The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto

  FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2015

  Copyright © 1988 by Wallance Stegner

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Except as noted, all photos courtesy of Mrs. Bernard De Voto. Photo 2: SOOY, Ogden, Utah; photos 30 and 31: James Wolverton Mason; photo 35: Pix photo by K. W. Hermann; photo 43: Carl E. Vermilya, staff photographer, The Oregonioan, Portland, Oregon.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91169-3

  v3.1_r1

  This is a book which in simple justice must be dedicated to the Tribe of Benny—to those who as his friends, companions, colleagues, and antagonists were so constantly bombarded, needled, provoked, challenged, outraged, informed, and enlarged by his conversation and his books.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Quote

  I THE AMNIOTIC HOME

  1 · “These People Are Not My People”

  2 · Fossil Remnants of a Frontier Boyhood

  3 · Harvard

  4 · A Spiritual War

  5 · Harvard ’20—as of ’18

  6 · “Between Pauperism and Drugged Dreams”

  II NORTHWESTERN

  1 · Students and Epworth Leaguers

  2 · In Print

  3 · The Mercury Mood

  4 · Stirring Up the Animals

  5 · “One Story to the S.E.P.”

  III MORE PRIVILEGED EARTH

  1 · Breaking In—and Down

  2 · “Functional Justification as Part of an Institution”

  3 · New England: There She Stands

  4 · Bernardo Furioso

  5 · On Bread Loaf Mountain

  6 · Lincoln, Mass.

  7 · Seminar on Pareto

  8 · The Literary and the Left

  9 · Pen Pal

  10 · We Accept with Pleasure

  11 · Editorial Temptations

  12 · “Keep Your Self-Respect”

  13 · A Hazard of New Fortunes

  Photo Insert I

  IV THE MANHATTAN CAPTIVITY

  1 · On Moving to New York

  2 · Beside the Limpopo

  3 · “You’re There to Lick ’Em for Us”

  4 · “An Incumbrance for His Lively Spirit”

  5 · Cambridge Regained

  6 · An Incident on Bread Loaf Mountain

  V “PERIODIC ASSISTANCE FROM MR. JOHN AUGUST”

  1 · Mostly Waste Motion

  2 · Certain Satisfactions

  3 · America Revisited

  4 · Keeping Promises

  5 · War Effort

  6 · History as Synecdoche: The Year of Decision: 1846

  VI BLOWS GIVEN AND TAKEN

  1 · “So Goes Another of My Fathers”

  2 · “Fools, Liars, and Mr. DeVoto.”

  3 · Strange Fruit

  4 · “The Job I’m Eyeing Is Lewis and Clark”

  5 · Historian by Serendipity

  6 · Dog to His Vomit

  Photo Insert II

  VII FULL CAREER

  1 · “The Best Thing I Ever Did in My Life”

  2 · A Function of Journalism

  3 · Crusader

  4 · The Lost World of Fiction

  5 · The Course of Empire

  6 · The Perils of Paul Pro

  7 · Collection of Clowns and Cowards

  8 · “May Six O’clock Never Find You Alone.”

  9 · Deathward from Childhood

  Photo Insert III

  Notes

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  First by accident and later through his friendship and example, the curve of my life has touched some of the points that Bernard DeVoto’s did. We were both boys in Utah, though at different times and in different towns. We were both Westerners by birth and upbringing, novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us. We both made our way eastward to Harvard, with a stop in the Middle West. We were for some years neighbors in Cambridge and colleagues at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The same compulsion that made amateur historians of us made us conservationists as well: we both wrote a good deal on the subject of conservation, and we both served on the Advisory Board for National Parks, Historical Sites, Buildings, and Monuments.

  But until I began this biography I had not realized how many of my basic attitudes about the West, about America in general, about literature, and about history parallel his, either because so much of our experience retraced the same curve or because of his direct influence. It would be impossible at this date to say how many of my attitudes have been formed or modified by contact with him; but the debt is considerable, and I freely acknowledge it.

  As a consequence of both the parallelism and the confluences of our lives, the making of this biography has meant renewed contact with many mutual friends, and that has been the pleasantest part of the job. I have profited so much, from so many individuals, that a full accounting would bankrupt me. There is even a sense in which this record of Benny’s personality and career is a collaborative effort of his friends. Nevertheless, I have done my best to be objective; and though I thank all those who have helped Benny back to life for me, I assume full responsibility for what I have done to their recollections and the ways in which I have arranged or interpreted their memories. I have tried to re-create Benny DeVoto as he was—flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull. He was a force in his times, though probably less a force than he would have been if he had represented another region than the Far West, and certainly than he would have been if he had not stood at the passages of Jordan crying, “Say now Shibboleth.” He challenged many of the fads and intellectual assumptions of his times, and he never had a gang—he only had friends, and enemies, and those who had to pay attention, however irritated or aggrieved.

  For what must have seemed to her an interminable time, ever since 1968, Avis DeVoto has helped me promptly, efficiently, fully; she has corrected my errors and done her best to clarify my obscurities; she has dug into memories that had to be painful, and put herself cheerfully at the disposal of my book, and has trusted me. I not only thank her, I salute her.

  For advice, assistance, friendly support, help so generous that sometimes it has humbled me, I say my thanks, collectively but with personal intention, to many people: to Fred Anderson, George Ball, Stewart Ball, Anne Barrett, Fred Bissell, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sarah Boyden, Carol Brandt, Dr. Mary Brazier, Lila Eccles Brimhall, Fawn Brodie, Paul Brooks, Paul Buck, Constance Bunnell, and Lyman Butterfield; to Ralph Chaney, Henry Steele Commager, and Malcolm Cowley; to Dorothy di Santillana, Scottie Eccles, Paul Ferris, Leon Fetzer, John Fischer, and David Freed; to John Kenneth Galbraith, A. B. Guthrie, Ray B. Hall, W. E. Higman, George Homans, Ida James, Howard and Bessie Jones, and Alfred Knopf; to Eric Larrabee, William Lederer, Richard Lillard, and Dr. Alfred and Julie Ludwig; to Edward Martin, Dave MacDonald, Elizabeth Browning McLeod, Frederick Merk, Kenneth and Eleanor Murdock, Laurette Murdock, and Theodore and Kathleen Morrison; to Talcott Parsons, Mrs. Arthur Perkins, Earl Pomeroy, Ricardo Quintana, Henry Reck, and Dr. Gregory Rochlin; to Mark Saxton,
Dr. Herbert Scheinberg, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Scowcroft, Robert Shenton, Claude Simpson, William and Julie Sloane, Henry Nash Smith, Carl Spaeth, Howard Stagner, and George Stevens; to Lovell Thompson and Edward Weeks.

  Five friends who helped me a very great deal died before the book was finished. I will always owe Robeson Bailey, Helen Everitt, Elizabeth Kennedy, Dale L. Morgan, and Lawrance Thompson the thanks that I should have offered sooner.

  To those who willingly read through an early draft in the effort to save me from error, I owe a special debt. They were Avis DeVoto, Anne Barrett, Dr. Lawrence Kubie, Kay and Ted Morrison, Mark Saxton, Julie and William Sloane, Dr. Herbert Scheinberg, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I will guarantee them some errors in spite of their efforts.

  Patricia Palmer, Susan Rosenberg, Julius Barclay, and Ralph Hansen of the Stanford libraries have been cheerful and indispensable in guiding me through the DeVoto papers. Edward Connery Lathem of the Baker Memorial Library of Dartmouth College has exceeded even himself in helpfulness to a peripatetic scholar. In addition, I have benefited from the prompt help of librarians at the University of Montana, Middlebury College, Bread Loaf, the University of Vermont, the University of Utah, and the Weber County Library in Ogden, Utah—librarians whose names I may have miserably and unforgivably forgotten but whose helpfulness I have not.

  Much of the work of this book was done under a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The early stages were aided by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. To both of those organizations I give my thanks.

  WALLACE STEGNER

  Biography is the wrong field for the mystical, and for the wishful, the tender-minded, the hopeful, and the passionate. It enforces an unremitting skepticism—toward its material, toward the subject, most of all toward the biographer.… His job is not dramatic; it is only to discover evidence and to analyze it. And all the evidence he can find is the least satisfactory kind, documentary evidence, which is among the most treacherous phenomena in a malevolent world. With luck he will be certain of the dates of his subject’s birth and marriage and death, the names of his wife and children, a limited number of things he did and offices he held and trades he practised and places he visited and manuscript pages he wrote, people he praised or attacked, and some remarks made about him. Beyond that, not even luck can make certainty possible. The rest is merely printed matter, and a harassed man who sweats his life out in libraries, courthouses, record offices, vaults, newspaper morgues, and family attics. A harassed man who knows that he cannot find everything and is willing to believe that, forever concealed from him, exists something which, if found, would prove that what he takes to be facts are only appearances.

  Bernard DeVoto

  “The Skeptical Biographer”

  Was it fancy, sweet nurse,

  Was it a dream,

  Or did you really

  Take hold of my scalp lock

  When I was half asleep this morning

  And open up a trapdoor in my skull

  And drop a poached egg in among my brains?

  Don Marquis, Grotesques

  I

  THE AMNIOTIC HOME

  1 · “These People Are Not My People”

  Thirty-five miles north of Salt Lake City, spread across the alluvial land between the Wasatch Mountains and the salt marshes of Great Salt Lake, is the city of Ogden, Utah. First settled as the ranch of the mountain man Miles Goodyear, it became a Mormon colony and later a division point on the Union Pacific. After the railroad-building boom of the late 1860s, it replaced another hell-raising town, Corinne, at the north end of Great Salt Lake, as the only Gentile stronghold in Brigham Young’s empire. But no determination to be a seat of opposition, intransigence, and heresy could be maintained in the face of Mormon pressure and infiltration. Corinne wound up a ghost town, and Ogden wound up about as mixed as Salt Lake City itself, a city whose politics, economics, and social life were all resultants of the intersection of religious lines of force. By the 1890s, Ogden was substantially under Mormon control. Then the Liberal Party rallied all the varieties of opposition and took some of the control back. So it has gone, a seesaw or a standoff. Just before World War II, when industry and administration were being dispersed, as it were, beyond the Urals, the town acquired some war industry, some additional regional offices of federal bureaus, and the headquarters of the Army’s Ninth Corps Area, which had previously been based at the Presidio, in San Francisco. The old Ogden Arsenal, beginning in 1940, was transformed into Hill Air Force Base. For some years, until 1971, Ogden was known in infamy as the address to which the entire West mailed its income-tax returns.

  Before it began to be invigorated by these federal transfusions, it was a rather stodgy postfrontier town of 30,000-odd, a transportation-and-mining-created human accretion unworthy of its splendid setting. From its tracks and marshaling yards it straggled uphill through warehouses and a business district based upon an avenue named for President George Washington, and upward through a succession of other presidential avenues as far as Polk. There were some pretentious houses both Mormon and Gentile, many more that were somewhat shabby middle class. After Polk the streets gave out in weeds and sagebrush, and the foothills (or rather the terraces, fossil beaches of ancient Lake Bonneville) lifted toward the Wasatch Mountains, over whose abrupt escarpment an eastern moon, in season, rose to shed imported enchantment.

  In the late summer of 1920, in one half of a nondescript duplex house at 2561 Monroe Avenue, one of Ogden’s most gifted sons was undergoing a nervous breakdown. What had begun as insomnia and eye trouble had gone on to migraines that split his head like a watermelon and brought on fits of agonized vomiting, and from there to deep depression, helplessness, and panic. If he forced himself to work on the novel whose manuscript was all over his desk, he knew even as he worked that the effort was useless, that the thing was inert, foolish, jejune, dead, worse than bad. During that summer he had written an unkind little article on Senator Reed Smoot and sent it off to Oswald Garrison Villard at The Nation, who had once kindly invited him to contribute things from the West. Some time after he mailed the envelope, his depression was instantly cured by a letter from Villard accepting the essay. Next day came an unexplained letter rejecting and returning it. Bottom again. Whenever he ventured outside he walked fearfully, feeling himself watched. Without warning, a cold, sweating dread could rise up out of the hot streets and engulf him. The familiar smells of his town, known from boyhood and sensuously cherished, were a mockery. He could not smell bitter cottonwood or watered lawns or the fruit scents of a passing produce wagon, or even the salt smell of Great Salt Lake that foretold rain, without that irrational panic of the blood. Sometimes he could not force himself to cross a street. Sidewalks humped by tree roots reached for his feet as he fled.

  His mother was dead a year. His father was a brilliant, contrary, sometimes lovable, mule-headed eccentric with a paralyzed will. He himself was in process of breaking up with a girl who for a year and a half had enforced his passionate adoration. He had no job, no prospects, no future, no place in this town that imprisoned him. In every face he met he saw ridicule for a man fool enough to imagine himself a writer, and fear of a man overeducated and probably revolutionary. Though he was gregarious, and had friends, the friends who shared his deepest intellectual interests were far off, in another country. To one of them, Melville Smith, he had written in July:

  Do not forget that at best I am a spore in Utah, not adapted to the environment, a maverick who may not run with the herd, unbranded, given an ill name. These people are not my people, their God is not mine. We respect, hate, and distrust each other, and though self-defense forces me to take them with much humor, nothing forces them so to take me. You, who have the good fortune to be among that other kind of people, must share your good fortune with me. I am much nearer to you than I shall ever be to Utah.1

  In his desk drawer, among a handful of personal papers, were a Certificate of Baptism sta
ting that at the age of four, in Omaha, Nebraska, a town with which he had no connection, he had been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, in which he did not believe; a paper commissioning him as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry, trained and approved to fight in a war that was now over and that he had never got to; a diploma—which he had determined was not real sheepskin—granting him the rights and privileges of a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College, with honors; and a clipping from the Harvard Crimson listing him among the seniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa. One of the things that fretted him during his sleepless nights was that he had never been notified of his election by the Phi Beta Kappa chapter itself, and that the secretary had not replied to his two importunate letters. Was it a fact, then, or an error? Did he or did he not belong, and if he belonged why had they not notified him? Like all the rest of the world, that stuffy scholarly organization that he scorned even while he yearned for its certification seemed to ignore him and deny his existence.

  2 · Fossil Remnants of a Frontier Boyhood

  East of Ogden, several canyons cut into the Wasatch. Of these, Taylor Canyon, Waterfall Canyon, Strong’s Canyon, and most especially Ogden Canyon, which led up to the heart of the range and the beautiful circular valley that the mountain men had called Ogden’s Hole, were always places of escape and resort. They were wild pathways for hiking boys, and Ogden Canyon offered a fine trout stream, and locations for summer cabins out of the valley heat, and access to a maze of smaller canyons that were almost wilderness.1 But still another canyon, Weber (pronounced Weeber), opened widely south of the city, and it was no dead-end refuge but a gateway, one of the great gateways of western history. Through it, following down the Weber River, had come one branch of the California Trail as well as part of the Mormon migration. Down it came the transcontinental railroad and the highway that under several names—Lincoln Highway, US 30N, Interstate 80N—has always been a major access route to the Great Basin from the East.