The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  Much of the light, as well as some of the incidental heat, came from his maverick unwillingness to run with the herd—any herd—or to accept the standard varieties of intellectual fashion that his times offered him. “There are no new ways to be new,” his father and adversary Robert Frost used to remark. As with so many of Frost’s wisdoms, that was something DeVoto knew without being told. He had chosen not to be new but to be himself, not to be in but to be at liberty, with consequences to his reputation, both during his life and since, that have been more damaging than otherwise. The man who walks by himself has no gang or coterie, and in the profession of words it is coteries that more often than not determine reputations, at least in the short run.

  In forcing the inward coward to productive effort, DeVoto had involved himself in a series of free-for-alls with a variety of systems and cliques and beliefs, and had made himself more enemies than he needed to; and yet despite his vehemence he had managed to wring from his often reluctant contemporaries most of the rewards the profession had to offer. Loved by a small circle, he was respected a long way outside it, and disliked and feared by many with whom he had found himself in conflict. But by the early 1950s, as we have seen, he had kept himself so harshly at the desk that most of his projected jobs were either done, or were abandoned as beyond his powers. What succeeded was a restlessness without definable cause, a hunger without ascertainable origin, a pain that was less pain than emptiness, a discontent that groped for its own stimuli, a busy-ness without enough real satisfaction. Once he had finished editing the Lewis and Clark Journals, in 1952, his only solid intellectual gratification came from the forays against the thought police and the enemies of conservation, and even those were often tainted by his feeling that they were rear-guard actions without much hope in them. His energies, which even in their exhausted state were formidable, were too much applied to turning wheels that he had to think unimportant, however economically necessary. Because he took pride in being a pro, he wrote his best in the travel articles for Holiday, Ford Times, The Lamp, and other magazines with which Carl Brandt eventually allied him. But because he had been ambitious and the reverse of humble—“My mind is as good as there is”—he often chafed for work that demanded his full powers.

  From the time of his 1946 western tour he had projected a book about the modern West,2 but it came off only piecemeal, as essays, and when he tried to bend those into a coherent argument he found himself betrayed into the generalizations that had made challenging journalism but looked dubious in the soberer context of a book. One feels that this book (its working title was Western Paradox) seemed to him a logical necessity, the completion of his long study of the West, and yet he found it very difficult. The chapters that he was sending down to Carl Brandt during 1955 did not please him; he thought they had no shine or brightness, they were chapters in a book he was writing because he was determined to have a book to write, not chapters of something that demanded powerfully to be said. In the end they wound up among his papers like the Cambridge novel Assorted Canapés, unpublished and unpublishable except for one Easy Chair, “Birth of an Art,” which examined The Virginian and all subsequent horse opera against the real-life background of the Johnson County War, the cowboy myth against cattle-kingdom realities.

  The house at 8 Berkeley Street, which had been sanctuary and workshop since 1941, was still the place to which he repaired for both work and healing, but the necessities of his life forced him out of it constantly on lecture tours, business trips to New York or Washington, and excursions to the West. The Lewis and Clark route that he had first traveled in 1946 had introduced him to his favorite country, and he returned again and again to the forested mountains around Missoula. In 1951 he had transferred his Bread Loaf affiliation to Joseph Kinsey Howard’s “Bread Loaf, Montana,” and had barely missed being present for Howard’s fatal heart attack a few weeks after the conference. Missoula had also become the demonstration area, even more than Chet Olsen’s region based on Ogden, of the Forest Service’s watershed and timber preservation; he had friends in the Region One office from stenographers to regional foresters. In 1954 they happily collaborated with him in his last and in many ways most satisfying expedition. What made it especially satisfying was two companions, one of them Adlai Stevenson, the other the young man who since 1952 had been DeVoto’s physician, Dr. Herbert Scheinberg.3

  Their intimacy was new but intense. Scheinberg had finished up a junior fellowship at Harvard in 1950, and, uncertain whether he wanted to practice or teach, had settled for the time being on both. He hung out his shingle on an old house on Story Street in Cambridge and saw a limited number of patients while continuing to do research at the Children’s Hospital and teaching at Peter Bent Brigham. He had always been interested in psychoanalysis, and had many friends among the psychiatrists of Boston. One was Gregory Rochlin, also a close friend of the DeVotos’. When DeVoto, suffering from his vague uncomfortable symptoms and a persistent cancerophobia, indicated that he was unsatisfied with his current doctor, Rochlin sent him to Scheinberg for an examination.

  It was clear that DeVoto thought Scheinberg too young to be his physician, but when he returned from his western lecture tour, in June 1952, with all his symptoms intact, he went back to him, and Scheinberg put him in Peter Bent Brigham for exhaustive tests, primarily aimed at looking into his high blood pressure. He did not tell DeVoto what he was worried about, because he did not want to add another worry to his patient’s hypochondria. And anyway he found no kidney, heart, or brain difficulties that might have been anticipated, and concluded that DeVoto’s hypertension might continue for years to be asymptomatic, without serious consequences.

  That fall, Scheinberg was in Geneva editing a book for the World Health Organization and combining that chore with a honeymoon. On his return, in October, he again saw DeVoto, and from that point their intimacy grew swiftly. Scheinberg’s father had been killed when he was six; he had always, he says, been unconsciously hunting for a father. As for DeVoto, father hunting had been almost a career for him. This time, father and son got curiously mixed, for though Scheinberg was almost young enough to be DeVoto’s son, he was a doctor, a member of a profession for which DeVoto had always had reverence, and was in charge of DeVoto’s health, and so in a way became father to the man he himself looked upon as a father.

  The two families were very close friends by the time Scheinberg’s young wife gave birth to a child, in the spring of 1953. A little while later, only a few days after they had been together at one of the DeVoto Sunday Evenings, Mrs. Scheinberg died of a brain hemorrhage. The next time Benny DeVoto and his doctor met, DeVoto broke down in tears.

  Shortly afterward, Dr. Scheinberg moved from Cambridge to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, and their friendship was interrupted. But on his frequent trips to New York, DeVoto made it a point to see his medical father, and their correspondence was constant. When Scheinberg suggested to DeVoto that they go together, in June 1954, to see the total eclipse of the sun in Minnesota, DeVoto said he wasn’t very interested in that, but why didn’t Scheinberg come along with him in August and help him teach Adlai Stevenson all about the problems of the West.

  He had made a standing offer to Stevenson that, at Stevenson’s convenience, and no matter what else he himself was doing, he would undertake that instruction. He and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had discussed the development of a strong conservation plank in the Democratic platform for 1956, when Stevenson would surely run again, and they had also had conversations about a possible conservation congress, to be held in the West, to revise and renew what the Roosevelt-Pinchot Conservation Congress of 1906 had done.4 The congress never came off, but the instruction in western problems did.5 Stevenson and William Blair and a small group would be coming back from Alaska and would meet DeVoto in Missoula. There DeVoto’s friends in the Region One office of the Forest Service would take over.

  It was an interlude that Stevenson, Scheinberg, and DeVoto himself remembere
d as pure pleasure. The camping trip itself was enough to ask; to DeVoto the companionship of good friends, the presence of two people whom he loved and respected and whom he could also instruct, the sense of being schoolmaster on important matters to the politically important, was even more. The junket was arranged and carried out with a minimum of publicity, though when the Stevenson plane was struck by lightning on the way home they got a little more attention focused on the where-abouts of the candidate than they had wanted. DeVoto was in Missoula, at the Florence Hotel, which he called the best hotel in the West, two days before Scheinberg and two and a half before the Stevenson party. The Forest Service, not wanting to get embroiled in political accusations, had been discreet. The party slipped out of town and into the mountains for two days of what the White House correspondents have taught us to call working vacation. The movie film shot by Dr. Herb Scheinberg shows them to have been a jovial and relaxed party. Stevenson impressed both Scheinberg and the Forest Service with his quickness in catching on to both the environmental and the political aspects of the National Forests, and he indicated a subtle deference to the much-publicized alcoholic prejudices of his mentor DeVoto when somebody offered him scotch. “I believe in free trade,” he said, “but I would not go that far. Bourbon, please.”6

  Stevenson got the fishing on the Lochsa that he had been looking forward to, and after two days he left refreshed and instructed—the instruction was rubbed in a little later when DeVoto sent him six single-spaced pages of notes entitled “Remember About the West”7—while the Forest Service drove DeVoto and Scheinberg down to Ogden. There one evening in the Weber Club, the only place they could find to have a drink, DeVoto told Scheinberg, his medical father-son, all about Robert Frost, his poetic father. “Kronos,” he called him, and surprised Scheinberg with the depth of bitterness and hatred he revealed. He also told Scheinberg he would never write another novel—told him and repeated it several times, though in his desk at 8 Berkeley Street a drawer contained several tries at the Cambridge novel, which dealt with one of the avatars of Kronos and which he would go on tinkering with in private until he died.

  Walking one morning on the Union Pacific tracks near the farm of DeVoto’s grandfather Dye, DeVoto and Scheinberg were passed by one of the last steam locomotives on the line, a survival, and in the passing of its smoke and steam and churning drivers, Scheinberg, an eastern city boy and a Jew, felt a curiously emotional tension. The Dye farm was gone, unrecognizable, its orchards long since cut down to make way for a fox farm that had long since failed. All the painful labor that the immigrant English mechanic had expended in clearing sage, building ditches, planting and pruning and harvesting, extending little by little his small oasis of productive green in the Weber bottoms, had been obliterated, and the suburbs were spreading like a skin disease outward from Ogden. And as the engine of a past time chuffed and churned by them, it seemed to Scheinberg that he had a glimpse of what it might have been like to grow up in that canyon mouth terraced by the fossil beaches of a dead lake, with the mountains behind, high and protective against the east, and the flats spreading westward to the dead salt sea. New Jerusalem, asserted and declared and chanted, and Bernard DeVoto not of it, suspicious of it, scornful of it. And yet the mountain light lay over the lucerne fields and the scattered roofs, and the protective loom of the mountains was gentle, and the gateway canyon led eastward through the mountain wall toward adventure, accomplishment, and the anguishes of maturity. Dr. Herbert Scheinberg was a sensitive and understanding man. He thought he could feel, a little, how it had been for the man beside him when he had been a boy there half a century before.

  One more excursion remained. From Ogden the two hired a car and drove down to Salt Lake City—DeVoto said he wouldn’t drive into Ogden but he didn’t mind driving out, thereby declaring his undying feud even while nostalgia was at work in him—and from Salt Lake City Chet Olsen in a Forest Service car drove them over into Colorado, to the Manitou Experimental Forest, near Pike’s Peak. There they met Alfred Knopf, once DeVoto’s publisher when they expected Americana Deserta to sweep the country, later DeVoto’s pupil in matters western.8 Knopf, however western he might have become under DeVoto’s tutelage, remained himself. He had brought with him a case of carefully selected wine, and he had arranged a dinner at the Manitou Ranger Station that made their eyes bulge. They ended on that high note, and Scheinberg hurried off to Denver and back to his duties and his daughter, left with relatives, while DeVoto came home on the train,9 and on the way felt the euphoria of the excursion seep out of him and the vague, unplaceable symptoms of malaise reveal themselves still there, unassuaged.

  Other trips were bad both going and coming, as desolate as the circuits of a traveling salesman. His lecture tours of 1953 and 1954 were an agony to him. The Leigh agency consistently overlooked his requirements, booked him for three weeks or more instead of the two that had been agreed upon, scheduled lectures during the periods that he had specified must be kept open for the writing of the Easy Chair, and scheduled him, after two or three warnings, during times when the National Parks Advisory Board was meeting. It also objected, as if to a breach of contract, when he accepted an honorific and unremunerative lecture invitation from the American Philosophical Society.10 The lecture contract was the only ill turn that Carl Brandt had ever done him, and he had done it out of the best of motives, when it seemed he would never be able to restore him to a profitable place in the magazine market.

  He was a pro. He grumbled, but he carried out the schedules the agency arranged, at a cost to his health and his peace of mind, as well as to his other work, that he ultimately found himself unwilling to pay. The long journeys, the lonesome hotel rooms, the strangers whose hospitality was either too eager or too dutiful, the waiting in airports and stations when he wanted more than anything else to be back in his study at 8 Berkeley Street or in his own living room with a handful of friends, eventually wore his patience completely out, and he begged Brandt to get him out of the contract. Brandt finally did, and none too soon. DeVoto did not like speaking before universities and women’s clubs, and he felt, often correctly, that he did not thrill them. Some of the Indiana apathy seemed always present in the groups he faced—apathy or an angry repudiation of his ideas. He was not a good speaker except in indignation or before an audience he knew and trusted; and indignation was hard to sustain through many repetitions of the same written-out lectures. Even read as essays, the lectures he gave for Leigh11 are seldom comparable in challenge and gusto with the things he wrote monthly for the Easy Chair.

  And they took him from where he wanted to be; they exposed him to a loneliness that was increasingly harder on his spirit. “May six o’clock never find you alone,” he says in The Hour. He says it humorously, but like much else in that little book, it is meant. Sometimes a joke, glancing off the unspeakable, speaks it more plainly than seriousness could. A marksman, DeVoto understood the principle. If it breaks the edge, it’s a bull’s-eye.

  The Hour, put together out of three genial Easy Chairs and an Atlantic essay signed “Fairley Blake,”12 had gone into a lot of Christmas stockings and delighted a lot of readers in the Christmas season of 1951. A mock-heroic hymn to alcohol, it is a long way from being a funny book in praise of drunkenness. In an indirect way it is a piece of American social history, part of the celebration of American folkways that was DeVoto’s abiding obligation. He was not entirely joking when he said,

  In the heroic age our forefathers invented self-government, the Constitution, and bourbon, and on the way to them they invented rye.… Our political institutions were shaped by our whiskeys, would be inconceivable without them, and share their nature. They are distilled not only from our native grains but from our native vigor, suavity, generosity, peacefulness, and love of accord. Whoever goes looking for us will find us there.…

  The roads ran out in dust or windswept grass and we went on, we came to a river no one had crossed and we forded it, the land angled upward and we climbed t
o the ridge and exulted, the desert stretched ahead and we plunged into it—and always the honeybee flew ahead of us and there was a hooker of the real stuff at day’s end and one for the road tomorrow. Nothing stopped us from sea to shining sea, nothing could stop us, the jug was plugged tight with a corncob, and we built new commonwealths and constitutions and distilleries as we travelled, the world gaped, and destiny said here’s how.13

  But The Hour is not simply a piece of humorous cultural patriotism either. It is a manual of witchcraft, a book of spells and observances. If it makes jokes, it makes them to mislead and confuse the desperate necessities from which the Hour is the surest and sometimes the only escape. Epicurus was the remote ancestor of these rituals; nobody ever understood better that the justification for our brief and precious pleasures is the abiding certainty of pain.

  All sorts of things, in DeVoto’s view, were important in the rituals of drinking. The place, for instance—best of all, the home; next best, a good, quiet, restful bar with low lights and low voices. The liquor? Rye or bourbon, honest American whiskey with honest branch water, and for special occasions and purposes the martini, made according to the mystic formulas and with a regard for the proprieties. No bargain brands—“Cheap liquor is grudge liquor”—and none of the sickening concoctions, reversions to the soda fountains of childhood, that hostesses commonly called cocktails. And the people? Friends, no more than a handful, including an attractive woman or two. As for the preparations, especially the preparation of the martini, those were distillations of witchcraft feasible only to the properly purified soul.