On that note he went off to Chicago. When he came back he swiftly finished the serial, got Mark Twain in Eruption off to Harper’s and Lark—and, astonishingly, had it promptly approved—and completed the last little jobs. On May 19 he climbed into his Buick along with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and started for a motor trip through the West, which he had not seen since the summer of 1925.
3 · America Revisited
His immediate purpose was historical research, a refreshment of his somewhat faded familiarity with the West at large and a personal look at the Santa Fe Trail, along which so many of the events of 1846 had moved, and which he had not previously seen. But it was no serene scholarly journey, for Germany had invaded the Low Countries only nine days before the two left Cambridge, and as they drove West the car radio reported successive, stunning disasters: the fall of Rotterdam, the fall of Brussels, the advance of the panzers to the Channel, the desperate evacuation from Dunkerque, the capture of Paris, the fall of France, the first flurries of the Battle of Britain. Tracing the history of the small, almost lighthearted war of 1846, DeVoto kept hearing like the strokes of doom the defeats of a war that might end civilization.
In the terminology of the 1960s, he would have been called a hawk; he had been convinced it was America’s war since the invasion of Poland, or before. He offended St. Louis newspapermen by crying fire into their untroubled midwestern isolation. On May 16 he and Schlesinger stopped outside of Trinidad, Colorado, to listen to Franklin D. Roosevelt on the car radio, with a group of silent Hispanos leaning to listen too, and heard the President ask for a preparedness program to cost two and a half billions, and agreed that that settled it: sooner or later we would be in.
It was hard for him to stay with the functions of his trip; the 1918 patriot in him kept urging him to go back and enlist in something. But he stuck, partly because Avis on the telephone said he would be a fool not to, and when he was through with Santa Fe (it was not his West, and he felt no affinity for it, however well he knew its history) she and Gordon joined him in Ogden, having left the baby on Coolidge Hill Road with a trained nurse. They had a queer, half-lyrical, half-fearful vacation in Jackson Hole, struggling with bad radio reception to get the reports that harrowed up their souls, before they drove back through Montana and the northern Plains, on along the shore of Lake Superior and down the St. Lawrence into Quebec, and thence, through New England, home. In the next months, according to his habit of making Easy Chairs out of what happened around him, DeVoto wrote four of them about the western trip, plus a full-length Harper’s article.1 Representing as they do both reiterations and reappraisals, they are worth a look.
Anxiety had made a patriot of him; going home after long absence had kindled both nostalgia and the perception of change. He found it a better West than he had known. Perhaps remembering MacLeish’s Air Raid, and certainly oppressed by the war news, he was almost offended by how safe the continental interior felt, how snug and secure behind its lawns and banks of flowers, how hopeful in the midst of the New Deal’s windbreaks and reservoirs. There were better schools than he remembered. The population was relaxed and good-humored, and offered the traveling historians not a single instance of discourtesy or rudeness. The pioneering that he had honored in his grandfather Dye had gone farther, there was noticeable progress away from barbarism and vulgarity toward “clean and garnished towns.” The earlier and more commonplace war of 1846 had won it, American effort had improved it. Now, how much of hard-won America would have to be sacrificed in order to preserve the rest? One thing was certain: Whatever of America could be saved was worth fighting for.
Crisis, plus nostalgia, plus perhaps a degree of wishful thinking, made him deny in these Easy Chairs much that he had previously said about the West. Thus in the bars that had replaced the saloons of an earlier time he found barmaids of a YWCA rectitude who worked trigonometry problems or read Thornton Wilder in their off minutes. He found town matrons dropping in for a beer, and turning loose their toddlers to play among the tables as in an Old World ordinary, and he reassured America that it need not fear any resurgence of Prohibition from the prairies. He found foods better and tastier than he remembered them, the salad had spread, domestic-science courses had taught a lot of girls about nutrition. He inspected with interest the new caravanserais, the motel strips, whose food he found calamitous, and he recommended instead the corner drugstore of any town, which at least understood how to make a sandwich. He dismissed the folklore that said any truck stop was a place where the food could be depended on. He praised the roads and the highway commissions in general, and the Michigan roadsides and the Montana historical markers in particular. He found the western drivers fast and dangerous, thereby demonstrating that in fifteen years he had ceased to be a Westerner and had lost his casualness about speed and distance. He found roadside garagemen skillful but of dubious morality, and he praised the American automobile and damned the automobile tire, which wore out after sixty-five hundred miles. He warned the Middle West about its smugness and isolationism. He thought it was calm out of hysterical panic, whereas it was probably demonstrating something he had long believed in, sometimes denounced, and occasionally praised: the continental mind. It did not listen as DeVoto went through crying that its house was on fire and its children would burn, it did not believe him when he said that the bombs falling on Dover were destroying its house, its future, its children’s school, its peace of mind. Sleep in times like these, cried the Easy Chair, is death. All that exhortation, replied the Middle West editorially and by letter, is hysteria.
But on one issue DeVoto and the Middle West met with a gladness that had not always marked their contacts. In November 1940, Harper’s published the culminating report of his western trip, the essay called “Main Street Twenty Years After.” In it he said what the Middle West had always believed, or wanted to believe, about itself. He reported again the clean, flowery towns with self-respecting houses and wide lawns. He said that in Great Bend, Kansas, there were now no farmers, or at least no farmers’ wives, according to the specifications standard among literary people. No yokels, no frumps, no drabs. Farmers’ wives in Great Bend looked like the club women of Great Bend, who in turn looked like the women you saw on Madison Avenue or Boylston Street. The show windows of Great Bend contained most of the consumer goods that all Americans wanted. If America was promises, as a MacLeish poem declared, then some of the promises had been kept. “The economic system in the years of its collapse has somehow contrived to distribute goods more variously and more deeply than it ever did in the years of its greatest vigor.”
He needed and wanted no vision of the classless or perfected society. The American approximation was as good as an imperfect world was likely to provide. Standardization, which scared people when it threatened thought, had actually meant pride and self-respect to the farmer’s daughter. The “spongy decay” of the small towns, about which literature had been bitter in the 1920s, had been arrested and the trend reversed: now it was megalopolis, not the villages, that declined. In the backlands, radio had compensated for bad newspaper coverage and emancipated country kitchens from isolation and loneliness. WPA and other agencies had created parks and built swimming pools in rural places. Good music came over the airwaves. Without a Five Year Plan or a Ten Year Plan or a Twenty Year Plan, our small towns had been transformed since Carol Kennicott had walked in dismay down Main Street in Gopher Prairie. The American heartland had a well-informed, confident, and increasingly cultivated public now. In Council Grove, Iowa, where once the fleeing Mormons had died of the bloody flux, DeVoto and Schlesinger had heard teen-agers at a soda fountain discuss Brahms. Why hadn’t literature been as assiduous to report that transformation as it had been to report the village virus?
As a matter of fact, it had begun to. In “A Generation Beside the Limpopo” DeVoto had remarked that some of the literary intellectuals were finally arriving in 1936 at the position from which Robert Frost had started in 1913, and he might have adduced
as evidence more than Harold Stearns and Van Wyck Brooks. Ever since Nearer the Grass Roots, in 1929, Sherwood Anderson had been heard saying over and over, “It really is a democracy, it really is,” and he said it again in Home Town the year DeVoto went West. After dropping his blockbusters on Gopher Prairie and Zenith and the state of Winnemac, Sinclair Lewis had come full circle to the last democratic bastion, a Vermont village, in It Can’t Happen Here, and had made his peace with the middle-class family in The Prodigal Parents in 1938. In the crisis last years of the 1930s it was beginning to be a bandwagon.
But if it was a bandwagon, DeVoto could at least say with truth that he had been on it early, and had preached the American gospels when they were far less popular. It undoubtedly gave him a certain satisfaction when in the fall of that same pivotal year 1940, shortly after DeVoto had returned from his restorative trip westward, Granville Hicks published a utopian romance called The First to Awaken.2 For who was the hero of that book by the ex-editor of the New Masses? The same that Sinclair Lewis had found in It Can’t Happen Here, and Bernard DeVoto in “Main Street Twenty Years after”: village democracy.
4 · Keeping Promises
At some point or other, DeVoto had offered to resign from every position he had ever held except his teaching job at Harvard. Americana Deserta, the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, the Saturday Review had all brought him to the point of high-minded and hot-tempered withdrawal. Now, when he returned in early July 940, he found that Mark Twain in Eruption, approved in May, had generated in Clara Gabrilowitsch the same qualms she had felt over Letters from the Earth, and that Harper’s had yielded to her objections and modified the text. In a fury he told them to cross him off as editor, throw away the introduction, and make a public statement, first submitting it to him for approval, canceling any publicity that had linked him with the book.1
Harper’s, pinched between door and jamb, made mollifying sounds.2 Charles Lark tried to persuade Mrs. Gabrilowitsch that her fears were excessive, and DeVoto that a few changes wouldn’t be too damaging. DeVoto insisted that there was no reason to soften remarks Mark Twain had written for publication. But he did not have much hope that arguments would avail with Mark Twain’s daughter. He said to Lark that no sound book could come out of the papers as long as she was alive. He said he would finish arranging the papers, since he had begun the job, but he wanted the book withdrawn.
Lark did not, Harper’s did not. In the end Mrs. Gabrilowitsch did not, and neither did DeVoto. As a last concession he softened some remarks about Bret Harte and about Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s daughter, and removed a libelous reference to Judge Landis, and excised an anti-God passage, and that did it.3 By late September the book was in press, by November it was out, the first and so far only fruit of two and a half years as curator of the Mark Twain papers.
There remained, of the three books that DeVoto had agreed to do, the volume of letters. But two stiff battles with Mrs. Gabrilowitsch had diminished his enthusiasm, and even without the threat of Mrs. Gabrilowitsch, two other matters would have taken precedence over Mark Twain at that point. One was the frontier book, the other was the war. He would gladly have postponed the first to serve in the second; but as it turned out, he worked on both simultaneously.
Before going West he had put his name in with several agencies that might have a use for him. No call was made on him during his trip, none after his return. He kept waiting for the Army Air Corps to “command his pen,”4 but it never did. After a month of waiting, in self-defense he sat down and wrote by hand the first page of “Empire” and put it in the mail to Kate Sterne as a token or promise.5 He said he could write on it with only Easy Chair interruptions until about February, when he would have to lay it aside to give John August his turn.
Once he had started it, the book went fast. He had been preparing for it for a long time, it was ready to spill over. Complicated as its structure was, with dozens of lines of development and the obligation to present as if simultaneously the events of a whole continent during a critical time, it seemed to write itself. “We think we can weave,” DeVoto confessed to Garrett Mattingly; “maybe we can only sew.”6 Yet, weaving or sewing, he wrote forty-five thousand words in less than two months, and that despite insomnia, war anxieties, migraines, and a weekend visit to Bread Loaf that renewed his gloomy antagonism to Frost and convinced him that Frost was breaking apart all the bonds of fellowship and trust and shared effort that had made the place DeVoto’s favorite club and the staff his surest friends.7
Despite all that, despite the reading glasses that told his hypochondriac mind that he had passed a climacteric and that from here it was all downhill, the book wrote itself steadily from day to day. It went on writing itself through the newest of Frost’s domestic disasters, the suicide of his son Carol in October. Pitying and apart, DeVoto watched the repercussions of that, but he did not forgive. That odd little incident at Bread Loaf in the summer of 1938 had shown him God acting like a malignant and sadistic boy, and he was implacable. “The friendship that was pretty fervent between us for some years went out like a light in three or four days two years ago, since when he has hated me with an appalling violence as a man whom he could not consume and whom in the process of trying to consume he has opened himself to far more than the demon in him could ever bear to remember.”8
Hallucinatory or not, excessive and paranoid or not, his sense of Frost’s evil and destructive side, and his resistance to what he thought Frost’s domination, put him under additional emotional strain, for which the cure, as usual, was work. Work got him past the Frost crisis and past the divorces of two of the couples with whom the DeVotos were closest in Cambridge; and when work on “Empire” stopped according to schedule in February, what took its place was alternative work—a spy thriller that made its way into Vermont from Canada along routes that DeVoto, Homans, Eli Potter, and Emery Trott had pioneered for the transportation of alcoholic beverages a decade before. Collier’s bought it with enthusiasm in April.9 Security achieved. Back to work.
By now there was no question in his mind or Avis’ where they would live the rest of their lives. They had found that membership in the Cambridge community did not depend on affiliation with Harvard; their removal from the faculty even gave them a spectatorial and ironic distance without in any way inhibiting their participation. So in May DeVoto made an offer on the William Roscoe Thayer house at 8 Berkeley Street—a big, old, three-story ultra-Cambridge house in an ultra-Cambridge neighborhood only a short walk from the Yard, the Square, and the Common. By a quirk of circumstance its former owner had been an editor of the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine and a historian whom Harvard had seen fit to let go. The estate was eager to settle. Before the end of the month they found themselves owners and had conferred upon them a sort of instant gentility.
It was as a place to work, as much as anything, that 8 Berkeley Street pleased DeVoto. The double parlors to the right of the entrance hall were matched by double library rooms to the left. Sliding doors could be opened to create a vast study with room to spread out all his jobs at once, or closed to shut away sight of what he didn’t want to work on. There were bookshelves for a library of ten thousand volumes. But also the house had an uppercase address and a shabby, Cantabridgian dignity. One of its near neighbors was Craigie House. The Episcopal Theological Seminary shared (and coveted) its drive, so that DeVoto was warned to post it once a year as private property, to thwart the seminary’s designs. Antique neighbors gave a cautious, polite sanction to the new owner—said to be a literary man—and a surviving lady relative of the Thayers, Mrs. Thayer’s sister, unable to bear the thought of selling off all the furnishings or giving them to Morgan Memorial, sent her chauffeur to pick some of them up and carry them off to the warehouse, where she had already stored the furniture of two or three other family houses. One evening in the dusk they found her, an Emily Dickinson figure, with the help of her chauffeur digging up a white lilac in the yard.10
The house needed extensive
modernization, and they would not move in until September. But in June DeVoto had a gratification at least as ego-enhancing as being a Cambridge property owner. That was the day when, as Phi Beta Kappa orator, he sat on the stage in Sanders Theater beside President James Bryant Conant and heard himself introduced as a distinguished scholar and man of letters and a great teacher in the tradition of Barrett Wendell and Dean Briggs.11
Days later, when the Germans invaded Russia, it was sardonic joy to watch the flip-flops of the remaining Communist intellectuals as they converted party-line pacifism and neutrality into the United Front. For lack of any more heroic duty, he was keeping track of things like that in the Easy Chair. And he would not have been Bernard DeVoto if he hadn’t been gratified by an invitation to deliver the annual lectures at the Lowell Institute in the fall. He would kill the usual two birds with one stone by telling the Lowell audience about the year 1846, which Paul Buck was urging him to call The Year of Decision.12
But the interruption while John August fattened the bank account, plus the distractions of the Easy Chair, the Phi Beta Kappa address, and the purchase of the house, had cost him his momentum on the history book. The summer of 1941 seemed to him wasted in random lectures, time lost consulting the newly discovered Oregon Trail diaries of Francis Parkman,13 consultations with Walter Wanger and Jesse L. Lasky about movies that never came off, trips to New York that produced nothing. In August Ted Morrison induced him to return to Bread Loaf, but the strain of his relations with Frost, who had bought the Homer Noble farm in Ripton and had more than ever established himself as the genius loci, made an otherwise good session half unpleasant.