That was where his wandering glance was falling at the end of April 1944. That was what, out of a whirlwind of intellectual warfare and a daily life tense with crises and deadlines, his extraordinary energy suggested to him. It began to feel as if all the varieties of literary and historical experience to which he had exposed himself had been leading up to this. The program that he had announced to Melville Smith from the middle of his breakdown in Ogden in 1920 had been headed steadily, by whatever detours and deviations, this way. The continental vision that he had then merely glimpsed was coming into focus. Now he was looking back 140 years to the time when the Lewis and Clark party was gathering at the mouth of the Missouri with the intention of dissipating mystery and finding the way to the Great South Sea, and with the less-than-half-comprehended further intention of creating a United States that was one country from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
But even now he could give it only a glance. There was always the Easy Chair, as demanding as a bright child and as unshakable as an albatross. There was the twice-failed novel Mountain Time, which he had dug out again while hanging around in Washington hotel rooms waiting for the Army to make up its mind to something. And there was also a historical interruption, a completely unexpected diversion of his interest and energy: On the way back to 1804 he got hung up in the 1830s. As if following his own historical practice of simultaneity, these matters all demanded to be dealt with, and were dealt with, at the same time. But they are best treated one by one.
5 · Historian by Serendipity
Sometime near the beginning of 1944, about three months before the publication of The Literary Fallacy and the comic-opera sale of a copy of Strange Fruit in the crowded little University Law Book Exchange, there came into the Houghton Mifflin office at 2 Park Street, Boston, a gentleman named Emery Reyes.1 He had in his briefcase the rough outline of a book and a bundle of more than one hundred watercolors of the western plains and mountains painted in 1837 by a Baltimore artist, Alfred Jacob Miller. These belonged to a Mrs. Clyde Porter of Missouri. She had run into them in the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, had recognized them as a unique record of the mountain fur trade, and had succeeded in buying them.
Reves, already known to Houghton Mifflin, was a Hungarian émigré, an enigmatic and fascinating figure like one of those historical people DeVoto was fond of pulling out of the past to illuminate a moment when the energies of a man or a nation were about to enter a new phase. A friend of Winston Churchill and other international politicians, he had made a living in Paris before the outbreak of war by copyrighting the League of Nations speeches of his acquaintances and selling them to the news media, splitting the take with the authors. Later, after coming to America, he had written a book called The Anatomy of Peace, and as agent or representative of the author Jan Karski had brought out an account of Poland under the Nazis called The Story of a Secret State, which had been a Book of the Month Club choice. Two years hence, in 1946, he would serve as the intermediary who enabled Houghton Mifflin to buy book rights to Churchill’s memoirs for three hundred thousand dollars. He was an operator, and one with authentic connections. Now, in early 1944, he was the owner of Hyperion Press, which was actually defunct and existed only as a name; and he wanted to publish, in some sort of collaboration with Houghton Mifflin, these Miller watercolors of the West, with an introductory essay by their owner and discoverer, Mrs. Porter. He wanted some competent western historian to write about twenty thousand words of captions, for a fee. Various people including Dixon Wecter, then director of the Huntington Library, had suggested that DeVoto was his man.
Houghton Mifflin agreed that DeVoto was his man, though it foresaw a possible difficulty. DeVoto was a Little, Brown author. He might be borrowed for a caption job without serious difficulty, but it was Houghton Mifflin’s opinion that twenty thousand words of captions would not do justice to the Miller pictures, or make an adequate book. Clearly the watercolors and the captions would be the book, since Mrs. Porter’s introductory essay was not conceived as anything more than that. The tentative title, The Stewart-Miller Expedition, suggested a full account of the western journeys of William Drummond Stewart, the Scottish baronet who had spent parts of seven years in the West at the very climax of the fur trade and had taken Miller into the wilderness with him in 1837 to paint and draw it. Houghton Mifflin guessed that what Reves ought to ask of DeVoto was more like forty thousand words than twenty thousand, and that would be a book, to write which DeVoto would have to get a release from Little, Brown.
The release turned out to be the smallest of the problems connected with Reves’s proposal. And if it had been forty times as difficult as it turned out to be, DeVoto would somehow have arranged it. One look at the pictures, which he knew were the first ever painted of many of the places they reproduced, and some of which were drawn from such real-life models as Jim Bridger, told him that he must do those captions at all costs.
Houghton Mifflin let him take the pictures home to study, and on February 15, 1944, he reported on them to Reves. Two, perhaps more, had been previously published, but most were new and of inestimable historical importance. He thought the book’s title should be changed, since the expedition on which Stewart took Miller was in no sense a joint effort. It was Stewart’s expedition; Miller was along as a paid artist. Moreover, if they went through with the book as proposed, DeVoto’s contribution and Mrs. Porter’s would have to be separately signed. The “research” notes that she had given Reves, on which her introduction would presumably be based, were in DeVoto’s opinion totally inadequate and were full of historical errors.
By March 13, when he again wrote to Reves about errors in Mrs. Porter’s notes and proposed the terms on which he would undertake to write the captions, he indicated that he was finally free of all military-history projects and ready to go to work. He stated the terms on which he would do the job, but he did not suggest that he would back out if his terms were not met. The Miller pictures had captivated him completely; he was willing to ally himself with someone he thought an incompetent amateur in order to get a chance at them. This was at the time when he had already begun to contemplate Lewis and Clark. Clearly he thought of the captions as an interesting but not-too-demanding preamble.
Within a week he was in correspondence with Charles Camp, Dale Morgan, the Missouri Historical Society, and other informed sources,2 asking questions about Stewart’s years in the mountains, about possible connections between Miller’s pictures and the characters Killbuck and Labonté in Ruxton’s Life in the Far West, and about the implications of specific pictures, including one showing Jim Bridger in armor. As yet he had no commitment either to Reves or to Houghton Mifflin.
On May 11 he sent back the contract that Reves offered, objecting that it did not bind Reves to publish within a specific time and that it said nothing about the return of the manuscript in case Reves failed to perform. Clearly he mistrusted Reves and found his Hyperion Press a dubious publishing house. But on May 27, those minor details having been satisfied, he sent back the signed agreement. The very next day, as we have seen, he tried to resign from the curatorship of the Mark Twain papers, as if clearing away other obligations to permit the pouring of his energies into western history.
But though he might sign the agreement, he remained uneasy about both Reves and Mrs. Porter. He did not trust the one; he thought the other incompetent. Shortly it became evident that Reves did not trust him either, for on June 11 Reves protested DeVoto’s writing directly to Mrs. Porter—all communications should come to him as her agent. DeVoto replied that Reves could see his letters to Mrs. Porter for all of him. He had no ill feeling toward her, or toward Reves. He simply did not trust her research and had been trying to straighten out her history. “She confuses wish and guess with fact, as all amateurs do, and I begin by doubting everything, as a historian must.” At that point he indicated that he was about ready to begin writing. The job, he estimated, would take four to six weeks, but he did not want to begin until he h
ad seen a fairly finished draft of Mrs. Porter’s contribution.
Thus lightly, in approximately the way he would have approached the writing of a magazine article, he set out into the fur trade. But his June 11 letter to Reves accepted the role of historian, and a historian’s need for accuracy and thoroughness was already working in him. Having left Stewart’s personal history to Mrs. Porter, he kept writing to her trying to get firm facts about the dates of Stewart’s expeditions, the fur brigades he traveled with, his relationships with certain famous partisans such as Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, and Lucien Fontanelle. She could tell him little that he trusted.
But he trusted Reves even less. On September 9, just returned from a working summer on the shore at Annisquam, he wrote Mrs. Porter in frank misgiving. Exactly what was her relation with Reves? DeVoto had no guarantee that Reves would publish the book, and the more the material worked upon him the less willing he was to undertake it until certain details were clearer. So far as DeVoto could tell, Reves had published no books and had no facilities for doing so. Hyperion Press was only a name, and a dead name at that. Reves had approached Houghton Mifflin in the first place as an agent, no more. Just exactly what was he, agent or publisher? What sort of agreement did Mrs. Porter have with him?
DeVoto was still talking about thirty thousand to forty thousand words of captions. Up to now his research had been directed toward locating each picture in time and place, identifying landscapes and possible historical figures and incidents, and relating these sketches from life to the known movements of actual fur brigades during those years in the mountains. But the deeper he went into the pictures, the clearer it became that here in a capsule was the entire mountain fur trade. Here were the great partisans, the competing companies, the native tribes, the repercussions produced by confrontations between the Americans working up the Missouri and across South Pass and the British working up the Columbia and the Snake from the Pacific Northwest. Here were the skills, the way of life, the costumes, stories, legendry, the savage color of the heroic age that had always fired his imagination. Stewart in his baronial wanderings had touched it all. His expeditions were the perfect synecdoche, a part that could be used to illuminate the whole. The plainer that became, the more DeVoto wanted to do it right, and the more uneasy he became about the obscure and unsatisfactory four-way deal among Houghton Mifflin, Reves, Mrs. Porter, and himself.
On September 22 he wrote Mrs. Porter again, laboriously recapitulating the entangled negotiation from the beginning, cautioning her about publishing practices, and saying that in his opinion they ought to talk again and clarify the contract. He also said something else, something significant: that Houghton Mifflin was willing to publish the book even if the caption text ran to twice forty thousand words—if, in fact, the book was converted into something quite different from its previous intention and made into a history “which would indicate the larger outline of the trade, fill in the outline with enough details to make it intelligible to a contemporary reader, and relate the parts to one another and especially to westward expansion as a whole.”
Lovell Thompson and Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin were DeVoto’s good friends and hearty admirers. From the beginning, they had not wanted to see him held down to twenty thousand words of captions. And now serendipity had worked on him, opportunity had intersected with personal inclination and accumulated capacity. Both DeVoto and Houghton Mifflin wanted that book at its maximum, not at its minimum, and they did not want it inhibited by a dubious collaboration and uncertain publishing arrangements. Though Thompson never shared DeVoto’s ill opinion of Reves and thought him simply unacquainted with American publishing practices, he and Brooks agreed that the contract should be discussed and clarified.
On October 15, after conversations with Thompson and with George Stevens, his old Saturday Review colleague now with Lippincott, DeVoto wrote Mrs. Porter that they all thought the contractual terms she apparently had with Reves were unfair both to her and to DeVoto. They now proposed a new contract, under which Reves would get 15 per cent of gross and DeVoto 5 per cent of gross and Mrs. Porter 5 per cent of net out of Reves’s share. For his function as agent and go-between, those terms were more than generous. If he would not accept them, DeVoto would withdraw.
On October 31 he proposed the new terms to Reves, indicating that Houghton Mifflin would pull out rather than proceed on the old basis. He took a big-money tone: he wanted to begin writing in about six weeks, as soon as he finished a serial (that was Mountain Time, and it would be a lot longer than six weeks before he finished it), and he could not afford to put his high-priced time into the Miller book without a new agreement.
Writing privately to Charles Curtis,3 who was both his lawyer and Houghton Mifflin’s, DeVoto denounced Reves as a crook who was trying to cut himself in for a publisher’s share, an agent’s share, and an author’s share, and profit three ways from a transaction in which his contribution had only been to bring the real contributors together. He said he was checking the contract he had made with Reves with the Authors Guild, to whose board DeVoto had recently been appointed, and he wanted Curtis to determine if he and Mrs. Porter were legally obligated to Reves.
Curtis replied4 that they were legally bound only if Reves had a legal contract with Mrs. Porter, which from her description did not seem to be the case. With that reassurance, DeVoto undertook to bring Reves into line. His letters for the next month were icy and cutting to Reves, encouraging to the bewildered Mrs. Porter. Hang on, he told her; we have Reves where we want him. But it was not a book about the Miller-Stewart Expedition that he was now talking about, and it was not a little caption job added onto Mrs. Porter’s amateur essay. What he wrote her on November 16 was that if Reves caved in, he expected to use Sir William Drummond Stewart “only as a line to hang the whole fur trade on.”
By the purest accident, he had arrived at a book he had been unconsciously preparing himself for twenty years to write. He could finally, if Reves did cave in and perhaps even if he didn’t, express at full length, but within the metaphorical form that best suited him, the enthusiasm he had felt for the mountain men since he was a romantic boy in Ogden Canyon walking dust that had been trod by the moccasins of heroes. He could describe and celebrate skills that he had always admired and sometimes imitated. He could tie this job, which had begun as some casual captions, into the grand theme of the development of the continental nation. Here was the Manifest Destiny of The Year of Decision before it had ever been formulated as a conscious idea. Here was one of the first and most direct consequences of Lewis and Clark, whose decisive explorations he had barely begun to study. A Hungarian-émigré promoter and a women’s-club amateur had opened a door and released him into the large freedom of the mountain past. There was something almost ruthless in the way he responded to that accidental opportunity, something like manifest destiny in the way he made the book his own.
It still took some doing, however. Reves resisted and declared himself wronged, and did not finally sign the new contract until February 1945, more than a year after the negotiations had begun. Mrs. Porter’s contribution remained unsatisfactory to DeVoto, and DeVoto’s taking over of a book she had thought of as her own was unsatisfactory to Mrs. Porter. She intimated, in some women’s-club talks after the publication of the book, that DeVoto had merely “recast” and “written up” her historical notes, and Houghton Mifflin felt obliged to ask her not to make such statements.5 Actually DeVoto had either corrected or thrown out those notes in the first weeks, when the captions had begun to twist in his hands and become a narrative history of the fur trade during its climactic years. It was a long way from being Mrs. Porter’s book by the time he was through with it, for both in subject matter and in the quality of the writing it went far beyond her competence. It was written with all of DeVoto’s passion for the geography, climate, and history of his native region, and with all the tricks of the novelist’s trade that never quite worked for him in fiction but worked superbly when
he applied them to historical people, real geography, and real events.
God was very good to give him Sir William Drummond Stewart as a line to hang the fur trade on, though one suspects that, once galvanized as he had been by the Miller watercolors, he would have found some other line if Stewart had not been available. His mind demanded such culture heroes as James Clyman, whom he had used in The Year of Decision: 1846; and in fact he did make use in the fur-trade book of Joe Meek, another of Clyman’s breed, to dramatize a moment, at the end of August 1839, when the first Oregon-bound wagon train met one of the last free trappers in “a splendid transit of past and future.”
Joe Meek, the bear killer, a Carson man, a Bridger man, an RMF Company man, a Company man—Joe Meek, free trapper, raised his hand and rode off toward Fort Davy Crockett. And the three greenhorns, authentic settlers, and their Snake guide took the trail again, toward the Columbia.6
On that symbolic meeting between the dying fur trade and the first of the wagon trains, Across the Wide Missouri finally ended, more than two years after the completion of the publishing arrangements and more than three after their beginning, when Emery Reves first brought the Miller pictures into Houghton Mifflin’s office for a quick caption job. The job turned out to be not 20,000 words, nor even 40,000, but something closer to 170,000. The whole of the vast, panoramic narrative—and much of the mountain fur trade—occurs between the year 1833, when four “Flatheads” (Nez Percés) appeared in St. Louis seeking teachers in the religion that Lewis and Clark had told them of, and the day in 1839 when Joe Meek encountered three Oregon pioneers on the Bear River.