The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  Back in the time of the Battle of Britain, when the author of the typist home at teatime and the young man carbuncular had put on the steel helmet of an air-raid warden, all Cambridge had smiled. The world was not ending with a whimper as literary prediction had specified. And that, said DeVoto, was because literary prediction was based upon literary description, which in so far as it referred to America had been spectacularly wrong through most of the twentieth century. It had taken soundings on the literary side and found America shallow, whereas all it had had to do was to throw the lead over the other side and find depth. The prodigals had squandered their substance abroad, living on remittances from America until they wore out their funds and their welcome, and then they came home and were greeted with fatted calves, and developed stern, resolute feelings about the old farm. DeVoto’s feelings toward them were not warm, and never had been. He rewrote the story of the Prodigal Son from the viewpoint of the son for whom no fatted calves had ever been slaughtered, the one who had been stuck in a furrow while his brother played expatriate.

  In Bloomington he expanded the unpublished Phi Beta Kappa talk into six lectures, pouring in as documentation much material from the English 70 notes that he had once planned to utilize in a book with Robert Frost at its center. To those six lectures illustrating how some of the most talented men of their time had gone wrong about their country because they took too narrowly literary a view of it, he appended a chapter on two non-literary Americans who by simple devotion and integrity in their work had affected American life in ways the literary might envy. One was John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River and founder of the United States Geological Survey, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the Bureau of Reclamation. The other was Dr. Robert H. Aldrich, the Boston physician who had played skeptical instructor to DeVoto’s comic-opera first-aid class in Cambridge and who was the developer of the gentian-violet treatment of burns. The America which by literary appraisal was enfeebled, stereotyped, vulgarized, insensitive, puritanical, and philistine had produced hundreds and thousands of such men, whom the literary had never heard of. Forget to be literary for one moment and America revealed itself as one of the most vigorous civilizations mankind had ever evolved. Not flawless. Vigorous. Creative. Ready. Hopeful. And capable of meeting such a crisis as Hitler’s war with cheerfulness, humor, and confidence.

  Once, years before, defending his overstated essay on the co-ed as the hope of liberal education, DeVoto had said to William Sloane, “Well, I made my point. Women have minds.” Here, too, he made his point, and overmade it: a non-literary activity may be important, and a civilization may as properly be judged by its science as by its literature. But he made his point at the expense of the profession of letters, the profession to which he had given twenty-five years of his life, the profession his hearers had come to hear explicated and praised. Not everyone in the Bloomington audience listened with a calm mind, and that surprised DeVoto and threw him on the defensive. He had thought that crisis patriotism, and the conversion of such people as MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks,2 would have produced some support for his position. Instead, he encountered resentful silence, all the stronger and more widespread because, in hunting major adversaries through the smoke of battle, he had again come upon Saladin. A good part of the Patten Lectures came down to another repudiation of the early ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, not because DeVoto hated Brooks or wished to persecute him, but because he found him, as before, the most eloquent and influential champion of literary ideas with which he disagreed.

  He went home from Bloomington feeling that the lectures had been a disaster. Shortly he had to fight out his crepuscular battle with Frost, and there was always the Easy Chair to consume the best part of a week out of every month, and the war to worry about, and the way in which his favorite country managed war information. The vortical suction of his own energy drew him into other matters, including other controversies more rewarding than his warmed-over irritation at the literary. But with a certain defiance, confidently expecting to see the reviewers illustrate the very attitudes he described, he revised the Patten Lectures into a book and called it The Literary Fallacy. Simultaneously with its publication, in April 1944, the Saturday Review ran a part of the final chapter under the title “They Turned Their Backs on America.”

  This time the lectures got more than the damnation of minimum and chilly applause. One week after his essay appeared in the Saturday Review, one of the novelists whose work DeVoto had used to illustrate the endemic literary disparagement of America erupted into reply. He was a Nobel prize winner and a sort of friend; in the early twenties DeVoto had thought him the most significant American novelist. He was also the husband of Dorothy Thompson, whom DeVoto had publicly spanked in the Easy Chair for December 1942. And he was a close friend of Van Wyck Brooks, who had recently, and not for the first time, been taken to the hospital suffering from nervous collapse. If DeVoto had deliberately set out to stir up an antagonist with a personal grievance and with powers of vituperation equal to his own, he could hardly have done better than Sinclair Lewis.

  In literary treatises [began Mr. Lewis] it has not been customary to make one’s points by yelling “Fool” and “Liar,” but perhaps we have all been wrong. In his new volume The Literary Fallacy, my old friend Mr. Bernard DeVoto … has this pronouncement:

  “Writers must be content to hold their peace until they know what they are talking about. Readers must be willing to hold them to the job if they refuse to hold themselves. An uninstructed gentleness toward writers has been the mistake of readers of our time. Words like ‘fool’ and ‘liar’ might profitably come back to use.… If literature is to be serious, then it cannot be permitted folly and lying, and when they appear in it, then they must be labeled and denounced.”

  Very well. I denounce Mr. Bernard DeVoto as a fool and a tedious and egotistical fool, as a liar and a pompous and boresome liar.3

  That sort of journalism had hardly been seen in America since the Gold Rush. It went beyond insult; it resorted to horsewhip, derringer, biting, gouging, and kneeing in the groin. The rules of debate which DeVoto thought he had followed in the lectures, the statement of the opposition case and a systematic refutation of it, here went out the window. Lewis stated the DeVoto thesis as baldly as possible, with none of its qualifications and exemptions, only to denounce and ridicule it, and he pounced upon the renewed dispute with Van Wyck Brooks. The real thesis of The Literary Fallacy, Lewis said, was “merely that Mr. DeVoto is an incalculably wiser and nobler man than Mr. Van Wyck Brooks,” and the real impetus behind the book was DeVoto’s brattish, febrile necessity to show off in public.

  Lewis used more terms than “fool” and “liar.” He found such epithets as “yahoo.” He called scornful attention to the slick fiction of John August, whose serial The Woman in the Picture was then running in Collier’s. He quoted some John August dialogue as an example of the serious literature that DeVoto wrote while belittling the fiction of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe. With approval he quoted The Literary Fallacy to the effect that when writers chance to be frivolous or silly their books will correspond. He described his early encounters with DeVoto, his “screaming, his bumptiousness, his conviction that he was a combination of Walter Winchell and Erasmus.” He made venomous reference to “that froglike face.”

  The savagery of the attack brought a kind of appalled stillness into the literary world, followed by a boil of discussion both happy and indignant. DeVoto’s enemies wrote letters to the Saturday Review, saying in effect how gratified they were to see a man who had gone around twisting donkeys’ tails finally lay hands on a mule. His friends were filled with an embarrassed anger that inhibited them from entering a quarrel already so painful. Many felt that the low blows, the personal vilification and ridicule, the unforgivable reference to DeVoto’s looks, could simply not be replied to, though Dixon Wecter, Ted Morrison, and Kitty Bowen all wrote the Saturday Review protesting its publication of personal scurrilities.

>   This last was DeVoto’s own attitude. He was as furious with Norman Cousins for printing Lewis’ piece as with Lewis for writing it. He said that if he had still been editor he would never have printed such an attack on anyone until the personal vilification was removed from it. Argument he had expected; disagreement was his native atmosphere. But he insisted that he had vilified no one in The Literary Fallacy, had been contemptuous of no one and angry at no one, and had imputed bad motives to no one. He had attacked certain ideas and a certain way of thinking, and he had expected that anyone replying would feel bound by the ordinary rules of decency. When Cousins permitted the continuing publication of letters and doggerel containing personal slurs on DeVoto, he wrote Cousins a sizzling cold letter demanding that he make correspondents confine themselves to the ideas and leave personalities alone. They were indefensible either as literary discussion or as journalism.4

  By May 8, when that protest was registered, it had been a month since publication of the excerpt that had started all the controversy. By then the talk had begun to die down. DeVoto’s failure to reply to Lewis publicly starved the fire. But there was one unexpected and positive result brought about by the squabble. Malcolm Cowley, who was about to review The Literary Fallacy for the New Republic when Lewis’ blast appeared, wrote to DeVoto to dissociate himself from the virulence of the Lewis essay. Cowley, too, was a close friend of Brooks’s, and like Lewis he did not think much of The Literary Fallacy. But he wanted DeVoto to know that his forthcoming unfavorable review was not motivated by personal rancor. He thought that DeVoto’s apparent ill will toward some of the writers he discussed had provoked similar feelings in some readers, and he did not think DeVoto understood the period from 1905 to 1920, when the ideas he disliked had been germinating. Brooks, he said, had probably not understood it fully either, but he had described it exactly. After his first breakdown he had become more scholarly and more cautious in judgment (as DeVoto had admitted); he had grown from a prophetic Emerson into a sort of Prescott-cum-Holmes. And through all his development, Cowley said, Brooks had remained one of the finest and gentlest of men.5

  Cowley’s letter contained an implicit rebuke, but its frankness and honesty blunted the DeVoto stinger. Cowley was one of the Young Intellectuals—once a Harvard aesthete, then an ambulance driver, then an expatriate, then a literary Marxist—precisely the kind whom DeVoto habitually deplored and disagreed with. But he showed himself reasonable and friendly, and his openness turned away wrath. DeVoto replied to his letter with a completely reasonable and friendly letter of his own. By one of those accidents that provide seasoning to literary controversies, he made his most explicit and revealing statement on the long disagreement with Brooks to one of the opposition, one of Brooks’s closest friends.

  It seems to me, and this is the point of my book, that the writers I was talking about sank their shafts in too small, too restricted, and too unrepresentative an area. Certainly the plumbing industry thinks that bathtubs are the measure of civilization, which leaves criticism the duty of pointing out that they really aren’t. So I point out that literary experience isn’t the measure, either.

  I owe you a considerable debt for stating in public what the book is about. So far, in the stuff that has come in, only Harry Hansen, apart from you, has done that.… It’s only silly of, for instance, Gannet to maintain that when I talk about Powell, medicine, and the like I’m showing off how much I know and calling people’s attention to the fact that so-and-so knows less than I do. What I’m saying is, look, this kind of experience is one of many good kinds that the boys failed altogether to sink their shafts into, and until they take this and other vital kinds of experience into account, what they say is necessarily wrong. That’s my thesis.

  Now consider this, and don’t think I’m kidding. I honestly think the book is good-natured and soft-spoken. I intended everything I said about individual writers to be considered in the light of the reservations and qualifications which I thought were made sufficiently clear in the opening statement.… However, all I want to say now is that I don’t think I’m strident, angry, or unjust.…

  I did know about Brooks’s breakdown. I faced that question long ago. I had written about half of my first Mark Twain book when I learned about it. Nothing in the world appeals so directly to my emotions as nervous trouble. I scouted around and found that Hans Zinsser was an intimate friend of Brooks’s. I went to him and said, look here, I’m writing such and such a book, saying such and such things—told him the whole argument and all the points I intended to make, reading him some of the passages I had written. I offered to do either of two things, drop the book entirely or rewrite it centering the argument on someone else and leaving Brooks entirely unmentioned, if he thought that it would have a bad effect on Brooks, wound him personally, or affect his future. It was the first time I had met Hans, and one of the most profound friendships of my life began that day. Hans first said that he did not think my book would have a bad effect on Brooks, that if it had any effect at all he thought it would be a good one. Then he turned to and preached. He said, you damned young fool, this is your book isn’t it? you mean and believe what you say don’t you? then what in hell do you mean by taking into account anything except what you conceive to be the truth? He laid into me as few ever have, and I went away and took up my stand at the passages of Jordan. Ever since then I have tried to concentrate on the idea, whether Brooks’s or anyone else’s, and to disregard the personality of its begetter, along with its psychological origins.…6

  That friendly, confidential, and healing conversation with a member of the enemy camp was probably the best thing that came out of the furor over The Literary Fallacy. It demonstrated something about DeVoto, too: know him a little, learn to discount him a little, meet him on some sort of personal basis, and the belligerence and contentiousness dropped away, leaving exposed what all his friends knew—a man who had much to say, even if he did always oversay it, and a man, moreover, of principle, kindness, and generosity of spirit. It might have astonished Sinclair Lewis to see what the dropped guard revealed, though he was himself, with emotional difficulties that made DeVoto’s look minor, a man whose essential spirit was both kind and generous.

  3 · Strange Fruit

  Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, a novel on the theme of miscegenation, was published by Reynal & Hitchcock on February 29, 1944. It showed every sign of climbing rapidly up the best-seller lists, and sold freely in Atlanta, Birmingham, and many cities that in 1944 might have been expected to suppress it because of its subject matter. On March 17 its sale was stopped in Boston and Cambridge on the ground that it was obscene.

  It was not stopped by legal proceedings. The Massachusetts obscenity statute forbade the sale of materials tending to corrupt the morals of youth, but no one made a complaint to the police that Strange Fruit was contributing to juvenile corruption. The book was closed out of Boston and Cambridge bookstores by action of the Board of Trade of the Boston Book Merchants, which for a good while had been preventing legal actions under the obscenity statutes by killing doubtful books in advance—opening their own veins in order not to be bled. A bookseller who violated the ban of the association would not be defended by the association if a criminal complaint was brought against him. Needless to say, the association got most of its confidential clues about books that might cause trouble from the Watch and Ward Society.

  This preventive censorship operated by caprice, whim, timidity, and premonition. Books had been known to be untouched in their original editions and then banned in reprint. On occasion, publishers faced with the likelihood of Watch and Ward blacklisting had agreed not to ship any more books after those already in the stores were sold. This meant that a title could become obscene on a deadline, or when purchased directly from the publisher, but be without spot if purchased before a certain date or from a jobber who had made no promises to Watch and Ward. Sometimes booksellers afraid of snoops and plain-clothes men simply sent back questionable books rather t
han take the risk. And nobody knew what was supposed to corrupt youth, though Bernard DeVoto’s early guess in the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine was as good as any: anything that sexually excited a member of Watch and Ward was corrupting. In the case of Strange Fruit, the offense was a single word, twice repeated. Richard Fuller, owner of the Old Corner Bookshop and head of the booksellers’ association, admitted, in a tone almost aggrieved, that the excision of a couple of short passages would have made the novel entirely acceptable, since aside from those passages the Watch and Ward had given it a clean bill of health.1

  The Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (GLUM) had long desired a test case in order to get a legal definition of obscenity and to bring the Massachusetts regulation into line with recent court decisions in other states. This could be done only by forcing censorship into the open, which meant into the hands of the police. Strange Fruit, a serious novel on a serious theme, and written moreover by a southern lady of unimpeachable gentility, seemed a good vehicle for such a case. After consultation with the publishers, the GLUM decided to precipitate an arrest by staging a carefully publicized sale of the book.

  The Harvard Coop, approached, shrank away. So did other prominent bookstores. Eventually the Harvard Liberal Union located a bookseller who was willing to put himself in jeopardy. He was Abraham Isenstadt, operator of the University Law Book Exchange, on Harvard Square. The man who bought the book was Bernard DeVoto, chairman of the censorship committee of GLUM—a committee that included his old enemy F. 0. Matthiessen, now quaintly become his ally.

  Propped conveniently around the crowded little bookstall on April 4 (this was virtually the very hour when the Saturday Review, carrying an excerpt from The Literary Fallacy, arrived on the stands, and a week before Sinclair Lewis’ retort incourteous rattled the windows), were reporters and news cameramen, four Cambridge policemen, Frank Taylor of Reynal & Hitchcock, Matthiessen, a Civil Liberties attorney named Anthony Brayton, and A. Sprague Coolidge of the Harvard Chemistry Department, who was there to discuss bail as a member of CLUM. DeVoto asked for the book, Isenstadt produced it, DeVoto handed him a five-dollar bill and received, as witnesses solemnly attested later, $2.25 in change. Sergeant Breen then stepped forward and arrested DeVoto and Isenstadt and confiscated the book. As he was doing so, a copy of May’s Criminal Law fell off a shelf onto the head of one of the witnesses.2