Indignant DeVoto

...The cloud cover was a persistent shadow...

...DeVoto's life-long ambition to be a first-rate novelist was never realized...

...It became denser, and there were fewer and fewer intermissions as DeVoto grew older...

...McCann is a free lance writer and critic...

...The acknowledged hack work, the fictional potboilers, essays dashed off on subjects of minor importance, travel articles for popular magazines (he prided himself on being a ready, competent "professional") provided the bread and bourbon for a man who liked to live and entertain generously...

...In the realm of controversy he was the angry sharpshooter of his generation...

...He deliberately stirred up battles...

...Depressed but undaunted and frantically ambitious, DeVoto continued to turn out a torrent of work— short stories, flawed novels (some pseudonymous), essays, reviews, and his first "big book," Mark Twain's America (1932), a frontal attack on Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain...

...The Uneasy Chair is a superb book, a sensitive, sympathetic study of that writing jack-of-all-trades who was historian, novelist, essayist, teacher, editor, conservationist...

...It was a rambunctious Indian assault on the literary palefaces of the East...

...But to the last, Stegner notes, his "Easy Chair" pieces kept "their old muzzle velocity, and he was still a deadly shot...

...Mr...

...reviewed by William McCann We can be thankful that Wallace Steg-ner, author of numerous novels and two books of short stories, ignored Bernard DeVoto's dogmatic declaration that "literary people should not be permitted to write biography...

...And in the area of Wilson's literary interests DeVoto was indeed a puzzle...

...The stout, overworked heart of this "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous" man at length gave out...

...He never fully got over the tendency to mistake a lightening of his internal cloud cover for the dawn of a new day," Wallace Stegner discerns...

...Harold Nicolson believed it "provides a system of triangulation enabling the author to fix the position of his hero with much greater accuracy...

...Students of Mark Twain are indebted to him for his scholarly labors in editing and appraising Twain's papers...

...DeVoto's claim to enduring recognition as a man of letters undoubtedly rests on his great Western trilogy: The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947), and The Course of Empire (1951...

...We were novelists by intention," Stegner writes, "teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us...

...What did he want...

...For thirty years prior to his death at fifty-eight in 1955, DeVoto with his embattled opinions and hyperbolic flourish enlivened the American literary and journalistic scene...

...It was in writing nonfiction—history, essays, the spirited pieces he did for twenty years in his Harper's column, "The Easy Chair" (he called it "cultural criticism")—that he excelled...

...In these volumes his impassioned love and encyclopedic knowledge of the West fused to create a product of unquestionable superiority...

...a pompous and boresome liar") were reduced to silence or grudging praise...

...But he injected hilarity into some pretty lumpy literary solemnities...

...On an April day in 1956, an old friend flew a plane over the Clearwater National Forest in western Montana and Bernard DeVoto had his final wish...

...Sometimes he generated more heat than light in these skirmishes and occasionally mistook warts on his nose for dirty birds in a bush...

...Samuel Johnson held that an author's personal acquaintance with his subject is a prerequisite of a superior biography...

...What was he for...

...He taught English at Harvard but never quite "made it" and was denied a permanent position, "perishing," as it were, in a plethora of publications...

...In his last years he was often gloomy, fatigued, beset with vague mental and physical ailments...

...But it became clear later on, as DeVoto's literary involvements dwindled, that he had two major concerns: the writing of Western history and the conservation of the nation's resources—forests, grazing lands, minerals, oil...

...In any case, biographer Stegner and DeVoto were friends, spent their boyhood in Utah, and were Westerners by birth and upbringing...

...His most hostile critics (Sinclair Lewis once called him "a tedious and egotistical fool...

...DeVoto had asked that his ashes be scattered in the mountains of the West...

...DeVoto, who disliked his home town of Ogden, eventually found an intellectual and spiritual home in Boston and Cambridge...

...Edmund Wilson, who admired DeVoto's truculent independence and shared some of his views, was baffled by his constant indignation...

...One feels in his writing that he was the aggrieved, exasperated victim of the things he attacked with such enormous gusto...