That self-judgment is not entirely inadequate, however exaggerated the percentages. He did expect too much of his readers, he did compress too much, he did demand that readers retain the most casual hints and most disguised forecasts and signposts, sometimes for two or three hundred pages, until another bare hint should illuminate them. Concentrating on the subtleties and ambiguities, he often neglected to draw in the obvious. But what is much more damaging, he failed to endow his obscurities with ultimate importance; he didn’t succeed in making the characters who mattered so much to himself matter that much to his readers.
Cy Kinsman might misunderstand himself through 357 pages, might fail to comprehend that he loves the version of Skinny who in the novel is named Josephine. He might not fully understand that his quarrel with Dr. McAllister is simply another round with his actual father, Old Doc Kinsman, and that his return to the West is an attempt “to face and fight his [dead] father in his father’s home town.”10 He might scorn the literary deviousness and dishonesty in Josephine’s divorced husband without recognizing similar deviousnesses in himself. He might in the end come to the glad realization that it was Josephine all along whom he wanted and Old Doc Kinsman whom he was fighting (“I was afraid of Old Doc Kinsman. I didn’t dare to be the better man.”)11 Those realizations, so important to their author, strike the reader as just a shade obvious, the realizations of a John August serial. Their author presses too much, and at the same time he hides too much. His aim seems less fiction than self-therapy, and less self-therapy than a formula of self-therapy–precisely the thing he accused Lawrence Kubie of wanting fiction to be, precisely the thing DeVoto denied it should be.
The biographer, confused by what his subject seems to take so seriously, hunts for evidence in DeVoto’s life that Florian DeVoto was as important and as dominating as his son seems to think, and cannot find it. To the outside eye, Mountain Time looks more like an assertion of self-understanding than like understanding itself. It reads like an elaborate charade, the attempt of a literary analyst to find an acceptable caption for his own emotional troubles. And that uncomfortable impression occurs whether one reads Mountain Time as a self-revelation or as a novel. One feels the artificer bending people and events toward some tolerable conclusion. At the end, when Cy and Josephine cement their affection beside a mountain stream, up one of the canyons of their shared youth, one hears the sort of fantasy that sounded in the Skinny story as told by Bernard DeVoto to Kate Sterne.
Once, DeVoto had expressed to Kate the wish that some good analyst, perhaps Kubie, would analyze a novel from its inception to its final period.12 Writing to Kubie on January 16, 1947, just after the book publication of Mountain Time, he confessed that he was “crazy to know” what questions and theories Kubie had about the book, and he explained that it should be read as the middle volume of a trilogy that had been planned to carry Cy Kinsman out of his native West to the East Coast, then back to fight his dead father in his father’s home town, and then back East again, not as his father’s rival, a doctor, but as a physiologist, something related but different, and hence non-competitive. He did not want Kubie to think he had advocated flight back westward as the solution of anything—that would have been Harold Bell Wright.
The whole job was conceived and I’d bogged down in the writing of it once before the fall of 1935, when I first became intimate with Frost, so the inner block was not Frost—at first, anyway. I bogged down again in 1939 when, you may remember, I was in a post-analytical storm. I wouldn’t question that Frost has something to do with that.… I was never able to get farther than the middle of the present book, where the two of them leave New York, till I broke whatever the dam was. The second half of Mountain Time, that is, wasn’t written on either of my first two attempts, though clearly in mind.… I orginally conceived the book as the converse of We Accept with Pleasure. That one dealt with people making terms with personal defeat, this one was to deal with people triumphing over what threatened from within to destroy them. It was going to be me being positive about life.… I’d say that the emotional genesis of the relationship between Cy and Josephine was me and Skinny … and that there is a hell of a lot more phantasy than fact in what I remember about Skinny and me. But also, the second time I tried and also the third time, I was aware that I was writing straight toward that penultimate scene in the mountains where they finally sleep together. That would appear to be important as hell, but it wasn’t in the first conception. There’s a job for you: why was it so damn important? Unless as a symbol of the impotence proved on me when I couldn’t write the novel.
One does not inquire of a man’s analyst why, or if, he thinks a scene in his patient’s novel particularly significant in the patient’s emotional life. But like so many of the tormented and intricate questions woven into Mountain Time, it is at once insoluble and subject to an explanation too simple for DeVoto himself to believe. The consummation of the unfulfilled fantasy of Skinny, rich, beautiful, game, friendly, adoring, daughterly, and afflicted with the horrors (Josephine in this novel has just such horrors, and Cy Kinsman deals with them by just such medico-parental understanding as young DeVoto dreamed of employing with Skinny, and the older DeVoto actually did employ with Kate Sterne and a whole series of emotionally troubled women friends and with several men friends as well) appears from outside to have been much more important to the author of Mountain Time than any struggle against a dominant father. One has trouble seeing Bernard DeVoto as Franz Kafka. John August sneaked into this novel when Bernard DeVoto wasn’t looking. At its heart is not an oedipal struggle but a romantic daydream, nourished now for a quarter of a century and brought to a new vividness, a compulsive recapitulation, by Kate Sterne.
Some of DeVoto’s inordinate ambition and focused energy probably did derive from the effort to prove himself in the intellectual East from which his father, brilliantly equipped, had dropped out. Some of it may have derived from the need of a provincial Dick Whittington to rise to be Lord Mayor of London, the urge of a Rocky Mountain Jack to climb the beanstalk and come back with tales and treasure. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a large part of it was the uncured and incurable need of a poor, gifted boy, an outsider in the town he was born in, to show off before the girls and win them, or one of them, to adoration.
Almost every time he touched fiction, that compulsion revealed itself. Almost every time his fantasy life intruded into his fiction, something self-conscious and mawkish showed through the story fabric. He could deal with everybody but himself, and himself was what he most needed to deal with, surmount, justify, and assuage.
When he finished Mountain Time, he apparently intended to write another novel, in which he would bring Cy Kinsman triumphantly East as a whole man, no longer at war with his father and no longer blind to himself. That novel he does not seem ever to have begun. Instead, he began quite another, one set in the intellectual community of Cambridge.13 It was never published or submitted for publication, and it was the last attempt at a novel that DeVoto ever made. The need to fantasize remained strong in him, but successive failures eventually persuaded him that he lacked some essential gift. Though he went on working on the manuscript of the Cambridge novel practically until his death, he admitted early that it would probably come to nothing. The man who had started as a belligerent pro came finally to the status of amateur, writing privately, almost secretly, a fiction that he would show to no one. The dominant father figure is still in it, and so is the adoring, gravely protected female, evidence that whatever haunted DeVoto’s private life had not been exorcised by thirty years of literary effort.
But the temptation to clothe that incubus in fictional forms for public consumption did die. Even so stubborn a spirit as DeVoto’s had to admit that he was best at history and controversy. As he had worn out other preoccupations, especially literary criticism, he eventually wore out fiction. Mountain Time was his last public try at it, and his farewell. Inexorably, experience was scrubbing away the literary overlay, c
orrecting DeVoto’s long misreading of his own talents, and leaving the historian and the polemicist and the public defender unencumbered by a mistaken self-image.
Bread Loaf, 1938. Top row: Raymond Everitt, Robeson Bailey, Herbert Agar, Herschel Brickell, Wallace Stegner, Fletcher Pratt; middle row: Gorham Munson, Bernard DeVoto, Theodore Morrison, Robert Frost, John Gassner; bottom row: Mary Stegner, Helen Everitt, Kay Morrison, Eleanor Chilton (Mrs. Herbert Agar).
Archibald MacLeish, Bread Loaf, 1938.
George Homans visiting DeVotos in Walpole, New Hampshire, 1938.
Bernard and Avis DeVoto in 1930s.
Avis DeVoto, Mark and Gordon DeVoto, 1940.
Bread Loaf, with Mr. and Mrs. Mark Saxton.
Bread Loaf. Fletcher Pratt, Bernard DeVoto, William Upson.
Bread Loaf. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Bernard DeVoto.
Two cartoons by Inga Pratt, 1941 and 1947.
To our left we have Mount DeVoto, sometimes slurred by the local patois into Mon’deVocal, only active volcano in Vermont. In a recent eruption 43,022 children perished, and several libraries were swallowed up in the crevasses.
Next, distinguished by the revolving air beacon, is Mount Dean Pratt, characterized by unusual and complex formations which scientists have been able to study only from the air. Tricky bogs at its foot have trapped many earthbound historians. The middle slopes are infested with snails.
DeVotos home on Berkeley Street, where they moved in 1941.
VII
FULL CAREER
1 · “The Best Thing I Ever Did in My Life”
Bernard DeVoto was forty-nine on January 11, 1946. After almost a quarter of a century of intense writing activity, he was identified with the Rocky Mountain West in the mind of every reader who knew his name at all. He had celebrated its scenery, defined its geographical and cultural and mythic boundaries, scorned its limitations, criticized its state of mind, re-created its history, and interpreted its legends, folklore, and emerging literature. The book-review editors who in 1925 had type-cast him as a western authority had either been extraordinarily prescient or had exerted the strongest sort of influence on his development.
But the fact was, his extensive knowledge of the West was more from books than from personal experience. The only part of even the Rocky Mountain West that he knew intimately was the narrow Wasatch front, and only the northern end of that. He had traveled the Union Pacific to and from Utah several times, and there is a story, unconfirmed and by now probably unconfirmable, that as a boy he went with his father to Mexico. After he settled in the East, lectures had taken him to Kansas and Nebraska as well as to the gateway city of St. Louis—all of this “back East” to his Ogden consciousness. In 1940 he had followed the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico and Colorado and come home by way of Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. He was one who prepared for travel with maps and books, and he learned as he went. Nevertheless it is true that even of the country he had visited, he had up to 1946 only the briefest firsthand acquaintance, and there were whole regions of the West that he did not know at all. He had apparently never visited the Northwest, California, Nevada, Texas, or Oklahoma; and he knew southern Utah and Arizona only casually, and no part of Idaho except the southern edge. By 1946 he had lived more years in Cambridge than in Utah. Westward he walked free, like Thoreau, but he did so largely in Thoreau’s fashion—in books and in imagination, from a narrow New England base.
This acknowledged authority on the West was just completing a book on the fur trade without ever having set eyes on much of the country over which the fur trade had operated. Not from choice: he had been held down by lack of money, by the Depression, by the demands of a furious work schedule and the needs of a number of dependents. His 1940 tour, the first in many years, had whetted his appetite and led him to project another, for the summer of 1941. Anxiety about the war, as much as anything else, had killed that, and Pearl Harbor and gasoline rationing insured that it would not be revived until the war was over.
When chance threw the fur trade into his lap, he was able to write about it with all the vividness of personal knowledge only because he was an avid and intuitive reader of maps, because he was familiar with an extensive literature, and because he had a novelist’s visualizing imagination and the gift of synecdoche. As he was fond of saying with cynical emphasis, he could make a fact go a long way. For however limited his western experience was, it was deep. What he did know, he knew in his bones and skin and eyeballs and emotions as well as in his head. He could re-create a rendezvous on Horse Creek or in Pierre’s Hole from knowing Ogden’s Hole and Cache Valley. He could imagine the Absarokas or the Wind Rivers from knowing the Wasatch. He could find words for mountain weather, mountain light, mountain water, because they lived in him, his most authentic inheritance.
Those qualifications would not be enough for the job he was now embarked on. To present as personal experience the adventure of discovery, to trace the opening of Upper Louisiana and the groping out of a Northwest Passage up the Missouri and across the Stony Mountains and down the Oregon to the Great South Sea demanded detailed knowledge of a lot of country that he knew only from books. Before he could discover the West with Lewis and Clark, he had to discover it for himself. In the summer of 1946 his personal inclinations, the end of wartime travel restrictions, and the completion of his other writing jobs coincided to send him out after the geographical expertise that most of his readers assumed he already possessed.
As we have seen, he was busy all through the winter and spring at a dozen different jobs. He conducted a calculated raid, in two successive Easy Chairs, against the revisionist Civil War historians J. G. Randall and Avery Craven; he argued with Clara Gabrilowitsch, now Clara Samoussoud, over her stubborn opposition to Letters from the Earth and with Thomas Chamberlain over his slowness in permitting little actions with regard to the Mark Twain papers; he advised Alfred Knopf on the possibilities of a new series of western books of the Americana Deserta kind; he negotiated with the History Book Club about his possible participation in its selective process; he finished up Across the Wide Missouri and Mountain Time. But all the time he was giving thought to his coming expedition. It had to be self-supporting, and he had an incurable unwillingness to ask help from the foundations. Magazine commissions, therefore; and since he had long since given up his connection with the Curtis Brown agency, he had to negotiate the commissions himself.
A good journalist with a historian’s conscience, he prepared his sources through an extensive correspondence with Newton Drury, director of the National Park Service, with Walt Dutton, Chief Forester of the National Forest Service, and with friends and informants, official and unofficial, scattered over the whole West. A worrier and hypochondriac, he fretted about such things as Rocky Mountain fever, and whether the family should be inoculated. An anxious father, he enlisted Stewart Holbrook and a flock of forest supervisors to find a summer job in the woods for Gordon, now seventeen, and consulted other friends in the attempt to locate a mountain ranch or camp where Mark could be left for at least part of the summer. Jittery as the greenest tourist about hazards, discomforts, and the lack of civilized facilities, he badgered correspondents for the names of decent hotels and restaurants, and for several months he had half the Time-Life-Fortune staff working to get him a Ford or Mercury station wagon as soon as the assembly lines newly converted to peace should turn one out. No 1846 pioneer outfitting at Independence in anticipation of Pawnees, Sioux, flooded rivers, poison water, and the terrors of a desert crossing could have been more concerned.
Or excited. Or willing to share his preparations with anyone who would listen. The Personal and Otherwise column in the April Harper’s gave a report of his activities, including his plans for a three-month western tour that would be paid for, he said, by articles in Harper’s and “less exalted journals.” These, as things finally developed, were Life, Fortune, and Woman’s Day, the A&P magazine which under the editorship of Mabel Hill Souvaine was becoming
his most dependable meal ticket, open to practically anything he chose to send it.
In the July Easy Chair,1 written before he left, he took the public into his confidence and announced himself prepared to test and rate the goods and services offered the American tourist in the first postwar summer. He could not report on the new station wagon, because it had not come off the assembly line, but he could announce in advance that the eighteen-dollar fountain pen he had bought for the trip was worthless, and that when he had shopped for new pants he had found everything so shoddy and overpriced that he was going in his old ones.
On June 5, the old Buick loaded like a pack horse, Mark developing hysterical vomiting spells, Avis “determined to shame” her husband by wearing long shorts,2 they got the doors closed upon themselves and started out of Cambridge.
Their itinerary took them to Buffalo, by boat to Detroit, across the south peninsula of Michigan, and by boat again from Ludington to Manitowoc, and across Wisconsin and Minnesota to Pierre, South Dakota, the site of old Fort Pierre, built in 1832 as a bastion of the Sioux trade. There they made rendezvous with a Life photographer, Wallace Kirkland, who had been working upriver from St. Louis shooting Lewis and Clark and fur-trade sites set up for him in advance by DeVoto. As a team, they went on up the Missouri to Fort Clark, sixty miles above Bismarck, North Dakota, where they found the boom precipitated by the Garrison Dam submerging a place whose history should have exempted it from progress. Thence on to old Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone, which for some years had been the uppermost reach of the river fur trade. DeVoto had prowled it in the books while writing Across the Wide Missouri, had lived inside its palisades with the naturalists Townsend and Nuttall and the titled amateur Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, and with Maximilian had watched a battle between Assiniboins and Blackfeet outside the walls. Now he could prowl it on foot and in fact and in the reduced present.