Education: The Challenger

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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.