The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

2. “College Education for the Intelligent Few,” Current History XXXV (March 1932), pp. 792–98; Anonymous, “Grace Before Teaching, a Letter to a Young Doctor of Literature,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XL (March 1932), pp. 261–75.

  3. BDV to Knopf, January 22, 1930. AAK.

  4. Manley Aaron to BDV, May 6, 1930. AAK.

  5. Knopf to BDV, May 28, 1931. AAK.

  6. Across the Wide Missouri, Houghton Mifflin, 1947, p. 272.

  7. The collection of long, intimate letters from King to DeVoto (SUL) expresses King’s steadily growing frustration at his failure to do anything substantial as a writer, though as an advertising executive he was both successful and prosperous.

  8. Mattingly, Bernard DeVoto, p. 22.

  9. “From a Graduate’s Window,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XXXIX (September 1930), pp. 47–50.

  10. “Literary Censorship in Boston,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XXXIX (September 1930), pp. 30–42.

  11. “From a Graduate’s Window,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XXXIX (December 1930), pp. 176–79.

  12. These matters run serially and largely through the editorials of the four 1931 issues.

  13. “We Brighter People,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XXXIX (March 1931), pp. 323–37. For “Mark Twain and the Genteel Tradition” and “Grace before Teaching” see notes 1 and 2, above.

  14. “Grace Before Teaching.”

  15. DeVoto believed with some justice that his outbursts in print were directed against ideas, not against individuals. But for reasons geographical as well as reasons temperamental he often sounded more personal than he intended. Of Brooks he did not always speak respectfully, but he meant to: he thought him the best and brightest exemplar of a way of thinking with which he profoundly disagreed. On Mumford he looked with dislike, on Ludwig Lewisohn and Waldo Frank with contempt. Some inhibition against personal contumely in print kept his published opinions somewhere within bounds—though those he attacked were unlikely to notice the inhibition. But in conversation and in letters he was not inhibited in the least, and his gift for vituperation often led him into extravaganzas of disagreement that ended by becoming humorous. As a single example, here is a comment on Waldo Frank, taken from a letter to Kate Sterne on December 26, 1934: “It is the rock on which my church stands that, for instance, Waldo Frank can’t be right about anything, that Waldo Frank’s odor of sanctity is ipso facto hydrogen sulphide, that when Waldo Frank sees God, necessarily his vision, like Moses’s, is confined to the hinder parts, that any opinion ever held by Waldo Frank in any circumstances about anything is axiomatically blithering nonsense and can no more be accepted by any intelligence, however limited, than Joseph Smith Jun. could consecrate the Eucharist. And when the to-do about this new book [about Stieglitz] started I got out the god-damnedest silliest book ever written by anyone not a Christian Scientist, I refer unabashed to Our America, and read what Waldo wrote about Stieglitz in 1919, while, here and there, a faintly comprehensible meaning was still left in his cirrocumulus style. And I don’t know, Kate, I don’t know.” That is a fair example of his gift for hyperbole, “the Mencken tone.” It is also a sufficient explanation of why the Kate Sterne letters, his most uninhibited outpourings, are in the Stanford University Library’s safe.

  16. “Mark Twain and the Genteel Tradition.”

  17. Review of Clara Clemens, My Father, Mark Twain, New England Quarterly V (January 1932), pp. 169–71.

  18. “The Graduate’s Window,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XL (June 1932), pp. 408–13. He gave different explanations of his leaving to different correspondents. To Wesley Stout of The Saturday Evening Post (BDV to Stout, April 15, 1932, SUL) he wrote that he was quitting. To Kate Sterne he declared, almost bragged, that he had been fired.

  Chapter 3 ·

  1. BDV to Kate Sterne, June (no day), 1936.

  2. Or vice versa. He was at least as nimble in interpretations as any of his analysts. See his self-analysis of Mountain Time, Section VI, Chapter 6.

  3. The invitation was reported, with obvious delight, in several letters, for example BDV to Paul Ferris, May 1, 1931, SUL, and BDV to Lee Hartman, May 15, 1931, SUL.

  4. Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Brigham Young in Whittingham, other leaders in St. Johnsbury, Danville, and other villages and towns in the Green Mountains and the Caledonian Hills. The cohesive Mormon social system was as much a product of New England village folkways as of divine revelation; Mormon virtues were about equally those of the frontier and those of upstate New York and Vermont. DeVoto admired in Vermonters precisely what he admired in some of his mother’s family, and since it had nothing to do with his own experience or his own emotional life, and nothing to do with dogma, he could “return” to Vermont as he never could have to Ogden.

  5. BDV to Rev. C. J. Armstrong, September 1, 1931. SUL.

  6. Late in his career, DeVoto wrote up this episode in “My Career as a Lawbreaker,” which his agent Carl Brandt tried vainly to sell to some magazine and which ended up as Easy Chair No. 219, Harper’s CCVIII (January 1954), p. 8.

  7. A friend during the Cambridge years, and, after the DeVotos’ move to Lincoln, a country neighbor.

  8. “New England: There She Stands,” Harper’s CLXXIV (March 1932), pp. 405–15. Frost’s interest in the essay, and even more in the attitudes and moralities it explicitly applauded, is attested by Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, The Years of Triumph, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970, p. 671, note, and also by Frost to BDV, ca. June 10, 1943, Thompson, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964, pp. 509–10. See Section III, Chapter 12.

  Chapter 4 ·

  1. The inescapable ironies of a war that was supposed to save the world for democracy, and its aftermath in repression, anti-syndicalism laws, and such events as the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution, encouraged after the war the spread of what had been essentially a literary-coterie attitude before it. Thus a period of intense and brilliant literary activity coincided with a period of literary contempt for the country and culture that produced it, and even with the common assertion that high creativity was impossible in America. For a single sample, related to the Brooks-Mumford doctrines but not immediately associated with that school, consider T. K. Whipple’s Spokesmen, a series of literary essays celebrating American writers and simultaneously demonstrating how the gas-lighted barbarity had blighted their genius.

  2. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day, Beacon Press (first paperback edition) 1957, p. 144.

  3. Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, E. P. Dutton, 1920, p. 14.

  4. Ibid., p. 34.

  5. Ibid., pp. 35–37.

  6. Ibid., p. 84. The thesis that in becoming a funny man Mark Twain “felt that he was selling rather than fulfilling his own soul” is central to Brooks’s “ordeal” theory. It was one of the targets over which DeVoto sent wave after wave of bombers.

  7. Malcolm Cowley, ed., After the Genteel Tradition, Southern Illinois University Press, 1964, p. 184.

  8. If he had not learned it in 1932, he learned it later. Zinsser’s “biography” of typhus, Rats, Lice, and History, begins with arguments between Zinsser as scientist and a literary man who is Bernard DeVoto. The two were close friends until Zinsser’s death; and they met when DeVoto took to Zinsser the manuscript of the first part of Mark Twain’s America and asked Zinsser, a friend of Brooks’s, if he should soften his attack on Brooks’s ideas in consideration of Brooks’s reported nervous illness. See Section VI, Chapter 2, “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”

  9. Mark Twain’s America, Little, Brown, 1932, Foreword, pp. ix–xiii.

  10. Ibid.

  11. It should be pointed out that the American celebrated and represented by Mark Twain and assiduously prospected for by Henry James was a temporary synthesis only; he represented the culmination of a limited number of racial stocks and a limited number of cultural variants within the context of a continental nation expanding to its geopolitically logical limits. He might look a little o
ut of place in contemporary New York or Detroit or San Francisco.

  12. Mark Van Doren, review of Mark Twain’s America, The Nation 135 (October 19, 1932), p. 370.

  13. Robert E. Spiller, ed., The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters. The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921–1963. E. P. Dutton, 1970. Mumford to Brooks, December 27, 1932, p. 84.

  14. Paine’s letter, though somewhat condescending (and hence irritating to DeVoto) had been kindly enough, though it refused access to the papers. Paine repeated the refusal on October 2, 1928, while giving DeVoto permission to quote from Paine’s books, with credit, as much as he pleased. In that October 2 letter he justified his refusal of access to the papers on the ground that these papers were Mark Twain’s “refuse,” properly closed to everyone. Out of this refuse, since DeVoto’s original request to see it, have been published not only DeVoto’s Mark Twain in Eruption, parts of Mark Twain at Work, and Letters from the Earth, but several volumes edited by Dixon Wecter and Henry Nash Smith; and at the present time every word of the “refuse” is being scrupulously edited and published under the direction of Frederick Anderson of the University of California at Berkeley. This will run to fourteen to sixteen volumes.

  So time has been on DeVoto’s side in the disagreement about Mark Twain’s unpublished manuscripts. Nevertheless his blunt assault on Paine in his Foreword brought indignant demands for an apology and threats of a court suit from Paine, who said DeVoto was guilty of something very close to libel or slander; and from Charles Lark, the lawyer for the Mark Twain Estate, a demand for a photostatic copy of the Paine letter that DeVoto said had said no more books about Mark Twain needed to be written. DeVoto refused Lark’s demand, but a week later, he had either acknowledged his overstatements or Paine had cooled down. “Hell, let it go,” he said. As for Charles Lark, he later became a close friend of DeVoto’s, the one individual in the Mark Twain Company whom DeVoto thoroughly respected. See Paine to BDV, October 2, 1928, October 27, 1932, and November 4, 1932; BDV to Charles Lark, October 24, 1932; and BDV to Paine, November 1, 1932. SUL.

  15. Lawrence Kubie to BDV, November 3, 1949. SUL.

  16. Compare his reactions to the attacks on him by Sinclair Lewis and others after the publication of The Literary Fallacy. Section VI, Chapter 2, “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”

  17. See, for example, Henry Seidel Canby, review of Mark Twain’s America, Saturday Review of Literature IX (October 8, 1932), p. 164.

  18. Spiller, The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters, Brooks to Mumford, December 30, 1932, p. 85.

  Chapter 5 ·

  1. Homans, DeVoto’s first Harvard tutee, became his intimate friend, as did Charles Curtis, a Boston lawyer and member of the Harvard Corporation. In his complicated way, DeVoto valued both of them for their connections as well as for their intelligence and good company. Homans was the son of Henry Adams’ favorite niece, and so as blue-blooded as the Back Bay produced. Curtis, later forced off the Corporation because of his divorce, was a bluestocking who became a victim of the bluenoses. Both Curtis and Homans were members of Henderson’s Pareto seminar; in 1934 they collaborated in An Introduction to Pareto, the first extended study of Pareto’s sociology in English. In 1936 Curtis married Frances Prentice, an ex-Fellow at Bread Loaf, a friend of Kitty Bowen’s, and, like Mrs. Bowen, one of DeVoto’s fervent admirers. Both Curtises were regular reviewers for The Saturday Review of Literature during DeVoto’s editorship, she of popular fiction, he of books on sociology and the law. DeVoto and Charles Curtis were associated as members of the board of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and in later years Curtis was not only DeVoto’s lawyer but the attorney for his publishers, Houghton Mifflin. In 1947, as chief judge for the History Book Club, DeVoto helped pick Curtis’ book on the Supreme Court, The Lions Under the Throne, as a History Book Club selection. George Homans is presently a professor of sociology at Harvard. Curtis died tragically in a house fire at Stonington, Connecticut, on December 23, 1959.

  2. BDV to William Sloane, July 5, 1949. SUL.

  3. BDV to Mark Saxton, September 18, 1947. SUL.

  4. See especially the Easy Chair, Harper’s CXCV (November 1947), pp. 434–37, a product of the same euphoria that provoked the letter to Mark Saxton quoted above, and “Bread Loaf, Vermont,” Ford Times XLVIII (May 1956), pp. 2–6. Dozens of letters recommend Bread Loaf to aspiring writers.

  5. “When we can barricade ourselves away from the customers we’ll have a good time,” he wrote Kate Sterne just before the beginning of his third Bread Loaf session. “At four P.M. on Thursday the entire gang will be in that pre-game jitters, deciding wholesale that it was a mistake to accept the appointment, quarreling with each other, and clamoring to poor Morrison for room transfers and transportation out, and drinking some lukewarm infusion of Hervey’s [Hervey Allen’s] made up of old tea, sweet vermouth, sugar syrup, Scotch, lemon peel, grenadine, cedar bark and table salt, and never wondering why they feel so bad. The bark of a Pontiac horn, a bellboy enters bearing ice, then silence and expectation for a space, and, the dust of Lincoln still on him, Benny is seen mixing martinis. At once she’ll be driving six white horses and no one needs to tell me why I’m asked to Bread Loaf year after year.” BDV to Kate Sterne, August 12, 1934.

  6. Catherine Drinker Bowen, distinguished member of a distinguished family, was a protégée of DeVoto’s from the time they met at Bread Loaf in the summer of 1933. She had all the qualifications: she was acutely intelligent and greatly talented, she was a lady but by no means a stiff lady, she had a sense of humor, she admired him and valued his advice and took it. And her researches on Holmes and John Adams led her into American history, where they met on ground that both revered. DeVoto was instrumental in bringing her to Little, Brown, then his own publishers, and for years he acted as her patron, critic, and adviser.

  7. Josephine Johnson, frail, pretty, poetic, and feminine, appeared at Bread Loaf as a Fellow, along with Frances Prentice, in the summer of 1934. She elicited from DeVoto a fury of admiration that lasted for several years. Her winning the Pulitzer prize for Now in November was a triumph that he predicted and enjoyed fully. As editor of The Saturday Review of Literature he published a number of her poems. His admiration did not go unnoted. On one occasion, a staff artist at SRL produced a DeVoto Map of the United States, which showed only Cambridge, Bread Loaf, Utah, and the routes of Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, and Josephine Johnson.

  8. Fletcher Pratt, author of Ordeal by Fire, The Navy: A History, The Navy’s War, Empire and the Sea, and other books. His Bread Loaf career began when he came as a Fellow, in 1937, and continued until his death, in 1956.

  9. Gorham Munson, an editor with several publishing houses, was the author of a number of books, including Waldo Frank, a Study (1923); Robert Frost: A Study in Sense and Sensibility (1928); and The Dilemma of the Liberated (1930). He died in 1969.

  10. DeVoto alludes to Mrs. Carroll’s objections, and suggests that she was a busybody and a gossip, in a letter defending the administration of Ted Morrison and offering suggestions about how Bread Loaf could be continued and bettered. BDV to President Paul Moody of Middlebury College, fall 1935. SUL.

  11. Robeson Bailey to WS, November 9, 1968. Bailey’s reward was a forty-ounce bottle of Hudson’s Bay Scotch.

  12. In 1902 Edith Mirrielees came to Stanford University from Big Timber, Montana, in much the same spirit that brought DeVoto to Harvard. She rarely left the Stanford campus except to make her summer trips to Bread Loaf, first to the English School and later to the Writers’ Conference, though she did spend some years working with Indian schools in New Mexico. At Stanford her students included, among others, John Steinbeck, who continued to come and see her long after he had repudiated the rest of the university. Both at Stanford and at Bread Loaf she was sincerely loved by all sorts and conditions of people. Long after her retirement, in 1943, she was a fixture on the Stanford campus, a bridge between the early days of the university and the present. When she was well past
seventy, she edited The Pacific Spectator for several years, and when she was eighty, she wrote the history of the university that had enclosed her life.

  13. Helen Everitt, first an agent with Curtis Brown, returned to the publishing business after the death of her husband, Raymond, in 1947. From 1947 to 1952 she was with Houghton Mifflin, in 1952 she became fiction editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal, and in 1968 she joined Lovell Thompson and Mark Saxton in the new publishing firm Gambit. She died in 1971.

  14. In 1946 Sloane left Henry Holt & Company to form his own firm, William Sloane Associates, which failed and was taken over, on July 1, 1952, by William Morrow. Since 1955 he has been director of the Rutgers University Press.

  15. Presently an editor at Gambit. His father, Eugene Saxton, was an editor at Harper’s and a friend of DeVoto’s from the time of his earliest Harper’s articles and stories.

  16. Julia Peterkin, South Carolina writer best known for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1928.

  17. Hervey Allen wrote many things, including poetry and a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, but he will probably be remembered primarily for his phenomenally successful novel Anthony Adverse (1933).

  18. John Marquand was several times a short-term visitor and lecturer at the Writers’ Conference. He seems to have served as a full-time staff member only in 1940, a year DeVoto missed because of an extended trip West.

  19. From a long career as a newspaperman and book columnist, Herschel Brickell had branched out into editing. He was editor of the O. Henry Memorial Award short-story volume during his Bread Loaf years.

  20. A. B. (“Bud”) Guthrie, author of The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills, The Blue Hen’s Chick, and Arfive, also began as a newspaperman. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, working on The Big Sky, when he met DeVoto. Nieman dinners were not unlike sessions in Treman Cottage at Bread Loaf, and the effect was often the same: many people in both places came firmly and permanently under Benny DeVoto’s influence.