The Challenger

For such a well-mannered magazine as the Saturday Review of Literature, the experience was a shock -- but the shock was not limited to the magazine. In 1936 a scrappy, pug-nosed man from Utah took over as editor. His name, Bernard DeVoto, soon became a synonym for the atrabilious type of crusader who seems perpetually to be throwing a tantrum. Sinclair Lewis, one of his early targets, called him "a tedious and egotistical fool . . . a pompous and boresome liar." "What," asked Critic Edmund Wilson, "is Mr. DeVoto's real grievance . . . this continual boiling up about other people's wild statements which stimulates him to even wilder statements of his own?"

Over the years, Bernard DeVoto did indeed strike wildly, but more often than not he struck home. On speakers' platforms, in his books, and from "The Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine, he lectured the nation on everything from its airplane service to its conservation policies to the methods of the FBI. He deplored, denounced, defied, but he seemed to do so out of a passionate fondness for America that made even the tiniest fault seem an outrage. He called himself a "critic of culture." He was actually a challenge. "We have fought at Arques," he recently told his readers after describing his bitter feud with McCarthyism. "Where were you?"

Semi-Educated. DeVoto's battles began early. The "child of an apostate Mormon and an apostate Catholic," he entered the University of Utah at 17, founded a

Socialist club, quit the campus entirely when four professors were fired for airing unorthodox views. He was later "semieducated" at Harvard, served as a smallarms instructor during World War I, taught for a while at Northwestern for $1,700 a year. Once again he quit, this time because "they were changing over from a good, small school into a metropolitan university, and standards were falling, well, wherever they happened to fall." By the time he returned to Harvard as an instructor and settled down in Cambridge, Mass., his writings were already beginning to sell.

He wrote slashing articles for the Saturday Review and Harper's. Under the name of John August, he made his daily bread with serials and stories for the slicks. He became custodian of the Mark Twain papers, produced three books (Mark Twain's America, Mark Twain in Eruption, Mark Twain at Work) that rescued Twain from the pryings of psychoanalytical critics. His interest in Twain was characteristic of his down-to-earth Americanism: while his fellow writers were busy exiling themselves to Europe, DeVoto remained stubbornly rooted in the U.S.

Which Paris? He never left the North American continent ("Why," he told his wife when she proposed a trip to France, "I haven't even seen Paris, Idaho"). He hated the literary exiles who called themselves lost, and said that the sickness they saw around them was only their own. He despised writers with delusions about the writer's importance ("The importance of literary people is chiefly to one another"), and he insisted that literary criticism was "an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility is almost impossible." DeVoto was a man in search of facts. The facts he liked best: those that lay behind the building of America.

A dogged scholar, he worked all hours of the night ("What people who need more sleep than I do call insomnia was a help"), and even when sick ("I find that what I write while the annual virus is working in me is as good, or as bad, and as plentiful as what I write when I can breathe through my nose"). He spent his vacations inspecting battle sites and tracing the country's great expeditions. Eventually he came to know as much about the opening of the American West as any man alive. His The Year of Decision: 1846 and The Course of Empire reopened that West for thousands of readers, and his Across the Wide Missouri won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize in history. Actually DeVoto was historian to the whole nation. "I'm fed up," he once said, "with being thought of as a writer of only Western history. The general impression is that DeVoto is some kind of tributary to the Missouri River."

Too Dumb to Know. In whatever he did, Bernard DeVoto was tributary to nothing. He was father confessor to scores of Harvard students who, he thought, had a sincere desire to be writers. But when it came to sham--either academic or political--he could be merciless. Occasionally, his reputation for sounding off on everything, whether big or small, tended to becloud his reputation as a serious scholar.

In 1944 he defied Massachusetts law by publicly buying a copy of the banned novel Strange Fruit. He raged at New Dealers for thinking the people "too dumb to know what is best for them," but he hated "the Old Guard minds" among Republicans and became one of Adlai Stevenson's top campaign writers. He said that Ernest Hemingway's characters were "anthropoids," that those of Dos Passes were "diminished marionettes." He cham pioned Pareto, James Farrell and Robert Frost, denounced Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Wolfe and practically everyone else. Of modern Western women he said: "I should like to call them buxom, deep-breasted, strong-thewed, fit to be mates and mothers of big men. Mathematics forbids; too high a percentage of them are just fat. They must be the bulwark of the corset industry."

He could speak with feeling of the dry martini. "I suppose nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis. Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best." He could also speak with feeling about the national mania for compiling subversive lists: "Nomination to them is the diagnostic test of decency for anyone who has a public forum."

Last week Benny DeVoto came to Manhattan to appear on TV. He got through the program, was chatting with friends afterwards when a fatal heart attack struck him at 58. He had been a man whose judgment was sometimes off balance, but whose rampages helped keep a generation on its toes. His proudest boast appeared in his last collection of Easy Chair articles published a few weeks ago: "No one has got me to say anything I did not want to say and no one has prevented me from saying anything I wanted to."

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