The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  Then, in the spring of 1915, the Mormon-Gentile conflict, which in Utah was a more natural way of life than literature was, surfaced again. A pair of English instructors at the university, one of them Bernard’s Freshman English instructor, Wilbert Snow, were fired. Charges flew that the Mormon Church was exerting its customary suppressive influence upon the freedom of the mind and manipulating the university to its own purposes. Fifteen members of the faculty quit in protest, the president of the university stood his ground, the American Association of University Professors investigated and eventually blacklisted the university, the president ultimately resigned. Bernard DeVoto, as a friend of Snow’s and one of the young radicals of the campus, had no difficulty choosing his side, though he seems not to have written anything about the incident for any campus publication. Well before the melted lavas had re-formed the crust that permitted business to go on, he had shaken the dust of that “alleged institution” from his feet, had somehow raised the money to go to Harvard, had applied, and had been admitted.

  So Mrs. F. lost him to the wider world, where he was more likely to fulfill the hopes she had for him. He escaped from the “culture clubs and chiropractors” of his native city and made his way toward the mysterious and intellectual and literary East from which his father had come. Never mind that his father had come from Indiana. To an Ogden boy, anything east of Cheyenne is back East. In the fall of 1915 the Union Pacific took him up Weber Canyon past his grandfather’s farm, and Ogden—so went his resolve—was behind him forever.

  3 · Harvard

  Naturally he was wrong. Also he was a little scared. If he thought that a year in college in Salt Lake City had made him a man of the world, he could think again. Looked back at from the shadows of ivied Georgian brick, their echoes heard amid the sound of unfamiliar, flattened vowels and obliterated r’s, remembered from his bed in Gannet House while the interminable Cambridge rain swished in the street and gurgled in gutters and downspouts, Ogden and Salt Lake City turned out to be merely variants of the same place, the only place he knew, and he turned out to be only another undergraduate away from home for the first time. Cambridge might stimulate him halfway to combustion, but it was shabby under the rain, its people were strangers with cold hearts and indifferent faces, its girls were unpretty, its ways were foreign. His only acquaintance at first was his roommate, Arthur Perkins, neither literary nor a close friend, but an Ogden boy and therefore a support.

  A week after he had put Ogden behind him forever, young DeVoto was homesick for it. His homesickness lay much of the time below the level of awareness, probably, but it crops up in the letters he wrote to a girl named Helen Hunter at the University of Utah.1 Calf letters full of inflated, playful rhetoric, and salted with French and German phrases sometimes misspelled, they were calculated to stimulate envy and reveal how completely Bernard had taken possession of the larger life. They refer casually to plays and concerts, they drop names sure to sound impressive on Thirteenth East Street in Salt Lake City. They report the pieces he has learned on the mandolin, they describe his collection of pipes.

  But through the undergraduate brag and the clichés leaks an occasional spasm of self-doubt, and the interest in Utah matters is constant and hungry. He keeps asking about Utah’s football team, presumably unreported in the eastern press. He wants news of Ogden people, especially his “ex-wife”—a phrase to describe some lost girl friend. He complains about the Cambridge weather, the Bahston accent, and his room in Gannett, a room like all the other rooms that Washington slept in. “No doubt it has traditions but I should prefer electric light.” At midterm exam time he despairs, fearful that he will flunk something. Later he reports that he missed an A in philosophy—the apparent extent of his casualties. He reveals that his eyes have been bothering him (they bothered him off and on all his life, generally when he was in one of his spells of nervous disintegration) and that he has had to get glasses—tortoise-shell. He demonstrates his new philosophic depth by a solipsistic rumination meant to stun the reader with its profundity: In a world so like a dream, who can tell whether dreams and memory are not as real as what we call reality?

  Who indeed. For shortly Helen sent some photographs, which, arriving in the depths of the Cambridge winter with its lead skies and gray snow and black ice, detonated a poem. Her pictures, the poet says, call forth the Wasatch, memory, dreams, YOU, into his far-off room, and Lo! Memory and dream of Ogden, Utah, are as real as Gannett House, and a good deal more attractive.

  There are other poems, mostly about love in twilight, love in moonlight, and love to music (Helen was a musician, a contralto). The last one is signed “Florien,” which was his father’s name with an Old French flourish, and which might mean something to a psychoanalyst tracking down a young man who was in turn tracking down his own identity.

  But he wasn’t always sticky. Helen’s confession that she had gone skiing in her father’s pants inspired him to burlesque:

  Behold through hovering shadows slowly stealing

  A gliding form endowed with fairy shape.

  Ye Gods! a maid, with all her maiden’s feeling,

  And clad, I veil mine eyes, in manhood’s drape!

  About her limbs paternal garb is clinging,

  And o’er her forehead looms a Stetson felt.

  And I, her bard, must wonder while I’m singing

  Whether she wears suspenders or a belt.

  At least once, in these letters to Helen Hunter, he is defiantly confessional. He always valued the outward evidences of accomplishment—medals, prizes, memberships—as if he needed them on his wall to reassure him. Especially in his college days, that need of certification was extreme. When he joined a club called Kappa Gamma Chi, in May 1916, he joined it for reasons that he said had made him an outcast among his Cambridge acquaintances. No prestige attached to that club at Harvard; it was a long long way from Porcellian. But membership would give Bernard status among his intellectual inferiors in Ogden. “At least,” he wrote Helen, “I have the grace not to be a hypocrite.”

  By that time, Helen Hunter had dropped out of the University of Utah to study voice. By October of the following year she was remote enough from his life so that he didn’t know whether to address her in Salt Lake City or Chicago. But for a while, when he was least at home in Cambridge and in himself, she was that person he always needed: someone to cling to, not one of the blonde goddesses and not one of the mentally occluded of Utah, but a good companion, a fellow intelligence, somebody trustworthy, unaffected, unconventional, open, western, friendly, a girl from home. And a contralto voice, something that ever after undid him.

  Bernard DeVoto came to Harvard a raw western youth impressed with Harvard’s intellectual eminence and defensive about Ogden’s assumption that literature was sissy. Sometime during his years there, he seems to have observed that not his literary graces but his westernness got him noticed. He may or may not have realized that his westernness was to a considerable extent the crudity that he had scorned as an attribute of his home town. Iconoclasm is easy to undergraduates, and was particularly easy to this boy who had always been an outsider, an unbeliever, a suspicious and sensitive maverick, and a show-off. If at Harvard he sometimes assumed philistine attitudes and emitted coarse guffaws, if he sometimes attacked the ideas of his fellows with a vigor and a gift for invective that some found offensive, let us never forget that Ogden had a hammer lock on him from behind. Ogden forced him to the perception that, for all its advantages, the East was effete, that it lacked the continental view, that its assumptions and prejudices needed a little western fresh air. The literary needed to be told they were sissy.

  The more confident he became that his talents and intelligence would stand up against the competition of the best, the more he adopted the western role; and the more western he became, the more he felt it necessary to back up the role with knowledge, to know what it meant to come from the place he came from. It was at Harvard that he began to read about the West, and since the
modern West seemed to him simply provincial and unwashed and unworthy of his allegiance, he was diverted to its history, whose violence and boisterousness were as masculine as even Ogden could desire, but whose distance and heroic largeness made it romantic.

  Any western American history he wanted to study he had to get outside the curriculum. He did take some history courses, including a course from Harold Laski, the history of religion with George Foot Moore (his interest in pentecostal aberrations coming to the surface), and the history of science with L. J. Henderson2; but those represented less a personal interest than the satisfaction of requirements and distributions. In November 1915 he had indicated a disinclination for history courses.3 For the fact was that the American social history which most interested him, the history of how the country was settled, how people lived, what houses they built and tools they used and skills they practiced and folkways they knew and entertainment they enjoyed, was not yet a common offering of history departments. Political, military, diplomatic, and the newly popular economic history he could have got; social history as a respectable calling would await the work of Arthur Schlesinger the elder (who brought it to Cambridge from Iowa) and some others who would be DeVoto’s friends later on. As DeVoto’s friend Garrett Mattingly said, you might have to be buried two thousand miles deep in the continent to have a dependable sense of it.4 Even as an undergraduate, young DeVoto had a sense of it that was denied most of his professors.

  If western American social history was outside the canon, something to be learned not from classes but from reading the narratives and autobiographies and reminiscences and letters of those who had experienced it, American literature was hardly more accessible. Despite his later assertions that his first intention was to become a doctor or a psychiatrist, DeVoto’s interests seem to have been literary when he came to Harvard, and to have remained so. Thanks to Mrs. F. and Wilbert Snow, his stance was more American, more contemporary, and more creative than Harvard in his time was quite prepared to deal with. As taught at Harvard in 1915, American literature was the preserve of Barrett Wendell, who “studied it as a now-abandoned folkway of the Bostonians.”5 The men who taught writing—Byron Hurlbut, Dean LeBaron Russell Briggs, and Charles Townsend Copeland—were sympathetic teachers through whose classes passed scores and hundreds of the literary young, including Bernard DeVoto, but they were not themselves writers, and they were all older men, considerably removed from the impatient and revolutionary impulses of their students. “In short, the young writer could not get at Harvard either a creator’s point of view toward writing or any critical guidance whatsoever through the values, the contradictions, the fads and shams and controversies of the new movement which he hoped to join.”6

  That statement, characteristically unqualified, sounds like the complaint of a student allowed to flounder. DeVoto may have floundered some, adjusting himself to a new place and to standards of excellence well above anything he had ever been held to, but he did not lack for guidance. All three writing teachers were impressed by him and became his good friends, adopting him in almost fatherly fashion; and if they could not steer him confidently among the forming literary tendencies of the time, they could at least encourage in him the skepticism that he already possessed in good measure. If he was looking for something to join, he quickly found out that he did not fit into any gang or coterie—not the Fabians, not the “poor-devil followers of the Russian novelists,” and certainly not the aesthetes of whom Malcolm Cowley’s account in Exile’s Return is the standard one. “An oafish kind of cub, lubberly and stammering and Rocky Mountain,” upon whom “no kind of form was imposed” until after the War, he admitted that he was “hardly even a hanger-on of this high-church aestheticism … with its “perfumed and uncapitalized verse, with some symbol in the stage directions, such as ‘Utter darkness,’ ‘To be accompanied by a hautboy and a lute,’ or ‘The mist lifts and Christ is seen.’ ”7 Through his sophomore and junior years he remained, despite his abiding need for friends, something of an outsider, more oriented to America than to Europe, closer related to the muckrakers and H. L. Mencken than to Pound, Joyce, or the twilight diabolisms of the Yellow Book. Like Sinclair Lewis, and for somewhat similar psychological and geographical reasons, he specialized in the Bronx cheer.

  His companions were more accidental than chosen. In an effort to ease the isolation of students who transferred from other institutions, Memorial Hall made up tables of such waifs. Some of those with whom DeVoto was thrown by this administrative gesture remained his close associates and in some cases his roommates through his three years in Cambridge. Gordon King from CCNY, Tommy Raysor from the University of Chicago, Dave Snodgrass from the University of California, Kent Hagler from the University of Illinois were four of them. King and Hagler became DeVoto’s closest friends. Snodgrass and Raysor, though less close, were his roommates for a year in Fairfax Hall.8 King and Raysor were literary, as DeVoto was, but by no stretch of the imagination could any of them have been called a member of an elite.

  Outside the groupings created by intellectual and literary currents, he was also apart from some accepted affiliations and loyalties. In so Anglophile a place as Harvard, during the early years of World War I, there was much pro-Ally sentiment, some prowar talk, and an accelerating amount of enlistment in the American Ambulance Service, the Norton-Harjes, or the Red Cross ambulance units that served on the Italian front. The literary were peculiarly susceptible, though their attitude toward the war itself was often what Malcolm Cowley calls “spectatorial.” “One might almost say that the ambulance corps and the French military transport were college-extension courses for a generation of writers.”9 A class list would have included Cowley himself, Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, Edward Weeks, Hemingway, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, Slater Brown, Harry Crosby, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, Louis Bromfield, Dashiell Hammett, and a lot more.

  But not Bernard DeVoto. Considerably later, reviewing Exile’s Return, he would scold Cowley for assuming that his ambulance-and-camion crew accurately represented a whole generation.10 For a while the war was simply not real to DeVoto; it was something in the rotogravure sections and in the headlines. Then there came a time when it moved up a long step and became a personal possibility. At one of Copeland’s Monday Nights there was a guest, a journalist from the Manchester Guardian, a man whom a year or two later Copey would hate and fear as a Bolshevik, but who in January or February of 1917 was a voice from the threatened Motherland. His name was S. K. Ratliffe. “He sat in the guest’s green chair, Copey vis-a-vis, with the yellow light of Copey’s oil lamp on him, and a score or so of us young stotes ranged in the brown shadows on the floor. Quite simply and emotionally, but with a fine art—one then much practiced by visiting Englishmen—he told about seeing the troops march off for Folkstone, singing ‘Send father and mother, send sister and brother, but for God’s sake don’t send me,’ [and] about following them to France, about simple, isolated, immensely effective vignettes militaire. Just as simply and inevitably, he from time to time dropped his narrative, looked round at us through great gleaming spectacles, mildly, reflectively, and remarked, ‘I’ll see you young men there in a year or two.’ It was a perfection of propaganda, of a particular British propaganda that stinks to God, but it did its job. At least, sitting there with a fire burning on the hearth of Emerson and Thoreau and Everett, looking out to bright moonlight on the snowy roofs of Thayer and Holworthy, I heard the tramp and shuffle of those feet and the hoarse singing overseas.”11

  Heard, but did not yet heed. Though shaken for a moment by the contagious idealism of sacrifice, he prided himself that he did not share the hysteria. Gordon King and others, who did share it, argued and pled with him, called him an anarchist, quoted him Plato on the necessities of the state. He held out. And then, about the following November, when Harvard boys began rotten-egging pacifist and anti-war groups, the belligerent and contrary part of DeVoto rose up and told him to join the pacifists. He did, and
was called a yellow coward, from the podium, by Copey—Copey who had paid the expenses of at least one Harvard boy to sail off to France and make his sacrifice. Even among friends such as Gordon King and Kent Hagler, he felt the tension of an effort to understand what to them was a monstrous selfishness and indifference.

  Writing about it afterward, DeVoto felt that he held out hardheadedly until the actual declaration of war, listened with some skepticism while Copey extolled Woodrow Wilson’s war speech as the highest rhetoric ever uttered, and then quite suddenly and coolly, when Harold Laski in History 2 asked how many war-bound students were taking the special examination, realized that he was taking it. Shortly after, he enlisted in the Harvard Regiment, whose barracks were the Freshmen Dormitories, and found himself a patriot while his friend Hagler, held back by a damaged eye and an injured spine, was not.

  Whether or not his motives were as clear to him, and as cynically realistic, as this account implies, there is little doubt that he was divided and had to make a choice. The role of American suspicious of entangling European alliances was native to him (and to Ogden); that of pacifist was merely a contrary reflex. For one of DeVoto’s temperament, peace is most attractive when one is fighting in its name. And his later commentary tends to play down the youthful idealism by which, in middle life, he was embarrassed. What put him on the road to war was actually a flash flood of generous feeling.

  Water, he liked to point out when engaged in the fight against destructive land uses in the West, runs downhill. In an ardently romantic nature, emotions also run downhill, sometimes over all the dams that common sense and cynicism have erected. They took him into the Harvard Regiment on April 6, 1917. The unit trained through the spring in Cambridge and later went to a camp in western Massachusetts. In August it disbanded, freeing its members for further choices. DeVoto went back to Ogden, renewed his love-hate relationship with the town, talked with his parents, and restlessly contemplated the possibility of returning to a war-altered Harvard from which most of his acquaintance would have vanished into uniform singing such songs as were sung on the road to Folkstone. With characteristic anxiety he examined his soul, tested his resolution, analyzed his reasons, doubted and asserted his courage, passionately read the war news, felt the surge of war fever swirling even in that remote mountain town, and finally enlisted. He was posted for training at Camp Devens, Massachusetts.