The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  This sort of thing was exhilarating or in questionable taste or tainted with a dangerous radicalism, depending on which reader of the Graduates’ Magazine you happened to be. In any case it was a pronounced change from what the magazine had contained before September 1929. And it continued. In his person as The Graduate—an insider, observe—DeVoto damned the building boom that was erecting new freshman dorms, creating payrolls, and desecrating the charm of the Yard. He publicly doubted the necessity of the proposed memorial chapel. He applied to Harvard the findings of Abraham Flexner’s Universities: American, British, German and found Harvard guilty of becoming an adjunct of the plutocracy. He thought the new House Plan would freeze out the poor student unless it was accompanied by an enlarged program of scholarships. He championed the outsiders and the non-resident students, the neglected ones for whom Harvard was a streetcar college. He thought Harvard should stop building for a while and devote its resources to students and junior faculty caught by hard times. He proposed, as a fundamental element of the House system, a Thoreau House, where plain living, high thinking, and minimal costs would be the standards. The ideal, he said, was Pareto’s “free circulation of the elite.” Harvard’s obligation was to renounce its affiliations with the plutocracy and devote itself to creating and sustaining an aristocracy of the mind.12

  His editorials involved him in debate with readers, some of them hot readers against whom he had to defend even the principle of expressed editorial opinions. Dissent did not deter him; he took it as a sign that the moribund Graduates’ Magazine had begun to stir. When he could find no lively material with which to fill the magazine, he wrote it himself, either inserting whole essays or stretching the Graduate’s Window to fill unoccupied space. Three essays—“We Brighter People,” in the spring 1931 issue, “Mark Twain and the Genteel Tradition,” in winter 1931, and “Grace Before Teaching,” in March 193213—gave his obscure little forum a literary and intellectual distinction such as it had never had and would never have again. Any of the three essays, he could have sold to Harper’s or the Mercury. All of them are significant in the development of his ideas, as he himself acknowledged by incorporating the Mark Twain essay into Mark Twain’s America and including both the others in the first collection of essays that he liked well enough to reprint in book form. The last of the three to be published we may consider first, since it was an extension, in one way a reversal, of some of his earlier opinions on the teaching of literature. In form a letter to a prospective Ph.D., it was indulgently contemptuous of the methodology of graduate training and the “guild of nincompoops with degrees” under whose domination literature atrophied. It was true that the Professors sometimes knew what they were talking about, as the Young Intellectuals rarely did; but their increasing insistence on methodology was deadly. Literature “ceases to be an art, it ceases to have any bearing on human life, and becomes only a despised corpse, a cadaver without worth except as material for the practice of a barren but technically expert dissection.”14

  To that judgment, any lover of literature who has ever suffered through graduate school is likely to say amen. The New Humanists were in the same years attacking literary scholarship on similar, if more academic, grounds. Twenty-five years after DeVoto gave his advice to an unknown Ph.D.—incidentally justifying his own failure to pursue literature through that maze—the Harvard Report on General Education was making the same plea for education through literature rather than in it, and nearly forty years afterward, Saul Bellow managed to annoy both the Professors of literature and the Young Intellectuals, who by that time had merged into a single, formidable critical Establishment, with almost identical sentiments.

  In 1932 the system had not yet metamorphosed, or even cracked its pupal case. DeVoto’s dissenting opinion was relatively new to the public prints, though not new to him. He had from the beginning resisted the standard forms of dissection, as he had resisted the classical bias and the academic decorousness of the New Humanists and the vaudeville tactics of teachers avid for student approval. He had gravitated to those teachers who taught literature from the creative end, he had always been suspicious of theory and systematic analysis, he referred himself to facts and ad hoc situations. If you were going to teach literature—and “in this forbidding world we are everywhere surrounded by mystery, which wraps us in the cloak of our own ignorance, and any genuine solving of any genuine part of it is good”—teach it to undergraduates and teach it by being true to literature, not to pedantry or method. “I do not mean that a teacher of literature is, rightly, a man who would be a poet if only he could write poetry. I mean that the communication of literature to students is a form of the imaginative expression of experience, and is subject to the principles of creation, not to those of dissection.”

  “Be humble!” he adjured his young Ph.D. And also, “Be proud!” Like the West, which was a great place but was lousy with Westerners, the teaching profession was a high calling but was lousy with pedagogues. Dean Briggs, who had objected to the Mencken tone of some of the earlier essays, could have read this one with satisfaction, for it not only expressed some of his own convictions about literature and teaching, but expressed them with force and eloquence.

  “We Brighter People” was more deliberately contentious. Even its title was a sneer. An attack on the Young Intellectuals—Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Harold Stearns, the whole Seven Arts, Golden Day, America’s Coming-of-Age group—the essay represented DeVoto’s matured but not necessarily mellowed judgment of ideas and tendencies that had infuriated him even as an undergraduate. It was also the first salvo of a bombardment that would go on for two decades and breed great bitterness and cause many great wounds, of the least of which an emir would have died. During the five years he had been working on the Mark Twain book, DeVoto had been steadfastly bent upon refuting the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks about Mark Twain and the frontier that had bred him. Those ideas had been profoundly influential. They were likewise widespread—were not only held by the Brooks coterie and those whom it had influenced, but were assumed to be true for a whole culture, not simply for Mark Twain.

  Characteristically, DeVoto opened up firing by battery. The Young Intellectuals, he said, held their ideas in ready-made sets. Their idiocies began with Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age, “one of the decennial abstracts of Emerson’s ‘American Scholar,’ ” but did not achieve complete expression until The Ordeal of Mark Twain. The YI’s spurned the “puritanism” and commercialism of America without having read enough history to know they were distorting it. Where facts conflicted with their a priori theories, facts were ignored. They canonized Melville and Emily Dickinson as symbols of the Artist crushed by materialist America. Having Freud ready to their hands (often confused with Adler, Jung, and J. B. Watson), they felt free to psychoanalyze writers, especially dead writers, and to find in them what they had gone looking for. Brooks said that Mark Twain had had the Artist in him crushed by frontier buffoonery and Calvinism, and had been combed all to thunder and effectively gelded by his mother and his wife. It was a nice theory, but it wasn’t true. Very little of what the YI’s said was true. Of all the books written about America by the YI’s, Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century was the only one that did not misrepresent it.

  To the YI, moreover, literature was seldom an art, any more than it was to the pedagogue. It was a means to reform according to a blueprint conceived without reference to life, history, or human nature. And it rarely meant what it said; it contrived to mean obliquely, symbolically, metaphysically. In contrast with physicists, say, who really knew something, but were very cautious about asserting it, the YI’s knew nothing about fact or history, yet were constantly vulgarizing ideas and bending truth by asserting certainty.15

  We have heard that dissenting opinion as early as 1922, when DeVoto rebuked Melville Smith for knocking America as a kill-joy civilization. We have heard something related to it even earlier, when he wrote Smith from Ogden announcing his resolution to
spend his productive years comprehending the true history and spirit of America, not in Brooks or Mumford terms, not hearing the fiddles tuning up for any Golden Day, but realistically. Since he had read America’s Coming-of-Age in the year of his graduation, he had worked more than ten years, interruptedly but with a singular persistence, to achieve that comprehension. It was finally coming to a head in his Mark Twain book, not yet ready for the press but getting there.

  A modified chapter from that book, combining the theme of Mark Twain with the theme of censorship, was the last-but-one of the essays DeVoto published in the Graduates’ Magazine.16 It is not the whole story—it concerns primarily the contacts between Mark Twain and the genteel tradition—and it takes the rather mild position, unexpected in the light of DeVoto’s belligerent antagonism to all censorship, that the combing over that Mark Twain got from the genteel, including his wife, Howells, and Richard Watson Gilder, did him less harm than the Brooks contingent seemed to think. Mark Twain’s relation to the genteel tradition was the western relation: “He came East and he accepted tuition.” The cleaning-up impoverished literature very little, and he submitted to it without complaint and without the collapse of artistic integrity that had been asserted. In the same way that he submitted to Clara’s and Howells’ editing, he allowed Gilder to bowdlerize Huckleberry Finn in the pages of the Century. A tradition enforced conformity on an alien, because the folkways of gentility would not then accept a realism rougher than that of Howells or James. Unfortunate, yes; seriously damaging, no. Not unless you were constructing a theory from it.

  Having fired the opening salvos (the artillery metaphors are all but inescapable), DeVoto kept up a rolling barrage looking forward to the time when his book should come off the press and the attack should be made in force. In January 1932 he reviewed Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch’s My Father, Mark Twain, a collection of love letters from Mark Twain to his wife.17 “This unneeded book,” selected with a taste that was “really dreadful,” could have been, he said, something notably more important. It could have contained all the letters to Howells that had been returned to the Mark Twain Estate when A. B. Paine was writing his biography. It could have drawn on the vast body of manuscripts and correspondence locked up in a New York warehouse and available only to Mrs. Gabrilowitsch and Paine. Mrs. Gabrilowitsch’s principal purpose, to protect her mother’s memory from the aspersions of Van Wyck Brooks, was hardly justification for a book. Nobody took those aspersions seriously anyway.

  It seems impossible to come at the details of DeVoto’s leaving the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, which he did with the issue of June 1932. The Graduates’ last editorial reviews his two years and takes some pride in his several campaigns; it commiserates with his unknown successor; it praises George Homans’ “unawed intelligence” as Undergraduate Editor. Also, it excoriates the “personified flaccidity” known as the Alumni of Harvard College—the Graduates’ subscribers—thereby suggesting that his attempts to liven up the magazine had been resisted and that he was leaving by request.18

  Whether that was true or not, he had left a mark. His files for a year or two afterward show letters from alumni regretting the end of his editorship and thanking him for his contributions. Beyond any question, DeVoto himself regretted the closing of that forum, for he was, then and always, a man in search of an audience. Many of the qualities of his later career as an editor and commentator are already here: the personal tone, the dissenting opinions, the impetuous rhetoric, the direct talk to readers, the willingness to do battle in attack or defense, the impatience with hypocrisy or nonsense, the championing of civil liberties and various kinds of underdogs, the bluntness that is close to insult. In later and more effective forums he would demonstrate that there was a vigorous editor in him, along with the novelist, the critic, the historian, and the pamphleteer, but that the editor could not operate except as a crusader and that every page of a magazine he edited would be an editorial page. Anyone who desires to experience the general tone and pace of a DeVoto-edited periodical can get it by going to the puppet shows of Palermo, especially in those moments when Orlando or Oliver seizes his sword, when the stamping begins and the dust rises and the blows rattle off the armor and the Saracen heads roll.

  3 · New England: There She Stands

  “An apprentice New Englander,”1 DeVoto liked to call himself. Many things combined to make him one. His abiding vision of America as a new, emerging, ultimately hopeful civilizaton was one of them: in New England a marked and generally admirable variety of native America had already perfected itself. His persistent intellectualism was another: New England had been and at least in his eyes remained the model and schoolroom of the American mind. But personal insecurity and acute ambition had likewise helped fasten him like a limpet to the New England rock. Having repudiated Utah as deficient and stultifying, having rejected his mother’s Mormon tradition and his father’s irritable, dislocated intellectual snobbery, he was in the market for a new place and culture to belong in. America as a generalized nation provided it in some degree; but generalized America was large and diverse, and his attachment was primarily to its past and its process. New England gave him a second belonging-place.

  Probably he was trying to replace an unsatisfying home, which he felt had rejected him and laughed at his literary ambitions, with a place that would satisfy his need for accomplishment, drama, recognition, and the companionship of true minds. But if that were all, Northwestern should have answered his needs better than it did. Maybe, as one of his analysts later suggested to him,2 he was searching eastward for a father, determined to demonstrate his ability to prosper in an intellectual climate from which his father had been a dropout and a failure. Whatever psychoanalytic explanation he or his analysts might propose, he was never in the slightest doubt, from the time he arrived at Harvard as a brash sophomore transfer to the day of his death forty years later, that New England was the region he loved and respected, the best of all places to live and work. Next to the West, it is the most frequent subject of his writing over a period of twenty-five years; but unlike the West, it generally comes out smelling like a rose. He never said of New England that it was a fine place but lousy with New Englanders.

  By 1931 he had had four years of it superimposed on his three undergraduate years. He had some experience not only of Cambridge, Boston, and their environs, but of the countryside. One summer on the Cape, one divided between Bob Bailey’s farmhouse and the Almy place at Hix Bridge, and parts of two others near Conway, New Hampshire, had let him sample three varieties of New England landscape and three subspecies of New Englander. He had put Bailey over a good many miles of rural Massachusetts hunting down utopian colonies and New Jerusalems during the distracted summer of 1928, and since acquiring a car of his own he had gone back to his old Ogden habit of driving off the shakes, anxieties, and horrors by getting behind the wheel.

  An apprentice New Englander. His son had been born in New England, and though he probably would have subscribed to the Vermonter’s laconics—“Cat kin have kittens in the oven but that don’t make ’em biscuit”—he was closer to being biscuit after four years in New England than he would have been after a lifetime in Evanston. Then, in the summer of 1931, he discovered Vermont, and what had been respect and liking turned into a love affair. He fell for Vermont with the same headlong ardency that had marked his attachments to the brewer’s daughter, Mattie, Skinny, Helen Avis MacVicar, and Harvard College.

  Again it was a Cambridge friend who provided opportunity. His old teacher L. J. Henderson, famous for his research into the chemistry of the blood and a formidable gourmet, misogynist, and intellectual, was leaving with his wife to spend a sabbatical year in California. His summer place at Morgan Center, ten miles below the Quebec border, was available to the DeVotos, their ten-month-old child, and any friends they might choose to ask up.3 Done, on the instant. On June 13, they drove up and took possession.

  That quiet, green village looking southward across Lake Seymo
ur to the peaks that walled Lake Willoughby could provide out of its own resources none of the intellectual stimulation that was the greatest charm of Cambridge. But it could provide everything else. It was New England to the seventh power. Its fields, hewn out of the forest just after the Revolution and maintained with stubborn labor since, were hedged with mossy stone walls and bounded with dense wild woods of maple, birch, beech, hemlock, spruce, white cedar, balsam, tamarack, white pine, ash, elm, ironwood, butternut and cherry. Its houses and their furniture and a lot of its wagons and farm equipment had been made out of those woods, and so had the character of the Vermonters. Every quality of independence, self-reliance, laboriousness, ingenuity, stubbornness, endurance, and hard-mouthed integrity that DeVoto admired in the New England character were here undiluted. Town-meeting democracy, democratic self-respect, an essential conservatism that went all the way from frugality in making things do, and do again, and do over, to a skeptical and humorous political view were demonstrated to him twenty times a day. He admired the Vermonters’ uncomplaining adaptations to a hard climate and thin soil, he liked their jack-of-all-trades skill, he liked their humor, he liked their finished physical type. Something both explicit and implicit to the American gospels had here been allowed to grow and develop in relative isolation, back in a corner where boosters had found no reason to go and where the phony had no acceptance. Needs had been reduced to a minimum, adaptive skill was at a maximum. A Vermont farm family with a garden, a cow, a woodlot, and a sugarbush could get along in the Depression year 1931 on three hundred dollars cash a year and never lose one grain or scintilla of its independence and self-respect. Though he does not seem to have said it anywhere, in so many words, what he found exhilarating in Vermont was an extension into contemporary times of everything that he admired about the frontier, as well as much that he had been familiar with from childhood in the laborious mores of the Mormons,4 many of whom, including both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, were born in Vermont.