Little of this, in the Cambridge view, was quite intellectually respectable, however vigorous.5 The stories were of course potboilers. The reviews, if one examined them carefully, demonstrated a lively mind and a willingness to have opinions on anything from Philip Guedalla to Judge Ben Lindsey, from P. T. Barnum to Ford Madox Ford. The frontier essays had a rather attractive lustiness, and seemed to indicate a considerable knowledge of those vague states to the westward. The essays on education were clearly the work of a mere journalist kicking up a dust. Personally, the man was a sort of professional Western Wild Man, though without the red-flannel shirt and the bearskin coat—something more like the illegitimate offspring of H. L. Mencken and Annie Oakley. And a very pretty wife who seemed determined to outdo him in flaunting her unconventionality. It was perhaps understandable that he must always be snapping his suspenders and asserting his western masculinity, but must every other word out of her mouth be “bitch” or “bastard”?
One is partly guessing, but only partly. Aggressive crudity was one of the characteristics Helen Howe gave her pair of midwestern Freudian barbarians in We Happy Few. She got it, presumably, either from observation (some years later)6 or from Cambridge gossip. But she erred in making it unconscious and hence obtuse. It was neither. In so far as it existed—and it did not exist to the extent Miss Howe suggests—it was compulsive and sometimes regretted, and the more regretted the more compulsively repeated. One of the things Benny DeVoto never did learn, all his life, was the social sense of how much was enough—how far to go in colloquialism among those who spoke only the stiffest king’s English, how far to go in profanity among those whose mouths had early been sterilized with soap, how far to go in familiarity with reserved strangers or friendly women, when to stop tomahawking the body his intelligence and eloquence had slain, how much to resent an apparent slight, how not to turn simple disagreement into insult, how to state his opinions, which were quick, powerful, and sure, without stating them at someone’s expense.
One Cambridge friend, one of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant wellborn well-educated women of the kind DeVoto always liked to impress (and shock), the kind he conceived collectively as The Lady, guesses that some people in Cambridge liked and admired the DeVotos immediately, and that many more, put off at first, came to understand and discount the crudity; and that as this happened, the crudity diminished, though it never entirely disappeared. That seems to have been true. By 1939, when I first knew them and Cambridge, they had made themselves a secure place, with many warm friends, a few bitter enemies, and nearly universal respect. But that was more than a decade later. In the beginning, he and Avis gave many people the impression of a provocative “modernity” and an unseemly coarseness in language, combined with great intelligence, ambition, and what to Cambridge was a mongrel vigor. Plus what to Cambridge was an obsession with Freud. Hunting the roots of his own panic, DeVoto had read a lot of psychology books and consulted a few healers, and he talked of what was on his mind. As the months went by, that “obsession” would increase.
At first his contacts seem to have been limited to those whom he already knew, notably Briggs, Hurlbut, and Copeland, and those with whom he established a bond on the basis of his writing or his intellectual interests. These included men interested in the new field of American Literature,7 especially Kenneth Murdock; those such as Fred Merk and Arthur Schlesinger, who worked in American frontier and social history; and L. J. Henderson, the distinguished, pink-bearded, and woman-hating chemist from whom DeVoto had once taken a course in the history of science and with whom he shared an enthusiasm for the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Those plus the group of students who came around on Sunday afternoons.
When Robeson Bailey was elected president of the Advocate in April 1928, one of his first acts was to beg a contribution from his friend and mentor. What he got was a stout defense of the Yard and the Square against one of their detractors, Heywood Broun, who had publicly questioned that he should send his boy to Harvard.8
Where, asked DeVoto for all Harvard to read, had Broun got his figure of only twelve first-rate intelligences in the whole Boston area? That was simply nonsense, New York envy, Algonquin spleen. And where had he got his obscene notion that the object of education was to “enthuse your students”? Education had a few other purposes than entertaining the sluggish-minded. Speaking for himself, he had found better and richer intellectual fare in Cambridge than he had found anywhere else—and he had lived in New York. (The hell he had, says the skeptical biographer, wishing his subject didn’t sometimes weaken a sound position by having to pose as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibiblical, an expert in everything.) “Some significance … may be found in my almost feverish determination to come back to Cambridge,” he went on, and here one can make no demur. “Deciding to follow Mr. Broun’s way of living, by the pen, I could have gone anywhere on earth, to New York, to Paris, or to Spuyten Duyvil. I didn’t. The grain of life here suits me. It is what has been, too pompously, called the intellectual life.… I have found it more attractive here than anywhere else I have been. Why? Because of Harvard.” He suggested that Mr. Broun quit worrying whether or not to send his boy to Harvard. Send him for advice to Bernard DeVoto, who clearly knew a lot more about Harvard than Mr. Broun did.
It was a characteristic performance, contentious and aimed at a prominent adversary. It also demonstrated that DeVoto could boost as well as knock, and if Cambridge intellectuals who would not have stooped to answer a journalistic slur in the New York World may have smiled at being defended by a writer of slick stories for Redbook and the Post, that did not make the defense less heartfelt. Or less a tactical maneuver in a campaign for acceptance. Again one is guessing, this time from internal evidence. The tone is a little too assured, the assumption of a secure position as a known writer a little too casual, the untruth about having lived in New York a little too transparent. Archie the cockroach was in some such mood when he said he was six feet and went everywhere.
The fact seems to be that DeVoto was apprehensive when he came to Cambridge, and that as the months went by his apprehension became anxiety and his anxiety deepened into the old panic, with all the accompanying symptoms of migraines, insomnia, and demoralization. Cambridge was what he had desired, but Cambridge was not to be won by mere thundering on its gate. He had coveted independence, and had it, but independence was linked to a scary insecurity. He spun his living and support out of his guts like a spider, and whenever he quit spinning long enough to look around, he saw himself hanging over vertiginous space. Even Northwestern, even the drudgery of Freshman English, even the Evanston of the W.C.T.U. and the endowment drives could have seemed a tempting security by comparison. His Mark Twain book, which might win him serious notice and acceptance as more than a writer of slick fiction and popular essays, was constantly put off by more of the potboilers upon which he depended and by which he was trapped. And what if he should wake up some week and find that well pumped dry?
Those were legitimate worries, but they took a good while to come to a head, and meantime there were encouragements. His agent, Cora Wilkenning,9 continued to sell everything he sent her: stories to his three sure markets,10 an article on Northwestern—by name this time—to College Humor.11 He made Who’s Who, and that was the sort of imprimatur he valued. And Macmillan’s long procrastination about The House of Sun-Goes-Down had been ended by his peremptory demand, the previous December, that they publish the book or release it.12 As if to make up for their past reluctance, they not only agreed to publish it as it was, but commissioned a little biographical and critical booklet on DeVoto by his former Northwestern friend Robert S. Forsythe, now unhappily exiled at the University of North Dakota.13 He maintained his ability to scratch up articles out of the soil around him. Thus when an earnest young man wrote him, on the strength of one of his articles, and asked where and how he could get a decent education, DeVoto wrote him a four-page, single-spaced reply, responding with notable generosity to a request that
another might have dismissed, and then in a postscript asked for the return of the letter when its recipient had read it: it might make the basis of his next essay.14
A hypochondriac about security as he was about his health, he counted his earnings and projected his earning capacity; he bought a little AT&T stock and was nourished by a sense of bank account. And he hoped. Most of all, he hoped about The House of Sun-Goes-Down, for until the slow Mark Twain book could be finished (he had not yet even begun writing, but had only read and read and read), the novel was his best chance not only for making money but for establishing legitimacy in Cambridge.
It appeared in May, 1928. The Boston Transcript liked it. The New York Times thought tepidly that it had carefully drawn characters. Nobody else paid it much attention. The Chicago Tribune didn’t review it until a month after publication day and then damned it with faint praise. Two months after the book appeared, the New York Herald Tribune panned it for its “self-conscious manner” and its addiction to the violent and melodramatic. “What probably was intended to be vividness or color,” it said, “frequently becomes mere verbal virtuosity.”15
Plenty of cause for a gloomy summer. Through May, while he sat through the ordeal of unenthusiastic reviews and even more excruciating neglect, he could feel Cambridge beginning to disintegrate around him. People were preparing for the shore or the country. He could anticipate the Cambridge summer heat, and he hated heat and suffered from it. So when Robeson Bailey, who was staying near Cambridge in order to take a couple of courses and work on the Advocate, proposed that they share the farmhouse of a relative of his or his wife, Hetty’s, near Harvard, Massachusetts, the DeVotos accepted gratefully and locked their apartment and got out.
But it was a gloomy summer even in the country. The manifest failure of his novel, made abundantly clear by the Herald Tribune’s destructive review on July 29, was never off his mind. In several letters he damned book reviewers—doubting that they could read—and Macmillan—asserting that they had never had confidence in the book and had published it under wraps.16 He was depressed and irresolute; when he tried to exorcise his demons by work, the work disgusted him. For hours he would sit in a window seat staring out into the hot yard.
The best thing about the farm was that it lay in territory rich with memories of sects that had been on terms of familiarity with the Holy Ghost and groups that had tried to plant in America’s virgin countryside the perfect human society. Alcott’s Fruitlands was only a short distance away, Alcott’s school was only as far as Concord. The Millerites had ascended these hills, the gentle and joyous Shakers had lived nearby and come as close as any to perfection, their one error being that in abandoning sex they had abandoned the instrument that might have perpetuated them. The relics of America’s heavenward aspirations interested DeVoto, but not enough to rouse him out of his anxieties. An hour after Bailey’s car returned him from an expedition, he would be back in the window seat. Avis began to be afraid to leave him alone. She conspired with Bailey to get him playing something.
There was no tennis court on the place, but Bailey, understanding that DeVoto had used to box at Northwestern, brought out some gloves from Cambridge and offered himself as a sparring partner.
“I had done very little boxing,” he says. “Gym classes in prep school, and some friendly bouts in the dormitory. My idea was that boxing a friend meant dancing around, feinting a lot, and maybe landing some modest jabs. I went into my dance, but Benny didn’t even shuffle. He just stood there, without even putting a guard up. I feinted a left jab to the midriff, and followed with a right cross to the head. It never landed. What did land was my arse on the greensward. It was the hardest punch I ever took—and that includes three or four very serious bare-fisted fights in school and college. I got groggily up and resumed my dance. But Benny began unlacing his gloves. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you don’t know how to box.’ He threw the gloves on the grass and went into the house.”17
Bailey told that anecdote as an example of how sick DeVoto really was. For though he decided the punch was legitimate, the contemptuous refusal to go on was completely out of character. In health, Benny DeVoto was too kind to humiliate a friend in that fashion. He was a fierce competitor and a bad loser, but he respected an opponent who stood up to him, and he was immensely tender of his friends. He was sick enough, nearly as sick as he had been in Ogden and in his first year at Northwestern. If one were utilizing his own method of history by synecdoche, one could take the blow that set Bob Bailey on his arse as one that also floored Macmillan, a gaggle of book reviewers, and all the hindrances, difficulties, and uncertainties of being a man of letters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Somehow he survived the summer, the latter part of which they spent at Hix Bridge, South Westport, Massachusetts, with their Northwestern friend Bob Almy, who had come back to Harvard to complete a Ph.D. With them, for a while, was Betty White, that fetching girl, fond of both DeVotos, and busy with the manuscript that would become I Lived This Story and win her a prize of ten thousand dollars from College Humor. Pontificating to the attractive young female of the species probably helped restore DeVoto; seeing Northwestern getting another black eye in her novel didn’t harm his peace of mind; having to take care of Avis, who had her tonsils out, took his mind off himself; the death of Byron Hurlbut’s son turned him outward in friendliness and sympathy. He ended the summer healthier than he had begun it, but not so healthy that he was confident or in good spirits. His application to A. B. Paine for additional information, from the Mark Twain papers, about the relations between Mark Twain and Bret Harte had been turned down, cavalierly, as he thought, and he was smarting with the sense of having to make his own way without the customary literary courtesies. And though during the fall and winter he published three stories in Redbook, two in the Post, and a story and an article in Harper’s, he remained anxious about money. To Paul Ferris, the Chicago newspaperman who was one of his first and most faithful fans, he wrote on September 25 that he got only two hundred fifty dollars an article from Harper’s. They would pay fifty dollars more for stories, but he couldn’t afford to sell his stories there. He had to write for Edwin Balmer at Redbook, who would take formula stories, or Lorimer at the Post, who said he would not but who in fact did. And he had had a bellyful of book reviewing and had broken with Canby, this time for good. (He hadn’t.) He had heard that in Chicago Llewellyn Jones and Fanny Butcher both disliked him for things he had said in print. As for his novel, Macmillan had sold only forty-five hundred copies.
The letter was grouchy and discontented, an ominous beginning to the new Cambridge year. As the year progressed his depression deepened and his production fell off. As his production fell off, his money worries were magnified, and as his money worries increased, he sank lower and lower toward the suicidal depression and sweating dread that both he and Avis feared.
Some index of his condition is provided by his bibliography. For 1928 it contains twenty-two items, nine of them reviews.18 For 1929, which reflects the production of late 1928 and the first half or two thirds of the next year, it contains only eight, three of them reviews.19 His paying production, the essays and stories he and Avis lived on, dropped from eleven to five.
Probably no more than a bare handful of friends knew about his depression, which sometime during this period put him again under the care of a psychiatrist.20 To Cambridge at large he probably looked like the same confident dynamo who had blown in from the Middle West in the autumn of 1927. For whether he sold enough to live on or whether he didn’t, he looked to be, and was, as busy as a nailer, and at least some of what he was busy on struck Cambridge as far more respectable intellectually than the stuff he lived by.
In January 1929 he proposed to Alfred Knopf a series of reprints of significant books in the American tradition, himself to be general editor and perhaps to do one or two titles. There is no need to look upon that proposal as an effort to achieve respectability in Cambridge, for in this case what might impress Cambri
dge would satisfy his own deepest intellectual urging. He had been devouring the western shelves of Widener for fifteen months, building upon a body of reading that was already substantial. His Mark Twain book was taking him straight to the frontier, and the frontier was taking him straight into what he felt to be the quintessential America. The books that reflected or expressed America deserved to be in print, and available.
Knopf was receptive. Letters about the projected series went back and forth throughout the winter and spring, until on April 25 DeVoto signed a letter of informal contract for what was tentatively called The Cambridge Bookshelf, to contain, among other things, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, edited by DeVoto; Melville’s Pierre, to be edited by Robert Forsythe; a collection of tall tales, to be edited by Franklin Meine, a Chicago rare-book dealer; and a collection from the ladies’ books and annuals of the nineteenth century, to be edited by C. J. Furness. Perhaps also an anthology from the joke books; perhaps Nathaniel Tucker’s The Partisan Leader; perhaps other titles, up to a minimum of ten, perhaps extending to a whole shelf. There had been nothing like it in American publishing. The colleges were stirring with a restlessness to know and teach the American tradition. With luck, the series could ride into the future on the very first wave.21
By the end of May the series had been renamed Americana Deserta, on the suggestion of the Mercury’s associate editor Charles Angoff,22 and DeVoto and Meine and Forsythe were already at work. What was at least as important to DeVoto—and just as hard on the production of the potboilers that paid his bills—he had begun at the end of March to write the book he then called Mark Twain: a Preface.23 He was approaching the enviable scholarly condition in which one hand washes the other, every job contributes to every other, one expertness reinforces another. The joke books that he was examining while he hunted for an editor had a clear relation to the backgrounds of Mark Twain. The tall tales that Meine was assembling were the very soil out of which Mark Twain had grown. Every book of social history, every magazine, every reminiscence from the frontier, every old newspaper contributed to his knowledge of the world that had produced the most American of writers. DeVoto and Mark Twain and the entire series of Americana Deserta celebrated a history, a nation, a people, and a set of values which from very early in his life he had instinctively supported against those who ignored, denigrated, or misrepresented them.