The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

  21. An Alberta boy transplanted to Montana, Howard was the author of Montana, High, Wide, and Handsome, and Strange Empire, a history of the Canadian métis revolts. DeVoto did not meet him until his 1946 trip West, but in many letters of the late 1940s and early 1950s he describes Howard as “one of the two good writers in the West.” (The other was Thomas Hornsby Ferril, of Colorado.) In the summer of 1951 both DeVoto and Helen Everitt taught at Howard’s Montana Writers’ Conference, in Missoula. A few weeks after the conference, Howard died of a heart attack, and DeVoto subsequently finished up and wrote an introduction for Strange Empire. With a characteristic gesture, he sent his fee to Howard’s mother.

  22. He told Kate Sterne it was the only literary crowd he could even imagine spending two weeks with. BDV to Kate Sterne, August 12, 1934.

  23. Official records of Bread Loaf, especially of the Writers’ Conference, are meager, and I have been unable to locate any correspondence files. The years of DeVoto’s service on the mountain are reconstructed from his personal letters, from the Middlebury College Catalogue and the annual Bread Loaf Bulletin, the Conference newspaper, The Crumb, and the reminiscences of Ted and Kay Morrison, William and Julie Sloane, Kitty Bowen, Robeson Bailey, and others. George K. Anderson, Bread Loaf School of English: The First Fifty Years, Middlebury College Press, 1969, contains a useful summary chapter on the Writers’ Conference.

  24. Compare BDV to William Sloane, July 14, 1947, SUL, working out in detail the assignments that each staff member will carry out.

  25. The Hour, Houghton Mifflin, 1951, p. 83. The alcoholic rituals are discussed at greater length in Section VII, Chapter 8, “May Six O’clock Never Find You Alone.”

  26. This is how I saw it during my summers on the mountain, and see it now. On the other hand, it has been fairly easy for a certain kind of journalist to strike the body and count coup on it, as witness Rust Hills, “We Believe in the Maestro System: The Bread Loaf Process,” Audience, Vol. 2, No. 8 (May–June 1972), pp. 90–108.

  27. For the history of Bread Loaf, see Anderson, Bread Loaf School of English.

  28. Ibid., pp. 136–37.

  29. For an account of Robert Frost’s relations with the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 1921 to 1936, see Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, The Years of Triumph, pp. 683–85.

  30. Who’s Who in America calls him “co-founder.”

  31. “English 37,” Saturday Review of Literature XVI (June 26 through September 4, 1937).

  32. The World of Fiction, Houghton Mifflin, 1951.

  33. There is a complete file of The Crumb in the Wilfred Davidson Library, at Bread Loaf.

  34. Variants of the Bread Loaf doctrine are remembered by Sarah Margaret Brown Boyden, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Mark Saxton, Fred Bissell, and others who took writing courses from DeVoto. Other variants are contained in the many long and singularly generous letters he wrote to those who asked advice or sent him, asked or unasked, their manuscripts. The ghost of DeVoto was very apparent even as late as the Bread Loaf session of 1972, when John Ciardi stepped down with a nostalgic farewell speech.

  35. The argument with Dr. Kubie extended over a period of several years, incorporated into a dozen long letters each way, and in at least three magazine articles by each man. For a summary discussion, see Section VII, Chapter 4.

  36. BDV to Garrett Mattingly, June 15, 1938. SUL.

  37. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Biography, the Craft and the Calling, Little, Brown, 1969, p. x.

  38. “Genius Is Not Enough,” Saturday Review of Literature XIII (April 25, 1936), pp. 3–4.

  39. “Bread Loaf Guidebook, 1947,” The Crumb, August 27, 1947.

  40. “Bread Loaf Circus,” The Crumb, September 1, 1938.

  Chapter 6 ·

  1. Avis DeVoto to WS, February 2, 1972.

  2. Henry Reck to WS, October 25, 1970. Tape.

  3. Avis DeVoto to WS, October 8, 1968. Tape.

  4. See the Barclay bibliography, pp. 151–55.

  Chapter 7 ·

  1. BDV to Paul Ferris, March 12, 1928. SUL.

  2. The Mind and Society (Trattato di sociologia generale), by Vilfredo Pareto; edited by Arthur Livingston; translated by Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston, with the advice and active co-operation of James Harvey Rogers. Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

  3. George Homans to WS, October 20, 1970; Talcott Parsons to WS, March 1, 1972.

  4. Charles Curtis and George Homans, An Introduction to Pareto, Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.

  5. L. J. Henderson, Pareto’s General Sociology, a physiologist’s interpretation. Harvard University Press, 1935.

  6. “A Primer for Intellectuals,” Saturday Review of Literature IX (April 22, 1933), pp. 545–46.

  7. See Curtis and Homans, An Introduction to Pareto, Chapter 1.

  8. DeVoto answered Mumford, humorously but not quite convincingly, in a letter to the Saturday Review Points of View column on May 20, 1933.

  9. Robert K. Merton, also in the Points of View column for May 20, 1933, reminded DeVoto of some others who had heard of Pareto.

  10. BVD to Mattingly, May 10, 1933. SUL. See also “DeVoto and Pareto,” Saturday Review of Literature IX (May 30, 1933), p. 607; “Mr. DeVoto Wins,” Saturday Review of Literature X (July 22, 1933), p. 4; and “Pareto and Bassett Jones,” Saturday Review of Literature X (September 2, 1933), p. 80. These are all letters to the editor stemming out of the Pareto article.

  11. “Sentiment and the Social Order; Introduction to the Teachings of Pareto,” Harper’s CLXVII (October 1933), pp. 569–81.

  12. Curtis and Homans, Introduction to Pareto, p. 20.

  13. Ibid., p. 236.

  14. Ibid., p. 249.

  15. The phrase is adopted in BDV to Mattingly, November 1, 1945 (SUL) as the key to his as-yet-unwritten book.

  Chapter 8 ·

  1. “Exiles from Reality,” review of Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, Saturday Review of Literature X (June 2, 1934), pp. 721–22.

  2. “He has tried to invalidate the literary and critical approach as such.” Spiller, The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters. Brooks to Mumford, December 3, 1932, p. 85.

  3. “The Skeptical Biographer,” Harper’s CLXVI (January 1933), pp. 181–92.

  4. “How Not to Write History,” Harper’s CLXVIII (January 1934), pp. 199–208.

  5. Of this, too, DeVoto was himself sometimes guilty, as witness his common use of such phrases as “the continental mind.” In practice, such generalizations are all but indispensable. The crucial matter is whether the historian begins with facts and arrives at his generalizations or whether he begins with the generalizations and selects his facts to prove them. DeVoto’s generalizations are not as reprehensible as they are made out to be in Peter Skiles Pruessing, “Manifest Destiny and ‘The Literary Fallacy,’ ” unpublished M.A. thesis, Iowa State University, Ames, 1968.

  6. “American Life,” review of Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, Saturday Review of Literature IX (March 4, 1933), p. 464.

  7. “The Rocking Chair in History and Criticism,” Forum LXXXIX (February 1933), pp. 104–7.

  8. “Jonathan Dyer, Frontiersman: A Paragraph in the History of the West,” Harper’s CLXVII (September 1933), pp. 491–501.

  9. “The West: A Plundered Province,” Harper’s CLXIX (August 1934), pp. 355–64.

  10. “Fossil Remnants of the Frontier; Notes on a Utah Boyhood,” Harper’s CLXX (April 1935), pp. 590–600. As indicated earlier, both “Fossil Remnants” and “Jonathan Dyer,” as well as the later “A Sagebrush Bookshelf,” Harper’s CLXXV (October 1937), pp. 488–96, were partly stimulated by Kate Sterne’s questions about his background. He confessed that he had never autobiographized for anyone but her (BDV to Kate Sterne, February 25, 1935, SUL), and she in turn was “proud of [her] midwifery.” But the autobiographizing served other and less personal ends, and some of its effects may be seen in DeVoto’s reply to Edmund Wilson when Wilson challenged him to “stand u
p and reveal himself.” See Section IV, Chapter 2.

  Chapter 9 ·

  1. The correspondence with Kate Sterne, in which DeVoto spoke his mind about issues and people with uninhibited vehemence, has been put in the Stanford University Library safe until the year 2000. But because as Avis DeVoto’s vicar I myself put the file there, I have been privileged to read it, and I quote from it with Mrs. DeVoto’s permission and with, I hope, discretion. I have suppressed nothing important to this biography, and in general have avoided only personal allusions that DeVoto himself would never have made publicly or in print.

  2. Kate Sterne to BVD, October 17, 1933.

  3. BVD to Kate Sterne, undated, but from context shortly after the above.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Kate Sterne to BDV, October (no day), 1933.

  6. BDV to Kate Sterne, October 17, 1933.

  7. BDV to Kate Sterne, “The Kent Potter Story,” Installment 4.

  8. His letters to Kate came back to DeVoto after Kate’s death. There is evidence that he reread them and was struck by the fact that they added up to an intimate journal of a decade. Jottings in the margins indicate that he may have planned to use passages or whole letters, perhaps as elements in some fiction, perhaps as the basis for a diary of the depression and war years. It is not unlikely that he was kept from doing so by the same inhibitions that kept him from ever meeting Kate Sterne.

  9. Minority Report and Mountain Time.

  10. The Year of Decision: 1846, Little, Brown, 1943, dedication.

  Chapter 10 ·

  1. BDV to Kate Sterne, November 25, 1933.

  2. Even before Sinclair Lewis commented scathingly on John August’s fiction in “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto” (see Section VI, Chapter 2), DeVoto had begun to feel that as an alias John August was too well known. Two years before the Lewis attack, the Boston Globe publicly challenged DeVoto to admit his identity with August (BDV to Kate Sterne, February 15, 1942). After Lewis’ exposure, DeVoto did not use the pseudonym again, but instead substituted a series of others: Cady Hewes, Fairley Blake, Frank Gilbert. He wrote Kate Sterne (BDV to Kate Sterne, June 27, 1934), when he had just begun to make use of the August nom de plume, that he “refuse [d] to publish tripe” under his own name.

  3. He told Kate Sterne about the episode in BDV to Kate Sterne, July 4, 1934.

  4. BDV to Kate Sterne, June 27, 1934.

  5. BDV to Kate Sterne, December 30, 1934.

  6. BDV to Kate Sterne, shortly after October 10, 1933, while he was working on the manuscript of We Accept with Pleasure.

  7. BDV to Kate Sterne, April 14, 1935.

  8. Anonymous, “On Beginning to Write a Novel,” Harper’s CLXXIII (July 1936), pp. 179–88.

  9. BDV to Kate Sterne, September (?) 1934.

  10. BDV to Kate Sterne, September 16, 1934.

  11. Alvah Bessie, “Bernard DeVoto’s Novel of Character,” review of We Accept with Pleasure, Saturday Review of Literature XI (September 22, 1934), p. 125.

  12. BDV to Kate Sterne, November (?) 1934.

  Chapter 11 ·

  1. “A faculty appointment with full academic trappings has been offered to me every year since I came to Cambridge and will doubtless be offered to me every year I stay but I am not interested in it and will not take it. I am editing the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, and this year I am guest conductor of a composition course which was given for many years by Byron Hurlbut who was an old friend of mine and who died last year.… I may give the course next year.… Certainly I will not give it more than once more, and just as certainly I will not give any other courses or do any other teaching work.” BDV to Ney McMinn, April 29, 1931. SUL. That was what he felt compelled to say to those who had heard the vehemence of his farewell to pedagogy. He may have been offered teaching positions at Harvard, as he said, but his disinclination was less than what he asserted. So far as one can tell, he accepted every teaching offer that Harvard made him in the next four years.

  2. BDV to Kate Sterne, April 20, 1936.

  3. Avis says, “First he found he couldn’t sell them, then he found he couldn’t write them.” Avis DeVoto to WS, February 2, 1972.

  4. Henry Reck to WS, October 25, 1970 (tape).

  5. BDV described the negotiations to Kate Sterne as they developed. BDV to Kate Sterne, May 14, July 19, August 1, and August 7, 1935.

  6. BDV to Kate Sterne, July 19, 1935.

  7. The history of the Easy Chair, and DeVoto’s intentions in writing it, are described in “Number 241,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CCXI (November 1955), pp. 10–17.

  8. George Stevens to WS, March 6, 1972.

  9. Henry Seidel Canby, American Memoir, Houghton Mifflin, 1947, p. 402.

  10. George Stevens to WS, March 6, 1972.

  11. BDV to Kate Sterne, November 26, 1935.

  12. Originally entitled Senior Spring, it was published in ten installments as Life Begins So Soon, Collier’s XCVII (February 1 to April 4, 1936).

  13. BDV to Kate Sterne, November 26, 1935.

  14. J. B. Munn to BDV, December 16, 1935. SUL.

  15. Mr. Conant discusses his promotion policy, and the difficulties in which it involved him, in his autobiography, My Several Lives, Harper & Row, 1970. Though he spends some space on the case of Walsh and Sweezy, which roused wide-spread disaffection because of its political overtones, he does not mention DeVoto, whose crisis had come up the year before. Presumably Mr. Conant does not remember it as particularly significant. His subsequent behavior toward DeVoto suggests that he had no personal ill will toward him.

  16. J. B. Munn to BDV, December 18, 1935. SUL.

  17. As reported by BDV to Kate Sterne, December (no day), 1935, and corroborated by George Stevens to WS, March 6, 1972.

  18. BDV to Kate Sterne, February 11, 1936, contains a long and perhaps heightened and dramatized account of the negotiations.

  19. “Mark Twain and the Limits of Criticism,” paper read before the American Literature section of the Modern Language Association, January 1, 1936. It was never published in a periodical, but was collected in Forays and Rebuttals, pp. 373–403.

  20. Lawrance Thompson says that the meeting occurred on January 17, and implies that it was the first between the two men. (Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, the Years of Triumph, pp. 436–37, and p. 671.) I have taken the date January 16 from the notes that DeVoto made immediately after the meeting, which are among the DeVoto Papers at Stanford. The meeting was actually the third between Frost and DeVoto. The first was at Bread Loaf, near the beginning of the Writers’ Conference in August 1935. Evidently Frost, though he was not on the staff of the Conference, had stayed over from the English School. Two entries in Elinor Frost’s engagement book, both in Robert Frost’s hand, indicate a Bread Loaf speaking engagement for “Aug. 7 or 12,” and later change the date to “July 16 or Aug. 9” (Frost Papers, DCL). But the Frosts must clearly have stayed on after the opening of the Conference on August 15, for in the Kate Sterne correspondence, which Mr. Thompson never saw, DeVoto refers to a photograph he took of Frost at Bread Loaf in the summer of 1935, and a letter, BDV to Kate Sterne, August 17, 1935, remarks in passing, “Robert Frost is not only the best poet in all U.S. lit., he is also the swellest gent that walks the earth.” A later letter, BDV to Kate Sterne, November 4, 1935, alludes to an afternoon and evening spent with Frost at Amherst. So they were acquainted, and a mutual admiration was well under way, before the Miami encounter.

  Chapter 12 ·

  1. Compare Thompson, Robert Frost, the Years of Triumph, pp. 437–38.

  2. “What is an unemployed writer?” he asked Kate Sterne scornfully. But he did value the WPA Guides to the several states—productions, as he pointed out, less of “unemployed” writers than of professionals brought in for the job. See “Unemployed Writers,” Saturday Review of Literature XV (October 31, 1936), p. 8, and “The First WPA Guide,” Saturday Review of Literature XV (February 27, 1937), p. 8.

  3. “Solidarity at Alexandria,” Easy Chair, Harper’s
CLXXI (November 1935), pp. 765–68.

  4. Thompson, Selected Letters of Robert Frost. RF to BDV, November 1936, pp. 430–32.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. BDV to Kate Sterne, January 29, 1936.

  8. BDV to Kate Sterne, February 15, 1942.

  9. Thompson, Robert Frost, the Years of Triumph, p. 445.

  10. Ibid., p. 437. Also BDV to Kate Sterne, January 29, 1936.

  11. BDV to Kate Sterne, February 11, 1936.

  12. “The Absolute in the Machine Shop,” Easy Chair, Harper’s, CLXXII (December 1935), pp. 125–28.

  13. “Memento for New Year’s Day,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXII (January 1936), pp. 253–56.

  14. “The Folk Mind,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXII (February 1936), pp. 381–84.

  15. “Terwilliger in Plato’s Dream,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXII (March 1936), pp. 493–96.

  16. “Another Consociate Family,” Easy Chair, Harper’s CLXXII (April 1936), pp. 605–8.

  17. “Genius Is Not Enough,” Saturday Review of Literature XIII (April 25, 1936), pp. 3–4.

  18. BDV to Mattingly, March 22, 1936. SUL.

  19. BDV to Kate Sterne, March 30, 1936.

  20. See BDV to Gannett, March 29, 1936, and the undated note from Gannett to BDV in reply (SUL). Gannett (Gannett to BDV, April (no day), 1936, SUL) ended the dispute charmingly by saying he had assumed that DeVoto, a rough controversialist, would appreciate a similar roughness in others.

  21. Kate Sterne to BDV, no date, but between March 3 and March 10, 1936.

  22. This count is made from the Barclay bibliography, from which, as we have seen, a number of reviews and minor articles are omitted.

  23. Published as Forays and Rebuttals, Little, Brown, 1936.

  24. DeVoto thought that it was Dean Birkhoff and hinted that Birkhoff might have been poisoned by F. O. Matthiessen. BDV to Kate Sterne, May 1, 1936, and BDV to Mattingly, June 4, 1936. The guess about Matthiessen is given a certain credibility by a story from Mrs. Howard Mumford Jones. When Jones was being interviewed in the spring of 1936 in connection with his possible appointment at Harvard, Bessie Jones said aloud that she hoped her husband wasn’t being sought as a replacement for Mr. DeVoto, whom she admired. Matthiessen, she says, asked rather coldly, “What’s he done?”