The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  That was when there were still elms. That was when the world was young. It was never younger for Benny DeVoto than during the last two weeks of August in the 1930s and early 1940s, when he was doing what he liked to do and did well, among people he liked to work with, in a place that he liked. It was as close as he ever got to being an insider, a leader with a constituency that he could have confidence in, a teacher who instructed not only his students but his colleagues. If it was Theodore Morrison and his wife, Kathleen, who were primarily responsible for pulling the Conference together and holding it together against all the multiple strains of Depression, war, talent, genius, temperament, neurosis, and propinquity, DeVoto helped define it, and it helped define him. Probably he never thought in such terms, but it was totally appropriate that this belligerently American intelligence should have been influential in the creation of the writers’ conference, an institution as native to America as Rotary or universal free education.

  Joseph Battell, a shrewd and successful Vermont Yankee, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on February 23, 1915. When his will was published in the Middlebury Register, which he owned, Middlebury College found itself endowed with thirty-one thousand acres of the Green Mountains, together with an inn and its numerous cottages and outbuildings three miles east of Ripton, below Middlebury Gap.27 After five years of trying unsuccessfully to make the inn pay as a summer hotel, the trustees voted to put it up for sale. But, during those same five years, the college had been developing its summer language schools, imaginative enclaves of German, French, and Spanish (with Italian, Russian, and Chinese to follow later on) in the pleasant summer atmosphere of rural Vermont. With those as a model, and the unused Bread Loaf Inn as a base, a group of Middlebury professors proposed and got approved a Bread Loaf School of English, designed for teachers working toward the M.A. It opened its doors in the summer of 1920, an educational innovation that returned learning to the country at the precise time when the literary, including Bernard DeVoto, were fleeing the village in fits of the dry horrors and rural America was thought to be accurately pictured in Winesburg, Ohio and Main Street.

  Six years later, largely through the efforts of President Paul Moody and John Farrar, who had been teaching at the English School, the innovation begot a secondary innovation, the Short Session for Students in Creative Writing, to follow immediately after the English School and run for ten days or two weeks. Farrar, then editor of The Bookman, soon to become a partner in the new publishing house of Farrar & Rinehart, was a literary professional, not an academic. His bulletin for the session of 1927 states an intention which has not substantially changed in nearly half a century and which has provided the rubric for every writers’ conference since that first one: “The program will consist of background lectures on the writing of short stories, novels, articles, and poems, with practical suggestions on developing a prose style and the preparation and placement of manuscripts. Informal discussions on both the artistic and practical problems of creative writing, and group and individual conferences on manuscripts brought by the students, will furnish opportunity for professional criticism that should result in marketable writing.”28

  The emphasis was practical and professional—by some standards, crass. But the auspices were academic, and so, through the years, has been part of the staff. The combination has proved better than either of its components. What in other circumstances might have developed into something narrowly and even cynically commercial, a sort of Famous Writers school exploiting the yearnings of the untalented, was born with a conscience that was essentially academic—which is to say, disinterested, and at least in principle devoted to the impartial promotion of excellence.

  Other possible developments—classes of amateurs under amateur professors, an arty mutual-admiration society of the pathetically ungifted, or a sort of Yaddo or MacDowell Colony where creators could take shelter while they created—were made unlikely by the continuing presence of people for whom literature was both an art and a business. What took shape, after some cloudy beginnings, was a literary teaching institution with a respect for the art, but with the practical perception that art must make its way with some reasonably representative audience if it is to be anything but a pleasant self-indulgence. Some, including DeVoto, insisted that until communication between writer and reader had been established, no art in fact existed. It was the writer’s first obligation, by skill and cunning, to make contact with an audience. The level at which he established and maintained that contact was an index to his honesty and credibility as a writer.

  John Farrar ran the Conference through 1928. His announced successor in 1929 was Robert Frost, who from the beginning had taken an interest in the English School and hoped to turn it toward creative purposes. (“We aren’t getting enough American literature out of our colleges to pay for the hard teaching that goes into them.”) But Frost had not got on well with Farrar, and he did not succeed Farrar as director, either, despite the announcement; apparently President Paul Moody of Middlebury feared putting so jealous and disruptive a personality into an administrative position.29 Though Frost delivered an annual lecture at the English School almost every year from its opening until his death in 1963, he withdrew himself from the Writers’ Conference, of which he has sometimes been erroneously called the founder,30 and did not come back to it until 1936. The actual director in 1929 and in the two succeeding years was Robert Gay, the Simmons College professor who also directed the English School from 1930 to 1936. In 1932, finding the double directorship too burdensome, Gay turned over the Writers’ Conference to Theodore Morrison.

  Morrison gave coherence and direction to what had previously been somewhat haphazard and improvised. A Harvard graduate and native New Englander, he was heir to the Wendell-Briggs-Copeland-Hurlbut tradition of the teaching of composition, which was the best such tradition in the country. As poet, teacher, and former assistant editor of the Atlantic, he combined the qualifications that Bread Loaf uniquely required, and he was in touch with others who combined them. One of these was his closest friend and, since 1931, next-door neighbor in Cambridge. When he took over the Conference, his first move was to get in touch with DeVoto, summering seventy miles northeast of Bread Loaf, in Peacham, and bind him to the new enterprise. He had a great admiration for DeVoto’s unconventional vigor of mind, and in the two years they had lived next door to one another they had become very close. It is appropriate that the span of years from 1932 to 1955, during which DeVoto participated in the Conference, exactly corresponded to Morrison’s term as director. Bread Loaf as it developed was more the creation of those two than of any others.

  It would be as unfair to judge DeVoto’s literary theories by his Bread Loaf utterances as to judge a historian by his class notes. He was talking, after all, to an audience of whom the best were Not-Yets and the rest were Never-Would-Bes. The coherent theory of fiction that he elaborated first in the series of columns called “English 37” in The Saturday Review of Literature,31 and in 1951 published at full length as The World of Fiction,32 leaked through only in simplified form into his Bread Loaf lectures and clinics. What he taught there was mainly practice, or at most the theory that derived from experience. The skeptic in him said that all theory was likely to be the rationalization of practice; here as elsewhere he was suspicious of a priori generalizations and abstractions. The pro in him, who seemed to stalk around inside cowing with a club the artist who now and then ventured a peep, said that any writer is to some extent a purveyor of what the audience, through its editors, wants and will accept. We may leave till later the discussion not only of his theory of fiction but the extent to which it was itself a rationalization of his own neurosis and his commercial necessities. The Bread Loaf teaching was a how- to course—how to do, how to avoid. Inevitably it reflected his personal attitudes, and it helped to establish Bread Loaf as a hardheaded, commonsensical, practical academy, anti-faddist, anti-modernist, anti-Bohemian, anti-Marxist, anti-coterie (or at least non all of these), closer to
the middle class than to the proletariat either Lumpen or intellectual, closer to America than to Europe, closer to Harper’s, Atlantic, and The Saturday Review of Literature than to The New Masses, New Republic, or The Nation, more inclined to stress the traditional than the experimental or revolutionary. And, DeVoto might have added, more inclined to think than to throb, more inclined to consult fact and experience than wishful theory, more interested in communication than in self-expression, exhibitionism, or public confession.

  That was the essential teaching bias, but one of the triumphs of Morrison’s administration was his practice of keeping the instruction practical, traditional, and consistent while opening the Conference to every sort of literary influence. Fellows were selected for their talent, not for their conformity to Bread Loaf principles, and often their opinions contributed stimulating clashes to clinics and round tables. The Fellows, over the years of DeVoto’s service, included many names that became well known: Josephine Johnson, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, John Ciardi, Theodore Roethke, Eugene Burdick, William Lederer, and more. Likewise the staff and visiting lecturers, who during the Morrison and Ciardi administrations, in addition to those I have listed as the regulars, included writers as various as James T. Farrell and Katherine Anne Porter, Sinclair Lewis and Hervey Allen, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Joseph Wood Krutch, W. H. Auden and Merrill Moore, Nancy Hale and Dudley Fitts, Saul Bellow and Richard Wilbur, Eunice Blake and Jessamyn West. A full roster of the ships would include virtually every tendency apparent in the national letters. It is well to have a pedagogical orthodoxy of a conservative tinge; it is likewise well to have it constantly challenged.

  Conservative or not, Bread Loaf’s teaching was probably less calcified than it would have been under any variety of the revolutionary. Unlike the marriage of gin and vermouth, the intimate relations between writing instructor and potential talent took place according to no formula, and at a temperature closer to the boiling point of lead than to absolute zero. Everything in that relationship, as in every other context where the mind and spirit tried to make sense of experience, was ad hoc. There were no fixed rules, no abstract principles. DeVoto was not one of those who ask with a weary or superior smile if writing can be taught. He never tried to teach writing in that sense; he tried only to help young writers to an understanding of what writing was and what it entailed, and to set them on a path where their own capacities and necessities could become productive. Form and method were the resultants of the impact of the mysterious individuality of talent, intelligence, and passion upon the intractability of experience. Anything the material demanded was justified, anything you could get away with was legitimate. But make sure you were getting away with it, and try to make it worth getting away with. Before plunging into a story, ask if you had anything to say besides yourself; before adopting an experimental way out of a difficulty, inquire whether your new way was necessary or whether it was merely indulgence of personal cleverness. The chances were better than 3.7 to 1 that tried methods would work better. Experiments were best made by people who knew how.

  It is possible that DeVoto’s Bread Loaf instruction is not preserved even in students’ notebooks, for Ted Morrison specifically discouraged the note-taking that was the first impulse of the eager and dutiful seeking the Way. The class topics listed in the Conference news sheet, The Crumb,33 show rubric and content changing from year to year, splintering and re-forming against the ad hoc realities of new contributors, new manuscripts, new individual problems, and the slight annual changes in the staff. But some pragmatic rules of thumb have persisted and acquired the compactness of aphorism, and are probably still quoted on the mountain every August. It is ironic that DeVoto, who desired above all things to be a serious novelist, should be remembered by his friends and students not for any fictions of his own but for a handful of obiter dicta about the writing of fiction; and that the sworn enemy of critical theory and other forms of “beautiful thinking” should have ended his lifelong preoccupation with fiction with a book examining its psychological bases. At Bread Loaf he put his rules of thumb as bluntly as possible. They have the same relation to his theories as The New England Carpenter, say, has to the notebooks of Sir Christopher Wren.34

  The one indispensable of fiction was movement. “A novel is always story,” he said, and he defined the short story as “a narrative hurrying toward its end.” If fiction did not move, it was nothing, and to move, it must present living people in action. But fiction was also illusion—reality transformed and made coherent, or fantasy given such form that it could be shared and utilized by readers. That did not mean that the writer was a mere enzyme or catalyst, any more than it meant that he was the helpless vehicle for his own efforts at equilibrium. “Art is man determined to die sane,” he said; but he insisted that the artist was in part the creator of his own sanity, with a considerable degree of autonomy and control. On that point he argued heatedly with the Freudian critics and especially with Lawrence Kubie, who he said confused literary creation with self-therapy, and the creator either with a helplessly self-protective censor or an equally helpless self-purger.35 Literature was no drifting lifeboat, said DeVoto in effect, but a craft under power, and with a steersman.

  Being a maker, and in at least partial control of his fantasies, the writer had the obligation to be skillful, which meant submitting to a long apprenticeship in technique. “Write for the reader, never for yourself,” he said over and over, in lectures, clinics, conversations, and arguments. Writing for the reader meant creating an illusion in which, at least for the time of reading, he could believe. The necessity for a created and maintained illusion in turn involved certain technical necessities, or near necessities. One was a point of view that let the reader know whether he was inside or outside the action, participant or observer, and that point of view could not be slack or inconsistent without risk to the illusion. Likewise, dramatic propriety, the fitting of style and tone to character, the consistency of a character with himself and his created world, was a doctrine not to be violated with impunity. Likewise style, which must submit itself to the fiction and not try to dominate it. If you found yourself inordinately admiring your own prose, suspect it. If there was doubt about a passage or a phrase, there was no doubt. “Murder your darlings!” the exhortation went, and in clinics and round tables the staff, working over the manuscript of some cringing victim, often wielded the knife like First and Second Murderers.

  “Throw away the first five chapters,” DeVoto liked to tell beginning novelists, meaning that too often those first chapters were written not for the reader and not in answer to the inner necessities of the story but for the clarification of the novelist’s own mind. They were too often part of the preliminary gestative process carried over into the book, a sort of caul or afterbirth. They were likely to contain material that the novelist needed to know but that, once he knew it, he could trust the reader to pick up along the way. “In narrative, fewest is best,” DeVoto advised Garrett Mattingly when Mattingly was struggling with the story of the Armada. “If anybody is with you at all, he is probably half a yard ahead of you.”36

  As for revision, which separated the men from the boys, he had a phrase for that too. “It’s all right for a first draft,” he told Kitty Bowen after slashing to pieces a manuscript she had worked over twenty times; and handing it back to her with a smile he added, “Just run it through your typewriter again.”37

  Run it through your typewriter again. There was nothing new about that advice. Horace nearly twenty centuries before had advised poets to polish their poems to the fingernail and then put them away for nine years to cure. There was nothing new about other elements of the Bread Loaf doctrine, either—about movement and the elimination of slow expository beginnings (who said begin in medias res?); about drama’s being men in action (same old Aristotelian gospel); about economy (from Poe through Maupassant and Chekhov to Joyce and the moderns, that has been the essence of short-story effect
iveness); about point of view (Henry James, whom DeVoto did not otherwise admire, had taught everybody about that one).

  Nothing new. Standard fare, about equally compounded of the traditional and the inductively pragmatic. None of it encouraged self-indulgence, artiness, or the ineffable. There wasn’t a heartthrob or a swoon or a social theory or a mystique in any of it. Compulsive public confession got the horse laugh, narcissistic autobiographical revelations drew anything but cries of admiration. In the phrase DeVoto later pinned on the greatest autobiographizer of them all, Thomas Wolfe, “genius is not enough.”38 You took what genius you had and you disciplined it—which was exactly what the New Humanists said, though DeVoto would not have relished the association.

  One principal reason for the success of this body of doctrine—for it was a doctrine of sorts, and it did have perennial success—was that it was presented to the uninitiated by people who had proved themselves, in various ways and at various levels of excellence, able to practice what they preached. Because of the peculiar solidarity of the fiction team, the customers found themselves ganged up on, snowed under, forced to consider and take stock. I doubt that attendance at Bread Loaf convinced every young writer of the infallibility of those who instructed him in discipline, technique, and the primacy of perspiration over inspiration. But it cured a good many of the half-baked aestheticism that so often accompanies talent, and it made better writers of some, and it probably harmed or discouraged only a few. Most went away with something. They even went away more stimulated and determined to excel than if the Conference had set out on the dubious adventure of trying to “enthuse” them.

  Yet even at Bread Loaf, where his friends were most numerous and most tested, where his authority was most respected and submitted to, where he was no Johnny-come-lately trying to break in but one of the inner group of regulars, DeVoto’s abrasive temperament sometimes offended people, and their resentment brought him back to the old, unsleeping suspicion that there were “DeVoto-haters” around. Edith Mirrielees could cut away literary gangrene, or put a deformed story out of its misery, so gently that the victim did not even know he bled, and kissed the knife that ventilated him. DeVoto in private, or in a letter, or to anyone about whom he felt protective, could do the same—could deal with the sad incongruity between ambition and talent with a surprising understanding and gentleness. The respect for him that many Fellows and Conference members carried away with them was close to reverence. But when he stood before an audience he had to impress it. As Kubie told him, he heard the bugles of his own rhetoric and sniffed dust and gunpowder. He could not resist making a phrase, and when he was warmed up there was no such phrasemaker in the United States unless perhaps Mencken. The implacable show-off in him stamped and thundered, he lacked the internal governor that would have told him when enough was enough. In chasing foolishness and pretension through Bread Loaf’s auditorium with his bloody hatchet, he sometimes forgot that pretension and foolishness had people wrapped around them and that these people could bleed.