The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  The December 5 issue of the Saturday Review contained his essay on the Christmas that the Lewis and Clark expedition observed in 1804, far up the Missouri, lost in Mandan country, deep in the central reaches of unknown Louisiana on its way to Oregon and a United States that stretched from sea to sea.6 (His account of the gift of weasel tails that Sacajawea gave William Clark set one of DeVoto’s Rocky Mountain admirers to combing the Wasatch for a duplicate set, to be presented to her favorite editor.) DeVoto wrote that essay to please himself, and because another contributor had failed to come through with a promised article. It is an index of how hand to mouth his procurement of articles was likely to be, and also an index of how completely, when he found himself unprovided at deadline, he turned the magazine in the direction of his own preoccupations. Not everyone on the Saturday Review staff thought it appropriate—George Stevens, for one, thought it got too far afield from the proper material of a literary review—but if Stevens had looked closely he would have seen that “Passage to India” essay as simply a positive manifestation of the American gospels whose negative statements lashed the intellectuals as with nettles. He could not have DeVoto as editor unless he had him whole.7

  All together, a lively three months, the last three months of 1936, but they brought no immediate improvement in the Review’s fortunes. The letters that came in were both enthusiastic and angry; certain telephone calls suggested, anonymously, that DeVoto was about to have his hide nailed to the barn door.8 December and January went by with nothing more controversial than a rebuke to the Salt Lake City librarians who had put the works of Vardis Fisher, a novelist whom DeVoto deplored, on the restricted shelf.9 But then, in the New Republic for February 3, Edmund Wilson picked up the gauntlet that DeVoto had flung in “A Generation Beside the Limpopo.” In “Complaints: II. Bernard DeVoto,”10 after acknowledging DeVoto’s vigor, style, and independence of mind, and praising the new life he had brought to the Review, he asked him to “stand and unfold himself.” Why was he so angry? What, exactly, was he objecting to? What general philosophy or system of ideas did he operate from? He sounded as if he must have some such system, but reading him failed to make it clear. “This indignation at other people’s errors which seems to prevent him from stating his own case, this continual boiling up about other people’s wild statements which stimulates him to even wilder statements of his own, have been characteristic of all his criticism.” He seemed to be a supercilious academic lambasting the non-academics of literature, a professional Westerner accusing all others of ignorance about the West, a follower of Pareto who simply threw the name Pareto at his readers’ heads without explicating him, a champion of “fact” who accused whole generations of the most various people of “misrepresentation” and “fantasy,” a critic of psychoanalytic biography who did not hesitate to use psychoanalysis himself when it was convenient, a damner of utopian and idealistic and progressive thought who did not say how he expected society ever to be improved and appeared not to believe it could be. What did he want? He was obviously intelligent and articulate and well read. If he would state himself clearly, he would have an attentive audience.

  That was by no means the nailing to the barn door that DeVoto had been expecting. Wilson’s tone, puzzled, skeptical, judicious, mildly remonstrative, even respectful, did not warrant a slam-bang reply. But the article provided the opportunity for public debate that DeVoto had been waiting for. He answered Wilson on February 13 in a double-length editorial.11

  Not even his most uncritical advocate could pretend, on the basis of this editorial, that DeVoto adequately answered Wilson’s demand to know why he was so angry. That was a question he probably could not have answered if he had tried. Indignation was his style, and the style was the man. There was no more moderation in him than there is in gunpowder. But other parts of Wilson’s inquiry he replied to with relish, and some part of the answer, as he wrote to Kate Sterne,12 came out of the self-examination that she had stimulated the year before.

  Modestly he denied being an academic, pointing out his lack of degrees and his lack of a university job. Modestly he denied being an expert on Pareto, referring Wilson to Henderson and the other authorities and to the new English translation of the Trattato. He said that Wilson had appeared to misunderstand some of his writings, and to have ignored others. Gently he chided Wilson for taking seriously some things that had been meant as jokes. But he pounced on the demand for an articulated system of ideas by which he could be explained. “For, you see, this is a demand for a gospel, and I have been acquainted with it since my earliest days. I was brought up in a religion which taught me that man was imperfect but might expect God’s mercy—but I was surrounded by a revealed religion founded by a prophet of God, composed of people on the way to perfection, and possessed of an everlasting gospel. I early acquired a notion that all gospels were false and all my experience since then has confirmed it.… I distrust absolutes. Rather, I long ago passed from distrust of them to opposition. And with them let me include prophecy, simplification, generalization, abstract logic, and especially the habit of mind which consults theory first and experience only afterward.”

  If labels were needed, then he would describe himself as “a pluralist, a relativist, an empiricist.” He rested not upon a gospel but upon a method, the inductive method of science. If he objected to a great many kinds of people, he objected because they exemplified a particular way of thinking which most of them consistently pretended was something else. “As for America, let us go slowly. Many men are confident that they can sum up a nation and a people in one manuscript page; but I must refuse to try. I have no formula to explain the American past or present, still less the future; I have no logically articulated system of conceptions that will make all clear. The fault I find with the literary is precisely that they have such formulas and systems.…”

  An impartial critic might find in DeVoto’s characterization of “the literary” something interestingly close to the generalization he objected to in them. Pressed, he would have had to exempt many individuals from his indictment, and he would have had to retreat from some categorical absolutism of phrasing. But the generation beside the Limpopo had demonstrated, as a pervasive coloration of mind, as a dominant tendency, much of what he accused it of categorically. Before too many years, he would have so unlikely a convert to his essential position as Van Wyck Brooks himself.13 But that would be a wartime flurry, an aberration brought on by crisis. Brooks’s premises were never DeVoto’s; they never ceased to be literary and elitist, they never quit assuming the essential importance of the intellectuals as a force. And neither DeVoto, nor Brooks, nor Archibald MacLeish,14 nor any of the patriots of the 1940s much altered the course of literary ideas. If DeVoto were alive in 1973, he would find another whole generation beside the Limpopo, yearning toward the perfected society that the history of Mormonism had taught him to treat with skepticism and scorn.

  The little public debate with the champion chosen (as he thought) by the opposition flared and waned. He was on record, the battle was joined, there was sniping from editorial offices on the Left, but there seemed to have been little or no immediate benefit to the Review. Meanwhile, he was chained to his guns, and no amount of irritable wanting to write his own books made him find the time to write them. He went on as he had begun.

  Thus when Harold Stearns, in America, A Reappraisal, reversed the opinions he had expressed in America and the Young Intellectual and illustrated in his symposium Civilization in the United States, DeVoto could dance on Stearns’s repentant body in an editorial.15 When Judge Curran dismissed the obscenity charges that John S. Sumner had brought against Farrell’s A World I Never Made, DeVoto could repeat his confidence in the free forum of ideas and reassert the right of people to select their own reading without help from self-appointed censors.16 When the League of American Writers issued a call to a congress that would discuss literary matters and especially how literature could encourage a healthy culture, DeVoto could comment with a
Bronx cheer. “We like writers, but we like them writing, not making speeches and adopting resolutions.” And when Burton Rascoe’s autobiography and Malcolm Cowley’s anthology After the Genteel Tradition came out more or less simultaneously, DeVoto could use Rascoe’s comfortable nostalgias as a stick to beat Cowley with, and use the Cowley book as the text for a sermon on the tendency of the literary Left to find in American life and literature whatever it had previously hidden there. “Plus Ce Change,” he called that review when he collected it in Minority Report. He did not regard it as a personal attack on Cowley. It was an attack upon a set of ideas, one more blow against the Saracen holders of a desecrated Holy Sepulcher, the monkeys who had inherited Angkor Wat.

  3 · “You’re There to Lick ’Em for Us”

  He conceived his crusade to be against ideas, not against individuals, though in the heat of battle he often attacked ad hominem and though his opponents, under a hail of blows, could hardly be blamed for failing to understand that the lumps they received were impersonally intended. To the Left, he seemed a reactionary, perhaps a Fascist; even Wilson had suggested that he came close to being that rare thing, a spokesman for the literary Right.1 (By the same principle under which everything east of Cheyenne is “back East” to an Ogden boy, everything to the right of Norman Thomas was “reactionary” to the New Republic and “Fascist” to the New Masses.) Whatever they called him, his genius for hyperbolic scorn and superheated invective had made him cordially hated in leftist quarters by the time he left New York early in June to receive an honorary degree from Middlebury College (an honor that Frost had arranged with Middlebury’s President Paul Moody)2 and to spend the summer in the Shingled Cottage on the Bennington College campus (a house that Frost had helped obtain for him). Impersonally meant or not, his controversies inevitably involved the personal element, and it was increased by his alliance with Frost, a good hater and a canny manipulator of his friends in behalf of his reputation.

  For more than a year DeVoto had been itching to take on Frost’s critics, especially those of the Left who had universally disparaged A Further Range when it appeared in the spring of 1936. Rolfe Humphries, Newton Arvin, Horace Gregory, Granville Hicks, and R. P. Blackmur, in series and in parallel, had found the book poetically wanting and politically offensive, and neither its selection as Book of the Month nor its winning the Pulitzer prize could salve for DeVoto—and Frost—the cuts of these notices. In the fall of 1936, DeVoto had lectured at Amherst on Frost’s invitation and had begged Frost for the chance to reply to the critics. He could do it better from the Saturday Review, a literary journal, than from the Easy Chair, where he was expected to be a public thinker rather than a literary critic. Throughout the winter, which Frost spent in San Antonio, DeVoto kept renewing this offer, until Frost agreed to “let you strike that blow for me.” Then the debate with Wilson broke out, and Frost backed away, unwilling to get drawn into a controversy that had nothing to do with his own poetry.3

  Later still, he was again persuaded, but the article was delayed, partly by DeVoto’s other work and the illnesses that kept recurring like psychosomatic warnings, partly for lack of the precisely right occasion. In May 1937, just before DeVoto left New York for Middlebury and Bennington, Frost was clearly counting on the article and clearly a little afraid that DeVoto would leave the Saturday Review in disgust before it got written. “I hope I haven’t made you too unhappy by having thrown my weight into your decision to leave teaching,” he wrote. “Nothing is momentous. Nothing is final. You can always go back if back is where you can best strike from. Some like a spear, some like a dirk. The dirk is the close-in weapon of city streets. Anybody can take his choice of weapons for all of me. I suspect you’re an all round handiman of the armory. I had no idea of sacrificing you to the job down there—or letting you sacrifice yourself. You’re there to lick em for us. To Hell with their thinking. That’s all I say. I wish I were any good. I’d go up to the front with you. As it is—as I am—I must be content to sick you on. Results is all I ask.”4

  Given his filial and reverential feeling toward Frost, DeVoto needed no sicking. They held many enemies as well as ideas in common. But there was still not the proper occasion that would give the blow news value. That came, finally, in October 1937, brought about partly through another admirer of Frost’s, another Pulitzer-prize poet, another Harvard colleague, another Bread Loaf regular, Robert Hillyer.

  In the Atlantic Monthly for August 1936, Hillyer had published a two-hundred-line “A Letter to Robert Frost,” an excessively adulatory poem in rhymed couplets.5 At Bread Loaf, toward the end of the month, he showed parts of a second poem to DeVoto. DeVoto asked for it for the Review, only asking that its title be changed from “A Letter to Bernard DeVoto” to something else. In early October he published it as “A Letter to the Editor.”6 Its change of title did not alter its personal tone or its assumption of shared antipathies, for it began, “Time brings us, Benny, to our middle years,” and it went on to paraphrase Caligula in wishing that the symbolists, the proletarians, the literary illiterates, the pretentious, the commercial, and the publicity-seeking had only one neck among them, and he or Benny a sword.

  The poem released the acids in Granville Hicks, who promptly sent in to the Saturday Review a parody “Letter to Robert Hillyer,” in which he took skin off not only Hillyer but also Frost and especially DeVoto:

  The Eliots and Cranes you damn in toto

  But speak with vast respect of one DeVoto

  The Howells of our age—God save the mark!

  Who’s bid his sad farewell to Durgin Park,

  To swanboats, Pops, and other Boston joys,

  And now laments the humbug and the noise

  Of Mannahatta, though there’s some suspicion

  He’s well equipped to furnish competition.

  He’s versatile at least, and swiftly shuttles

  From co-ed tales to forays and rebuttals.

  (His forays fill the women’s clubs with awe,

  And his rebuttals slaughter men of straw.)

  Cagily, not to expose himself to a New Masses blast, DeVoto neither quite accepted nor quite rejected Hicks’s contribution. He said it was not good enough poetry to be accepted for the regular columns of the magazine, but that he would print it on the Letters page if Hicks would cut it down somewhat.7 Hicks chose not to do anything more at the time, but a year later, when Hillyer’s poem was published in a volume along with similar letters to Frost, James B. Munn, Charles Townsend Copeland, and others, he sent his anti-Hillyer parody to the New Republic, which printed the less abusive part on October 20.8

  The Hillyer-Hicks exchange restored Frost to the limelight as a figure of controversy without any overt move of his own or of DeVoto’s. Very shortly, Holt brought out Richard Thornton’s Recognition of Robert Frost, a retrospective anthology of critical praise, and that provided the immediate occasion DeVoto had been waiting for. Just after Christmas 1937 he sent to Frost in Florida the proofs of his long-planned article, written as a review of the Thornton book, and scheduled for the issue of January 1.9

  It was DeVoto at his most vehement. Though the second part of the essay was an exposition of Frost’s qualities as a poet and an examination of the reasons why critics had so often misunderstood him, he did not reach that part of the discussion until he had kicked all the chairs out of the way—and the critics in them—to clear the place for action. Thornton’s book, the ostensible excuse for the essay, was hardly mentioned. The real excuse, the unfriendly critics, brought on some of the most violently vituperative paragraphs DeVoto ever wrote.

  From the beginning, he said, Frost had been victimized by critics who couldn’t read him. Amy Lowell’s review of North of Boston, for example, was “screamingly silly.” Nothing even came close to it for idiocy until Newton Arvin and Horace Gregory reviewed A Further Range. But even those were outdone by R. P. Blackmur’s review of the same book in The Nation. That “may not be quite the most idiotic review our generation h
as produced, but in twenty years of reading criticism—oh, the hell with scholarly reservations, Mr. Blackmur’s is the most idiotic of our time. It is one of the most idiotic reviews since the invention of movable type. The monkeys would have to tap typewriters throughout eternity to surpass it.”

  Wiping his hands, he finally got around to the reasons why Frost’s poetry was so often misunderstood and underestimated. His comic spirit, for one thing, his playfulness with word and idea, his “antic willingness to make jokes about the verities,” his belief that poetry was a game played between poet and reader, that it involved deliberate obscurings and false leads, that the poet should “always keep one step ahead of his own sincerity,” had always offended the solemn, and bewildered them. DeVoto linked Frost with Mark Twain, who had a similar effect on the solemn, and who like Frost was more truly a “proletarian” than any of the fashionable Marxist intellectuals, since he wrote out of an identification with working people, and in their native vernacular and rhythms.

  The review delighted Frost. If Lawrance Thompson is to be believed, and the letters between Frost and DeVoto can hardly be interpreted otherwise, this was precisely what Frost had been grooming DeVoto for.10 Most of Frost’s friends were likewise delighted. Ridgely Torrence thought those particular critics would “never get up off the slaughterhouse floor.” Some others, among them Ted Morrison, though completely sympathetic to Frost and DeVoto, thought the attack too abusive and insufficiently judicial. As for the opposition, it was predictably furious. One of them, F. O. Matthiessen, wrote in to defend Blackmur’s review as a serious attempt to come to grips with Frost’s excursion into political poetry, and objected to DeVoto’s “tub-thumping and windy declarations!”11