The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto Read online

  There are years when a man grows by everything he touches and there seems no lock that the mind cannot pick. Dean Briggs, intensely admiring DeVoto’s literary gifts while sometimes dismayed by the forms they took, joined his other writing teachers in predicting a brilliant career. He moved with greater confidence, and so perhaps with greater grace, among Harvard’s intellectuals. But his constant companions did not change. He still saw a great deal of Raysor, Snodgrass, King, Quintana, and especially Kent Hagler, and increasingly Melville Smith. He still ate with the same tableful in Memorial Union. Malcolm Cowley, with whose ideas DeVoto later quarreled, says5 that he did not know DeVoto well at Harvard, because he didn’t like the crowd he ran with. It was in fact the same old crowd of transfers and outlanders that he had been seated with when he arrived in 1915. If it was a gang or coterie, it was a gang of knockers and iconoclasts and low-caste intellectuals who, now that patriotism was no longer a moral imperative, had learned to look cynically upon the warped idealisms of war and the callow capacity for belief among undergraduates.

  Some had been overseas. In some respects they found college kid stuff, in others they were determined to get the most from its somewhat torn cornucopia. They dared to be critical of professors; they aligned themselves against the paleolithic philological bias of George Lyman Kittredge; they snickered at Babbitt’s inner check; they even, some of them, regarded Dean Briggs as a kindly old granny. When Bliss Perry elucidated his theory of literature, according to which experience entered into a man’s mind through his senses, circulated around in thought and memory, mixed with other experiences, was sifted and purified and transformed, and emerged finally as art, Bernard DeVoto, in the back row, was heard to remark sotto voce that the alimentary canal offered a better analogy.6

  They were not Flaming Youth, but they had already begun to bubble with the denials, jeers, emancipations, and challenges of the twenties. According to their temper, they were jaundiced, jaded, disillusioned, cynical, hopeful, or merely innocent. Predictably, they turned out as well as any other bunch of bright undergraduates.

  The two who dominated the table and gave it its character were the most inclined to idol smashing then, and remained so. They were DeVoto and Kent Hagler, who for all his physical handicaps had finally won or bought his way into the ambulance service and had come out of the war an authentic hero—Croix de Guerre, American Field Service Medal, everything that DeVoto in his secret heart had most craved. Hagler was more serious-minded than he had been before his war experience, a better student, determined to be a chemist. Sometimes he was morose and silent, touched by a hangover of the nihilism that DeVoto thought the only realistic element in the whole Lost Generation stereotype. But he had retained his direct fearlessness, his experimental coolness at committing experience. He drank harder than any of them, he sometimes inhaled ethyl chloride as an intoxicant. For reasons that he did not speak of, but that his close friends assumed had to do with his tubercular spine, he always carried with him a vial of cyanide salts. His wartime adventures, which had been a long way from spectatorial, DeVoto heard mainly from Kent’s sister Clarissa, a freshman at Wellesley. They fed a young hunger in him and all the others of that group. In DeVoto especially they evoked a combination of admiration, envy, and respect.

  They ran into each other on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Dunster Street two hours after DeVoto got off the train from Ogden, and were instantly friends “of the deepest.”

  “That relationship,” DeVoto remarked many years later, “is practically beyond analysis. Below the censor, the relation of man to man is, I doubt not, ambiguous and dark. Above it, it is infinitely more complex than the relation of man to woman, and sometimes fully as intense.”7 Very different, a maverick from the outlands and an aristocrat from the heartland, a literary man and a chemist, a white-stripe veteran and a decorated hero, they satisfied and completed something in each other. They ate together, worked together, toured Boston and the girlie shows and the speakeasies together, spent long evenings of crackers and cheese and bootlegged wine and intimate talk before a birch log in Fairfax, went together out to Wellesley, where Kent’s sister lived in a house known as the Bird Cage, and let the hungry Wellesley girls have a look at a man.

  It is easy to see some of the things that Kent Hagler gave Benny DeVoto. They were given and received so intensely that more than a dozen years later, DeVoto used them in a modified and ambiguous form as the central theme of his very personal novel We Accept with Pleasure. But DeVoto had something of his own to give. Quintana reports him as seeming to have secret, masculine knowledges, as being at ease in a world far rougher than the Yard. His conversation was salty and profane, as if learned from mule skinners. Though only normally obscene, he had the gift of delighting them, when he was aroused, by a most eloquent vernacular. When he chose to spit, he could split a plank. He was full of satirical wit and hearty contempts and humorous gibes: it was as a humorist that some of them thought he had a future.

  And the roughhouse West of which he spoke familiarly had its own aura of romance. Remarkable violences had occurred within his sight, or hearing, or reading, or even family. Whether he told them or not—and he probably told Kent Hagler, at least—his mother’s first husband had had to take off for Mexico because of his involvement in shady dealings. Later, after she divorced him, he was said to have been killed in a gun fight in Rock Springs. That sort of story, spun off as an aside during an evening’s bull session, had an authenticity that caught the attention. Though DeVoto was not himself a person of “unclean” habits, Ricardo Quintana says, Quintana remembers that he seemed to know by name and in some biographical detail a surprising number of pimps and whores and stewbums and broken-down desert rats along Ogden’s trackside and down on lower Twenty-fifth Street. Like Hagler, he seemed to Quintana a man among boys, one who had seen more than he told.

  In actual fact, he may have told more than he had seen. Perhaps he had, through the Evening Standard, come in contact with some of Ogden’s losers and outlaws. More likely, he knew them at second hand, through newspaper-office talk or from the mutterings of his father, a man who thought ill of all mankind but was a soft touch for a bum or a whore down on her luck. One aspect of the literary gift is the capacity to report the experience of others as if it has happened to oneself, and in that direction Mrs. F. had set him an early example. More significantly, he had read a great deal and he knew a lot. He read all the time, hungrily, omni-biblically but with a heavy emphasis on the history of the American frontier and in particular his own region. The novel he had started in his head at Camp Devens was now going onto paper in Dean Briggs’s class. It was built on that local history, and it looked as if it was going to stretch to three volumes. So much of a young man’s intellectual and emotional life goes into the discovery of who he is and how he got that way. So much of Benny DeVoto’s talking and writing in his last year at Harvard was spent in telling the effete about his West, inhabited by men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

  Wherever one can re-create it in detail, the academic year 1919–20 seems utterly confident. DeVoto was heading out into something he wanted to do and felt competent to do, and was polishing the tools to do it with, and enjoyed the encouragement of approving teachers and an interested, intimate audience. He said he had written and destroyed two novels, as well as stories, poems, blank-verse plays, and much other apprentice work.8 The star of the aesthetes, of whom he was contemptuous, had declined. His own tendencies, which were American, continental, and vernacular, seemed to be coming in. He could hardly have graduated from college, it seems, at a more propitious time.

  Except that there was that girl in Yonkers.

  Like many other Ogden matrons, her mother didn’t like him, and never had. The first letters he wrote to Yonkers were in two parts, the first part for her mother’s overseeing eye, the second for Katharine’s alone. As the school year progressed, Katharine’s replies to DeVoto’s letters became sparser, lamer, less personal. He
rebuked her, questioned her, eventually accosted her with his full hurt feelings and rejected love. They quarreled violently by mail. She retreated into injured silence, which was the sanctuary he had planned for himself but hadn’t the character to seek. He came crawling out; she admitted him to a friendship that was a long way short of what he desired. What he said or intimated about her mother offended her; he apologized. While his mind pursued learning and literature, his late-at-night emotions sought Yonkers in an anguish of yearning. What in daylight looked like a confident march toward a literary career looked after dark like a miserable imprisonment. He wrote her poems. He sent her his novelette “The Winged Man,” written for Dean Briggs’s course, and invited her praise. (It was an Ogden story, thinly disguised, and she would recognize passages of it, some years later, in his first and third novels.)

  In the privacy of his rooms, in the occasional outbursts of confidence to his roommates and friends, it was a horrible year, a year of unrest and infatuation. He may have thought of himself in terms of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage; he may have muttered lines from “Cynara” to himself as he pursued sleep.

  Upon graduation, he told Garrett Mattingly long afterward, he went down to New York armed with a letter of introduction from Byron Hurlbut, and paid visits to several literary establishments. He said that a New York daily and a national liberal weekly both offered him jobs.9 There is no knowing what the daily was, but the liberal weekly was clearly The Nation,10 and what it offered him was not a job. What Oswald Garrison Villard apparently said to this young man sent down from Harvard was that he would welcome the submission of articles about the West, with which the young man seemed well acquainted. It was not hard for the young man, desperately inventing reasons for self-confidence, to construe that invitation into a job offer and report it as such and even remember it as such. It is harder for the biographer to imagine what might have been the DeVoto career if it had started with an affiliation to The Nation.

  If any jobs were offered him, he took none of them. Having graduated in June 1920 “as of the Class of 1918,” he took his diploma, which he later compared with his father’s Notre Dame degrees and found to be ersatz parchment, made his brief pilgrimage to New York, and then left—not toward any job, not toward Paris and freedom and the five-to-one franc, not toward the Belgian scholarship that he told some people had been offered him but that he had in fact just missed.11 Not toward any of those things, but straight back to Ogden. He did the precise opposite of what a confident young literary man of provincial origins would have been expected to do in 1920. It was as if Stanley, having located Livingstone at long last, should perfunctorily shake hands with him and start back through the bush.

  Why did he do it? Lack of money? It is true he didn’t have any, and his occasional applications to his Aunt Rose, who had married wealth, had produced an occasional Eversharp pencil or silk shirt, but no funds.12 But it was a time when penniless young men in droves were getting to Europe by cattle boat and making a pittance support them on the Left Bank. Or they were flocking to New York armed with just such letters as Hurlbut had given DeVoto, and staying there until they could snag the handrail of the passing Literary Express.

  Was it concern for his father, desolate and unkempt in his widowerhood, that drew him back to Utah? Possibly, for all his life DeVoto accepted that sort of family obligation cheerfully and generously. For years he helped support not only his father, but members of his mother’s family and finally even members of his wife’s. But filial responsibility, especially since he and his father were considerably alike and did not get along, would hardly have taken him back in person, unless he had other reasons for going.

  Then he must have gone back to live in the midst of his material, sacrificing the good life and all intellectual companionship for the sake of his projected three-decker novel rooted in Ogden’s history. Mattingly, who accepts that reason, says that after his return DeVoto spent most of two years “knocking about the West, renewing and extending his acquaintance with the least spoiled parts of the American continent, tracing the old trails of the fur traders and wagon trains, camping among the peaks, adding to the knowledge of the Rocky Mountain frontier which he was soaking up from every book he could lay his hands on.”13 He suggests a Parkmanesque apprenticeship to the firsthand West, but apart from the camping trips it does not seem to have taken place. He read incessantly, that was true—his was a boiler that demanded an enormous woodpile—but there is no evidence that he “knocked about the West” or retraced any trails at all unless the one through Weber Canyon that he already knew like his own street.

  He just went back to Ogden and stayed there.

  A biographer should guess as little as possible about his subject, and should label his guesses, and probably put them in small type lest they outshine the less colorful truth. So it is in small type, with qualifications, that one makes two guesses: DeVoto went back to Ogden because he was helplessly in love with his blonde high school goddess, and also because he was afraid to go anywhere else.

  With his mother dead, there was no one except this brewer’s daughter to enforce his physical presence at a time when his Harvard friends were winning graduate fellowships or joyfully dispersing on their cattle boats to pry open the world’s oyster. His father, though desolate and seedy, was self-supporting and in reasonable health. If he wanted material about the West, there was more of it in the Widener Library than in all of Utah. Of his own generation, there was only Katharine to draw him ten miles out of his course. It seems likely that he followed her home, dragged helplessly like a toy on a string.

  But also one guesses that even if there had been a good job in New York he would not have dared to take it. All through his last year at Harvard, despite the stigmata of success, he was painfully uncertain: he submitted his writings to friends, roommates, that insulated eighteen-year-old girl, professors, classmates, with hope that they would find them good, and near certainty that they would not. He was shakier than anyone knew. The prospect of being ejected out into the world with a career to make—and in a field that Ogden laughed out loud at—with no friendly institution to back him, no family, no potent friends, no army, no college, filled him (one guesses) with panic. One postulates something like his father’s paralysis of will. One speculates that DeVoto returned to Ogden partly because with all its limitations it was the only safety he knew or could rely on; and that later he rationalized his flight to sanctuary as a stern dedication to the necessities of his novel. That was a more palatable and pronounceable reason than either panic or an uncontrollable yearning for the brewer’s daughter.

  In any event, it took him just about two months to crack up. Not impossibly, he had been heading for a crack-up since before his mother’s death.

  6 · “Between Pauperism and Drugged Dreams”

  The early part of the summer he spent renewing his intimacy, and losing it again, and renewing it again, with Katharine. But circumstances and family were against him. By August 4, when Melville Smith wrote saying that he had won a musical fellowship to Paris and urging DeVoto to come along, DeVoto could pretend that the twice-interrupted “engagement” meant nothing any more. But he did not take Smith’s suggestion to cut loose and travel. He said he expected to be in Ogden another thirteen months, after which he would be off to New York, Washington, or Boston. His plans, though indefinite as to direction, were precise as to timing, and he wrote with all the appearance of confidence.1 Confidence was still with him two weeks later, when he was preparing for a four-day camping trip in Skull Creek Canyon, by himself, with only a bedroll and a .32 automatic to weigh him down. But a couple of weeks later he reported that he had contracted malaria on the camping trip and suffered a collapse of the emotional life on his return.2

  Whether he actually caught malaria is a question. If he didn’t he should have, for his girl and tertian malaria belonged together as recurrent fevers. His letter is full of hollow laughter and philosophical disparagement of women. It asserts (DeVoto ma
king the same mileage out of a polite publisher’s letter that he had made out of Villard’s invitation to contribute) that he could have his novel published “on a royalty basis” but will refuse to let it be printed unless he can revise it into greater sophistication. “It is a disgustingly immature production for one who asserts so much maturity as I.” So on one hand he defended his personal standards against the commercialism of the publishing world, but almost simultaneously he was crying out in a letter to Hurlbut that he had spent the summer “making an incoherent ass of myself.” The revision was undone, he was suffering from insomnia and nerves as well as his old eye trouble, and he had been losing weight. The tone of that letter is tense and desperate. He said he felt that his mind was slipping. The state of his nerves was somehow described by Poe’s line “Red winds are withering in the sky.”3

  By October 22 he had recovered enough to describe his condition to Smith. “I make progress. Slowly and with frequent lapses. My illness, as you now know, was not the venereal disorder you charge me with. It was, is, nervous. A neurosis perhaps. At any rate a compensation for disappointments more stable natures would have ignored. Perhaps, in addition, an excuse, a retreat from work, a subconscious bolstering up of jealousy, inferiority, and then sloth.” The “fiction of romantic love,” he said, was not likely to impose on him again. Having said that, he launched into an enthusiastic account of his friendship with another seventeen-year-old high school girl, “the daughter of Ogden’s only great man.” They were accustomed, instead of necking like other young people, to indulge in roughhouse competition. They punched and wrestled, hiked, swam, argued, and fought. He did not hesitate to sock her in the wind. She had loosened two of his front teeth with a left hook. These healthy physical contacts demonstrated the possibility of a wholesome asexual friendship between man and woman.