The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  That theory of fiction DeVoto had been elaborating and polishing ever since he left the eleven installments of “English 37” for George Stevens to run during the summer of 1937. He was publishing essays that dealt with it during the fall of 1938, and his interest had been immensely stimulated by the discovery of the “Great Dark” manuscripts among the Mark Twain papers. At exactly the time when he was beginning to rework Mountain Time, during the fall of 1938, DeVoto was discussing these manuscripts avidly with his former analyst William Barrett, and was developing the hypothesis that the several broken fragments of those manuscripts, with their false starts and their shifting images of desolation, were Mark Twain’s attempt to write his way out of despair following the collapse of his fortunes, the epilepsy of his daughter Jean, the invalidism of his wife, and the death of his favorite daughter, Susy.11 They were the attempt, that is, to make despair itself serve a saving adaptation, and in the end, the theory went, they came to a late, autumnal consummation in The Mysterious Stranger. There is no reason to examine the theory or the manuscripts here, except to note that they were on DeVoto’s desk while he “fought for his identity” with Frost, and very much on his mind as he tried to work his own emotional entanglements into the order and safety of art.

  He abused Van Wyck Brooks for attempting to psychoanalyze Mark Twain, and he himself should not be subjected to the analysis of amateurs. The excuse here is that one is taking the analysis from the subject’s own mouth. He was electrically aware of the complicated things he was braiding or unbraiding—aware not in the way of an analyst but in the way of a writer. (He said a writer who tried to write like an analyst was like a man carrying his bicycle on his back.) DeVoto was trying to ride it. With a seriousness that, always quick with the memory of his own nervous troubles, was never far from desperation, he was struggling with “what happens in the caverns of the soul.” The irrational had its profound importance in human experience, and must be coped with somehow. Freud, Pareto, and his struggle with neurotic dread had taught him that. But Pareto’s lesson was cold, Freud’s infused with emotion. “There is a noble and tragic poetry in his vision of man’s journey deathward from childhood, beset by terrors whose shape and import are disguised from him, striving to discipline a primitive inheritance of delusion and rebellion into a livable accord with reality, striving to establish mastery over disruptive instincts, striving to achieve a social adaptation of anarchic drives.”12 And, he might have added, striving to reconcile respect for a father with the father’s weaknessess, love for a father with the father’s harshness, imitation of a father with the impulse of rebellion.

  Art, he said, is man determined to die sane. In Mountain Time, picked up again during his trouble with Frost, DeVoto was wrestling with his paternal angel, or believed he was, as surely as Mark Twain in the Great Dark manuscripts had been wrestling with despair.

  And like the Mark Twain of his theory, he was defeated, he couldn’t write it. The novel had balked him during the summer of 1936 and it balked him again, though he was some time in admitting failure. On January 20, 1939, with sixty thousand words written, he was cautiously optimistic. A month later, offering to send the completed Part I to Kate Sterne if she wanted to see it, he was listless and halfhearted. By the end of March he had given it up. Though all his novels had been, below the literary camouflage, intensely personal, this one was too close to his obsessive and affectional life. Its wires were tangled, it shorted out.

  A wasted six months. Within a short time it developed that the whole year had been wasted, except for the efforts of John August. On March 10 DeVoto had taken to Charles Lark the completed manuscript of Letters from the Earth, consisting of the manuscript by that name plus the related “Papers of the Adam Family” and “Letter to the Earth,” plus a second section of miscellaneous essays including the Great Dark fragments. Paine had withheld much of this material from publication, because it continued Mark Twain’s quarrel with the Christian God or expressed unflattering opinions of certain sects and public figures. Shortly it turned out that Clara Gabrilowitsch agreed with Paine. She thought her father might be accused of anti-Semitism on the strength of some passages, and she thought it unfair to his memory to renew, in times of crisis, that quarrel with God. She particularly wanted the essay “Letters from the Earth” deleted.

  DeVoto protested that to remove that essay would gut the book. Clara held firm. Under pressure from Harper’s, DeVoto agreed to some small deletions, but he would not agree to eliminate “Letters from the Earth.”13 By May 14 it was clear that Harper’s would not back him against Clara, and Letters from the Earth was as dead as Mountain Time. To cap his disgust, in the midst of the argument Mrs. Gabrilowitsch discovered in her house a box containing more than six thousand pages of additional Mark Twain papers and manuscripts, so that not even the careful cataloguing of Rosy Chapman and Henry Reck would stand. The entire body of papers would have to be reorganized and reindexed to include the new find.

  From March until well into July DeVoto was in New York much of the time, trying to straighten out the difficulties. Frustrated, angry, living at the Harvard Club and lunching at the Century, hating the city and the city’s heat, walking as empty and artificial as any leashed greyhound on the streets he did not respond to, killing evenings at the World’s Fair, he felt that New York had released him only to imprison him again. His fiction was aborted and his scholarship had come to nothing.

  Nothing but irritations and humiliations attended his stay. For a good while, ever since he had carefully split his personality, he had written no popular fiction under his own name, preferring to let John August take the onus. Now Cosmopolitan announced that it was finally publishing a story it had bought from him years before, and it would appear signed “Bernard DeVoto,” as if DeVoto valued it or didn’t care what he signed his name to.14 Then Eugene Saxton dropped him from the committee of judges for the Harper Nobel Prize because he had said in an Easy Chair that no one would ever write a good novel about the Mormons, and now it appeared that Vardis Fisher’s Children of God was a strong contender for the prize.15 DeVoto grumbled that no matter what he had said in print, he could be as objective about a Mormon novel as the next man, and was a hell of a sight better qualified to read it than most. But Saxton, afraid of an appearance of prejudgment, did not reinstate him. Then Allan Nevins published in Gateway to History a story about the biographer of John Reed who had suppressed some letters Reed had written from Russia shortly before his death expressing disillusionment in the Revolution. Nevins in a footnote specifically said he did not refer to Hicks and Stuart’s John Reed, but there was no other biographer he could have referred to, and he had cited the story as an example of intellectual dishonesty. Granville Hicks, sleuthing around, got a hint that the story had come from DeVoto, as indeed it had—or rather, it had come from one of the Harvard historians and DeVoto had told it at a cocktail party. Challenged to produce proof, he could not do so, nor would he pass the buck back to the story’s source. So he ate crow in the New Republic, a meal that did not improve his mood, for it was the second time he had lost to Hicks within the year.16

  Nevertheless, since the menu seemed to be crow, he took a second helping. He reviewed Fisher’s Children of God for the Saturday Review and praised it as the good novel he had said would never be written about the Mormons.

  After that, he wrote Kate Sterne a little grimly, he was about ready to get back to Cambridge and return to the offensive.

  2 · Certain Satisfactions

  Grumpy, irritable with the sense of lost effort and lost time, damning the city of New York and the Mark Twain Company, he returned to Cambridge on July 13 determined to work on the volume of Mark Twain autobiography, write an introduction to the Limited Editions Club Tom Sawyer, and really settle into the frontier book. But his mouth was still tainted with New York, and his mind was sore. In Cambridge, hot and nearly deserted, no one but him seemed to be doing any work. Avis was pregnant, expenses went on, the money from Troubled
Star was dwindling, John August would soon have to be called on again. But first a little interlude, some summer puttering, the pretense of life without pressures, a time to drink beer with Hillyer and play fist ball and badminton with George Stout of the Fogg Museum.1

  Almost by accident, in a mood of irony, he found himself a consumers’ advocate.

  Back during his editorship of the Saturday Review, Kate Sterne’s difficulties with books too heavy for her frail strength had led him into a brief campaign for small, light volumes fitted to people’s hands and pockets.2 He was a long way, in 1937, from bringing on the paperback revolution; that would await the end of a war that had not yet begun. In the end he solved Kate’s problem not by reforming publishing practices, but by sending her the unbound sheets of books that came in for review.

  Nevertheless, their correspondence about books and binding led them into the questioning of other industrial products. Her leaky and undependable fountain pen brought from him the confession that he himself had never found one that suited him—he used a penholder and the Estabrook #313 nib, which he bought by the gross. From that repudiation he was led on into consumer skepticism over a broad front, and in April 1939 his Easy Chair, “The Paring Knife at the Crossroads,”3 had aired some of the findings. Of standard typewriters, he said, he had had many models of many makes and had never had a bad one. Of portables, he had had as many of as many makes, and never had a good one. What was the matter with the most industrialized economy in the world, the inventor of the system of mass production with interchangeable parts, that it couldn’t build a decent portable tyepwriter? Fountain pens, as aforesaid, were universally worthless, as were mechanical pencils. Plumbing fixtures were reasonably dependable, but the water closet had not had its valve system improved in a hundred years. Household hardware was bad and getting worse, quality going down with price. Automobiles, on the other hand, were better built than almost anything Americans used. Automobile manufacturers could make a door handle that did not come off, electric switches that did not wear out. Why couldn’t the building trades? As for kitchen gadgets, those were cynically bad. Stainless-steel knives wouldn’t take or hold an edge, can openers wouldn’t open cans, labor-saving devices created rather than saved labor, or were so flimsy they came apart in the hands. In the tradition of liberal economics, he assumed that makers of shoddy goods would eventually be caught up with, but meantime he had a fear that Harry Hopkins might enter the knife factory and put it under federal controls before the factory got around to improving its product.

  Through the whole spring and summer, mail kept coming in in response to that complaint. The housewife elected him her champion by acclamation.

  Cheered on from all sides, DeVoto returned to the subject in July. The American housewife was not happy with the products offered her, and the only response of manufacturers seemed to be the soothing syrup of public relations. But you did not improve a bad can opener by painting the handle green or hiring a new advertising man, and you did not make up for a knife that would not cut by pointing out how shiny it was and how expensive chromium was. There shouldn’t be any chromium in a knife—knives were for cutting, not shining. What went for gadgets went for many foods, especially processed cheese, “unfit even to bait mice with.” It looked and tasted like laundry soap, but was no good for washing clothes. Presliced bread had the women hunting for little bakeries where they could get an honest, unadulterated, unlaborsaving loaf. He hoped they would go on hunting, and leave food processors to consume their own products.

  He enjoyed that foray. It was invigorating, like his old forays against the literary, but the target was new and there was a strong intimation of a supportive public. Also, the response amused him. Kraft-Phenix Cheese Company wrote in in great pain and some rage; there were mutterings about a suit. Knife manufacturers sent him samples, and wistfully explained that too little chrome left a supposedly stainless knife subject to stain, and too much made it difficult—though not impossible, they said—to sharpen. They instructed him in sharpening techniques, which he tested and found inadequate.4

  Four years in the Easy Chair, a post he had taken with some unwillingness, had proved in fact to be a satisfying experience, and had led him to develop public attitudes on several favorite themes. When he had been autobiographizing for Mattingly in 1936, he had told Kate Sterne, with surprise, that his first Easy Chairs were written for the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. It was a form ideally suited to him; its very brevity made his commentary pungent and pointed; its continuity allowed him to return over and over to a subject that proved important. His defense of the consumer was not going to end with a discussion of kitchen knives and processed cheese, nor was his attack on censorship going to stop with a slap on the wrist of Boston booksellers and the Watch and Ward Society. He would continue to praise science, fact, and the inductive method, continue to object to a priori thinking and the literary fallacy, continue to celebrate American history and the democratic gospels, continue to thump ignorance, stupidity, and the venality of public officials, continue to appoint himself supervisor over the self-appointed. His habits of mind would change no more than his favorite subject matters, and he would lay himself open, more than once, by his vehemence. As his student and friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told him, he often by a single overstatement, the sort of thing his friends characteristically overlooked or discounted, gave an enemy the handle by which he was able to win or draw a debate without ever actually refuting DeVoto’s solider arguments.

  But that habit, like Robert Frost’s “badness,” was not to be disentangled from his vigor and his common sense. His four years in the Easy Chair had given him a national following—while it was making him some enemies. Even in 1939 he was probably better known through those monthly essays than by all his fiction, both slick and serious, and all his historical work up to that time. His emotional life had failed to find an adequate artistic transformation, but his intellectual life had discovered both a forum and an effective form.

  With the new year, about to become a father for the second time and ready to take to his bed with couvade, he consulted his financial necessities and recalled John August from retirement. The child, a second boy, whom they named Mark Bernard (if it had been a girl, DeVoto had half planned to name it Katherine, for Kate Sterne), was born on January 11. For the next two months, the serial went forward through a confusion of nurses, illnesses, postparturitive transfusions, and efforts to spare Gordon the pains of sibling rivalry. For the moment, Frost was not a trouble to DeVoto’s mind: he was in the hospital “resting on his laurels,” as he said, after a fistula operation that DeVoto could not help describing as piles. It was a good, distracted, domestic time, toward the end of which he wrote to Kate Sterne in a mood of humility and gratitude, “It is hard to realize that we know so many people who so honestly wish us well.”5

  In literary ways, too, his second year away from the Saturday Review was far more satisfying than his first. The Limited Editions Club Tom Sawyer, with illustrations by Thomas Hart Benton, came off the press in time to be sent to Kate Sterne for Christmas.6 Rosy Chapman was putting together Easy Chairs and Saturday Review pieces for a second volume of essays, for which Kate would shortly suggest the title Minority Report.7 The autobiographical manuscripts that they were calling Mark Twain in Eruption would—Harper’s and Clara Gabrilowitsch consenting—be another book.8 John August’s newest subsidy, Rain Before Seven, was within a few installments of its end.9 The scholar, the publicist, and the hack would all be represented in print in 1940. In March, DeVoto was scheduled to deliver the William Vaughn Moody Lecture at the University of Chicago, and that discussion of the Great Dark manuscripts, together with the introductions to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, would eventually make still another book, Mark Twain at Work.10

  Satisfactions. Before he left Cambridge for Chicago he had two others, both of a soul-warming kind.

  One was the publication of “Anabasis in Buckskin,”11 the story of the march of the 1st
Missouri Volunteers, under Kearny and Doniphan, in the Mexican War. It was a preview of the frontier book, an episode from the year 1846, and the enthusiasm of his historian friends was immediate. For gusto, narrative drive, evocativeness, and the sense of participation, it was a kind of history all too few historians were equipped to write. The approval of Morison, Merk, and others convinced him that now, finally, he should make the last big effort and write the whole book about 1846.

  The second satisfaction, expressed in the Easy Chair of the same issue,12 was of a more personal kind. The Hitler-Stalin pact had been a blow that no American Communist could take without reeling; some of the more idealistic could not take it at all. A general confusion, a caving-in of the party line, tension among the professors of the Left, were followed by a series of recantations, notable among which was that of Granville Hicks, ex-editor of the New Masses, author of a Marxist interpretation of American literature, and once Fellow of United States History at Harvard. The breast-beating and the mea culpas, the mourner’s bench and the repentant tears (the metaphors were inevitable for one raised, as DeVoto had been, on the pentecostal faiths) were grimly amusing to those who had consistently fought the Marxists and resisted their ideas. But amid the general satisfaction that they had at last seen the light, there was an odd tendency to honor the recanters, and on the part of the recanters themselves an assumption of special virtue for having been through the fire and having emerged scarred but safe into democratic territory. That somewhat smug stance infuriated DeVoto more than militant Marxism ever had. Let there be rejoicing in Heaven over the sinner saved, yes. But that did not qualify the sinner to put on airs.

  When, he asked, had these converts begun to be wrong? And when had those who had been saying for years exactly what these penitents were saying now begun to be right? Did the Hitler-Stalin pact make the ex-Reds wrong, or hadn’t they been wrong all along, supporting “a brave and wholly literary rebellion on inherited incomes”? Where did they acquire the right to be listened to with special attention? What gave them their current authority? Their previous gullibility and capacity for making intellectual mistakes? It would make more sense to listen to people who had never had to hit the sawdust trail, who had never been gullible. And though the psychic homelessness of these people was often pathetic, and shattered faith was nothing to laugh at, yet it had to be remembered that many of these same people who had just lost Communism had previously suffered the loss of Art, and before that of God. He suggested unfeelingly that for their next devotion they take to drink, for “Drink may make you an involuntary drunkard but it won’t make you a voluntary damned fool.”