Controversy had been one such stay; from his youth onward he had been toughened and given confidence by the act of giving and taking blows. Friendship had been a stay; he had valued his friends, and had a generous concern for them, and depended on them. Alcohol had been a stay, not alcohol as a crutch or an oblivion but alcohol as ritual, as Host in the absolving Eucharist of the Hour. And work had been a stay, the safest one of all. But neurosis, which might have been a temptation and which he had described as an adaptation permitting the daunted to stay alive, he had looked upon throughout his life as his own peculiar and malevolent enemy, not to be succumbed to, to be fought and evaded and exorcised. All the other stays had been marshaled against this most deadly one. Controversy, fiction, friendship, alcohol, work, even his need for institutional justification and affiliation, had all been invoked tactics in his effort to die sane. In the end, he could not bear to believe literature coterminous with neurosis, as uncontrollable and compulsive as his panics. He had to demonstrate, and if he found himself unable to demonstrate he had to assert, that fiction was creation, an act of control and will, not the compulsion of a sick soul to puke up its disease as words.
Asserting fiction in those terms, he abjured it once and for all. The moment he turned over the manuscript of The World of Fiction to Houghton Mifflin, he gave up literature as a house of safety. Years before, he had thought he could trace Mark Twain’s transmutation of despair into the symbolic shape of The Mysterious Stranger. He had been wrong, or partly wrong, because he misread the internal evidence of the manuscripts and did not have all the external evidence that scholars would later find.10 But he had not been wrong in seeing Mark Twain’s lifelong habit of work as the road by which he reached safety. Mark Twain was a professional writer, which may be described as a body that will go on moving a pen even with its heart cut out. So was Bernard DeVoto. And because he was a pro, the mere act of finishing something, at a time when he had wondered if he would ever finish anything again, probably did as much to take him out of his depression as the resolution of his literary argument with Dr. Lawrence Kubie and his own soul.
But he had given up literature beyond recapture. In the last six years of his life only one short story, published under one of the pseudonyms that replaced John August, appears in his bibliography. Even articles about literature, even reviews of fiction and poetry, virtually disappear. From the time he threw away John August’s last, unsatisfactory serial and put the several versions of Bernard DeVoto’s last, unsatisfactory novel in the drawer, he was a writer of travel articles, a writer and reviewer of history, a pugnacious champion of conservation and civil liberties, and a continuing speculator about the nature and future of the West, but no novelist and no literary critic.
History waxed as fiction waned. One of the effects, though not necessarily one of the purposes, of his clearing the desk of all literary leftovers was that now he could no longer put off the book that he had announced in his letter to Henry Commager back in April 1944. Lewis and Clark, and all they implied about the pull of the continent upon the seaboard consciousness, and all they meant to the fabric of Bernard DeVoto’s incorrigibly western ideas, were there before him. They had begun the discovery and consolidation of the nation that stretched beyond the Missouri to the western sea.
DeVoto’s earliest and most effective defense against depression was work, and work was still to do. In August 1949 he posted off the manuscript of The World of Fiction11 and cleared his life of literature and sat down to write the book which, if any book of his life was, was preordained for him.
5 · The Course of Empire
Preordained, but not yet clearly defined. He had started with the innocent intention of writing a narrative history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, something in the general vein of the Christmas feature he had published in the Saturday Review in 1936. His old Harvard companion John Bakeless had beaten him to it,1 but he had already left that limited objective far behind before Bakeless’ book appeared. With the cockiness that was the other side of his insecurity, he was confident he could outwrite Bakeless with one lobe tied off if he chose to. He didn’t choose to. His subject had expanded on him, seeking its own dimensions. It reached outward in every direction, and especially it reached backward and backward and backward. In November 1948, DeVoto had complained to Mattingly about the endlessness of his research. For instance, he had had to spend months clearing up the explorations of Vérendrye, because he was uneasy with the accounts he found in the historians. From Vérendrye he had been led back to earlier explorers, and beyond those to still earlier ones. He had had to investigate, it seemed to him, all the native tribes of North America, even the mythical ones. The fabled Welsh Indians and their ramifying legendry had diverted him for many weeks, simply because the Mandans among whom Lewis and Clark spent their first expeditionary Christmas were held by some who did not know them to be descendants of the followers of Prince Madoc.
Do I think maybe I’m Francis Parkman? [he asked Mattingly rhetorically].
What do you do about geography? I mean, what do I do about it? Have I got to go up the Saskatchewan too? Or Lake Winnipeg? This guy Burpee appeared to know which peak was up but I got stalled when he had the Red River flowing both north and south in the same stretch.… Christ, Mat, I can’t dig out the background of the background of the background. How the hell do I learn historical geography?
For that matter, why should I? What the hell am I doing farting around with Charlevoix and who was where in 1690 and was there anything in that yarn of Marquette’s and if so what did it get bent into why? This was supposed to be about Sacajawea, wasn’t it? I figure I can clean up the predecessors of L&C in 30 years more, oh, easy. I figure I can do the empires and the wars in less than ten years more and the trans-Allegheny U.S., the state of scientific thought, symmetrical geography, the diplomatics and American politics in another 10, and maybe in 5 years I can get Napoleon and La. straightened out, though not as easily as F. Pratt could in five minutes.… Well, God damn it, twice now you’ve been able to tell me what book I was writing on the basis of the first draft. We haven’t got time for that sort of thing any more. You damn well tell me pretty soon what I’m working toward now or I’ll get buried under it.2
Mattingly told him he suffered from the sin of pride:
Only God knows everything. And we neither of us started early enough in our lives, or have worked single-mindedly enough since, to be Francis Parkmans.… And even Francis Parkman didn’t know everything.
You’ve just got a light case of regressus historicus. I’ve seen some lulus. Thirty years ago my colleague R. P. Evans decided that he couldn’t write about the 16th century German Sacramentarians without a little background of medieval heresies. Now he despairs of really knowing anything about the Albigenses without exploring the 11th century Bogomils and the 9th century Paulicians, and behind them, he knows, are Yezedees and Manichaeans and dark little twisty passageways leading off into Persia and Assyria and Egypt. Meanwhile he works away doggedly at the connection between Peter Waldo and the Humiliati, at Catherine and Potarini, half a continent and five hundred years from his starting point, which by now he has practically forgotten. And he hasn’t written a line on his real job since Coolidge took the oath of office.… There comes a point in writing history, as in every other activity, where a conscience is just a God damned nuisance. You have to kick it in the teeth and say, “Shut up and lie down and let me get about my business.”3
That good advice was easier to accept than to follow, for what fascinated DeVoto in the early explorations was the gradual overtaking of fable by fact, “the movement of these boys across a map that is not the map they have in their mind.”4 And shortly, while he made his exploration of the boundaries and nature of his subject, his conception of it changed, as the conception of the continent changed for the men who pushed into it. The Lewis and Clark expedition became not simply an adventure in the wilderness but a key action within a global context. Again it was Mattingly t
o whom he tried, sputtering and apoplectic, to explain what his book was doing to him:
In the odd moments during which my, shall we say, mind has been working on the material for this ectoplasmic book, I have somehow crossed the frontier into, shall we say, Historical Ideas. I say the hell with them but there I am.… Being of the uncircumcised, I don’t know how important they are—which is part of the impasse—but I do know that they’re fairly sizable. I told you there has to be a third leg to Parkman’s stool, which has just two. I seem to be swarming like bees around that third leg, and, as a case history in the vagaries of the psychopathic personality, I seem to have started swarming as far back as MT’sA, and to have been more or less working toward an eventual destination ever since, more or less the way you might go to Worcester from Boston by way of Key West, Rio, Nova Scotia, and Pittsfield. At any rate, the symptomology is that I’m running some ideas. And I just don’t know enough and I just don’t see how it’s possible to learn enough in the remaining time.… It isn’t a question of not knowing how Jefferson knew he was going to buy La. six months before he did know it—I’m perfectly willing to follow your theorem and tell the reader, look, I don’t know. It’s a question of an all-encompassing ignorance of the field in which alone the ideas I’ve spawned have any meaning at all and in which alone their validity can be tested. The L&C expedition was not primarily what Brebner, the best of the lot, wrote it off as, the beginning of a new era of exploration of the North American continent, the methodical, so to speak industrial-age era and no damn nonsense. It was, unless it was just some soldiers that Mr. Jefferson sent to find out how he could protect the sea otter trade from British sea power in case of war, it was a turning point in world history. And what the hell do I know about world history?…
There’s no reason to write a book about how a well-conducted party got to the mouth of the Columbia and back. John Bakeless … has written it. There’s no reason to produce a one-volume summary of Parkman or a modernization of Justin Winsor.… The only thing worth my writing or anyone’s reading is a book that says, hey, this seems to have been left out of the picture. And before I write it, I’d like to know whether it’s nonsense.
Diagnosis: intellectual palsy or elephantiasis of the ego. Prognosis: doubtful. Consultation requested.5
By the time DeVoto felt himself ready to start writing, in the fall of 1949, he was less terrified of the vastness of his subject than of withholding himself from it any longer. He was still making sour jokes about how, “properly speaking, Ch. 1 of this book would be about the last withdrawal of the ice cap and Ch. II would pick up with the Crusades,” but he had brought himself to the point where he could shrug away the ignorances that he could now do nothing about, and, accepting his limitations, go ahead. And nothing, now that The World of Fiction was off to the printer and his fictional temptations shelved, could be used as an excuse. As he wrote Mattingly on September 11:
I still know as little as ever and I’m oppressed by it. But also I’m suddenly oppressed by how much I know, at least how much information I have, and how hard it’s going to be to impose form on it and make it readable. I suppose there’s a structure; I know it’s going to be hell to find it. This pre-delivery stage is always a holy horror and I wonder anyone writes books. I’ve got some odds and ends to do and I hope also to pick up a little cash from the journals of fashion and thought before I begin. Then dip the pen and write, “Verrazano” Or maybe “Folsom Man.” … I’ll write as far as I know, then stop and find out, then write some more.6
The journals of fashion and thought, despite his need for money, got only odd moments of his attention, and then as often as not only if they welcomed something on the unceasing conservation struggle. He dipped his pen and wrote the first word, took the first paddle stroke toward the unimaginable Columbia, and he began neither with Verrazano nor with Folsom Man but with Columbus’ letter to Ferdinand and Isabella announcing the discovery of the New World. The first chapter went to Mattingly for comment in early October. There followed a year of intense work, interrupted only by Easy Chairs (including “Due Notice to the FBI” and “For the Wayward and Beguiled,” respectively the most salutary and the most charming of that long, distinguished series),7 by occasional reviews, by conservation forays, and by light essays on many subjects, most of them in Woman’s Day and most of them signed by Cady Hewes, who had taken up with non-fiction the slack left when John August retired from fiction.
In May 1950, he suspended the writing in order to examine South Pass and the Missouri River, courtesy Bill Lederer, the Air Force, and the Corps of Engineers. But immediately upon his return he plunged back into his history book, and he had been writing on it pretty steadily for a year when he again blew up to Mattingly about the impossibility of what he was doing. A year’s writing had turned everything that was solid in his temperament into liquid, everything that was liquid into gas, which was escaping from every petcock and threatening to blow the safety valves. “It is entirely your fault,” he told Mattingly, “… that I am embarked on the God-damnedest fool literary, or if it pleases you to say so, historical enterprise this side of John Bakeless or the far side of Bedlam.”
I say you will fry your ass in hell forever, as I stew mine daily in the dullest broth of watery, uremic, and flatulent prose ever compounded, of which there is not only no end but not even a middle. Middle? hell, there is not even an approach, there is not even a beginning. It takes me thirty thousand words to draw even with where I was when I began them. To begin a chapter is enough to make sure that I will be farther from the end of the book when I finish it—farther by twice as many words and God knows how many years. I run furiously, at the extremity of my (waning) strength, and the sweat that pours off me is all words, words, words, words, words by the galley, words by the thousand, words by the dictionary, and I sink forever deeper in them.… And Jesus Christ, what words, shapeless, colorless, without sound or substance or taste or perfume or indeed existence, words of immense viscosity and no energy or luminescence whatsoever, words out of a lawyer’s brief or a New Critic’s essay on Truman Capote or the ghost who writes MacArthur’s communiqués, words of unbaked dough, of glucose thinned with bilge, words less than a serum and somewhat more than an exudation, and in all the mess and mass of them not a God damned thought that would trouble the intelligence of Norman Cousins.…
I have, in nomine Patris et Filii, this day got the French out of North America. One year to the day, and three million words, after I began a book that had no intention of getting the French into North America.… And now I perceive an error in what I have set down here, an error which flows inevitably from my total incapacity to handle facts. It is not three million words I have written getting the French out of North America, it is thirteen million. Well, to be sure they compose, so far, what would be only a good fat third of a book for Jim Farrell or thirty-five books for Fletcher Pratt, and we may observe with interest that it took Francis Parkman, that elegant Brahmin who was plagiarizing me anticipatorily eighty years ago, nine books or eleven volumes to get as far as I have. So where are we? With thirteen million words written, or by our Lady some two score million, we have now accounted for 229 years that do not enter at all into my book, and have only forty more years to go, or say an even million words, if in the meantime I can learn something about concentration or alternatively get a tight cinch on my bowels, before we reach the beginning of my book and, with a sigh of infinite satisfaction and a suffusing glow of happy realization that only ten million words lie ahead, take up a blank, virgin sheet of paper and write at the top of it Page One.8
Mattingly was the only friend at once close enough to withstand these explosions and learned enough to be a ficelle for DeVoto’s ideas as the book generated them. Loyally he read the chapters that came to him, loyally he approved them as history and praised them as prose. He cooled the spiritual waters set to boiling by the heat of creation. On December 4, 1950, he got another installment of Historical Ideas from DeVoto:
/>
I put it up to you. It only hit me last week as an idea. If this stuff is five percent as good as you hold when drunk or five thousand percent better than my more realistic intelligence judges it to be, then by the end of page 2626 herewith something of an implicit point should have made itself apparent to the reader’s, if any, mind: that the land has by now affected the shape of the consciousness (North American). I succeeded in writing the ’46 thing without feeling I had to make the implicit explicit and I think that the reader, again if any, got there without my help. But I am not the gay young swaggerer I was in those days and I no longer feel if the dumb son of a bitch won’t work at this, so much the worse for him. I’m not only grateful to him, I sympathize with him very deeply.… It occurred to me that five to eight pages might undertake to set down in words, the simplest ones possible, that you learn to plant corn in hills, you then find you are making corn shocks that are architecturally and functionally different from the way they pile wheat in England, presently your house has the logs lengthwise instead of on end, by damn the helve of the axe you felled them with has a curve in it as no axe did before, you think entail ought to be abolished and by God of eternal and manifest right there must be no limeys in San Francisco Bay where rolls the Oregon.… There it is as a problem, and if anywhere, then at the end of the T. Jefferson chapter, which is not T. J. really, but the Young Republic. And nice, too, for Tom believed of 18th century right reason, and said so repeatedly in pellucid prose, that of course this continent is so damn big and the Pacific is so damn far away that the Young Republic won’t get there and what we got to work for is a free and independent Republic of the Pacific, dowered with our own inspired political institutions, populated by manly freemen of American blood, and bound to us by ties of friendship, philosophy, and the dollar balance. So he said of right good reason. And nevertheless, beginning with the time when the Rev. Maury was beating Greek verbs and the unity of continental geography into his head right on to L&C, he put on a perfectly straightforward, coherent, cumulative series of measures and deeds which would prove to anybody who hadn’t happen to hear him talk that by God what had to get to the mouth of the Columbia was the United States. I can now say clearly that the principal reason why I am disgusted with this book is that it is a different kind of stuff from its predecessors and I don’t enjoy the dilemma, for if one is history the other isn’t and who am I.9