“Though I’m not proud of the book, I’m not ashamed of it,” he wrote Briggs in April, after he knew the worst. “I feel that it measures up … when compared with the other novels of the day, of my contemporaries. Wasn’t there pity as well as irony and condemnation in my handling of Boggs? Wasn’t there a sense of tragedy, of determined things, of events overwhelming individual wills and characters? Wasn’t there, if not forgiveness, at least understanding of the complex passions and terrors of the religions and the men who embraced them? I hope there was.”23
A note in the margin of the letter, in Briggs’s hand, says, “I believe that this is true.” But DeVoto would have been little comforted by his old teacher’s qualified approval. For about the time he wrote that letter, Macmillan, discouraged by the reception of The Chariot of Fire and dissatisfied with the manuscript of The House of Sun-Goes-Down, on which they had an option, began to make it clear that they were unwilling to publish the new book as it stood, and wanted extensive revisions, including the rewriting of the whole last section.24
To his colleagues and students, DeVoto might look like a literary skyrocket. To himself, in the times when he gave himself a few minutes to think about his discouragements, he looked like a failure exactly where he had invested his spiritual resources and his pride.
And yet he was making money by writing. Thinking of teaching as only a bread-and-butter job to support him and his wife while he wrote his way out of it, he could foresee a time, not impossibly far off, when he could abandon it and be what he wanted to be. He finished for the Mercury another piece on the West, “The Great Medicine Road,” which was scheduled for publication in May.25 Whether he knew it or not, he found in the writing of it a subject that would eventually bring out the very highest capacities he possessed, and a method that he would later use with great effect in much longer works. The subject was a segment of the westward movement—what was happening along the Oregon Trail in the time between the rendezvous of 1835 and the great migrations. The method was what he would later call “history by synecdoche,” the concentration of large events and movements of population and clashes of attitude and interest within the single, sharp focus of a symbolic action or restricted period of time. When he keyed his Mercury essay to the deadly duel between Kit Carson and the trapper Shunar at the 1835 rendezvous, he was anticipating what he would do in more intricate ways in The Year of Decision: 1846, in Across the Wide Missouri, and in The Course of Empire, where, respectively, a single year, a single western expedition, and a single exploration are made to illuminate much wider histories.
He probably didn’t know yet what he was doing, but he must have known he had done something good. Briggs was enthusiastic, applauding the absence in this essay of the “Mencken tone.”26 And almost immediately, the door that had been opened up by “College and the Exceptional Man” opened wider. He sold to Harper’s a piece that for years was famous among freshman-English instructors and a sure-fire stimulator of the controversy that is supposed to beget interest and hence interesting themes. The article was called “The Co-Ed: The Hope of Liberal Education,” (later rechristened “The Co-Eds: God Bless Them”),27 and it was an acknowledgment of the part girls like Sarah Margaret Brown, Betty White, and for that matter Helen Avis MacVicar had played in his first five years of teaching. It was not simply a tribute to the chorus line of the front row or an acknowledgment of women’s emancipation. It was an assertion, characteristically overstated, that the co-eds were the best part of any student body—eager, interested, alert, skeptical, teachable. “The women think, the men throb.”
DeVoto lived to disparage that essay, as he disparaged and refused to reprint other essays on education. But it reinforced his association with Harper’s, an association that was to be close and warm from that time onward. What was perhaps most pleasing to him, Harper’s shortly thereafter bought the first short story he sold to a national magazine.
It was called “In Search of Bergamot,”28 and it dealt with the nostalgic return of a middle-aged man to the little western city where he had been born and where one missed romantic opportunity had left a dissatisfaction at the core of his life. The city was called Custis, but no one who had read about Windsor or who knew Ogden could have mistaken it. Sticking with materials that he knew best, and with feelings and fantasies not too unlike his own, DeVoto with that sale to Harper’s moved close to the emancipation he was working for. Now! he said (would have said). Finally!
He and Avis rode their exhilaration eastward in June, toward a boardinghouse in Chatham, on Cape Cod, that Dean Briggs had found for them. Behind them they left rumors: That DeVoto was about to be promoted to an assistant professorship. That he had been proposed for promotion but blocked by some of the mossbacks and Epworth Leaguers, who objected to his opinions or his language or his reputed overfamiliarity with students. That he was quitting. That he was going to be fired. That if he wasn’t promoted there was going to be a big explosion and protest among students and young faculty. Presumably the rumor of promotion was pleasant to the DeVotos. Has there ever been a junior faculty man to whom it wasn’t the pleasantest of all rumors? But it was not the thing on which his mind gripped with determination. When Harper’s bought that story, it brought instantly close the possibility they had been dreaming about. What was on DeVoto’s mind was the summer of renewed testing that lay ahead.
5 · “One Story to the S.E.P.”
Like a prisoner ransomed, he went straight to Cambridge. He wanted to show Avis the glories of Harvard, walk her through the Yard and along the Charles, display her to people on the faculty who had helped him and wished him well. They did run into Mrs. Hurlbut in the Square, and so had a personal welcoming back to the Cambridge DeVoto had not seen in seven years, but the people he wanted to see most were scattered to summer homes at Marblehead or the Cape or in the country, and the DeVotos’ lack of an automobile prohibited visits. Down to Chatham, therefore, where they knew their life would be circumscribed and circumspect. Their landlady had taken in writers before, and been burned, and had only consented to house them because of Dean Briggs’s recommendation. There was no little Academy there, no member of the Tribe of Benny, and none likely. The people they settled among were less open than the Washington Islanders, less friendly. Here they lived among strangers, and felt their difference.
But work, yes. That was a cloth that could be cut to cover any circumstances.
First he finished the revision of The House of Sun-Goes-Down and sent it off to Harold Latham at Macmillan. Then he wrote another western essay, entitled “Footnote on the West,” in which he said about the entire region, but in somewhat less outrageous terms, approximately what he had previously said about Ogden and Utah. He admitted, humorously, a lot of western limitations, while asserting western largeness, sun, scenery, and space. His West was the Rocky Mountain West, forever distinguishable from the Southwest and the Pacific Coast. It was not the scene of rugged individualism, as was often claimed. It was the precise opposite, the home of people who co-operated or failed. He quoted his earlier invention John Gale to the effect that western individualists had usually found themselves on one end of a rope whose other end was in the hands of a bunch of vigilantes. He found the whole West deficient in art, cultivation, ideas, mind, and also unduly under the influence of the booster, a middle-western type that slopped over the borders of its own proper territory. The West, he said, could not respond to boosterism as the Middle West did—it had too many limitations, most of them keyed to the basic fact of aridity. But if it ever learned its limitations, and threw out the boosters, and kept itself out of the hands of eastern capital, and developed itself as its real qualities and not its myths dictated, it would be the greatest home for man on God’s footstool.
It is worth pausing a moment on that essay, because, like “The Great Medicine Road” and to a lesser extent “The Mountain Men,” it forecast a lifelong subject matter and a persistent attitude compounded of love for the country and contempt for the p
eople who abused or gutted or colonialized it. The West, past and present, would never be far from the center of his preoccupation; his attitude toward it would be the same in the 1940s and 1950s—for example in the 1947 essay “The West Against Itself”—as it was in the summer of 1927. Perhaps influenced by Dean Briggs’s objections to the Mencken tone and Mencken’s magazine, he sent the article not to the Mercury but to Harper’s, and Harper’s bought it.1
So far, so good. He sat down to write some stories, frankly trying to take the measure of the slick-magazine market. These, like his essays on the West, were a forecast of things to come.
The first one, “Front Page Ellen,” is a romantic Washington Island story involving an athletic, beautiful, and reportedly “fast” ex-tomboy and the older man who in her youth taught her to swim, sail, and shoot. One can see Skinny in this Ellen, and one can see some DeVoto fantasies in the natural nobility and gentlemanly scruples and manifold skills of the leading man. And as in all good fantasies and magazine stories, the asexual companionship of girls and men turns out to have been wistfully sexual all the time.
The second story took him back to the town of Windsor and the contrasts between the old and the new West, the old being represented by a leathery old heroine named Mrs. Yancey, whom he would use again several times. Posterity will not preserve those stories, and no critic or biographer could learn much from either, or from both together. But when they are read along with fifty-two others and along with the novels and the Collier’s serials of later years, there is a recurrence of character, theme, and attitude that cannot be ignored. The stories represent formulas that DeVoto found would work, and hence used many times; but the special formulas he found and repeated suggest a compulsive circuitry in his fantasy, as well as a compulsive geography in which fantasy best throve.
Affecting to despise them, he sent them to Briggs, up at Halfway Pond. Briggs told him they were by no means as bad as he said they were. Certainly if they were to be judged by their success in the marketplace, they passed. Redbook promptly took one, and The Saturday Evening Post the other.2
A year before, he had written to Hurlbut that sale of one story to the Post would solve most of his difficulties. Now he had it, along with a sale to Redbook and another to Harper’s. He was more than an essayist; he was a writer. Three magazines besides the Mercury were open to him. Editors and perhaps audiences acknowledged his authority on the West, which seemed to be in fashion, and on the colleges, which made a convenient and perennial whipping boy. He knew, by now, his capacity for work. A moment of decision came closer with every day.
Just then, Northwestern chose to write informing him that he had been promoted to an assistant professorship. Considering the skin he had taken off some of the people who voted his promotion, it was an act of considerable impartiality, a concession that in the opinion of his colleagues his abilities outweighed his violations of decorum. Promotion meant that he could probably look forward to further promotions, to tenure, to a safe position on a faculty which, if it contained people he despised, also contained his closest friends.
Brought to the choice, DeVoto hardly hesitated. Not even the fact that Latham was maintaining an alarming silence about The House of Sun-Goes-Down deterred him. Inevitably there would be times when he half regretted the road not taken. Inevitably he would make efforts to escape the total independence and total insecurity he had elected, would attach himself to several sorts of institution for longer or shorter periods. But the choice he made on Cape Cod in the summer of 1927 was the one that directed his life.
He wrote Northwestern thanking them for their confidence and resigning from the faculty. On September 1 he wrote Hurlbut at Marblehead, telling him that the die was cast. He was coming to Cambridge to live and write.3
III
MORE PRIVILEGED EARTH
1 · Breaking In—and Down
At the beginning of September 1927, Robeson Bailey was a Harvard junior working as a counselor in a New Hampshire boys’ camp. He was a member of the Harvard tennis team and a hunter, an outdoorsman. Also, he was literary and a member of the Advocate. In the August Harper’s he had read and liked a story called “In Search of Bergamot,” by Bernard DeVoto, a writer who was new to him. In the September issue he found an article by the same author entitled “The Co-Ed: The Hope of Liberal Education,” which he thought so asinine he wrote the editor suggesting that its author stick to fiction. Shortly he received a reply from DeVoto himself, to whom Harper’s had sent his letter. Bailey’s objections, DeVoto said with disarming candor, were absolutely justified; the article couldn’t be defended. He also said that he was moving to Cambridge within a week or two and would be glad to have Bailey drop around.1
Was that invitation simply the act of a writer who felt friendly when a reader took the trouble to read him and respond to him, either with praise or blame? Was it an expression of the generosity and—one hesitates a moment and goes on—the courtesy that he displayed all his life to correspondents, answering them promptly, frankly, and at great length? Or did he ask that unknown Harvard undergraduate to call because, having brought himself by his own efforts to the condition and place he had always coveted, he was afraid he would inhabit them unwelcomed and as a stranger? After seven years, he knew hardly anyone in Cambridge except his three old writing teachers. Always urgently in need of friends, companions, and the comforts of acceptance, and remembering long nights of talk before grate fires in the company of his peers and betters, he perhaps imagined himself moving into the role that Copey and Hurlbut had used to play, presiding Socratically and indulgently over the eager discoveries of the young.
Robeson Bailey did call on the DeVotos at 64 Oxford Street, and responded with enthusiasm to the vitality, the profane and friendly openness, the electric stimulation, the curious mixture of intellectual impetuousness and personal vulnerability that he found there. He returned, and brought others; they became a Sunday-afternoon group. Practicing writers were not then so common in Cambridge, or so available to Harvard undergraduates, that DeVoto’s friendliness was likely to be refused. And he was very different from any writer these young men had ever seen. He was an outlander, but also he was a Harvard man. He knew Cambridge but belonged to none of its coteries. On many issues and personalities and books his opinions were outspoken to the point of blasphemy, and across Harvard’s untroubled intellectual skies he left the vapor trail of a belligerent professionalism. He had hard words for aesthetes and Capital-A Artists, thinkers of beautiful thoughts, abstract theorizers, and writers of cherished prose. He asserted the astringent values of the marketplace. He was bitter and witty at the expense of the teaching profession, at least as practiced in the hinterlands and even sometimes—oh, heresy—in Sever Hall. When he told them that as between pedagogy and prostitution they could have his virtue every time, he made commercialism sound like a declaration of intellectual integrity imperfectly disguised as cynicism.
Neither he nor they questioned why, if teaching so appalled him, he had instantly, upon achieving his freedom, fled to the place that had taught him, and there gathered around him a cluster of extracurricular disciples. None of them asked what it was he was doing when, one Sunday afternoon, he read aloud to them, entire, Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and at the end laid the book down into their respectful silence, declaring it the greatest achievement of English drama since Shakespeare. From a distance, a performance like that looks so much like one of Copey’s readings as to be indistinguishable from it, and if Copey was not a teacher, what was he?
Cambridge, at least that part of Cambridge tributary to Harvard Square, is a small town, and in 1927 was even smaller. Gossip and rumor go through it as inevitably and thoroughly as earth through an earthworm, and despite the intellectual snobbery which it sometimes denies and on which it ultimately prides itself, it has always looked with interest, often benign interest, on eccentrics, geniuses, and wild men from the Out Beyond who are drawn into its gravitational field and converted into functioning
satellites, or who crash on its bleak moonscape. More people than three aging writing teachers and a group of Advocate boys were aware of DeVoto’s entry into the Cambridge atmosphere. He was as visible as a comet, though for Cambridge tastes a little garish. The story and the article in the August and September Harper’s that had attracted the attention of Robeson Bailey were followed in the November Harper’s by “Footnote on the West.” The November Redbook was rumored to have contained a story. One heard that the November 19 Saturday Evening Post had a story. One noticed, thumbing through The Saturday Review of Literature, that DeVoto seemed to be a regular contributor of reviews.
And he did not burn out. In the January Harper’s an essay, “Farewell to Pedagogy,”2 kissed Northwestern and the teaching profession a simultaneous and untearful good-by. Rumor spoke of another story in the January Redbook,3 though Cambridge did not read Redbook and so could not say for sure. The February Mercury disturbed a few teaching assistants with “English A,”4 the essay on the teaching of English that DeVoto had promised Mencken two years before. Through the spring, the Saturday Review ran a half dozen more DeVoto reviews.