The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Berbnard DeVoto by Stegner Wallace

Author:Stegner, Wallace [Stegner, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History, Writing
ISBN: 9781101911693
Goodreads: 24683246
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1974-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

3 · America Revisited

His immediate purpose was historical research, a refreshment of his somewhat faded familiarity with the West at large and a personal look at the Santa Fe Trail, along which so many of the events of 1846 had moved, and which he had not previously seen. But it was no serene scholarly journey, for Germany had invaded the Low Countries only nine days before the two left Cambridge, and as they drove West the car radio reported successive, stunning disasters: the fall of Rotterdam, the fall of Brussels, the advance of the panzers to the Channel, the desperate evacuation from Dunkerque, the capture of Paris, the fall of France, the first flurries of the Battle of Britain. Tracing the history of the small, almost lighthearted war of 1846, DeVoto kept hearing like the strokes of doom the defeats of a war that might end civilization.

In the terminology of the 1960s, he would have been called a hawk; he had been convinced it was America’s war since the invasion of Poland, or before. He offended St. Louis newspapermen by crying fire into their untroubled midwestern isolation. On May 16 he and Schlesinger stopped outside of Trinidad, Colorado, to listen to Franklin D. Roosevelt on the car radio, with a group of silent Hispanos leaning to listen too, and heard the President ask for a preparedness program to cost two and a half billions, and agreed that that settled it: sooner or later we would be in.

It was hard for him to stay with the functions of his trip; the 1918 patriot in him kept urging him to go back and enlist in something. But he stuck, partly because Avis on the telephone said he would be a fool not to, and when he was through with Santa Fe (it was not his West, and he felt no affinity for it, however well he knew its history) she and Gordon joined him in Ogden, having left the baby on Coolidge Hill Road with a trained nurse. They had a queer, half-lyrical, half-fearful vacation in Jackson Hole, struggling with bad radio reception to get the reports that harrowed up their souls, before they drove back through Montana and the northern Plains, on along the shore of Lake Superior and down the St. Lawrence into Quebec, and thence, through New England, home. In the next months, according to his habit of making Easy Chairs out of what happened around him, DeVoto wrote four of them about the western trip, plus a full-length Harper’s article.1 Representing as they do both reiterations and reappraisals, they are worth a look.

Anxiety had made a patriot of him; going home after long absence had kindled both nostalgia and the perception of change. He found it a better West than he had known. Perhaps remembering MacLeish’s Air Raid, and certainly oppressed by the war news, he was almost offended by how safe the continental interior felt, how snug and secure behind its lawns and banks of flowers, how hopeful in the midst of the New Deal’s windbreaks and reservoirs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.