The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Read online

  Weber Canyon was the path by which the Outside reached Ogden. Like the moon, it brought word of happenings eastward, and it had seen most of the events and people of the brief, hot past that after a half century or so some Ogdenites began to think romantic. The Mormon lucerne fields and orchards between which railroad and highway passed had been the campsites of a people on the move westward. Before they were ever plowed or planted, they had been fertilized by the casual graves of Indians, mountain men, Morrisite heretics, and apostates rubbed out—rumor said—by Brigham Young’s Destroying Angels Bill Hickman, Porter Rockwell, and Hosea Stout. Farther east, beyond where Weber Canyon flattened out into a valley running lengthwise down the range, another pass, called Echo Canyon, came down through the red rock of the Wyoming Plateau, and up there Mormon minutemen had built breastworks, and Mormon cavalry had conducted guerrilla raids that stalled Albert Sidney Johnston’s invading army in the Fort Bridger snow in 1857. Through both Echo and Weber canyons the violent, portable camp called Hell on Wheels had passed as the Union Pacific raced westward toward closure with the Central Pacific at Promontory, and during its brief passage had disrupted, dismayed, altered, and made solvent the Mormon hamlets in the Weber bottoms.2

  In one such settlement, first called Easton and later rechristened Uinta by the railroad, Bernard Augustine DeVoto spent part of his boyhood on his grandfather’s farm. Born in Ogden on January 11, 1897, he was incomparably type-cast to represent the social and religious cleavages of the place, for his mother was the daughter of a pioneer Mormon farmer and his father was a vagrant Catholic intellectual, a former “perpetual student” and part-time teacher at Notre Dame.

  The boy was born into neither faith, but into the area of conflict between them; and since any conflict between a good Mormon and a faithful Catholic may be expected to end in a draw, it was predictable that he would adhere to neither. Actually, neither of his parents was a good communicant. His mother had backslid into the status that Utah knows as jack-Mormon, and his father, despite all those years at Notre Dame, was not a churchgoer.

  Nevertheless Catholicism had the advantage. To one born in the gopher hole of a Utah town, the Roman faith was bound to seem eastern, exotic, aristocratic, especially when it was the ostensible faith of a father whose intellectual capacities and training were superior to those of the people around him. Also, Florian DeVoto was a bitter anti-Mormon, and intellectually he remained a Jesuit. The baptism or young Bernard in Omaha was the doing of Florian’s sister Rose, and never took; but when it came time to send his only child to school, Florian concluded that there was no one in Ogden fit to teach that prodigy except the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. He sent Bernard to them, the only boy in a class of girls, until after several years the sisters themselves, finding him a handful and observing that he took a great interest in the opposite sex, suggested that he might now risk the public school.

  What Bernard got from his father was not a faith, or even an inclination toward one. By adolescence he was a confirmed agnostic. But he did get a stiff prejudice against the Mormon people, habits, and beliefs, a sense that culture existed only farther east and among people of another kind, and a pronounced, forced-draft hunger for the intellectual life. He really liked his mother’s people, found many of them first-rate, loved some of them dearly. But he admitted that the paternal inheritance, for which he had no such affection, was more important to his development. He did not scorn Catholicism as he scorned Mormonism, and not even the humiliating sense of difference he felt as the only boy among all the females of the Sacred Heart Academy could drive him back toward his mother’s church, against which he had been early inoculated. His intellectual affiliation remained with his father. He joined him among Mormonism’s sworn enemies.

  His mother was his protector and his refuge. A family story says that she nursed him at the breast until he was past two years old and running around. But it was his father who took charge of his mind. An embittered failure whose inherited money had been lost in land and mining speculations and whose talents as a linguist and mathematician went to waste in a hole-in-the-wall title-abstract office, Florian DeVoto was “a combination of Heyst, in Conrad’s Victory, and the Swift who wrote about the Yahoos.”3 A small man and a contentious one, with tiny tiny feet, he gave his son an example of thoroughgoing misanthropy and of an integrity that managed to alienate everyone it touched. He taught the boy to read at age three (according to family tradition, beginning with Pope’s Iliad).4 The same perhaps unreliable tradition says that he started to teach Bernard Greek at the same time, but if he did, the teaching took no better than Rose DeVoto Coffman’s rites of baptism. There is, however, no doubt that he set the boy at a very early age to a reading of the Greek, Latin, and Italian epics, and so bent the malleable child crookedly across all the conformities of a postfrontier half-Mormon town.

  What could Ogden make of a ten-year-old who was reading Orlando Furioso? Funny kid.

  The gods who really had charge of Bernard DeVoto’s boyhood were neither Mormon nor Catholic nor Renaissance humanist. Some goddess of geography had charge of the auspices. Religion, especially the pentecostal sects with which he classed Mormonism, always seemed to him one of the more egregious forms of delusion, but geography was a fact, an important fact with important consequences. It was important that the orchards of his grandfather Samuel Dye (“a perfect peasant, submissive, unimaginative, stolid, industrious, faithful, thorough”)5 lay in irrigated bottom land below a mountain watershed, for that single fact, familiar from infancy, instructed young DeVoto in a basic condition of western life. Even more important was the fact that it lay on one of the main thoroughfares of western history, for history offered the one dependable heritage to a boy born between worlds, in a place which his father’s contempt, his own sense of difference, and the literary currents of his time all led him to despise.

  Like many who fled the limited and puritanical village, he would not know until he had separated himself from it how much he knew about his home and how much he valued it. Later he said that he had no interest in western history until he left the West, but he had taken in a good deal through the pores.

  The curve of his life would be the curve traversed by many of those who made the influential literature of his generation, the curve of spiritual repudiation followed by physical exile followed by a delayed, reluctant, ambiguous return. “The Middle West,” said Glenway Wescott, is “a state of mind of people born where they do not like to live.”6 He needn’t have limited himself to the Middle West, or even to America. What Kewaskum was to him, and Sauk Center to Sinclair Lewis, and Cedar Rapids to Carl Van Vechten, and Oak Park to Ernest Hemingway, Indian Creek, Texas, was to Katherine Anne Porter, and Wellington, New Zealand, was to Katherine Mansfield, and Dublin was to James Joyce.

  And Ogden, Utah, was to Bernard DeVoto. By the time he graduated from Ogden High School his directions were established, he had been programmed for life. He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable. To Ogden he looked like a cowbird in a robin’s nest (“the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw,” says the sister of one of his boon companions).7 But he was not totally at odds with his place and time. In fact, he embraced frontier toughness as a substitute for—even a challenge to—the piety of the Mormon households in which he was a watched, suspected, and not always welcomed interloper. He played poker, he used tobacco, he spoke, at least, of using liquor, and this among people who still observed the Word of Wisdom, the dietary restrictions set forth in Joseph Smith’s Pearl of Great Price. He acquired, and valued, the casual skills of a western boy who has grown up close to open country but not in the absolute sticks. The opening of Ogden Canyon was no more than three miles from the center of downtown—a few minutes’ bicycle ride put a boy at the edge of wildness.

  Thus Bernard, a somewhat fat boy in his youth, who tried to play high school football and broke an ankle at
it, was a good shot with either rifle or revolver, a good, self-reliant mountain camper and hiker. He slept his share of nights on top of Mount Ogden, and his favorite sport was marksmanship. He spent a lot of time, when he was an officer in the high school ROTC, at the National Guard range, and he never went into the mountains without a cartridge belt and a holstered revolver or automatic. At the same time, he was a pretty good tennis player in what Bill Tilden used to call the “Young Pete Swattem” style.

  Through schoolboy and summer jobs he had gained a certain amount of concrete experience. Probably he never worked at as many jobs as he later claimed, or qualified himself as expert in so many skills, but he seems to have sold tickets and muscled baggage on the interurban line between Ogden and Salt Lake, and at several times, including the summer after his graduation from high school, he wrote sports and occasionally other things for the Ogden Evening Standard.8 Thus he could reassure himself in later life that he had been apprenticed in the hard school of professional journalism. It probably delighted him with some glimpses of the non-pious side of Ogden; it probably taught him to get around among different kinds of people, gave him a nose for a story and a certain skill at discovering and ransacking sources of facts. It contributed to confidence, and perhaps to the overconfidence which is one face of insecurity. Later on, warring with the effete and literary in New York, he would belligerently assert his pride in being a “mere” journalist.

  The Standard may also have contributed to his pose of worldly toughness, as well as to his realism, his contempt for cant, his cynical nose for the taint of hypocrisy, and his expectation of human cussedness. If his father’s misanthropy taught him that every man was probably a liar, a cheat, and a thief, and his father’s residual Catholicism told him that there existed in the universe and in men an abiding principle of evil that could not be wished or exorcised away, the Standard in the summer of 1914 and at odd times later instructed him in some of evil’s practical manifestations, exemplars, and victims.

  A journalist, he liked to call himself later, and perhaps then. But a very literary one. From his father’s bookshelves, which mirrored the tastes of a man “steeped in a culture which had been closed for almost a hundred years,” he found his way to fiction, of which his father had little, and to the “advanced” books that gave an overliterary boy a chance to feel superior. He admits that he bought more books than he read, and talked about more than he bought, but he and his two friends Wendell (“Fitz”) Fitzgerald and W. E. (Eddie) Higman bought a good many and read some, all tending to persuade them that Ogden was an uncultivated hole and that the fine mind must find its sustenance elsewhere.9

  The Ramayana, the Koran, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy’s plays, the Georgian poets, the Gaelic revivalists, Sesame and Lilies, Travels with a Donkey—the list is desperately eclectic, even accidental. Significantly, it does not contain the writers who were already creating the revolutionary attitudes of the twentieth century. Ogden was a long way from the fountain. It was too early for the Rocky Mountains to have heard the rumors of that calculated hatred of the modern which would come to be known as modernism. No echoes of Ezra Pound drifted back this close to his birthplace in Halley, Idaho. After all, the only guides a young reader had in Ogden in 194 were a misanthropic intellectual father with a paralyzed will and antiquated tastes, the clerks and attendants at Spargo’s Bookstore and the Carnegie Free Public Library (who probably knew less than he), and a tensely literary high school English teacher, herself a victim of the village virus.

  Literary affectations in a town that had no use or respect for literature and thought it a sissy occupation not proper for red-blooded males were surely both cause and effect of some of young DeVoto’s aggressive non-conformity. What was at first a conscious repudiation became eventually a reflex. If the majority was for something, or the Mormons were for it, or the dominant coterie was for it, or the academic historians or the English teachers or the critics or the political party in power were for it, he was moved to doubt and sometimes denounce it. Intellectually he was no democrat, whatever he might be in political and cultural matters.

  Also, being literary in Ogden, he felt his masculinity in question. Hemingway was not the only writer of that generation open to Max Eastman’s gibe about the false hair on the chest. With DeVoto, a compensatory aggressiveness began early and lasted. His defense against felt or suspected scorn was to scorn the scorners, preferably in advance, and to scorn them with such confidence, eloquence, and command of relevant facts that they could never get off the floor.

  For lack of concrete evidence one must guess about some things, but it does not stretch the probabilities of either DeVoto or Ogden to guess that some people in Odgen thought DeVoto a Wop name, or that Bernard thought they did. Or that the feeling of intellectual superiority generated by his father’s teaching, plus his condition of being a sort of Catholic in a Mormon town, brought him at times the desolating sense of being an outsider. The same acquaintance who thought him the ugliest, rudest boy she ever saw says that many Mormon homes were closed to him as a bad influence. After his father’s shabby-middle-class living began to decline toward real poverty, a poor Catholic boy might have complex feelings about those who were both Mormon and rich. There is a story that he used to sit on the porch of a girl he was rushing, and spend whole evenings watching the parties that went on in the Eccles house across the street. The Eccles house was big, built in the solidest Mormon fashion of sandstone and brick, with double turrets and a wrap-around veranda, and it occupied a big corner lot on Twenty-sixth and Jefferson. Presumably it was one of the houses that were closed to Bernard DeVoto. He was vocal and bitter about the wild parties that by his reckoning went on there, though in fact the numerous Eccles girls were nice Mormon girls to whom any drink stronger than lemonade would have been sinful and who would probably not have gone out with a boy who smoked.

  Cultural outsider, poor boy, intellectual snob, scorned poet, bad influence suspected by the godly, he had many of the standard literary quarrels with his home town. He also had a physical reason for an acute self-consciousness, a reason that like Henry James’s accident was not to be discussed.

  Though family tradition says he won some sort of beauty contest as a baby, and though early pictures show him with a nose which like his father’s was distinctly Roman, a boyhood accident with a baseball or a baseball bat flattened it badly, and the doctor who patched it up bungled the job. A later trip to Omaha for repairs failed to improve his looks. In conjunction with his natural conformation, that squashed nose made people look at him twice. His head was round, his face a full oval. Before he had to start wearing the glasses that were a fixture of his later life, his lively, alert, sardonic, strikingly intelligent brown eyes saved his looks, and it was a remarkable fact that the moment one began to know him his looks were forgotten; but those who did not like him took pleasure in thinking he looked like a goggled ape, his upper lip very long, his nose broad and flat. In his youth, when he was full of himself and aware of exceptional capacities, he must have stared into mirrors with despair for what the realities of his looks did to the gorgeousness of young fantasies.

  These last were ardent and various. One kind would have taken him to instant literary fame and confounded the blockheads and snickerers of Ogden. Another would surely have involved the salutary drubbing of bullies, a theme that recurs with regularity in his fiction. A third demonstrably led him through a series of impassioned attachments to one blonde goddess after another. Perhaps he felt the need of some beautiful woman who would look past his face and fall in love with his mind. The fact is, some did; he was by no means a universally scorned Lothario. But one serious difficulty was that they were of Ogden Ogdenish, and he was born both an iconoclast and a show-off. Sooner or later they flounced off their pedestals, or he shoved them off in a disgusted return to realism.

  There was one lady who did fall in love with his mind and remained its faithful handmaiden, but she was not one of the nubile
ones. In “A Sagebrush Bookshelf” DeVoto wrote:

  We must not forget one typical figure who was indigenous to the small town in that stage of culture all over the United States. She was either a high school teacher or a librarian, and she was the pure amateur of books, a woman who lived for literature and waged a bitter warfare against the horny-minded who scorned it.… When she found a youth who shared her passion, brought his ideas to her, and at last brought his sonnets too, it would be inevitable for her to serve literature by nurturing this strange blossom in the wasteland.… For the youth himself she was a fortress of strength and confirmation; she renewed his identity, armed him against scorn, coddled and mothered him, fiercely led him on to more discriminating taste.… Resented, derided, laughed at, she preached the gospel to the Philistines, and if the nation has a wider toleration of literature than it had fifty years ago, if there is a higher percentage of readers, then some thousands of her scattered from the Alleghenies to Puget Sound are one of the primary causes.

  DeVoto’s literary den mother he identifies only as Mrs. F. He says she had a way, transparent and probably pathetic to a perceptive youth, of sometimes quoting the great as if their golden words had been coined in conversations with herself, but she believed in literature as did no one else in Ogden except perhaps his father. She made it seem “a natural way of life,” she loaned books and opened vistas, she sent him to Yeats and Ossian and Fiona Macleod, she introduced him to the emancipated Wells. She nurtured and guided him until he was ready for college, which had to be the University of Utah because it was nearest and cheapest, and in September 1914 she sent him off with her seal upon his brow and all her hopes for vicarious fulfillment in his suitcase. She wrote him regularly, urging and encouraging, commanding him to read Ernest Poole’s The Harbor or some other indispensable book.