The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  In September, just after his return to Cambridge, Lee Hartman died,14 and that was a second climacteric. Zinsser was already gone; now he lost the editor who had made him welcome at Harper’s for fifteen years. Both had been people whose intelligence, realism, and toughness of mind he had greatly respected and whose friendship had warmed his life.

  Work, therefore. In October a series of lectures in Ames, Iowa, gave him a fresh admiration for the democratic heartland. It took the war too lightly, but in every other way Ames cheered him up: it was prosperous, healthy, self-confident, alert, and its students kept him on his toes, he said, more than Harvard’s ever had.

  Perhaps. When he had a point to make, he usually made it at a good, hearty markup, and in those months he was diligent to unearth evidences of the strength of democracy.

  The oncoming of the Lowell Lectures returned him perforce to “Empire,” from which the lectures would be taken. He was in the midst of delivering them to the modest audience of academics, antiquarians, and bums come in off Park Street to keep warm when Pearl Harbor all but blew him out of his mind.

  He had an extraordinary capacity, or weakness: war news hit him as personally as if bombs had landed on the roof of 8 Berkeley Street and put the names of his family and friends on the casualty lists. A setback to the British could keep him sleepless, the defeat of the Graf Spee stirred him to resolution and heroic thoughts, the long retreat of the Russians before Hitler’s armies was a doom that he endured with anguish. Pearl Harbor, precipitating the United States into the war he had always thought she belonged in, but in a way that no variant of the DeVoto war plan had suggested, galvanized him with new impulses toward duty and self-sacrifice. There had still been no call for his services, Washington remained mute, Archie MacLeish at the Library of Congress did not pick up the telephone. There remained the sort of humble but not inglorious service that had had all Cambridge laughing when T. S. Eliot, not with a whimper but a bang, put on steel helmet and gas mask during the Battle of Britain. DeVoto’s Phi Beta Kappa address in June had opened with that irony, as one more demonstration of how wrong literary opinion could be. Now he joined up as an air-raid warden, enlisted in a first-aid course, and accepted assignments as a four-minute morale speaker at bond rallies and in Army training camps.

  And hurried with the writing of “Empire,” “shoveling on the coal,” as he wrote Kate Sterne, in order to free himself for whatever war service he could perform. On February 15, 1942, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, he copied off the final page, which reported the discovery that Henry Bigler and some other disbanded members of the Mormon Battalion made at a millrace they were digging for John Augustus Sutter on the South Fork of the American River in January 1848. Their discovery was a postscript, actually. The dull gleaming that they saw in the millrace when they turned the water out of it, together with all the intricately interrelated events of the year 1846 that had started Henry Bigler and his companions toward that piney place on the Pacific slope, made it inevitable that the South was not going to win the appeal to arms when it came in 1861, that the forces of disunion were not going to shape the future or Balkanize the United States, that the American nation would be one nation from sea to sea. Full of the uncertainties of present crisis, he copied out the episode that had confirmed the nation’s direction in another crisis nearly a century earlier, and then he had John Dos Passos and others who had gathered for a drink at 8 Berkeley Street sign it before he put it in an envelope for Kate Sterne, a redemption of the pledge he had sent her on August 5, 1940.

  He had written the book out of his own internal necessities and his own understanding of American history, but he had also written it as a declaration of national unity in time of crisis, and finally, he had written it as a gift for a girl he had never met, but to whom he had once said he would dedicate a novel that he had proved unable to complete. He was a man who valued friends and tried to keep his promises.

  5 · War Effort

  It is hard to understand why, during years when hundreds of writers and professors were being enlisted to promote the war effort through the Office of Facts and Figures, Writers’ War Board, the Office of War Information, half a hundred agencies of the proliferating wartime bureaucracy, Bernard DeVoto, who yearned like an ardent boy for that opportunity, never had his name called until late in the conflict, and then in a way that he could not, finally, respond to.

  For a while he had hopes of Archibald MacLeish, who as a sometime speech writer for FDR, as Librarian of Congress, and as head of the OFF, was a man of power and could summon men to their duty. He did not summon DeVoto; instead, he summoned Malcolm Cowley and some of the poets—almost as personal a rebuke as Harvard’s appointment of Granville Hicks to be Fellow of American History. It apparently did not occur to DeVoto that his Phi Beta Kappa speech, which had taken specific issue with the literary idealism of MacLeish’s The Irresponsibles, might have hurt MacLeish’s feelings. But he disagreed with his ideas, which he thought not too far from the unreconstructed literary-ness of the other expatriates, and he had said so very publicly. Whether or not MacLeish was offended, he never called on DeVoto to come to Washington and write the war. Neither, later, did DeVoto’s even closer friend Elmer Davis, when he became head of OWI, though the two did collaborate in an effort to get war information more freely released, and DeVoto did air in the Easy Chair some opinions that Davis was officially prohibited from airing or operating by.1 For a while in 1943 the Army proposed to use DeVoto to teach teachers how to teach American history. Later there was a project for a nationwide lecture tour for the Army. Still later, in late 1943 and early 1944, DeVoto spent a couple of fruitless months in Washington discussing with the Secretary of War and others the writing of the history of certain campaigns: first North Africa, later Guadalcanal, finally (and lamely) Attu.2 The negotiations went so far that DeVoto had all his shots and kept a bag packed, subject to call. In the end, when it turned out that he would be expected to write military history without being given access to battle reports and other confidential papers, Avis looked at him and burst into tears and said, “Don’t go,” and he didn’t. Sam Morison, an expert in such matters, had given him the same advice: Don’t go unless they will open it all up for you.3

  That was the closest Benny DeVoto ever got to serving officially in World War II; it was the closest he ever got to leaving the North American continent. World War II left unhealed, actually abraded, the scars of 1918, when the Armistice had left him stranded—shoulder bars, Sam Browne belt, leather puttees, overseas cap, and Expert Marksman medal—in Camp Lee, Virginia.

  All around him, Cambridge thinned out as students and younger faculty went into uniform and older faculty taught Army Specialized Training Program courses or drained off toward Washington. Henry Reck was off to the Navy. President Conant had disappeared on some unspecified assignment and DeVoto’s friend Paul Buck ran Harvard. Radcliffe, “the Annex,” was admitted to full partnership over the dissent of certain alumni and of a few faculty men whose salaries were more than thirteen thousand dollars.4 Gas rationing mired Cambridge in its own steaming rumors. The harbor was full of British warships, and Cambridge parties were full of British naval officers. Submarines were daily sighted off Ipswich, mysterious rubber rafts brought saboteurs ashore through the murk of imagination and boredom, as if in imitation of a John August serial. Inept, well-meaning people met two evenings a week to listen to inept, well-meaning lecturers discuss what to do in an air raid or how to splint a broken limb, and those with some medical training or medical imagination went home praising God that no real emergency had yet occurred, for the victims would never survive the assistance.

  Dull non-combatant, fumbler on the home front, listener to the gossip of British officers and the inside dope of experts such as Davis and Fletcher Pratt, huddler over short-wave broadcasts from England and Germany, guesser and worrier, projector of luminous war plans and of prophecies based on false rumors or misleading communiqués, DeVoto had only two chann
els for the patriotism that melted and flowed in him. One was to do whatever humble job was handed him, however futile for any but morale purposes. The other was to warn and advise and thunder from the Easy Chair. Public thinker, historian, student of American life, defender of the democratic system, a man with a captive audience, he need not depend on calls from Washington. He could fight his war in the monthly dispatches he sent down to 49 East 33rd Street.5

  Of the thirty Easy Chairs that he wrote during 1941, 1942, and the first half of 1943, by which time the suspense about the war’s outcome had given way to the less crucial suspense about how long victory would be delayed, twenty-five either dealt directly with the war or reflected upon conditions of American life that the war modified, threatened, or confirmed. Some expounded historical parallels, some were concerned to make plain the stern inevitability of the war (and this even before Pearl Harbor) and the rightness of the cause. To the young men who asked, “Would you send us out to die?” he answered, “Yes, when the time comes.”6 There were times when sacrifice was not only heroic but necessary. Dulce et decorum est; the country one offered to die for was the source of all the freedoms one had grown up taking for granted. Including the right to bellyache. Including the right to full and honest and even disastrous information. Including the right to take a little refreshment and pleasure as one could, even in wartime.

  Publication of Dixon Wecter’s The Hero in America led him to evoke the mythic figures in whom the democratic nation had embodied its best impulses and highest aspirations. Dorothy Thompson’s denunciation of American materialism and fat pay envelopes brought him forth protesting.7 It did not become Dorothy to condemn the materialist industrial economy for Americans while holding it up as the hope of the undeveloped world. And it was absurd of her to say she was going to sell her luxurious possessions and turn them into war bonds. The poor could not afford such gestures and should not be urged to make them. Their morale, moreover, was going to be higher for the occasional steak, the little gas wasted on a Sunday drive. Mr. Ickes had forgotten that, and had lost his chance to be effective. Trust the people.

  But several Easy Chairs, including the ominous “Toward Chancellorsville,”8 drew lessons from the Civil War and warned against the isolationist complacency of the Middle West. Would we, DeVoto asked, have to go through Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run, and even Chancellorsville before we buckled down? Would it take an army at the edge of Washington, or bombs on Chicago and Gary, before the Middle West would admit the fact of salt water, the reality of foreign aggression? On the other hand, how could the government expect full public support for its policies when it withheld vital information, doctored news of casualties and ship losses, turned catastrophes into cautious victories, and issued “preliminary reports” that were plain lies? He denounced Army, Navy, and the President for their failure to trust the American people with their own vital business. He said out loud that no war in our history had been so misreported and so unreported, and as a consequence was given opportunity to be for a time political adviser to Wendell Willkie, who found that sort of historical information useful on the campaign trail.9

  He did not run a hate campaign, he did not, like some columnists, cry to Europe-bound troops, “Kill some for me!” He asserted the American gospels and the duty and privilege of defending them. Indignant, hortatory, sometimes inspiring, always protective of the right of citizens to know, he fought his war from The Easy Chair, and he probably did the war effort at least as much good as he would have done if he had joined the other frustrated writers in the OWI.10 Perhaps, in the process, he did himself some harm. In his tart rebuke to Dorothy Thompson he cast some bread upon the waters that Dorothy Thompson’s husband would return to him a hundredfold. And in dedicating himself to patriotic public speech for the duration, he suspended for the duration the kind of public speech at which he was better than anybody else. All during the war he was an unpaid and independent propagandist, not a writer operating with a free mind. Crisis dominated his thinking, he put aside “Lycidas” and Paradise Lost to be Latin Secretary.

  Fair enough. That was what the times demanded, that was the only wartime service that circumstance let him perform. He accepted the duty and the consequences. But when he finally collected a third volume of essays,11 in the last year of his life, he did not include in the book a single one of the Easy Chairs he had written between the end of 1940 and the end of the war.

  6 · History as Synecdoche: The Year of Decision: 1846

  The Year of Decision: 1846 was completed on February 15, 1942, and delivered to Little, Brown the next day, along with its dedication to Kate Sterne and two pages of acknowledgments of the help various people had given in the book’s preparation. The last name on the list was the most important. “Finally,” DeVoto wrote, “I acknowledge that I could not possibly have written the book if I had not had periodic assistance from Mr. John August.”

  Those who knew both DeVoto and August knew how real was the debt thus humorously admitted. The Year of Decision: 1846 had been gestating since at least as early as 1933, and had been DeVoto’s main preoccupation since 1938. John August, invented in 1926 to disguise the authorship of “Sex and the Co-Ed” and resurrected in 1934 to assume responsibility for the Collier’s serials, had supported DeVoto’s serious work ever since. There was not an artistic bone in August’s body, not a single aesthetic corpuscle in his blood. He was all pro, and he provided the security that other historians got from academic tenure and other novelists from foundation grants. Troubled Star, Rain Before Seven, and Advance Agent had each brought in twenty thousand dollars or more as serials, and each had been made into a book that outsold any novel signed by Bernard DeVoto. August was even beginning to have a reputation in England, where DeVoto had never had a book published. After receiving his public thanks in the front pages of The Year of Decision: 1846, he would be called on once more, and would respond with a fourth serial, The Woman in the Picture, in 1944. Three years after that, he and DeVoto would dispute authorship of a fifth, Mountain Time, and August would lose. After that, partly because Sinclair Lewis would publicly expose his identity, partly because he would have served his purpose, he would quietly disappear.

  But even in 1942 it had begun to seem that his creator might soon be self-supporting. History signed by Bernard DeVoto demonstrated itself more profitable than fiction by the same hand, and almost as profitable as fiction by John August.

  A pleasant though not overwhelming benefit came when the Atlantic bought The Year of Decision: 1846 as a five-part serial.1 The first installment was on the stands in July, when Henry Canby’s judges picked the book as a Book of the Month. Their act, DeVoto wrote Canby, was the biggest break he had ever had; but to Avis, when the news came, he reacted almost with panic. Oh God, he said, now I suppose something will happen to one of the kids.

  His reputation took a leap, along with his bank account. The Year of Decision: 1846 settled territory that Mark Twain’s America had pioneered. It made DeVoto the most conspicuous interpreter of the West, and though some “objective” historians such as his old friend Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, declared that the book wasn’t history, and some old Harvard enemies were reported to be “raging” (“Why? I’m not a candidate for promotion”),2 many who up to that time had considered him a picturesque or insufferable wild man useful at best for stirring up excitement at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association found this new book important and praiseworthy. It also enlarged him in the opinion of the literate public that had known him theretofore primarily through the Saturday Review, the Easy Chair, and the controversial essays.

  Delayed by the book-club choice, The Year of Decision: 1846 was not published in book form until March 1943. Its reception was almost unqualified praise. Book pages featured it, Time gave it two very respectful pages, historians as eminent as Frederick L. Paxson, Ralph Gabriel, Richard Hofstadter, and Henry Nash Smith reviewed it with respect or admiration or both.3 On one thing, the professional and
the lay reviewers were agreed. If this was history at all, it was a new kind of history, infinitely complex, intricately organized, extremely detailed where it chose to be and willing to ignore entirely what did not serve its purposes. On a close look, what seemed merely colorful narrative proved to be full of provocative generalizations. The bold portraits and dramatic scenes led to uncompromising judgments of men and events. Though DeVoto’s strategy of keeping many stories advancing simultaneously through the year meant jumping from story to story and place to place, most readers survived the somewhat bewildering first chapter4 and were hooked. Almost every reviewer testified to the book’s extraordinary impression of seething human activity, all of it bearing westward, all of it expressing the impulse that was not quite formal national policy (that in fact violated such specific elements of policy as the segregation and protection of the Indian Territory), and not quite even idea, but an urge below the level of consciousness, moving a people westward as inevitably as the sun compels the face of a sunflower.

  Manifest Destiny was what The Year of Decision was about, Manifest Destiny conceived as geopolitical inevitability. It was also “the story of some people who went West in 1846,” a frankly literary attempt “to realize the pre-Civil War, Far Western frontier as personal experience.”5 It was both intensive and extensive. From the Invocation in which Henry David Thoreau confessed that “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.… I must walk toward Oregon and not toward Europe,” to the final page, about the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, the book was a thesis developed and demonstrated by scores of individual examples. The thesis was that the year 1846, which fought a war with Mexico and barely evaded one with England, which confirmed Oregon and added California and the Southwest to the United States, which watched a growing file of wagons labor up the Platte Valley and over the mountains and deserts to Oregon and California, which opened the Santa Fe Trail to trade and empire, which saw the Mormons evicted from their City Beautiful on the Mississippi and driven into the wilderness on their dolorous way to the settlement of the Rocky Mountain West, which gave most of the men who would be Northern or Southern generals in the Civil War their baptism of fire at Palo Alto or Matamoros or Chapultepec, which produced the Wilmot Proviso banning the spread of slavery into the new territories—that this year 1846 made the Civil War inevitable and at the same time made certain that the Union would win it.