The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  The mere act of writing about this girl, called “Skinny” by all her friends, revived his spirits. He demanded that Melville send him books from Paris so that he would be able to keep up and not rot on the branch. And then in one leap he went from despondent description of his symptoms and disparagements of romantic love to pure intellectual euphoria. Clearly, even during his emotional upheavals and the discouragement of his exile, his reading had been at work on him. His continental perspective had expanded into a vision. Perhaps without knowing it, perhaps not even believing it, but whistling into the future only to get past the demoralized present, he stated the theme of his productive life, aligned himself against certain fashionable ideas, even anticipated a favorite whipping boy:

  I burst [he wrote] with creative criticism of America—I have at last found a kind of national self-consciousness. Not the mighty anvil-on-which-is-hammered-out-the-future-of-the-world. Still less the damned-bastard-parvenu-among-the-nations. But I have begun to see American history with some unity, with some perspective, with some meaning … to dare to think from cause to effect, from the past to the present and future, always with this curious new sense of yea-saying youth.

  I do not commit the historic folly, from Washington Irving to Van Wyck Brooks, of hearing fiddles tuning up all over America.… But I have dared at last to believe that the Nation begins to emerge from adolescence into young manhood, that hereafter the colossal strength may begin to count for the better, as well as for the worse. That indeed we have come to say yea, at last.

  And in the facts which alone can show whether we take the turn, or in the study of them, I shall, I think, spend my vigorous years.… I believe I have found something into which I may pour that arresting, God-awful emulsion that is I.4

  Correct on all counts, but premature. And in both its enthusiasm and its prematureness, symptomatic. He never fully got over the tendency to mistake a lightening of his internal cloud cover for the dawn of a new day.

  Euphoria and confidence escaped from him and were as if never known. His next letter to Smith, dated November 9, began with the somber news that Kent Hagler had died suddenly in Paris, and then, like a dog to its vomit, he returned to the obsessive subject of his infatuation, the like of which he hoped never to experience again, and came around to his compulsive self-analysis, the needle steadying on true north. “I have a peculiar capacity for suffering in those areas of personality which neither anatomy nor psychology has yet been able to describe, areas inextricably tangled with religion and sex and faith and poetry.” He thought, cautiously, that he was safely past “the spiritual lethargy which comes with peculiar oppressiveness to those of our calling—our emotions being our profession, precisely like our more honest sisters, the filles de joie.”5

  Having settled on himself, the needle began to fluctuate wildly, even to spin. For what had brought him out of his spiritual lethargy? The perception that all the time while he had been towed at the chariot wheels of the brewer’s daughter, the real object of his passion was another girl, named Mattie,6 a student at the University of Michigan, who had just reappeared in Ogden. The moment she showed up, barn! “Fireworks, lightnings, and millenniums.” He would ask her to marry him before long, maybe next summer. Already she had restored his capacity to work, and he was revising the novel with the energy of a fiend. It was now called Cock Crow, and nobody had ever done anything like it. For relaxation from it he had joined the American Legion and been elected its chaplain and was playing power games in its local structure of command. He had also been working in the recent presidential campaign, against Harding. And he had recently addressed the University Club on the subject of American liberty and had been asked to resign because of his revolutionary ideas, gleaned mainly from the Declaration of Independence. He believed he was now being shadowed by Department of Justice agents.7

  A biographer going through this correspondence might conclude that DeVoto was indeed unstable, that he displayed the classic symptoms of a manic-depressive, and that he was even touched with paranoia as well. More likely, drowning in his own lethargy and Ogden’s torpor, he was driven to create his own drama and his own eidolons. “It seems that my nature requires some object of adoration—some outlet for the intangible traffic of my commonplace life.” But Mattie, who had gone back to Ann Arbor, was no longer available for worship, and anyway, he had already begun to suspect her of being a calculating wench. He thought he had caught her weighing him against other and better possibilities. He felt that she had definitely cooled toward him, and wondered (not implausibly) if his own “half-satirical, half-tender letters” had contributed to the cooling. Though still asserting that he would ask her to marry him, he supposed he would get turned down—she would throw herself away on some fathead. Out of boredom and the need for money, he had taken a job clerking in Spargo’s Bookstore on Washington Avenue, but he was uncomfortable there; he felt that people looked at him sardonically as the fellow who had wanted to write.8 His novel was revised and at the typist’s, his restless mind was temporarily without fuel for its combustion. No romantic eidolon being present, his nature demanded drama, more drama than his cynical games at the American Legion or his baiting of the University Club could provide, or even the final and irrevocable end of the Katharine affair, brought on by Katharine’s mother. He found it in the mystery of Kent Hagler’s death.

  For it now appeared, from Clarissa Hagler’s distressed letters,9 that there was a mystery. Shortly before his death, Kent had given to a Paris acquaintance a sealed letter, asking that it be mailed to Kent’s father if anything happened to Kent. It arrived sometime after the news of Kent’s death, and it said, in terms so melodramatic that the Kent Hagler of Harvard would have laughed at it, that he had gone to Paris to track down a man who had mortally wronged him. If he found him he would kill him, or would be killed himself. He wanted his father to understand this purpose, in case news of some accident or fatality reached him.

  That note, coming on the heels of the cable saying that Kent was dead of “cerebral congestion,” distracted Clarissa Hagler, who had worshiped her brother. She was half convinced that Kent was not dead, that the letter was a cover-up, that he had perhaps killed his enemy and was in hiding, that he was in need of help, in danger. She transferred from her adored brother to her brother’s friend all the questions that her anguish suggested.

  Nobody, especially a distressed girl, ever asked Bernard DeVoto for help and failed to get it. He always respected trouble, having experienced some of his own. Moreover, Kent Hagler had been his closest friend. The gloom that might have been added to his already crushing depression did not, however, descend. In a way, Kent Hagler’s death was a dramatic release.

  From Ogden, a third of the world away from Paris and more than two thousand miles from Wellesley, he fired off letters of comfort, assurance, and advice to Clarissa, and to Melville Smith in Paris he wrote asking him to investigate as discreetly as possible all the details and the people involved: Burroughs, the acquaintance in whose room Kent had died, and who had sent the cable; the man who had been given the letter to mail; the tart with whom Kent had been living (no word to Clarissa of this); the coroner or physician who had made that diagnosis of cerebral hemorrhage; anyone else. He told Melville to check all possibilities of suicide, for he remembered those cyanide salts Kent had used to carry; and of foul play, poison, violence; he wanted him to determine if possible whether this was a case of a frail young man dying of his Bohemian excesses, or whether the note and its melodramatic suggestions really meant something. If Kent had killed himself with drink, cerebral hemorrhage did not seem quite the right fatal outcome, and he was too young a man for cerebral hemorrhage to seem proper in any case.

  For several months he kept up a feverish three-way correspondence, feeding to Clarissa only such details as he thought she should know, castigating Melville Smith for his slowness (he said Smith was the sort of man who would start out to get a newspaper and come back months later by way of California), t
esting Smith’s reported facts, framing theories. He found himself becoming more and more an adviser, brotherly or fatherly or something else, to Clarissa. He agreed to edit, as a memorial, Kent’s war letters.10 Partly his motivation was sympathy for Clarissa’s trouble and the family’s grief, partly it was his own uneasiness about the mystery of Kent’s death, partly it was (one guesses) the reassurance that comes with being a protector. Neurotics who become psychiatrists and lost souls who become social workers know the feeling. And lack of generosity to people in distress was a fault of neither Benny DeVoto nor his father. In his brotherly-and-more effort to spare Clarissa any sordid details, in his will to raise up her spirits and give her of his strength, he sounds as noble as the Virginian, and why not? That was the way of his nature and his youth.

  But Smith’s investigation turned up little.11 The doctor who had examined Kent said he had seen no signs that the death was not from the cause he assigned it to. Melville had not requested an autopsy while the body was being held in Paris, because that would have brought into the case speculation, newspaper stories, and other things he thought the family should be spared. If there was poison, there was no way now of finding out; and likewise no way of knowing whether it had been put in Kent’s cognac by another or by himself. The girl he had been living with knew nothing; Burroughs seemed to be what he said he was, a jewelry salesman having a holiday in Paris; and when he brought Kent’s body home at the family’s request they, too, found themselves believing his story that he had gone to bed one night leaving Kent reading with a bottle of cognac at his elbow, and had been wakened by the maid crying, “Votr’ ami, c’est mort!” Kent had been planning a walking trip next day. Was that in preparation for his hunting down of his enemy? No way of telling. Had the enemy found him first, and killed him? No evidence, and no knowledge among any of Kent’s friends that he was on bad terms with anyone. Was the whole thing a delusion, some figment of neurosis or DT’s? If so, the possibility of finding out had died with Kent.

  So, gradually, what had begun as a mystery tense with possibilities faded and raveled out. The mystery would tease and bother DeVoto for years, and he would eventually write elements of it into his fourth novel and then later amplify the novel with an extended, fictionized recapitulation of the Kent Hagler story, as part of his autobiographical letters to Kate Sterne.12 But he would never get an answer, never come any closer to solving the mystery than when he wrestled with it through the winter of 1920–21.

  As the excitement faded out, Ogden’s narcosis and the lethargy and self-doubt of exile seeped in to fill its place. “I am confronted by the terrible truth that I am doing nothing, but am wasting time while life slips away—and the more terrible truth that my ability and even my desire are diminishing,” he wrote Melville Smith on February 10, 1921. But the very act of expressing his apathy made him rouse up to deny it. Somehow he would pull out; the things that were in him were not easily killed. Only young hope and optimism had been killed; what could not be done with enthusiasm might be done by sheer doggedness. He had begun his new novel (no word about the first, which still exists as an unpublished manuscript among his papers and which E. H. Balch of Putnam’s rejected on April 21), but “one is not credulous. However confident I am of it and however rosy it may sometimes appear, I know to a minim how little it will assay. The difficulties of the environment and the obstacles to work are not the reason for my incredulity. I have obeyed Socrates perhaps too thoroughly, and know myself, a knowledge in which one has no pride.”13

  Thus the winter of his discontent passed, and the spring following, while he fought the sickness of his spirit with the only weapon that seemed even temporarily to heal it: work. Work was all that made Ogden tolerable; work was what the shrinking spirit would stiffen up to when it would stiffen to nothing else. He got on with his new book; he dared to dream of getting back to Cambridge, “the one place where I feel I belong.” He got a good deal of pleasure out of his platonic, tomboy relationship with Skinny, that symbol of the peppy, asexual, irreverent, good-scout flapper of the emerging twenties.

  But by the beginning of June his incubus had fastened on him again, a new disintegration of nerve and collapse of will that made the summer of 1921 as dreadful to him as the previous fall had been. Kent Hagler’s letters were piled on his desk half edited, his novel had stopped on June 2 and could not be made to go again, his hope of returning to Cambridge had had to be given up for lack of three hundred dollars. His life, dependent for its bare necessities on the father with whom he could not get along, had become “an existence between pauperism and drugged dreams.” He drank too much Green River redeye.

  The physical symptoms of his illness, which had again begun as aggravated insomnia and had progressed through high blood pressure to a functional heart disturbance, were over by August, but he was left in a state of deepest depression. “All the decency and aspiration in me, if indeed I had any, have died,” he wrote Melville Smith, his link with the Left Bank Bohemia where young Americans by scores and hundreds were making music and history and love. “Now what is the trouble? It cannot be the environment, for if it were that merely, I should be able to get out. No, it is something less tangible, a subtle motion or influence of the blood … not the commonplace wearing down to contented pedestrianism … not mediocrity but an inheritance of a different sort, a type of failure without romance or glamor, the cards stacked not from without but from within, a deep internal humiliation and abasement that is still not extraneous or cosmic but personal in origin.”14

  Some of that was perhaps self-dramatizing, some of it may have been merely the fashionable literary Weltschmerz of the period that led Sam Hoffenstein, one of the parodic mouthpieces of the twenties, to exclaim in a momentarily serious poem,

  But now I know how rare a thing, how truly rare

  Is true despair!

  One aspect of literary despair in the twenties was its association with an extraordinary ebullience of productive work. One aspect of DeVoto’s was that it balked his work, time and again. And we should note the personal acceptance of responsibility. Not the environment, as bad as he thought it, and not his inheritance of his father’s paralyzed will or “the characteristic Dye crack-up”15 from his mother’s family, but himself was to blame for his trouble. That honesty was the best thing in him, and it does not matter that he may have got it from literary sources, from William Ernest Henley, who would be the master of his fate and the captain of his soul, or from Othello, who in the crux took by the throat the circumcised dog who had wronged him, and smote him, thus. Wherever he got it, it eventually saved him from the fate of his father and perhaps of Kent Hagler. He chose not to blame fate, nature, or nurture. If he fell apart he blamed himself.

  Yet he could not say how the enemy within had come into being, what it was in himself that cut the hamstrings of his ambition and opened the veins of his self-confidence. And self-knowledge, however stubborn, could not gain him control over his life, could neither rouse him out of his numbness nor prevent the closing in of the periodic dread. There was no doctor in Ogden who could help him. He thought—he was fully confident—that he was going mad.

  In periods when his illness eased somewhat he did a little work, clerked at Spargo’s, took an assignment from the Standard, wrote a little on the novel. He saw Skinny off to school in Washington by squiring her through the booths of a carnival sponsored by the Herman Baker Post of the American Legion, winning her Kewpie dolls at the shooting gallery, and walking afterward for several hours, “almost breath-takingly chaste and uninvolved,” up one of the canyons.16 Then, in November, presumably as a substitute or fill-in, he took a job teaching United States history at the North Junior High School.

  He discovered that he had a gift for teaching, a gift enhanced by certain personal habits such as his profanity and his talent for the sulphurous phrase. He tickled the boys half to death with his daring, he shocked some girls and fascinated others, he offended parents and fellow teachers and took some pleasu
re in doing so. Ogden, he said, had “sharpened his social tongue, which was already sharp enough,” and had hardened him in his habit of iconoclasm. He stated his opinions of holy matters at 200 per cent of par, he introduced destructive bacteria under the skin of the godly, and the double gratification of having a despised target and a captive audience got him through the winter. He was not the sort of junior high school teacher who was likely to be retained, but by June, when his job ended, he had Skinny to occupy his mind.

  She had contracted encephalitis while away at school, had come close to dying, and had come home early to recuperate. Remembering this relationship later, writing about it to another sick girl, Kate Sterne, DeVoto either deliberately embroidered it to make a good story, or reported not so much the truth as his fantasy, or in some act of creation very like the creation of fiction, remade the relationship with Skinny according to the template of his own wishfulness. As he reported, “A queer thing happened at once. We became absolutely essential to each other and yet the exterior of it was just an amused friendship. Neither of us ever told the other, except in rare and momentary oblique allusions, what was wrong with us, but both of us knew damned well—so far as we could know without the vocabulary that I’m now letter-perfect in. We didn’t make love to each other, we didn’t even, in the language of the period, neck. Only, if I showed up at the hideous sandstone mansion at the corner of Twenty-seventh and Adams at seven-thirty in the morning, noon, or half past nine at night, Skinny quite unhesitatingly grabbed a hat and we were off to walk five or twenty miles or drive twenty or a hundred and fifty. Or I might say goodnight to her at midnight and go home and go to bed. After I’d been asleep an indefinite time I’d sit straight up in bed, recognizing the toot of a certain Willys-Knight horn. At whatever time it was I knew that Skinny had had an attack of the horrors, I’d finish dressing in the car, and we’d be off—not saying much, just deriving some odd and intimate and profound stability from each other.”17