Bee-Dee-Vee

(Fair warning to Bernard DeVoto devotees: This post will feature some mild criticism of the great man.) VSO came home from the Parowan Library yesterday with a copy of Across the Wide Missouri. How she was able to put her hands on it when I've searched high and low over there at least a dozen times is a mystery to me. But, that is beside the point. What I really want to do is wish her luck. I mean, there is no denying that DeVoto was one of the great historians of the American west—certainly in the top rank with Stegner, and perhaps Bolton and Bancroft—but he can really wear you down. You can get into it, and really be enjoying it, just plugging away, filling your head with facts about DeSoto, LaSalle, Meriwether Lewis, everybody you've heard about before and many you haven't. Then, you stop and look at the clock, and it's been an hour and you've read five pages. You do that every day for a month, renewing it at the library twice, and then a second month, until there are no more renewals on your library card: When you go to return it you're on page 300 of a 700 page volume. Whew. Defeated.

The last time it happened to me, VSO was dismayed. "I've seen you read Atlas Shrugged," she cried. "And War and Peace." "I've seen you read door stoppers by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and Sydney Ahlstrom." "If you can't get through it, nobody can." Well, as I said, I wish her luck. It's not that DeVoto was a bad writer; he wasn't. (Though Stegner was clearly better.) And, it's not that his knowledge was anything less than encyclopedic, but there is something about the combination of writing style and overwhelming information that can turn it into a bit of a grind. I joked with VSO that BDV probably never had an editor: Not only was he notoriously prickly, but there isn't a person on earth that could have gotten through all his material. In any case, I'm not saying that DeVoto should be left on the shelf: He is a one man history machine. But, I may take the month off and read something quick and easy, like Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.