11. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” first installment, p. 4.
Chapter 4 ·
1. Ricardo Quintana to WS, July 1971. Tape.
2. There are eighteen of these, dated from May 11 to October 7, 1918. SUL.
3. BDV to Mother and Dad, June 15, 1918. SUL.
4. BDV to Mother and Dad, June 23, 1918. SUL.
5. BDV to Mother and Dad, June 30, 1918. SUL.
6. BDV to Mother and Dad, undated, but from context early July 1918. SUL.
7. Personnel File, Harvard Appointment Office, Harvard University.
Chapter 5 ·
1. BDV to the Secretary of Harvard College, January 8, 1919. Personnel File, Harvard University Registrar’s Office.
2. BDV to Robert S. Forsythe, October 6, 1927. SUL.
3. Katharine Becker, the girl with whom DeVoto was infatuated from 1919 to 1921, eventually married his first Harvard roommate, Arthur Perkins, and in the summer of 1973 was still living in Ogden. The original letters, still in her possession, were transcribed for possible publication by Constance O. Bunnell, a friend. It is this transcription from which, through Mrs. Bunnell’s kindness and with Mrs. Perkins’ permission, I have quoted.
4. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” second installment, p. 2. SUL.
5. In conversation. Considering that for many years, from Harvard on, he and his friends lost a good deal of skin in BDV’s attacks on the literary and the Left, Mr. Cowley shows a generous and understanding spirit in his recollections. As in many other of his persistent quarrels, DeVoto’s objections to Cowley were intellectual and not personal; he in fact often seemed to avoid personal contact with those he attacked, for fear his intellectual disagreement would be softened by liking. The rift between him and Cowley was at least partially healed in 1944 by Cowley’s temperance on the issue of DeVoto’s book The Literary Fallacy and by their alliance on the question of book censorship, specifically the Strange Fruit case. See Section VI, Chapter 2, “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”
6. Ricardo Quintana to WS, July 1971. Tape.
7. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” second installment, p. 2.
8. Mattingly, Bernard DeVoto, p. 11.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. This is an inference from BDV to Byron Hurlbut, Sept. 15, 1920, SUL, in which BDV tells the story of the acceptance and then rejection of his editorial on Senator Reed Smoot. I find no references to any other “liberal weekly” in the early correspondence.
11. In “The Kent Potter Story” BDV told Kate Sterne that he refused the Belgian fellowship that Dean Briggs and Henderson “threw his way.” But a letter from Dean Briggs (Briggs to BDV, May 14, 1920, SUL) indicates that DeVoto was not recommended for the fellowship. Briggs says that if the recipient chooses not to accept, DeVoto might have a good chance as an alternate.
12. BDV never liked his Aunt Rose, who was pious and who was, he thought, inordinately severe with her daughters. One of these, Rose (Mrs. Jean-Marie Guislain), BDV did like, and in later years he went out of his way to assist her husband, an artist and writer. During the Harvard years and the years immediately following, Florian DeVoto’s letters to his son scold him for not writing to his aunt, and for disregarding her religious suggestions. See, for example, Florian DeVoto to BDV, September 3, no year, and Florian DeVoto to BDV, September 23, 1927. SUL.
13. Mattingly, Bernard DeVoto, pp. 10–11.
Chapter 6 ·
1. BDV to Melville Smith, August 4, 1920. SUL.
2. BDV to Melville Smith, undated but from context late August or early September 1920. SUL.
3. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, September 15, 1920. SUL.
4. BDV to Melville Smith, October 22, 1920. SUL.
5. BDV to Melville Smith, November 9, 1920. SUL.
6. Martha Guernsey, one of the recurrent figures of BDV’s amatory fantasies.
7. BDV to Melville Smith, November 9, 1920. SUL.
8. BDV to Melville Smith, December 17, 1920. SUL.
9. The letters from Clarissa Hagler to BDV, dated from November 8, 1920 to December 3, 1921 (SUL), report the facts and guesses of the case as they came to her, and also much else: details of Kent Hagler’s life and military record, earnest assurances that she will follow BDV’s advice and try to be “Kent’s kind of woman,” and comments on BDV’s manuscript novel. The relationship is fairly intense on both sides. What marks BDV’s part in it is his protectiveness and his profound sympathy with trouble.
10. These were never published, and it seems impossible now to tell how far BDV got with their editing. Among the BDV papers at Stanford is a duplicate notebook of his queries about Kent’s letters, addressed to Clarissa from May 3, 1921, to October 20, 1921. There is no correspondence indicating that he ever submitted Kent’s letters for publication.
11. Most of what he did uncover is contained in Melville Smith to BDV, November 28, 1920. SUL.
12. “The Kent Potter Story,” which remained unfinished, with the note “More, but not more than 2 pages more.” BDV summarized his theories of the mystery in BDV to Melville Smith, February 10, 1921. On that same day, he wrote a somewhat disinfected version to Clarissa, and kept a copy in his file—perhaps as something useful for the proposed edition of Kent’s letters, perhaps for his own still-undefined fictional purposes. Six months later he recapitulated it for Clarissa in six typed pages. BDV to Clarissa Hagler (carbon), November 12, 1921. SUL.
13. BDV to Melville Smith, February 10, 1921. SUL.
14. BDV to Melville Smith, September 26, 1921. SUL.
15. According to a genealogy that BDV with the help of his Aunt Grace prepared for Kate Sterne in the spring of 1936, several members of his mother’s family suffered from nervous disorders not unlike his own. Genealogical Notes, Dye Family, filed as a separate manuscript with the DeVoto Papers. SUL.
16. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” fourth installment, p. 2.
17. Ibid.
18. Describing Skinny to Kate Sterne, BDV said that “except for the one I did marry, [she] was the only woman I tried to marry” (BDV to Kate Sterne, November 2, 1934), and that Skinny gave “a sort of sachet of bergamot or mignonette to the whole period.” This burst of nostalgic reminiscence had been called up by the latest book of Phyllis McGinley, one of Skinny’s old Ogden crowd. That generation of emergent flappers, DeVoto felt, were “the first females who had been human beings since 1870.” The short stories and novels are full of the “Skinny” figure. See, for example, “Front Page Ellen,” Redbook L (November 1927), pp. 32–37, or the character Libby Grayson (a composite of Skinny and Avis DeVoto) in We Accept with Pleasure, or the character Josephine Willard in Mountain Time.
19. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” fourth installment, p. 3.
20. BDV to L. B. R. Briggs, February 4, 1922. Personnel File, Harvard Registrar’s Office. Briggs had evidently suggested possible openings at Syracuse and some midwestern university, and also the possibility of an assistantship or part-time job at Harvard. In reply DeVoto wrote: “I don’t want to apply to either the midwest university or Syracuse so long as there is a fair chance of getting in at Harvard.… It isn’t a question of going where I can make the most money, for the traditional crust and garret—provided the garret is equipped with a cold shower—will do amply for me, but of getting back to the United States first and foremost, and second of getting to the more privileged earth. The Yard and the Square are the most congenial places in the world, and I should rather be there than anywhere else for the year or two of trial, error, and investigation necessary to determine which particular tassel of the literary fringe I am [to] get attached to. Any place east of Utah is good, and I should happily, even joyfully, accept an appointment from a Methodist seminary with compulsory chapel, a ten o’clock rule, and an index expurgatorius, for it would be better than a Mormon community which doesn’t need the ten o’clock rule and has no books at all.” In applying to the Harvard Appointment Office on March
26, he appended a note to the forms, saying that he was not interested in any job in the Intermountain country or in the South. “Anywhere east of the Rockies and north of Mason’s and Dixon’s line.” Personnel folder, Harvard Appointment Office.
21. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” fourth installment, p. 2. “Skinny,” presented with BDV’s fantasizings about her, remembered their friendship as real and warm but without any of the romantic trimmings. She did not remember that they were two neurotics holding each other up, though she admitted having been ill and having appreciated BDV’s understanding and sympathy. It had never even occurred to her that he was ill, and the elopement story made her laugh. She wore his fraternity pin for a while on the understanding that it meant no formal engagement. EBM (Skinny) to WS, January 9, 1972.
22. In response to a letter from Clarence Budington Kelland saying that DeVoto knew nothing about the cattle industry and should stick to asphalt, where he was at home. BDV to Kelland, February 21, 1947. SUL.
23. Once, commenting on the clumsiness of his son Gordon, he confessed to Kate Sterne that he had himself never been any handier than Gordon was now. BDV to Kate Sterne, December 7, 1934.
24. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” fourth installment, p. 3.
25. Since the Kent Potter story is fictionalized, though lightly, and since the autobiographical elements in it involve some showing off before Kate Sterne, one must admit the possibility that his abrupt departure from the Hagler family was not fear of Clarissa’s too-clinging adoration or of her mother’s willingness to promote a match, but some social inadequacy or outright gaffe of his own. Viewed objectively he would not seem, apart from his friendship with Kent, a suitor whom the Haglers would have found irresistible, being nameless, penniless, and unwell.
26. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, undated, but from context December 1922. SUL.
II NORTHWESTERN
Chapter 1 ·
1. Betty White, I Lived This Story, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1930. The novel was written mainly in the DeVoto household during the summers of 1928 and 1929, and was dedicated to DeVoto.
2. Helen Howe, We Happy Few, Simon & Schuster, 1946.
3. Fred Bissell to WS, October 28, 1971. He adds that he has no proof she ever did say it to President Lowell, or that President Lowell would have understood her if she had. It is a characterization that Avis DeVoto repudiates with dismay now, but the story is an only moderately extreme form of the legendry she has sometimes inspired. Leave it that she was outspoken.
Bissell took DeVoto’s full-year course in writing during his senior year, 1930–31, a class that included Joseph Alsop and Russell Maloney. Later he was a graduate student and teaching assistant in history and literature, from 1932 to 1936, and to some extent a member of the DeVoto “crowd,” though not so intimate a member that DeVoto couldn’t confuse him with his brother Richard when Richard Bissell published, and DeVoto reviewed, A Stretch on the River, in 1950.
4. Always ostentatiously susceptible to feminine charms, BDV made much of the short skirts and rolled stockings of his students. His hyperbolic tribute to the girl college student, “The Co-Ed, the Hope of Liberal Education,” Harper’s CLV (September 1927), pp. 452–59, begins with a tribute to the legs in the front row.
5. This is Avis’ recollection of how BDV first noticed her. “My legs were never that good.”
6. Fred Bissell to WS, October 28, 1971.
7. Betty White, I Lived This Story, p. 48.
8. George Ball to WS, August 25, 1971. Ball’s older brother Stewart was a classmate of Avis MacVicar’s, and one of BDV’s favorites. He typed the manuscript of DeVoto’s first published novel, The Crooked Mile, and often played tennis and boxed with DeVoto. It was perhaps through his doing that his brother George landed in DeVoto’s advanced section of Freshman English when he came to Northwestern in 1926. When DeVoto resigned and did not return the next fall, George Ball was handed on to DeVoto’s close friend Garrett Mattingly, who had not yet switched from English to History.
9. BDV’s caustic opinion of Northwestern was expressed, after he left there, in “Farewell to Pedagogy,” Harper’s CLVI (January 1928), pp. 182–90, and in “Northwestern,” College Humor (January 1929), pp. 24–25. It was also apparent that in other essays on education he kept Northwestern in mind as a horrible example, and even in the stories that he wrote about “Morrison” and “Olympus” universities for Redbook and the Post during the late 1920s, it is plainly Northwestern that is the model. At least in his early years as a writer, DeVoto had a mountain man’s dislike for the Middle West and a Harvard man’s contempt for the middle western mind.
10. The anecdote is told in “Farewell to Pedagogy,” and a fictional situation that closely resembles BDV’s clash with President Scott is used in We Accept with Pleasure.
11. George Ball to WS, August 25, 1971.
12. Miss Brown, now Mrs. William C. Boyden, besides reminiscing for me on tape, in person, and in many letters, dug out a batch of her old Northwestern English papers, with BDV’s comments on them. These corroborate the pedagogical thoroughness that is evident in his comments on the papers of Helen Avis MacVicar preserved among the DeVoto papers at SUL, and Mrs. Boyden’s recollections of those Northwestern years amplify and corroborate the recollections of Avis DeVoto, George and Stewart Ball, Henry Reck, and DeVoto’s English Department colleague Arthur Nethercot.
13. BDV to Melville Smith, October 22, 1920. SUL.
14. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, undated, but from context late May 1923. SUL.
15. Washington Island I have reconstructed from DeVoto’s letters, Avis DeVoto’s recollections, the essay “Vestige of a Nordic Arcady,” American Mercury IX (November 1926), pp. 327–32, and the short story “Front Page Ellen,” Redbook L (November 1927), pp. 32–37.
16. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” fourth installment, p. 3.
17. The Crooked Mile, Minton, Balch & Company, 1924. The title, like so many of DeVoto’s titles, was the product of somewhat desperate collaboration between author and publisher.
Chapter 2 ·
1. This is the opinion of Sarah Margaret Brown, who as a Chicago newspaperwoman was familiar with the literary scene there from the time of her Northwestern apprenticeship onward. Her impression is borne out by Avis, who remembers the Chicago years as poverty-stricken, restricted, and half frantic with ambition and hard work. There is preserved no correspondence between BDV and Chicago writers, editors, and reviewers of the time, and he did not meet Fanny Butcher, of the Chicago Tribune, until she joined the Bread Loaf staff in the summer of 1934.
2. E. H. Balch to BDV, January 21, 1923. SUL. Subsequent letters in the same file trace the course of the negotiations. Balch to BDV, April 18, 1923, lists the revisions requested when the novel was finally accepted for publication: they amount to the cutting of John Gale’s conversations, analyses, and quotations, the softening of some sexy passages, and the reduction of redundant description. Later letters report on reviews, sales, movie bites, etc.
3. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Biography: the Craft and the Calling, Little, Brown, 1969, p. 98.
4. This was on his mind from the beginning, evidence of BDV’s determination to write his way out of the poverty and drudgery of teaching. The ambition to live well had never been dim in him. The original of “Skinny” says that once, surveying her father’s luxurious house, he confided that this was the way he wanted to live. EBM to WS, January 9, 1972. Balch, predictably, replied to his young author’s anxious query that he had no objection whatever to his getting rich off the Post.
5. See “Writing for Money,” Saturday Review of Literature XVI (October 9, 1937), pp. 2–4.
6. “I think you are a little hipped on the subject of your own physiognomy,” Balch said, bluntly and accurately. Balch to BDV, July 21, 1923. SUL.
7. The Transcript reviewed him on October 4, 1924.
8. On October 5, 1924.
9. On November 15, 1924.
&nbs
p; 10. Llewellyn Jones, “Extry! All about the Diaspora!” Review of Bernard DeVoto, The Crooked Mile, Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, October 24, 1924.
Chapter 3 ·
1. “Lesion,” The Guardian I (December 1924), pp. 4–7.
2. “America by the Frontier Formula,” Chicago Evening Post Literary Review, December 26, 1923, and “An American Tragedy,” Saturday Review of Literature I (December 27, 1923), p. 412.
3. To the correspondents who accused him of caricaturing Joseph Smith and the Mormons he replied uniformly that the character of Ohio Boggs was a composite figure based mainly on Peter Cartwright. But the “mobbings” and the pitched warfare against a frontier sect and the eviction of Boggs’s followers from the settlements have close parallels in the history of Mormonism, and the death of Boggs is clearly modeled on that of the Mormon Apostle Parley P. Pratt.
4. Duncan Aikman to BDV, January 7, 1925. SUL.
5. “Ogden: The Underwriters of Salvation,” in Duncan Aikman, ed., The Taming of the Frontier, Minton, Balch & Co., 1925, pp. 25–60.
6. See Julius P. Barclay, “A Bibliography of the Writings of Bernard DeVoto,” in Bowen, Mirrielees, Schlesinger, and Stegner, Four Portraits and One Subject: Bernard DeVoto, Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Though it needs a few small corrections and the addition of some items that have come to light since its publication, the Barclay bibliography has been indispensable in the making of this book.
7. E. H. Balch to BDV, February 12, 1925. SUL.
8. This visit to Utah is very thinly represented in the correspondence. It is alluded to in some of the letters from Florian DeVoto to his son, but for detail I have depended almost entirely on the recollections of Avis DeVoto.
9. If the article was designed to make the state of Utah aware of its rebellious son, it could hardly have been more successful. My own experience (I was then a resident of Utah) was perhaps not unrepresentative. Appearing for an early-morning class in the old L Building of the University of Utah, I came up the stairs just as the office door at the end of the hall opened and a magazine came skidding down the slick battleship linoleum. The door slammed—it belonged to George Emory Fellowes, a professor of history who had once been president of the University of Maine—and I picked up the magazine. It was the American Mercury, of which I had vaguely heard. In it, as I thumbed through looking for the cause of Professor Fellowes’ wrath, I found an article entitled “Utah,” by—as unfriendly publicists of any faith are likely to say in such circumstances—“one Bernard DeVoto.”
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Page 53
