BERNARD DE VOTO
32 COOLIDGE HILL ROAD
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

December 24, 1939

Dear George:

I'll do "U. S. Camera" for you as opportunity offers. But don't call
on me for anything else for a while. Not only does fatherhood impend but I'm up
to my ears in John August and trying to compose a piece for the Psychoanalytic Quar-
terly as well. And, as always, I'd feel happier about things if the laborer's hire
was prompt.

I suppose the editor in you can't subdue the friend long enough to
examine John Chamberlain's review of Sandburg's Lincoln in the January Harper's. But
the one's the finest chance for a public service I've observed in a long time. That re-
view is a complete given away, not only of the knowledge, wisdom, axioms, assumptions,
general ideas and what-not from which John conducts a career of public comment and ad-
vice, but of a large section of the intellectual, or seminar, ideas of the last decade
and these days. The deliberate admissions are amazing, the inadvertent ones stupefy-
ing. Any properly qualified person could use that review with really terrible effect,
and if I were sitting in your chair I'd see to it that someone did. Me, I'm going to
carry it about with me always, for consolation in the bad hours when I'm convinced I'm
slipping.

As a matter of fact, nobody has yet begun to appraise Sandburg's book.
Nevins put you well ahead of the Times and Books but even his review is just a sort of
preview. I'd say that there's an important, even obligatory, job still to be done.

Merry Christmas.

Yours,

BERNARD DEVOTO
8 BERKELEY STREET
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

May 12th, 1944.

Mr. Henry S. Canby
The Saturday Review of Literature
25 West 45th Street
New York 19, N. Y.

Dear Henry:

First, I have been asked by our concert of lawyers and
agitators to ask you if you would be willing to come to Boston
and tell the Superior Court that you regard Strange Fruit as a
serious and decent novel. The suggestion did not originate with
me, for I want to keep my friends uninvolved, but since it has
been made, let me say that I think you could do our cause a con-
siderable service. Let me say also that there is considerable
doubt whether the Superior Court, where the trial is to be held,
will permit the introduction of such testimony by such people as
you. The lower court held that there is no such thing as expert
testimony in these matters. We intend to try to get the Superior
Court to admit it. If it refuses to, we are going to make an offer
of proof, which will consist of a written statement of what our
experts would have said if permitted to testify. If this is refused,
according to our lawyers, we will have an additional argument for
going up to the next court of appeal. The idea is to offer the
testimony of several literary critics, several ministers, and several
psychiatrists or educators. We are going to try to pick up a couple
of Massachusetts authors, and the decision yesterday was to ask you
and Kip Fadiman to testify. The question was not raised, but I am
sure that if you will come your expenses will be paid.

I have been mulling over in my mind the article you
proposed. In the first place, I should like to phrase the subject
a little differently. I think something corresponding to an idea is
beginning to germinate in my mind. If it gets to the bud stage, I
will let you know its burden and bearing.

I am, however, increasingly aware that the dilemma I find
myself in is extremely painful. After I saw you I went back to the
Harvard Club and read the "Letters" page. It seemed to me to contain
some stuff that was altogether inadmissible and I had already resented
the appearance of the same sort of thing the week before. I send
you a copy of the letter I sent Cousins.

Let me be as frank as possible. I feel that the relation
between you and me is such that you are entitled to get from me
anything you may ask for and, quite apart from that, I certainly ought
to contribute to such a number as you are preparing. On the other
hand, I do quite seriously believe that Cousins is conducting this
debate without the kind of editorial responsibility that ought to be

- 2 -

brought to it. My hide has been toughened by years of scalping
expeditions, and it does not matter in the least to me that Red
Lewis did a war dance around me as a pole. I think that ultimately
it will appear that he did me a considerable service by so promptly
vindicating some of the charges I made against his school. On the
other hand, I still feel, as I said originally, that he ought not
to have been permitted to attack me personally in the Review. Since
Cousins had been laid under a certain necessity of publishing it,
however, I should have made no further protest if he had not extended
the same license of personal abuse to completely irresponsible
bystanders. Quite objectively I can say that no similar license was
extended on the "Letters" page during my editorship or yours or
George's. With each issue it becomes increasingly difficult for me
to write for the Review and retain the not immoderate amount of dig-
nity I like to have. It makes no difference to me how violently my
book is attacked. For one thing, I realize that I am not omniscient.
For another thing, I like a scrap. I think scraps ought to be Marquis
of Queensberry, however. I think, too, that I should not only look
silly if I contributed to a magazine that goes on letting bystanders
accuse me of jealousy and talk about my lack of scholarship, but
should also be forced into a bad controversial position.

I am reluctant to say this, since from the first I have
been resolved to make no reply to anyone. I am particularly reluctant
to say it to you, and I hope you understand that I am making no com-
plaint to you. I really want to write the article you ask for, and I
certainly do not want a transient literary scrap to impede in any way
the communication between our minds, which have a hell of a lot in
common. I merely think that Cousins' editorial policy is repeatedly
pushing me into a position where I shall have to ask you to let me
out.

Thinking over your editorial at length, I am moved to point
out that my book is not asking fiction to be history or to embody
history in any but the most casual and incomplete way. It is only
asking criticism, and particularly systematic criticism, to orient
itself by more and wider experience than that which fiction reports
on. If this were not a reasonable demand, why should Spiller ask me
to do such a chapter as he has proposed for the big history of
literature? Both my first chapter and the first half of my last
chapter assert that criticism ought to apply more than literary
criteria. I don't think I have anywhere ruled literary criteria out --
I am, as you know, personally always getting entangled with aesthetic
and technical questions to the detriment of wider ideas.

I see that Kip got the job I wanted. He is a damned good
man and you are lucky to get him.

Let me know what you think of the point I make about my
hands being tied. If you can find any way out of the dilemma, I will
rejoice.

["Dear George:", "Let not your heart be troubled. You will get this on Thursday hereafter. Unless Amy's unprincipled demand for a Roberts review holds it up next week. But if this God damned machine goes on pi-ing, either you don't get anything all summer or someone buys me a new portable.", "Break this up with spaces wherever you can. If you want to XXXXX, Xxxx, xxxx, x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x

BERNARD DEVOTO

8 BERKELEY STREET

CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS

February 27, 1951

Dear Henry:

I expected a good book from you but this is better than I expected -- it has more new things to say than I thought it remained possible to say. I expected to learn much about James from you, and I have, and I expected to learn a little about Mark Twain, but you've taught me a great deal. A great deal that's new and true. The Plutarch device turns out to be very fruitful indeed and you have made it reveal an astonishing number of parallels and contrasts. I very much admire the result, but I won't spend any more time praising it -- you know the book is good.

I take it for granted that you or your checker will catch most of the little errors, but there's one I can't take a chance on. *The Mysterious Stranger* was written not earlier than 1904 and probably, as I think certainly, in 1905. (Mark died in 1910, not as you have it 1905.) It's true that he started *The Mysterious Stranger* on the long road toward it in 1898, which is the date you twice give for its composition, but he didn't even get to the first Eseldorf story, which preceded it, till 1904.

Also, you are not clear in your text (Ch. XIII) and I'm not sure you know that *What Is Man?* is not a structural composition but only a selection *X* of dialogues from a considerably larger bulk, written episodically rather than continuously. The unprinted ones (those that are completed) are very much the same thing as those in the book, about the same in quality and identical in mood. There are, of course, fragmentary dialogues that belong with them, though, because these things are necessarily short, not many of them. . . . I'm not sure I agree with you that Mark withheld it from fear of losing his popularity but that's within the province of opinion and I won't argue.

In Chapter *X* XIII be very sure to get rid of "Lavinia" which you have several times used for "Olivia" or "Livy." And while I'm ad it, the name of the masterpiece is *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, without the article. Better be precise about that or the boys will jump you.

Chapter I, page 23. I've always doubted the story that he started to South America and especially the $50 part of it. Might be wise to express just a faint skepticism? Page 40, he said that the Turner looked like a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes, not dying. And, as I remember it, *KKK* color of cat not specified.

You are first-rate on the Hartford period and its coterie, which has been too much ignored, and you are very fine on *Huckleberry Finn*. I file a couple of demurers. Page 141; I don't think that Mark stopped writing it because he was doubtful of its reception. Simply, he began it with no objective in mind and eventually reached a point where he *K* knew, consciously or unconsciously, that he lacked one and had to have one if he was to go on. After all, the book begins as just a continuation of *Tom Sawyer* and proceeds as a burlesque of Tom's literature-derived romantic ideas, which wouldn't carry the necessary weight. It began to peter out in unrelated and extemporized episodes, some of which were barren, others of which held *KKK* what proved eventual to be the fruitful seeds. He put it aside, I think, from sheer want of a *KKK* guiding principle to carry it on. He'd done that with plenty of manuscripts before this one, wasn't surprised when it happened, and as we know did not think highly of what he had written, though on page 1 he had launched into his greatest inspiration, Huck's language. Then when he returned to the Mississippi in preparation for the

continuation of "Old Times" that was going to make it a book, his interest in and enthusiasm for HF revived and, either consciously or unconsciously, he found his unfolding and unifying principle, to survey all levels of society in the South he knew. He went back to the manuscript, discarded some episodes, amended others, and wrote still others into the part he had written, and then went ahead from there without any trouble or interruption. All this is laboriously set out in the second chapter of my Mark Twain at Work, if you have it handy.

In what you say about Huck himself here and in other places, notably Chapter I, I myself would add Huck's complete conviction, borne in on him by experience and observation alike, that the world is against you, that lying is best till you know it's safe to tell the truth, that disbelief is not only wisdom but empirical common sense. This is part of what you call his sad wiscons. A man was somebody you had better not trust. Don't give him anything he can use against you. Every time Huck meets a stranger he begins by protecting himself -- what he first says is always a lie.

If you have access to a set of Mark Twain down there, it might be worth your while to take a look at "Stirring Times in Austria," which in my edition is in *In Defense of Harriet Shelley* but in some other editions is put in other collections and at "Sold to Satan," which is in *Europe and Elsewhere*. Both are remarkable, both show his perceptiveness in areas where he is usually not supposed to have any, and both fit in very well with what you say about him. . . . I think you should know too about the one unpublished manuscript of genuine importance. I twice tried to get it published but the first time it ran up against Harpers' inhibitions and both times against Clara Clemens's, and I refused to publish it bowdlerized. XXXX it was written in 1909, that is in the last year of his life. Like everything else, practically, in the Papers it is unfinished, but unlike most, what he did finish makes a unit. It types up to 75 pages. It is a series of letters by Satan to his fellow archangels, written from the Earth, to which he had gone on one of his periodic exiles from heaven. It describes man and especially his God and religion -- and X entirely illuminates what you say about his using the Bible God to express his scorn of man. It is brutal, savage, and sidesplitting -- the most extreme misanthropy and misogyny he ever wrote. It is savage, I repeat, beyond anything of his you have read, and it has a chapter on sex which is not only funny beyond belief but exceedingly revealing. It is quite certainly in a major key. Paine (whom incidentally you several times spell Payne)del-antly alludes to it in his book and quotes a couple of innocuous paragraphs from it but gives no idea what it is like. I have a copy of it and will rush it to you if you would like to see it.

You are certainly right in calling Mark neurotic. I accept your terms and what you make of them. You have, of course, dodged the explanation -- but so have we all. I can't explain it; Wecter, with whom I discussed it many times, never would have explained it. I do not agree with you, however, when you say that there was no undue involvement with his father. I am as sure there was as I permit myself to be sure of anything that can't be proved. And his father not as a failure but as the classic father-image of Freud, the good father and the bad father in one but especially the bad father, who menaced and forbade. And forbade, especially, women. This is the only clue I have to the neurosis or the central mystery. Biographical mystery and literary mystery. It was dangerous to love a woman and it was dangerous to create a fictional woman who could be loved. As you note, Wecter was convinced that Mark was a virgin when he married. I'm not so sure, but he had had no deep emotion toward a woman till then and if he had had any sexual experience it was trivial and transitory, with whores or the equivalent. Well, he didn't marry till he was 35. That is singular and what is still more singular: he married an invalid -- a less dangerous woman. Permissive, I think; XXXX only such a woman could be married. It was a sexually happy marriage, as abundant evidence showed, but he was guilty about it, and Livy was more passionate than he was (was allowed by his father to be) and in the last year of

his life he wrote a savage derision of mankind, the point of which (in the chapter de-
voted to sex) is that women are incomparably more lustful than men. And in his work,
in most notably his fiction, there is no sexual love and almost no sex. His father
said no. He would be destroyed if he loved a woman. . . . Oh, well, I can't prove it.

You are, by the way, damn good on the _Yankee_. In fact, I think you're good.

You are entirely right about Tom and Huck and Mark's boyhood; that was the
fruitful part of his life for his truest work and they were the two sides of his per-
sonality and in them he remained a boy. And you are entirely right in that his ability
to endow *X* with fictional characters with life (sometimes in only half a dozen
lines) is at the very core of his genius, and right beside it is the prose he wrote.
I myself believe that no other American novelist had as much of this life-giving power
as he did.

I get a constant satisfaction, which is not without its irony, in your casual
assumption and repeated assertion that Mark is a great writer, a great artist, a great
literary figure, and in the knowledge that people reading you will not dissent, will
nod sagely and say, why, yes, that's so, isn't it. You won't get hit with a single
brick. And for that immunity you can to some extent thank me. Somebody would soon
have said it if I hadn't in 1932 but it just was not acceptable as an idea in that
vanished year. I got hell beat out of me for saying it. Why, Mark Twain, that clown,
that mediocrity, that abysmally American lowbrow, that very essence of all that was
wrong with an inferior civilization and a people who could not be artists or provide
an environment in which art or artists could survive. Well, I remember with X pleasure
that you were on my side and said so.

Gosh, Henry, I don't know if I've said anything here that will be of any
service to you. If it's a matter of little facts, dates or the like, I'll run through
the galleys for you when they're ready. As it stands, I certainly win, for it has
been a privilege and a pleasure to read the book.

I hope you're having a good time and getting some sun. I'm doing neither.
And my damn book goes on rolling out hundreds of thousands more words. But I can at
last say that the end is in sight, X only a few months and a few million words away.

Good luck to you.

Yrs,