The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  10. In 1926 he was still romantic about the cowboys. Later he became one of the bitterest critics of the cattle kingdom’s history, economics, politics, and assumptions.

  11. The Mutual Improvement Association, known as the MIA or “Mutual,” is a Mormon institution built into every ward house in Zion. It incorporates the Beehive Girls, Boy Scouts, and other youth groups, and publishes a magazine, The Improvement Era. It is the youth arm of Mormon orthodoxy and neighborly helpfulness and personal wholesomeness, much scorned by the rebels and probably as responsible as any other element of the Mormon system for the stability of Mormon society. In the amusement hall of every ward it sponsors dances, athletic leagues, amateur theatricals, movies, and much else. Every Mormon child, and many a Gentile child as well, is likely to be found at Mutual on Tuesday nights. In DeVoto’s mouth, in 1926, it is a term of contempt, the epitome of everything pious, middle-class, and dull.

  12. BDV reports it as fact in “Farewell to Pedagogy” and also in a letter, BDV to Paul Ferris, July 15, 1926. SUL.

  13. BDV to Melville Smith, September 25, 1922. SUL. “Do not persuade yourself that art is greater than life,” he told Smith in a tone that would become familiar to a whole generation of the literary—“that the greatest art is as worthy as the meanest life. Gravest of all, do not think that art can be separated from life for one second’s existence in itself. Make music. Make music of the elevated, of the billboards, of the vaudeville, of the baseball games, of the gasoline air, of the river stinks, of the garbage cans, the slums, of every blatant and vulgar monstrosity of this civilization. Incredibly vulgar it may be, offensive, repellent, hideous, intolerable. Nevertheless, it is alive; and while it is, your duty is to make art of it.”

  “This,” he added in a spasm of self-awareness, “is almost worthy of immortalization on Christmas cards.” He might also have said that he probably wouldn’t have been talking that way if Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, published a half dozen years before, had not taught him how. He meant it, nevertheless. He meant it then and all the rest of his life. “America, alive, is the future.” But, for the moment, in the first flush of being a published writer, and in the scornful sense of having proved himself to Ogden, Utah, he talked out of the other side of his mouth.

  14. Florian DeVoto to BDV, June 6, 1926. SUL.

  15. This recantation, first written as a letter to Jarvis Thurston on May 14, 1943 (SUL), was published in The Rocky Mountain Review X (Autumn 1945), pp. 7–11, and reprinted in The Improvement Era 49 (March 1946), p. 154. There is a discussion of DeVoto’s changing attitudes toward Mormonism in Leland Fetzer, “Bernard DeVoto and the Mormon Tradition,” Dialogue VI (Autumn–Winter 1971), pp. 23–38.

  Chapter 4 ·

  1. To numerous correspondents, over the span of a good many years, he asserted that he took up the theme of the continentalizing of the American nation because he was afraid to tackle the Civil War, the single most important event in American history.

  2. Florian DeVoto’s research on behalf of his son is reported in many letters: Florian DeVoto to BDV, January 18, 1926; February 8, 1926; February 24, 1926; undated, 1926; March 11, 1926; and September 3, no year. SUL.

  3. BDV to H. L. Mencken, February 7, 1926. NYPL.

  4. Mencken to BDV, February 4, 1926. SUL.

  5. Mencken to BDV, February 13, 1926. SUL.

  6. Mencken to BDV, March 4, 1926. SUL.

  7. Mencken to BDV, March 8, 1926. SUL.

  8. Never published, apparently never written, though “Farewell to Pedagogy” contains some ridicule of the education schools.

  9. Mencken to BDV, March 20, 1926. SUL.

  10. Mencken to BDV, April 15, 1926. SUL. Here, perhaps, is the model for DeVoto’s later campaigns against the Watch and Ward and other proponents of literary censorship. On April 5, ten days before writing DeVoto that “Sex and the Co-Ed” was being pulled from the May issue, Mencken had gone to Boston, obtained a peddler’s license, and publicly sold a copy of the warned-against April issue to T. Frank Chase, the President of the Watch and Ward Society, on Brimstone Corner. He was arrested and brought to trial, but the charges against him were dismissed by Judge Parmenter. After his acquittal, the April issue of the Mercury was banned from the mails ex post facto, though it had already been mailed. It was this situation that led Mencken to pull “Sex and the Co-Ed,” for fear of provoking more trouble. Years later, when writing autobiographical notes to go into the New York Public Library with his papers, Mencken wrote DeVoto asking if he had ever published the essay anywhere. He hadn’t. See Mencken to BDV, September 20, 1937, SUL, and BDV to Mencken, September 22, 1937, NYPL. The “Hatrack” case is summarized in Edgar Kemler, The Irreverent Mr. Mencken, Little, Brown, 1950, pp. 191–216.

  11. W. F. Bryan, Arthur H. Nethercot, and Bernard DeVoto, The Writer’s Handbook, Macmillan, 1928.

  12. Bernard DeVoto, The Chariot of Fire, Macmillan, 1926.

  13. “Vestige of a Nordic Arcady,” American Mercury IX (November 1926), pp. 327–32.

  14. “Saving the Sophomore,” by Richard Dye. American Mercury IX (November 1926) pp. 288–94.

  15. “The Mountain Men,” American Mercury IX (December 1926) pp. 472–79.

  16. “College and the Exceptional Man,” Harper’s CLIV (January 1927), pp. 253–60.

  17. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, December 29, 1926. SUL. The hunt for a suitable Cape Cod boardinghouse is reported in L. B. R. Briggs to BDV, February 16, February 19, February 27, March 20, and April 16, 1927. SUL.

  18. Briggs to BDV, November 20, 1926. SUL.

  19. Briggs to BDV, October 6, 1924. SUL. “At least to a person somewhat old-fashioned like myself, your method seems mistaken, next that I do not for a moment question your sincerity, next that though I question your wisdom in directing your power I do not question the power, and lastly that I am always yours with warm regard.”

  20. Briggs to BDV, November 20, 1926. SUL. The doubt of DeVoto’s powers as a novelist, expressed early by the writing teacher whom he most respected, was repeated over the years by many people both friendly and unfriendly. Though DeVoto was never until late in his life completely discouraged from writing fiction even though he officially renounced it in 1949 (see Section VII, Chapter 4, “The Lost World of Fiction”), Briggs’s judgment seems to me a sound one. DeVoto expressed himself better in history and in his controversial essays than in any of his fictions.

  21. Briggs to BDV, October 30, 1926. SUL.

  22. BDV to Paul Ferris, December 14, 1925. SUL.

  23. DeVoto’s letter is not preserved in its entirety. A piece cut from it is folded in with Briggs to BDV, April 6, 1927. SUL.

  24. H. S. Latham to BDV, no date, but, from context, spring 1927. SUL.

  25. “The Great Medicine Road,” American Mercury XI (May 1927), pp. 104–12.

  26. Briggs to BDV, April 30, 1927. SUL.

  27. “The Co-Ed: The Hope of Liberal Education,” Harper’s CLV (September 1927), pp. 452–59.

  28. “In Search of Bergamot,” Harper’s CLV (August 1927), pp. 302–12.

  Chapter 5 ·

  1. “Footnote on the West,” Harper’s CLV (November 1927), pp. 713–22.

  2. “Front Page Ellen,” Redbook L (November 1927), pp. 32–37, and “Sleeping Dogs,” Saturday Evening Post CC (November 19, 1927), pp. 18–19.

  3. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, September 1, 1927. SUL. His announced intention was to work on the Mark Twain book and on a “leisurely study of the brave old days of the West”—presumably either a collection of essays such as “The Mountain Men” and “The Great Medicine Road” or an articulated book in the same vein—while supporting himself by writing magazine fiction. He supported himself in the way he proposed to, and he worked on the Mark Twain book as he proposed to. But his “leisurely study of the brave old days of the West,” by diversions and torques that all writers will recognize, became something else—became most importantly the trilogy of histories The Year of Decision: 1846, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Cour
se of Empire, which, among them, won him the Bancroft prize, the Pulitzer prize, and the National Book Award.

  III MORE PRIVILEGED EARTH

  Chapter 1 ·

  1. Robeson Bailey to WS, November 9, 1968.

  2. “Farewell to Pedagogy,” Harper’s CLVI (January 1928), pp. 182–90.

  3. “This Must Not Get Out,” Redbook L (January 1928), pp. 68–73.

  4. “English A,” American Mercury XIII (February 1928), pp. 204–12.

  5. Fred Bissell indicates that even four or five years after DeVoto’s return to Cambridge he was “regarded by the literary faculty as a kind of wild man from the West, Utah, and probably had a lot of Mormon wives,” and that he “met the sneers” at his Saturday Evening Post writing “by letting checks be seen from the Curtis Publishing Co., when he would blow his nose.” And “in 1930,” Mr. Bissell remarks, “S.E.P. writers were the highest paid writers in the universe.” Fred Bissell to WS, October 28, 1971.

  6. In the early 1940s Miss Howe spent part of a summer near the DeVotos at Annisquam, on Cape Anne; her impressions apparently come from that contact. Her portrait of A. R. Boyer, who has some of DeVoto’s qualities, is a portrait done with an axe. The psychological obsessions with which Miss Howe endows him may have stemmed from the presence on Cape Anne, in that same summer, of Beata Rank, with whom DeVoto loved to discuss the psychological bases of fiction and to whom he later dedicated The World of Fiction. After publication of the novel We Happy Few, relations between Miss Howe and the DeVotos were somewhat strained. Richard Scowcroft tells of entertaining both shortly after the book appeared, and reports a general ice storm. On the other hand, DeVoto reviewed We Happy Few (“When the Goths Took Harvard,” New York Herald Tribune Books XXII (June 30, 1946), with what seemed enthusiasm: “Miss Howe is a better novelist here than she was in ‘The Whole Heart.’ Though there is less feeling in this book, its content is harder and firmer and her skill has greatly increased. She does not ask why academic life—for what she complains of is not a Harvard monopoly—erodes courage and integrity, but she is excellent and sometimes magnificent in rendering the surfaces of that erosion.”

  7. New, that is, as a field of concentration and serious study. At the end of the 1920s very few courses in American literature were yet offered in American colleges, and it was more or less standard to obtain a degree in English without ever having taken a single American-literature course.

  8. “Sitting a Little Apprehensively on ‘The World,’ ” Harvard Advocate CXIV, No. 8 (May 1928), pp. 23–27.

  9. Cora Wilkenning acted as DeVoto’s agent from sometime in 1927 until October 1934, when he became dissatisfied with her and signed up with Raymond and Helen Everitt, of Curtis Brown. A further inducement to change was that the Everitts promised to work him into the serial game, which offered an easier and more lucrative living than short stories. After Raymond Everitt became an editor at Little, Brown, Helen continued to work with DeVoto on his Collier’s serials.

  10. During 1928, four appeared in Redbook, three in the Post, one in Harper’s. See the Barclay bibliography, pp. 147–48.

  11. “Northwestern,” College Humor (January 1929), pp. 24–25.

  12. BDV to Harold Latham, December 20, 1927. SUL.

  13. Robert S. Forsythe, Bernard DeVoto, A New Force in American Letters, Macmillan, 1928. One of DeVoto’s closest friends at Northwestern, Forsythe had gone on to an unsatisfactory job at the University of North Dakota. In 1929 DeVoto brought him into the Americana Deserta series to edit Melville’s Pierre. Later he went to the Newberry Library, in Chicago.

  14. It did. The letter, BDV to a Mr. Collier, March 15, 1928 (SUL), was shortly incorporated into an essay, “Tools for the Intellectual Life,” Harper’s CLVII (October 1928), pp. 602–9. The tools he recommends are languages, mathematics, and science. He disparages the formal study of literature and the “pseudo-sciences” of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. History he ignores, for some reason; and he indicates that all instruction ought to be tutorial. The colleges justify themselves mainly as places where one can learn the tools for continuing self-education.

  15. Reviews of The House of Sun-Goes-Down appeared in the New York Times, May 13, 1928, p. 8; the Boston Transcript, May 29, 1928, p. 2; the Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1928, p. 15; and New York Herald Tribune Books, July 29, 1928, p. 14.

  16. BDV to Paul Ferris, July 10, 1928, Labor Day 1928, and September 25, 1928. SUL.

  17. Robeson Bailey to WS, November 19, 1968. SUL.

  18. Including two unpaid articles in the Harvard Advocate not listed in the Barclay bibliography. These were “Sitting a Little Apprehensively on ‘The World,’ ” already cited, and “The Bloody Shirt, World War Model,” Harvard Advocate CXV (November 1928), pp. 9–19, an inflated and bombastic account of his political shenanigans as chaplain of Herman Baker Post of the American Legion, and signed Richard L. Caxton.

  19. Plus two more unpaid Harvard Advocate items not in the Barclay bibliography: “Toward Another War,” Harvard Advocate CXV (April 1929), pp. 9–19, and “Remarks at the New York Dinner,” Harvard Advocate CXV (May 1929), p. 7.

  20. Throughout his life he had periodically to seek psychiatric help, and for a number of reasons he moved from healer to healer. His first Boston analyst, Dr. William Herman, died in the winter of 1934–35. His second, William Barrett, referred him to Lawrence Kubie when the DeVotos moved from Cambridge to New York. Later, after their return to Cambridge, DeVoto did not go back into analysis with Barrett, but saw him often in a “supportive” capacity until Barrett’s divorce and removal to California. In the early 1940s DeVoto saw a good deal of Beata Rank, but though they had many discussions about the relation between literature and psychiatry, it is uncertain whether or not he was ever her patient. Neither was he ever a patient of Dr. Gregory Rochlin, though Rochlin was one of his closest friends during the 1950s. His last psychiatrist was Dr. Alfred O. Ludwig, of Boston, who later married DeVoto’s secretary Julie Jeppson. The sessions with Ludwig lasted from late 1951 or early 1952 until DeVoto’s death, in November 1955.

  21. The original proposal, with an extensive list of possible titles, is contained in BDV to H. C. Block, January 27, 1929. AAK. After several letters of elaboration and clarification, and one trip to New York, DeVoto received the formal agreement for signature on April 25. He and Alfred Knopf did not meet at that time and did not become close friends until quite a number of years later, though as an owner of the American Mercury Knopf would have known DeVoto’s name and work as early as 1926.

  22. Block to BDV, May 22, 1929. AAK.

  23. As with later books that involved much reading and research, DeVoto was jumpy and nervous about beginning, exaggerated the difficulties, feared the likelihood of failure, and made humorous game of the way the book had expanded from something called a “Preface,” calculated to take six months in the doing, into something that had already taken four years and would have to be followed fifteen years later by a more ponderous work. BDV to Paul Ferris, March 26, 1929. SUL.

  24. “Brave Days in Washoe,” American Mercury XVIII (June 1929), pp. 228–37. This comprises pages 115–33 of Mark Twain’s America.

  25. BDV to Byron Hurlbut, July 2, 1929. SUL.

  26. “The Penalties of Wisdom,” Redbook LIII (September 1929), pp. 52–55.

  27. Meine to BDV, July 21, 1929. SUL. Meine found the sketch in The Carpetbag for May 1, 1852, an issue that also contained a John Phoenix drawing, and type for which was partially set by Artemus Ward. Meine, a non-academic but encyclopedic folklorist and bibliophile, was managing director of Chicago Book and Art Auctions.

  28. This move brought on a notable and important friendship. Their neighbors at 8 Mason Street were Theodore and Kathleen Morrison. Morrison, a poet and tennis player, had recently left the Atlantic to teach writing at Harvard. A little later (in 1932), he became director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and brought DeVoto into the warmest literary association he was ever to enjoy. DeVoto, in turn, broug
ht Robert Frost into the lives of the Morrisons, where he stayed.

  29. Published in American Mercury XIX (January 1930), pp. 1–13, and reprinted in considerably expanded form in Forays and Rebuttals, pp. 71–137.

  30. The records show that in 1929–30 his duties were entirely tutorial. The next year, he took over Hurlbut’s writing class, English 31, and taught it through the academic year 1933–34. In the spring term of 1933–34 he gave up the writing course temporarily in favor of English 95, a course in contemporary American literature. In the spring term of 1935–36 he taught both English 31, renumbered English 3-A, and English 95, renumbered English 70. Class records, Harvard Registrar’s Office.

  31. BDV to Melville Smith, July 8, 1920. SUL.

  32. BDV to L. B. R. Briggs, February 4, 1922. Personnel Folder, Harvard Registrar’s Office.

  Chapter 2 ·

  1. “The Real Frontier: A Preface to Mark Twain,” Harper’s CLXIII (June 1931), pp. 60–71; “The Matrix of Mark Twain’s Humour,” Bookman LXXIV (October 1931), pp. 172–78; “Mark Twain and the Genteel Tradition,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine XL (December 1931), pp. 155–63; and “Tom, Huck, and America,” Saturday Review of Literature IX (August 13, 1932), pp. 37–39.