The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Read online

  In September 1947, after what he thought an especially successful Bread Loaf session, he wrote his impressions to Mark Saxton, once his student at Harvard, the son of his friend Eugene Saxton at Harper’s, and later a colleague on the mountain:

  When you come to write that obit for Fred Melcher,* recollect that one of the biggest of the conflicts that have made my inner life as picturesque as the Valley of Dry Bones is the one between teaching and writing. Jim Conant, who resolved it without solving it, sacrificed the useful part of me and certainly did nothing for beautiful letters.… Bread Loaf, as may have occurred to you, is the damnedest place. My own hangover has persisted up to now. The bloody membrane of personalities … oppressed me there and does still. I went only under duress and it about used up my margin of safety. At the same time, the experience of working with friends at a common job is damn near inestimable.… A man who is at once bright enough and ass enough to be a writer is also sensitive enough about his personal deficiencies to long for functional justification as part of an institution. I suppose that’s why so uncomfortable, vexatious, and emotionally exhausting a place as Bread Loaf becomes so memorable to us as an experience looked back on.3

  In several essays, columns, and Easy Chairs, DeVoto testified that the teaching that went on at Bread Loaf was the best he had ever observed or taken part in, far better than any English department in the country could provide.4 The pros, he said, do do it best. But there were other reasons, more personal and compulsive, why he went to Bread Loaf every summer when his affairs permitted—went often at the sacrifice of something important to him.

  Bread Loaf on its green plateau was in some ways a suburb of Cambridge, for many inheritors of the Wendell-Briggs-Copeland-Hurlbut tradition of the teaching of writing practiced there: Morrison, Robert Hillyer, Archibald MacLeish, Edward Weeks, and others. But scattered through this core group were writers from many other places, and always a salting of the editors, agents, and publishers, mainly from New York, whom it was DeVoto’s professional necessity to know and deal with. As much as any of the hopefuls who came there to break in, he benefited from the Bread Loaf associations, and he found them easy to make because he himself never had to break in. From the first, because of his Cambridge connections, he was an insider.5

  Through the rest of his life, his closest friends and literary associates were likely to have at least a remote Bread Loaf connection. They were there when he came, or they came in later years by the natural processes of recruitment, or he met and liked them elsewhere and exerted himself to get them invited to the Conference. Certain Fellows about whom he was enthusiastic, especially Catherine Drinker Bowen,6 Josephine Johnson,7 and Fletcher Pratt,8 got asked back as staff members in later years, and it was of the essence of Morrison’s low-keyed administration of the place that people who worked well together and fitted in with what came to be called the “team” were repeatedly asked back. Instead of bringing together celebrities who might pull in customers, he chose people who had proved themselves willing and able to teach the customers something.

  Of the team of fiction teachers, DeVoto was both strategist and field captain. By influencing the selection of the fiction staff and by further influencing the attack it made upon teaching problems, he steered the fiction program in directions congemal to himself. Those he could not influence, he accepted or worked around. In fact, he was far more tolerant of differences when the opposition was a colleague on the mountain than he would have been in Cambridge or in print. Thus with Gorham Munson, who as a little-magazine critic, a founder of Secession, an advocate of Social Credit, and the author of a book on Waldo Frank9 could hardly have been farther from DeVoto’s corner, he shared Treman Cottage for many summers without friction and with a good deal of conviviality. Occasionally a fastidious nature found the DeVoto bumptiousness offensive, as did Gladys Hasty Carroll in 1935. She complained about him to the management as vulgar and uncouth and given to profane revelry.10 But it was DeVoto, not Miss Carroll, who returned in 1936 and subsequent summers.

  Once in a while DeVoto took direct action against someone. For instance Raymond Everitt, who in 1934, at Bread Loaf, became DeVoto’s agent, and later on, as vice-president of Little, Brown, became his publisher. What began as a warm friendship cooled somewhat. Before too many years DeVoto was thinking of Everitt as a mildly insufferable Yale boy, though he liked Everitt’s wife, Helen, and found her a solid member of the fiction team. As publications adviser to the Conference, Raymond Everitt had somewhat less to do than the active teachers on the mountain, and more time to play tennis. His game was precise and contolled, full of tricky drops shots, a lollipop game in DeVoto’s view. Unfortunately, Benny’s thunderous and muscle-bound power game did not always defeat it—and anyway, DeVoto had all but given up tennis. So he got Ted Morrison to import as a Fellow, in the summer of 1936, his first Cambridge friend, Robeson Bailey. Though as a former president of the Advocate and assistant editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine and as author of some sporting articles and stories Bailey had the qualifications to be a Fellow, he swears that the only reason he was brought to Bread Loaf was to defeat Raymond Everitt in tennis. For Bailey had played on the Harvard tennis team and was possessed of a severe service, sound ground strokes, and a habit of bouncing smashes over twenty-foot back fences. For a good many summers after that first one as Fellow, he returned to Bread Loaf in the role of Administrative Assistant and performed his solemn duty on the tennis court while DeVoto watched.11

  That was a characteristic Bread Loaf situation, one expression of the irritable intensifications that the Conference produced in personal relations. Much more important were the relations with the fiction team, which, though it changed somewhat over the years, was remarkably consistent both in its personnel and in its approach. One perennial member was Edith Mirrielees, of Stanford, a maiden lady as gentle as DeVoto was bumptious, as natural-born a teacher as he was himself, and as acute a critic of a manuscript. They became, improbably, the closest of friends.12 Another was Helen Everitt,13 who besides being a member of the short story team, helped DeVoto plot the Collier’s serials that, beginning with 1936, he ground out in a mist of migraine and fury when his money needs grew too acute. Another was William Sloane,14 who first appeared on the mountain as an editor for Holt, Robert Frost’s publisher, and returned year after year to become one of DeVoto’s closest friends and coadjutors. Still another was Mark Saxton,15 his former student who was first associated with William Sloane Associates and later with the Harvard University Press.

  For three years in the 1930s Julia Peterkin16 was a member of the team; for a while, Hervey Allen17 was; now and again I was; at least once, though not when DeVoto was there, John Marquand18 was. For a couple of years at the end of the 1930s, Herschel Brickell,19 professional book reviewer and editor of the O. Henry Memorial Awards short-story volume, fitted in. In the 1940s came A. B. Guthrie20 and Joseph Kinsey Howard,21 both Westerners and both close to DeVoto. With occasional short-term substitutions, those made up what might be called the working staff. In and around and through them, for a week or a weekend or the whole session, came a succession of publishers and agents: John Farrar, Everitt, Edward Weeks of the Atlantic, Lovell Thompson of Houghton Mifflin, Marshall Best of Viking, Alan Collins of the Curtis Brown agency, Herbert Agar of the Louisville Courier-Journal. At frequent intervals, to solace the customers for the unrelieved meat-and-potatoes diet provided by the team, celebrities added dessert, including some meringue.

  This was fiction’s single ring in a multi-ringed circus. Around it, running their own rings during business hours and contributing their own forms of intensification to Treman Cottage during hours of relaxation, were the poets: Morrison, Frost, Hillyer, MacLeish, Louis Untermeyer, once William Carlos Williams, once John Crowe Ransom, later John Ciardi, who would eventually, in 1955, succeed Morrison as director. Drama was handled by John Mason Brown, Walter Prichard Eaton, John Gassner, in the main; and non-fiction by Gorham Munson, Fletcher Pratt,
Bailey, Catherine Drinker Bowen, and others. Some of these unquestionably influenced DeVoto—Edith Mirrielees, for instance—though by the variant of the second law of thermodynamics that makes powerful and highly charged natures flow outward to fill in areas of lesser potential, the influence was more often the other way. But all of them, even some he didn’t much like, enlisted his loyalty because of the shared experience of the place. If DeVoto ever in his life had an intense loyalty to an idea and a group, he had it to Bread Loaf.22

  Bread Loaf was summer’s climax, discovered in 1932 and returned to in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1947, 1948, and 1949.23 Like the annual rendezvous of the fur brigades in the 1830s and 1840s, which had always heated his imagination to incandescence, which had been the subject of his earliest western essays, and out of which he would make robust poetry in Across the Wide Missouri, this literary assemblage in greener and tamer mountains produced in him and many others among its participants a kind of frenzy, a heightening of every perception, capacity, and emotion. It combined a frantic amount of business with an equally frantic amount of fraternizing, revel, and emotional release. For two weeks DeVoto could divert the fatigue and anxiety of hack work, the belligerence of controversy, and the drive of ambition. Diving into Bread Loaf was a little like overcoming the fear of drowning by deliberately going over Niagara Falls.

  It was frenziedly, manically literary. It involved daily lectures, workshops, “clinics,” symposia, conferences, mountains of manuscript. It called for strategy meetings of the fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction teams after breakfast to work out the best way to tell the customers the most in the shortest period of time with the greatest lasting effect.24 It was argument, gossip, news, getting acquainted with newcomers to the staff and with the new batch of talented youngsters who came as Fellows. Between Bread Loaf Mountain’s cold August rains it was hikes on the Long Trail, which crossed the road at Middlebury Gap, or swims in the marble basins of Texas Falls, or square dances to the fiddling and calling of the Dragon brothers in Ripton. Day in, day out, whenever the weather permitted, it was furiously competitive tennis, though by the time I reached Bread Loaf, in 1938, DeVoto himself had almost given up the game and had long since imported his ringer to whip Raymond Everitt. For some (not for the DeVoto crowd) it was a two-week-long croquet tournament dominated by Walter Prichard Eaton; for all, after about 1940, it involved an annual softball game down at Robert Frost’s Ripton farm. And—what sometimes aroused disapproval or envy among the customers and even within the staff—it was a lot of not-uncompetitive drinking. Since DeVoto began his Bread Loaf career in the year that saw the repeal of Prohibition, he needed to exploit his Vermont border connections and double as Conference bootlegger only for a year or two, until state liquor stores opened and acquired adequate supplies. But he did his share in consumption.

  Noons were mild; you had time only for a quick drink between the end of classes and the dining-hall bugle. Evenings were something else. I remember them as they were from 1938 on; they could not have been much different earlier.

  At five o’clock Fletcher Pratt, that odd, brilliant little man, self-made historian and naval expert given to red-plaid wool shirts and pink-plaid ties, who hated breakfast and couldn’t eat eggs without anchovy paste on them, appeared mysteriously in the kitchen door of Treman Cottage waving a pitcher of arsenical martinis and twitching his wispy beard. (The beard came later, during the war, but let it pass; it completed Fletcher in his character as Merlin, and we all remember him better with it than without it.) His hoarse introit, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” brought forth staff and Fellows, bedraggled by the day’s work or already slicked up for dinner. Many of the ladies, adding a touch of grace to chaos, would have put on long dresses.

  The gathering in Treman before dinner was one version of the Hour on which DeVoto was to compose some of his most heartfelt lines. He loved that pause “when evening quickens in the street,” the time of day that “marks the lifeward turn.” Then, he felt, “the heart wakens from its coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost, or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.” Lengthened by loving preparations, the pause extends itself. The ear is soothed by soft voices, musical tinklings of ice and glass; the eyes are soothed by soft light. Then the glass comes dewed and icy into the hand, the head inclines, lips tentatively touch the rim. Magic. “The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted. Nerve ends that stuck through your skin like bristles when you blotted the last line or shut the office door behind you have withdrawn into their sheaths. Your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart. You were wrong about the day, you did more admirably than you believed, you did well enough, you did well.”25

  Treman’s noisy, crowded Hour was not the ideal. The ideal, DeVoto says in his dithyramb to Mother Alcohol, is no more than a handful, two or three friends, a charming woman, a quiet room, an unhurried foreplay of measuring and stirring. Like some other Bread Loaf experiences, its preprandial rituals, though he participated in them with devotion, were rough drafts only, approximations that often made the true believer wince. There is some reason to believe that the most blatant imperfection of the Treman Hour, the martinis of Fletcher Pratt, led DeVoto over several years to develop his personal theory of the martini, according to which the marriage of gin and vermouth is consummated in a proportion of 3.7 to 1 at a temperature of absolute zero. “Half genius and half rodent,” he called Fletcher, and loved him as well as he ever loved anybody. But not even love could stomach Fletcher’s martinis, and not even the affection and security of friends in a known and loved place could disguise the fact that the Ideal was unattainable even here, that the Hour at Bread Loaf was sixty minutes of bedlam.

  Evenings were a fitting completion of the days. If there was an evening lecture, either by a regular or a visitor, most attended, if not out of interest then out of sheer solidarity. But afterward they found themselves again sprawling in Treman’s worn wicker arguing the lecturer’s points or rehashing theory or trading notes on the Conference madwoman (there was always one), or with astonishing generosity and unselfishness promoting some newly discovered talent among the Fellows or the customers. Or they played poker, or made a game of throwing ice picks at the pocked kitchen door, or settled down to soul-searching with highballs in hand. I can remember vignettes from those evenings as clearly as I remember anything: Eudora Welty sitting worshipfully at the feet of Katherine Anne Porter after a reading, Truman Capote holding himself conspicuously aloof from Louis Untermeyer after Untermeyer had lectured on contemporary poetry and called T. S. Eliot a writer of society verse, Carson McCullers in her starched, white boys’ shirt deep in talk with W. H. Auden—and deep in my last bottle of bourbon, which I had been saving for Sunday, when the liquor store in Brandon would be closed. I can remember the night one of the Fellows, a boy just invalided out of the Royal Air Force after forty-seven bombing missions, lifted somebody else’s bottle and hid it under his coat and took it to his room and went to bed with it, and to sleep; and how one of the staff, keeping an eye on him, went quietly over after a while and rescued the bottle and pulled the blankets up over the kid and tiptoed out.

  That sort of evening. Sometimes, while the conscientious tried to read manuscripts in their rooms upstairs, to which every word and laugh penetrated, and while the snakebit lay down to recover, others stood with their arms around one another in the hall and sang barbershop under the baton of Louis Untermeyer, dominated always by the beautiful basso cantante of Colonel Joe Greene, editor of the Infantry Journal, and at least once with the assistance of the black soprano Dorothy Maynor and her accompanist, Arpad Sandor. I do not take seriously DeVoto’s complaint about the glee-clubbers. Often I was one of them, and they were magnificent.

  But exhausting, to themselves and their auditors. At least during the 1930s and 1940s, everything ran at such a pace, everyo
ne worked so hard and played so hard and went to bed so late, that only will power held them together till the end. People of less than heroic fiber got sick, caught colds, got hung over, had accidents, sprained their ankles, ran into doors and blacked their eyes, fell in love, had quarrels, developed phobias and paranoias, so that every morning it was harder to get up and go forth to teach when duty’s bugle blew. More than one staff member, trying to see clearly enough to pack his bag on the last morning, blessed fate and the management that the Conference lasted only two weeks. One added day would have left staff, Fellows, and customers only quivering puddles of protoplasm.

  Nevertheless, from this combination of Plato’s Academy and Walpurgisnacht the customers more often than not went home thrilled and stimulated and overflowing with ambition and ideas; the Fellows left knowing what they needed to do to get a start on their careers, and knowing some people who were ready, willing, and strategically placed to help them; the professionals went back to their offices purged and refreshed, perhaps with a new novelist or two on their string; and the staff members who were college teachers dispersed to their several campuses full of readiness for the autumnal renewal under the elms.26