Go East, Young Man

By Melvin Maddocks

THE UNEASY CHAIR

by WALLACE STEGNER 464 pages. Doubleday. $12.50.

Nothing was ordinary about Bernard DeVoto. Even his homeliness was spectacular, compounded of defiantly bulging eyes and a nose broadened in a baseball accident. Girls from Ogden, Utah, remembered him all their lives as "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Also the smartest.

Legends surrounded his beginnings. His mother breast-fed him until he was past two. His father taught him to read before he was three, with the help of Pope's translation of the Iliad. It was as if DeVoto were his own tall tale, a product-in-exaggeration of the American frontier that he loved above all to write about until his death in 1955 at the age of 58.

Have effete Eastern intellectuals underestimated this whoop-it-up Westerner who often behaved, as his biographer admits, like "the illegitimate offspring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley"? Wallace Stegner, novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain), Stanford professor, and a fellow native of Utah, concedes that DeVoto was often wrong as well as "spectacularly right." He was also an 'Implacable showoff" who "set world records for taking himself seriously." But yes, says Stegner, DeVoto has been low-rated, chiefly because he ran with no coterie, and in fact ran head down against most of the opinion makers of his day. For him literature was a contact sport.

Stegner may not quite win his case. But in the process of building it he has composed one of the best-written biographies 1974 will see. It consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America of the '30s, '40s and '50s.

Like Stegner, DeVoto was a Harvardman who left the West as soon as he decently could. He joined the faculty at Breadloaf Writers' Conference, beginning in 1932. He was briefly editor of the Saturday Review, and for two decades the occupant of the Harper's magazine column called "The Easy Chair." He lectured at Harvard and lived in a gabled house in Cambridge, Mass., that featured an enormous paneled library behind sliding doors. There, in his later years, he and his wife Avis, a student during his young teaching days at Northwestern, entertained the John Kenneth Galbraiths and Arthur Schlesingers Jr. on Sunday evenings.

Yet DeVoto always felt himself an outsider. He was a compulsive worker who produced more than 230 magazine pieces before he was 40--plus four novels, a volume of essays and the book that made his reputation, Mark Twain's America. He was capable of hacking out 30,000 words in a fecund week of writing romantic serial fiction for the Saturday Evening Post under the pen name "John August," scribbling in panic before the "manias, depression and blue funks" as well as the living expenses that pursued him. (DeVoto had a fondness for domestic help, new Buicks and private education.) This "literary department store" came as close as he could to respectability as a historian. In 1948 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri, a chronicle of fur trappers in the 1830s. Five years later, a National Book Award came for The Course of Empire, which starts with a provocative quote from Columbus to Queen Isabella and ends with the Lewis and Clarke Expedition reaching the Pacific.

Stegner believes that the quintessential DeVoto was DeVoto the polemicist. He railed against censors, education-school pedagogues, the Old Left and the New Critics (whom he called simply "the boys"). He was a growling consumer advocate who made long lists of things that didn't work, including kitchen knives, portable typewriters and processed cheese ("unfit even to bait mice with"). He fought for conservation before anybody knew there was a fight.

Why was DeVoto always in such an uproar? Edmund Wilson once asked, genuinely puzzled. Part of the answer is that DeVoto--to use an almost obsolete word for an almost obsolete species --was a curmudgeon. It is Stegner's finest instinct that he does not try to make his curmudgeon correct--just very necessary.

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