the novel’s internal demands. In the “imposed honesty of the desk” he understands that a novel exists in its own right and that “the novelist is committed to an endeavor whose issue is predetermined.” The process “has no more doubt or chance in it than a chemical reaction has,” though there may be almost interminable experimentation before the writer uncovers those inevitabilities. Moreover, no novel is personal history, even if its author attempts to make it so, and psychoanalysis is most unlikely to come at the “true” bases, whether the psychoanalysis is amateur or professional. The amateurs write bunk and the professionals do not understand the nature of fiction. For any novelist must make freewill judgments and choices; he is not the helpless stylus of his unconscious. He must select among alternatives, he must ask how each such choice serves the inevitability toward which he gropes. The resolution of apparent contradictions between inevitability and choice, the fabrication of the “wire” that communicates an imaginary world to readers, is enforced at the desk. That is what art is, and no good novelist will falsify or pervert that process, either for profit or for praise.

  On the other hand, no good novel is planned; no good novel is about anything—about the class struggle or the westward movement or anything else. It is only about people and their relationships. “How men and women grow up and adapt themselves to themselves, to one another, and to the conditions of their lives. How they fail to grow up and adapt themselves. How they learn, or fail to learn, from what happens to them. How they deal with experience and how it deals with them. How desire and disaster and the death of friends affect them. How they are entangled with the world. Above all, the friendships they form, the love that racks them, the marriages they make. What happens in the caverns of the soul.”

  It is the sort of doctrine one would expect from an anti-doctrinaire—tentative, exploratory, inductive, dead set against simplification, Paretian in its emphasis upon the dynamic equilibrium of many variables. And it describes with considerable accuracy the kind of novel We Accept with Pleasure is, a human maze whose exploration works “toward the dissipation of mystery.”

  But this after-the-fact explanation or apologia was not written in the warm haze of triumph or addressed to an audience of admirers. It was written out of a bruised sense of renewed failure. Before the novel had appeared, DeVoto had been, against his will and despite the caution generated by previous diappointments, seduced into hope. Little, Brown was convinced he had hit it this time; there was the possibility of a book-club choice.9 When he sent Kate Sterne a prepublication copy at the beginning of September 1934, DeVoto’s depreciative noises did not conceal his euphoria. He reported in amusement that Zinsser did not like the bacteriologist some people thought resembled him. Though his own language was salty, he thought DeVoto had subtracted dignity from Gage Ewing by putting profanity in his mouth, and he somewhat grimly offered to infect DeVoto with Spirochaeta pallida so that next time he wrote about bacteriologists who caught their own diseases in their own labs he would know what he was talking about.10 That demurrer was amusing, not ominous—Zinsser’s belligerent tone was precisely the tone that DeVoto himself used upon the ignorant and the literary.

  The novel was published on September 21. On that day DeVoto wrote in good spirits that he was going down to the Square and pick up some magazines and see what the boys had done to him. What they did to him was to respect the organization and complexity of his novel, grant the validity of his characters and the reality of his episodes, and conclude that none of this involved them very much except those parts of the story that dealt with Ted and Libby Grayson. Alvah Bessie, in the Saturday Review,11 said it for most of them: “Yet he [the reader] can witness the dramatic events with equanimity; he can contemplate the petty mishaps, misunderstandings, jealousies, and passions of them all without sharing in them more than intellectually. They are all fatally intelligent; they are all witty and wide-awake (so much so that at times their conversation becomes almost interchangeable); they are all in motion, but they do not move.” Novels are what happens in the caverns of the soul, yes; but the novelist has to be a successful spelunker.

  It did not take long. Two months after publication, DeVoto could remark ruefully to Kate Sterne that his “fifth flop” had been “decently interred.”12 By December, when the reviews cast their eyes back over the season, We Accept with Pleasure could be nominated for Disappointment of the Year.

  11 · Editorial Temptations

  From 1931 onward, DeVoto had been denying to his old associates at Northwestern that his position on the Harvard faculty was more than temporary.1 He affected to be still disaffected with teaching; he said he taught at all only because people at Harvard kept urging him. But he accepted whatever teaching Harvard offered him—first some tutees; then Huribut’s English 31; then a course in contemporary literature, English 95—and he liked it all. For several years, his half-time status was exactly what he wanted. Being a sort of utility infielder to the Harvard English Department left him time to write but at the same time gave him a certain security and the institutional affiliation he craved.

  English 95, which he took on in the spring of 1935 in place of his writing course, began a new phase in his teaching. With the disaster of an empty mind constantly threatening, he read frantically to keep ahead of his students. Often he organized his lectures in the car, driving in from Lincoln, and finished the hour with his last note used up.2 But he liked it, and so did his students. When it seemed undesirable to give up his writing course for a second year in a row, he agreed to teach both it and contemporary literature. That would put him back in full-time teaching. There is no evidence that he looked forward to the spring of 1936 with anything but pleasure. He expected to get a book of some sort out of the course.

  Teaching may have looked more interesting because of his deteriorating position in the fiction market. For a year or more the Post had expressed dissatisfaction with some of his stories. Some had been sent back for revision, some rejected cold.3 In the spring of 1935 he felt that a change of editors had closed the Post to him completely. At once his nervous symptoms recurred. His eyes gave him trouble, the insomnia and migraines returned, he was haunted by the fear that other magazines, too, would find his work unacceptable and that the flow of his prosperity would be cut off as if by the closing of a tap. Henry Reck recalls times when, sitting at the table or lounging on the porch, DeVoto would break out into an instant, profuse sweat, throw a stricken look at Avis, and vanish, to reappear a few hours or a day or two days later, pale, quiet, and drained.4 Avis herself remembers the last year of Lincoln as uneasy and tense.

  It was in those circumstances that he agreed to go on full-time teaching the following year. And he made another move to shore up his
economic and psychological defenses. His long association with Harper’s had made him virtually a member of the editorial staff. About the beginning of June 1935, Lee Hartman proposed that he make the alliance official by taking over the department called The Editor’s Easy Chair, currently conducted by the eighty-year-old Edward S. Martin. As a counterproposal DeVoto suggested that Mencken be recruited for the Easy Chair and that he himself undertake the Books and Otherwise department of Harry Hansen. He said he did not want to be a public thinker, he wanted to be a literary critic. He wanted to give the country the unprecedented opportunity of a book section that every month would review an important book by an important writer, at length and in the context of his other work and from a consistent point of view.5

  Mencken proved unavailable, Hartman persisted in wanting DeVoto. At the end of July, still hopeful of Books and Otherwise but ready to accept the Easy Chair if he must, “for I’d rather have that forum than no forum,”6 DeVoto went to New York for discussions. When he returned, he had signed up to conduct the oldest feature in American journalism, begun in 1850 in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine by Donald G. Mitchell, shared from 1852 to 1859 by Mitchell and George William Curtis, written singly by Curtis until his death in 1892, picked up again in 1900 by William D. Howells, and taken over from Howells by Edward S. Martin in 1920. Though it was not a book section, it was a department of the highest prestige, in a magazine with the most intelligent lay audience in America.7

  His pay for those brief essays, rigidly limited to 2,650 words, would be only two hundred dollars apiece, twenty-four hundred dollars a year, and the prospect of getting one out every month, year after year, through sickness, crisis, and the pressures of other work, would have appalled anyone less fecund in ideas or less bent on airing a point of view or less eager for some economic security. Once he had agreed to take it, he had a piece of everything he wanted: a public forum, an affiliation with Harvard, some (more or less hypothetical) time for his own writing, and two small salaries that would keep him, meagerly, if the bottom fell entirely out of the slick-magazine market.