I’ve been to see Wessler. He says it’s just more of the same. That doesn’t ease the drive.
I don’t know how I’ll work it out. Humiliatingly, no doubt. But I’ll let you know. And so far I can contemplate New York without going nuts.
He nerved himself up to make the trip, and appeared as scheduled on “Adventure” at 3:30 P.M., Sunday, November 13. The stimulation of the show was good for him. He enjoyed it and was in cheerful spirits when he walked back to his room at the Gotham with Scheinberg, who had attended the show. They sat on the bed and talked a while.
And so six o’clock did not find him alone.
DeVoto died in good hands, in spite of quick, efficient, trained, and most personal efforts of a most trusted friend to keep him alive. If he was going to have a heart attack instead of the lung cancers and stomach cancers of his anxiety, he couldn’t have arranged to have it at a better place or time, when he was having a quiet drink and talk with his friend and doctor. And he was perhaps lucky, too, that Dr. Scheinberg’s care did not pull him through. For as if to illustrate the inescapable justifications for human anxiety, the autopsy revealed that the apparently benign hard spot on the prostate was a well-developed adenocarcinoma that would have killed him far more painfully within a year or two.
So the humorous tribute that the editors of Harper’s had written in the presentation copy containing the 241st Easy Chair was read over the air not as a living accolade but as an obituary. As a matter of fact, DeVoto had written a form of his own obituary in that essay that summed up his twenty years of monthly journalism and his career as gadfly and public thinker. His journalism, he said, had been personal, because it had seemed to want to be that way. It had taken on all sorts of jobs from the trivial to the urgent—a lot of them because no one else seemed likely to do them and they must not be left undone.
My job is to write about anything in American life that may interest me, but it is also to arrive at judgments under my own steam.… With some judgments that is the end of the line; express them and you have nothing more to do. But there are also judgments that require you to commit yourself, to stick your neck out. Expressing them in print obliges you to go on to advocacy. They get home to people’s beliefs and feelings about important things, and that makes them inflammable.
If he were to put a single label on what he had written in the Easy Chair, he said, he would call it “cultural criticism,” and the buried Howells in him rose to the surface when he insisted that “no manifestation of American life is trivial to the critic of culture.” Something else rose—pride—in his final paragraph:
I hope that what I have said has been said gracefully and that sometimes it has been amusing, or informative, or useful. No one has got me to say anything I did not want to say and no one has prevented me from saying anything I wanted to. The Easy Chair has given me a place in the journalism of my time. No one knows better than a journalist that his work is ephemeral. As I have said in my preface, it is not important, it is only indispensable. The life or the half life of an issue of Harper’s has never been calculated; the magazine has durable covers but even the copies kept in doctors’ waiting rooms wear out and are dumped in the bay or ground up for pulp. But a historian knows that a lot of writing which has no caste mark on its forehead gets dumped in the bay too, and that he can count on finding bound files of Harper’s in library stacks. He has to use them; he cannot write history without them.
The historian has to use Bernard DeVoto, too; he cannot write the history of his times without him, though some of the parties and coteries he was at war with have tried.
In the days following his death, that fact was not unapparent. He was a force that had passed, a wind that had suddenly died and left a stillness. Eric Severeid, Alistair Cooke, Senators Neuberger and Metcalf, editorial writers and politicians and conservationists memorialized him and regretted his passing and wondered who would do his work.6 They were agreed it would take three men. (If they looked back from 1973 they would have to agree it has not been done.) They called him hardheaded and softhearted, the nation’s environmental conscience and liberty’s watchdog, the West’s most comprehensive historian and most affectionate spokesman and most acid critic.
On November 15, at 2 P.M., in Christ Church, Cambridge, where the DeVotos’ musically gifted son, Mark, had been a choir boy and was now a bell ringer, DeVoto’s old Harvard companion Melville Smith, Director of the Longy School of Music, played Bach and César Franck for his memorial service and the congregation was made up of friends gathered from Cambridge, Boston, New York, Washington. If he had been alive, he might have remarked humbly how many people sincerely grieved for his loss. The ushers were long-time members of the inner circle of the DeVoto Academy: Sargent Kennedy, Mark Saxton, Lovell Thompson, Kenneth Murdock, Theodore Morrison, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walter Edmonds.7 The pews were filled with former students, old Harvard colleagues, writers and publishers and editors, people who had learned from him and liked him and been offended by him and had come out on the affectionate side of exasperation into wholehearted respect. He had made heavy demands on all who knew him well, but he had paid back, often in advance and almost always with interest, the drafts he had made on their friendship. And he had made even heavier demands on himself. One test of that was the way in which they remembered him: not haunted, not anxious, not distraught or gloomy, though inside himself he had been all of those much of the time. They remembered the pleasure and excitement they had derived from his company and his talk and his crackle of ideas. As Samuel Eliot Morison wrote Avis shortly after DeVoto’s death, “Benny’s conversation was sparkling; his writings, whether essays or history, were lively and vivid; his erudition in western history and American literature was amazing; his friendship warm and responsive.”8
And how, said Mrs. Howard Mumford Jones, how he could wake up a room!
One final detail. In mid-April of the following year Avis heard from Chet Olsen, who had been entrusted with a friend’s duty. Benny DeVoto had wanted his ashes scattered over one of the national forests, and James Vessey, one of his close Forest Service friends, had suggested the Lochsa. He had sent Olsen a map showing the approximate spot where Benny used to sit on a rock beside the stream and make remarks about anyone who would rather be riding a goddam horse. Olsen sent the map now to Avis, showing the spot on the Lochsa River between the Powell Ranger Station and Lobo Pass where Operation Lochsa had just been completed by him personally, in a plane rented from the Johnson Flying Service of Missoula. It was a beautiful day, Olsen said, the first good day of spring. The area was covered with an unusual depth of snow. He had seen not a person, a smoke, or a wild creature as he and the pilot made their pass.
That was the end of Benny DeVoto’s journey deathward from childhood. He sifted down as a handful of light ash—and probably illegal at that—over a forest wilderness he had loved. In twisting the arm of his inward coward, and in achieving mastery over his anarchic drives and bending his disruptive instincts to socially useful ends, he had first had to teach himself courage and then make himself live by it.
He never expected perfection, and even his most fitting memorial did not achieve it. When, some years after his death, Chet Olsen and James Vessey, with Gregory Rochlin, Senator Metcalf, and others organized a memorial for him on the Lochsa, they debated between an inscribed granite boulder and a bronze plaque, and decided on the plaque. As Vessey said, either stone or bronze was sure to be mutilated eventually—he was a man who had dealt with the traveling and vacationing public, and knew—but a plaque could be renewed from time to time, whereas a carved boulder, once defaced, would have to remain in its spoiled condition forever.
The reasoning would have pleased DeVoto. It acknowledged the principle of destructiveness and evil in the universe and especially in the damned human race, which sooner or later defaces everything, even what it reveres. But it asserted as well the capacity for renewal and repair that inheres in the human will. It said that you can exert sens
e and foresight and wisdom and care in this lamentable world, and that you should expect to have to.
At first they planned to fasten his plaque on a four-hundred-year-old western red cedar, a tree fifty inches through at breast height, in a grove that he had several times admired. In the end they fastened it to a boulder, as more lasting, and then dedicated the whole grove to him in another sign. There tourists who probably never heard his name, but should have, can read a sentence or two about him, there in the state where he wished he had been born, on a stream that he loved, at the side of a historic trail that he had followed from end to end with the excitement of discovery.
—“To Avis and Bernard Florian Augustine, Elmer Davis, 10 February 1942.”
Bernard DeVoto raising a Colt .45, a publicity photo taken in the 1940s.
Laurette Murdock, Kay Thompson (Mrs. Lovell), Bernard DeVoto, and Avis DeVoto.
Bernard DeVoto.
Bernard DeVoto and students at Radcliffe Publishing Procedures class, summer 1950.
Meeting of Advisory board, National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments, Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky. October 26, 1951. Alfred Knopf is just behind Bernard DeVoto.
President Stearns of the University of Colorado and Bernard DeVoto.
“A gathering of characters at Erickson’s Saloon.” Portland, Oregon, January 12, 1954. Bernard DeVoto and Stewart Holbrook.
Notes
Most of Bernard DeVoto’s papers, manuscripts, correspondence, and memorabilia, as well as his extensive personal library, are at Stanford University. Small collections of letters are among the Henry L. Mencken papers at the New York Public Library, the Robert Frost papers at the Dartmouth College Library, and the Alfred Knopf papers, destined for the University of Texas Library but quoted here directly from a Xerox copy of the files provided me by Mr. Knopf before the transfer to Austin. A body of youthful letters dating from 1919 to 1921 is in the possession of Mrs. Arthur Perkins of Ogden, Utah; and I have been privileged to see and quote from a folder of late, revealing letters written to Dr. Herbert Scheinberg of New York City. Numerous random items, as well as the complete correspondence between DeVoto and his last literary agent, Carl Brandt, are in my own files. These will shortly find their way into the DeVoto archive at Stanford. Files turned over to me by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth Murdock, Dr. Lawrence Kubie, and Robert Stearns have already found their way there.
When previously unpublished items are quoted, the sources are indicated by the following abbreviations. If no designation appears, the item is in my own possession, which means, shortly, Stanford’s.
BB—Brandt & Brandt
DCL—Dartmouth College Library
NYPL—New York Public Library
KBP—Katharine Becker Perkins
SUL—Stanford University Library
AAK—Alfred A. Knopf
HS—Herbert Scheinberg
When the source of any fact or quotation is identified adequately in the text, I have not bothered to duplicate the identification in the notes; and I have not appended a bibliography, because that of Julius Barclay, in Four Portraits and One Subject: Bernard DeVoto, Houghton Mifflin, 1963, is virtually complete on DeVoto’s own writings and is readily available. It is from DeVoto’s own writings, more than from any other source, that this biography has been made. The life of a man who wrote so much, and so directly out of his own thought, experience, and feeling, demands to be considered as a sort of annotated bibliography.
I THE AMNIOTIC HOME
Chapter 1 ·
1. BDV to Melville Smith, July 8, 1920. SUL
Chapter 2 ·
1. Despite frequent assertions throughout his life that he hated Ogden and all it stood for, DeVoto gave just as frequent evidence that its physical setting remained vivid in his memory. He wrote the Wasatch and its canyons into his earliest novels as well as into his last one, Mountain Time, and always in celebratory terms. In the last year of his life he wrote his most nostalgic description of the canyons and their influence on his boyhood, and specifically took back much of what he had previously said about Ogden as a living-place. See “Good Place to Grow In,” Lincoln-Mercury Times VIII (March–April), 1956, pp. 1–3.
2. In an autobiographizing fit inspired by his invalid pen pal Kate Sterne, DeVoto in the mid-1930s produced a number of essays dealing with the historical, social, and intellectual, as opposed to the geographical, aspects of the Ogden of his boyhood. See especially “Jonathan Dyer, Frontiersman,” Harper’s CLXVII (September 1933), pp. 491–501 (reprinted in Forays and Rebuttals as “The Life of Jonathan Dyer”), and “Fossil Remnants of the Frontier: Notes on a Utah Boyhood,” Harper’s CLXX (April 1935), pp. 590–600. The tone of these, as well as the later “A Sagebrush Bookshelf,” Harper’s CLXXV (October 1937), pp. 488–96, is notably mellower than that of his earlier essays about Utah. Both the personal grudge and the literary convention of revolt from the village have passed with the 1920s.
3. BDV to Robert S. Forsythe, October 6, 1927. SUL. In this letter DeVoto provides a brief family history, along with thumbnail sketches of his parents and both his grandfathers, as a basis for the biographical and critical booklet that Forsythe was preparing for Macmillan. At the age of thirty, DeVoto still speaks of his father as “the finest mind I have ever known,” a statement that tells as much about his own capacity for hyperbolic intellectual admiration as about his father’s intellectual attainments.
4. Family tradition may well have been helped along by Bernard’s imagination. In 1926, in response to a query from his son, Florian DeVoto made certain corrections: “As to your reading Pope, I can not say where you first got it. While Alice, Edith and Rhoda studied their lessons at the table, you in your high chair attempted to grab their books. I then got the magazines for you and you thumbed the advertisements. Your first impressions of form, however, were from the paper on the ceiling and I told your mother then that they were interesting you—so when you got the magazines you soon distinguished between the letters, the kids, mother, and myself telling you. You learned the alphabet long before you began to talk. When you did talk, you went forward rapidly. Your first recital was the Three Little Kittens and their mittens. Mother had been reading it to you sometime and you memorized it. Hiawatha was the first book you mastered, then Poe’s poems. I think Pope came next, tho you were still in dresses.…” Florian DeVoto to BDV, July 29, 1926. SUL.
5. BDV to Robert S. Forsythe, October 6, 1927. SUL.
6. Glenway Wescott, Good-bye, Wisconsin, Harper & Brothers, 1928, p. 39.
7. Her distaste, though in keeping with the sentiments of many people in Ogden, was perhaps excessive, since she had had two close relatives to protect from the contamination of DeVoto’s company; her younger brother, who was an early friend of BDV’s, and her son, who was later a pupil of his at North Junior High School. But the resentment and dislike that his name brought up in her existed to some degree in most good Mormon families with whom he had contact. He threatened what they wished to preserve.
8. His “autobiographizing” letters to Kate Sterne indicate that at various times during his youth he worked on the Salt Lake and Ogden Railroad as expressman, ticket seller, bookkeeper, brakeman, and general factotum (BDV to Kate Sterne, June 27, 1934. SUL); and that he worked on a road-building gang and as a cowboy in the Raft River Valley; and that he wrote in several capacities and at several times for the Ogden Standard-Examiner. To other correspondents he confided that he had worked cattle on the Platte and had mucked in a mine, location not specified. Some of this seems the innocent prevarication and exaggeration of a boy desperate to shine, though the stories persist well into his maturity. The summer on the Salt Lake and Ogden, the stints with the Standard-Examiner, and the (very brief) cowboy episode on the Raft River are corroborated by other evidence. The other experiences may be either imaginary or exaggerated.
9. He discusses his early experiences with books in “A Sagebrush Bookshelf,” Harper’s CLXXV (October 1937), pp. 4
88–96.
Chapter 3 ·
1. There are twelve letters and five poems, dated from October 3, 1915, shortly after BDV arrived at Harvard, to October 24, 1916. Two were written from Ogden in the summer of 1916. SUL.
2. His Harvard transcript shows a grade of B in History 2 and in History 32a and 32b, and an A in History of Science (with Henderson).
3. BDV to Harvard College, November 25, 1915. Personnel File, Registrar’s Office, Harvard University.
4. Garrett Mattingly, Bernard DeVoto, a Preliminary Appraisal, Little, Brown, 1938, p. 19.
5. Bernard DeVoto, “The Maturity of American Literature,” Saturday Review of Literature XXVII (August 5, 1944), pp. 14–18.
6. Ibid. But this somewhat captious judgment is contradicted by DeVoto’s respectful memorial to Hurlbut in Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XXXVIII (March 1930), pp. 302–7, and by his respectful, even reverential friendship for Dean Briggs.
7. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” first installment, p. 2. SUL. This is a fictionalized account of the Hagler story, written for the entertainment of DeVoto’s invalid friend Kate Sterne. It is filed as a separate manuscript with the DeVoto Papers at Stanford and is a useful, though not always reliable, fragment of autobiography. Since all the Sterne correspondence is in the Stanford Library safe, it will not hereafter be identified by library in the notes.
8. Ibid. These same Harvard years are recollected in Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return.
9. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return, Viking (Compass Books), p. 38.
10. “Exiles from Reality,” Saturday Review of Literature X (June 2, 1934), pp. 721–22.
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 52
