Books: Angry Man

MINORITY REPORT—Bernard DeVoto—Little, Brown ($2.75).

Out of the West after World War I came Critic Bernard DeVoto. He burst upon the literati of the effete East like The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang. At the top of his form Critic DeVoto suggested a geyser ejecting a column of live steam, accompanied by deep, sometimes rather incoherent rumblings, hisses, falling rocks, lava, fuliginous fumes. Readers of The Saturday Review of Literature began eagerly to await this weekly display. Later the same phenomenon could be observed in The Easy Chair, literary section of Harpers Magazine.

The exact causes of Bernard DeVoto’s chronic exasperation eluded many people. Critic DeVoto claimed that it was his passion for straight thinking. Said he: “I have not objected to the use of abstractions but only to the use of abstractions in the illusion that they are bricks, girders, and tie bars. I have not objected to the use of theories but only to their use in ways that produce what are called higher truths. I have not objected to simplifications but only to the use of simplifications in order to satisfy the lust for oneness by denying facts, experience and common sense. My objections rest on the observation that such ways of thinking produce confusion wherever they are applied and on the be lief that criticism has no privilege of confusing us.” DeVoto was even more credible when he added: “Human patience is short. . . .”

Doubtless there were other reasons. Critic DeVoto is possessed of a healthy combativeness. A professional Westerner (he was born in Utah), he takes a deep delight in curdling the blood of literary opponents with a Comanche yawp before rushing in for the kill. He is deeply, sincerely, authentically American: he always seems to be threatening to clinch a literary judgment in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. The literary situation which Critic DeVoto found in the East was calculated to exacerbate his deepest instincts, habits of thought and affection. With a loud roar of rage, the felicity of phrasing and invaluable candor of a common scold, he immediately started to set things to rights.

Sooner or later most U. S. writers of any importance, and many of no importance at all, had been DeVotoized. If Critic DeVoto had been merely an angry man, slashing, jabbing, scolding with picturesque spleen, his enemies would have made short work of him. He was much more. In an atmosphere saturated with alien intellectual influences, he remained steadfastly and intelligently native. While most U. S. writers sighed for Europe, he looked resolutely and fondly homeward. He was a cultural nationalist before his contemporaries had thought up the term. And like most pioneers, he was a little too forthright, a little too blunt, a little funny.

Last week Bernard DeVoto published some of his battle axes in book form. Most of them were taken from The Saturday Re-view of Literature and Harpers Magazine. The earliest was written in 1927, the latest after World War II began. Many of them were polemics, open to the charge that, like most polemics, they will soon be as dead and forgotten as the quarrels which caused them. Many of them were reviews of other people’s books, justifying Critic DeVoto’s barbed remark that “criticism is reviewing that is continued in the back of the magazine.” Among them were Crackle on the Left (Bernard DeVoto v. the leftish Writers’ Congress); Plus Ce Change, which once reduced pinkos to a red rage ; A Generation beside the Limpopo in which Critic DeVoto charges youthful U. S. intellectuals with two major ignorances—they did not know the Middle West or the middle class. Monte Cristo in Modern Dress, a gratuitously savage appraisal of Playwright Eugene O’Neill, makes very good sense; Witchcraft in Mississippi, an almost equally savage appraisal of Novelist William Faulkner, does not. Even praise from Critic DeVoto is somewhat like a caress by a lion’s paw.

In another piece (The Oncoming), Bernard DeVoto faces the fact of World War II. “There was war again and one’s son was asking why. . . . Tell him that the cost of any life, his or mine, is the price asked for it. Tell him . . . the job is to save something of the kindliness, the freedom, and the safety that are still ours . . . to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” It was Bernard DeVoto’s measure as a critic that he sensed so early that the nation was wounded, that he treated his literary feuds and fusses with an anger equal to their seriousness, seeing in the unseemly squabbles of the literati the symptoms of social strains and fissions, the outward bleedings of a deeper hemorrhage. Others might try to heal : his task was to probe, to cauterize, to clean out.