By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I don’t know if famous French chef and public television star Julia Child ever visited my hometown in Northern Utah. Her best friend, however, had the good taste to fall in love with and marry an Ogden man.
Avis MacVicar DeVoto (1904-1989) was an American culinary book editor, reviewer, mother, and cook. Born in Michigan, she attended Northwestern University and fell in love with her English instructor, Ogden native Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955).
I recently cobbled their fascinating story together from a variety of sources, including three excellent books: Wallace Stegner’s The Uneasy-Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, Nate Schweber’sThis America Of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild, and As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto.
Avis was 18 and Bernard was 25 when they met. Bernard was on the cusp of a writing career that would earn him the Pulitzer Prize for history and a national book award. Avis also was on the verge of a successful literary and TV career, albeit from behind the scenes.
Bernard was born in 1897 and lived just a few blocks from where I did as a boy. His father Florian was a Catholic Notre Dame graduate who moved west in 1877 seeking his fortune but never finding it. His mother Rhoda was the Latter-day descendant of a Mormon pioneer and Uintah farmer.
Bernard admired his hardworking maternal grandfather in a 1933 essay: “The earth was poisoned, and [he] made it sweet. It was a dead land, and he gave it life. Permanently. Forever. Following the God of the Mormons, he came from Hertford [England] to the Great American Desert and made it fertile. That is achievement.”
Stegner’s book describes Bernard with a captivating list of words: “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.”
He was not born into either of his parents’ faiths but rather “into the area of conflict between them; and since any conflict between a good Mormon and a faithful Catholic may be expected to end in a draw, it was predictable that [Bernard] would adhere to neither.”
As a result, Bernard grew up as a bookish outsider in Ogden, interested in a writing career. He felt ostracized for other reasons too, as Ogden teacher/writer Scott L. Greenwell explains:
“His peers took him for a sissy. The fact that his father insisted he attend the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy just a few blocks up the street on 25th didn’t make life any easier. And, when he reached [Ogden] high school, the adolescent torment continued. A former co-ed remembered him as ‘the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw’ (in part from a squashed nose, the result of a baseball accident). Still others referred to him as ‘Barnyard Revolto.’”
And yet, because of what Schweber’s book calls his “rebel charm” and “renegade humor,” Bernard was not unloved in Ogden. Stegner describes Bernard’s sometimes-platonic-sometimes-romantic relationship with a young woman named Elizabeth Caroline Browning.
Elizabeth was Ogden royalty, the youngest daughter of the great firearms inventor John Moses Browning. Bernard often visited her in the family’s elegant brownstone mansion at 27th and Adams, a half block from my home in what no longer was a posh neighborhood when I lived there.
The Brownings were the richest folks in town. Browning’s gun designs, bearing iconic names such as Colt and Winchester, still evoke the American West that DeVoto later would write about.
Three of Elizabeth’s uncles were Ogden mayors. Her brother was Val A. Browning, whose name now graces the performing arts center at Weber State University.
Stegner says the relationship was never very serious, despite a running joke between the two young people about eloping. Schweber claims it ended because Elizabeth’s Mormon family told her to stop kissing Gentile boys.
Bernard’s love and hate relationship with his hometown eventually pulled him away from it. He studied for a year at the University of Utah, served in the military during World War I, and graduated in 1920 from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1920 he told a friend, “Do not forget that at best, I am a spore in Utah, not adapted to the environment, a maverick who may not run with the herd, unbranded, given an ill name. These people are not my people, their God is not mine.”
After college, he penned an article for H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury that offended pretty much everyone at home, and that he later regretted. Bernard proclaimed, “Civilized life does not exist in Utah. It has never existed there. It never will exist there.”
Bernard eventually accepted a job teaching English at Northwestern University in Illinois. That’s where he met Avis.
Avis grew up as an outgoing and curious child in Houghton near Lake Superior on the upper Michigan peninsula. In contrast, her parents were taciturn Presbyterian Scots who grew distant after Avis’s younger sister died.
Stegner calls Avis a “character” who, in college in the 1920s,“bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, wore cloche hats, rolled her stockings below her knees, and spoke her full mind.” According to Schweber, she loved “iconoclasts, underdogs, and outcasts.”
Avis and Bernard were the perfect match. Schweber says, “They were compatible in humor, love of literature, curiosity about the world, and complex feelings about their hometown.”
He was a writer and she was an editor, he ate and she cooked, he was public and she was private. Despite the attraction, Bernard did not cut Avis any slack in his English class.
Mostly she worked hard and, according to Schweber, wrote “exquisite prose.” When she did not, for example in a “subpar” essay about Jonathan Swift she turned in just after they got engaged, Bernard gave her a C.
They got married in 1925 and visited Ogden soon after so Avis could meet Bernard’s father Florian. Bernard also brought her into his beloved Ogden Canyon and the Wasatch Mountains just east of town.
He had hiked and camped there often. Bernard later called that part of Ogden “an oasis, a garden in the desert, with the peaks splendid above it—lines that sweep the eye irresistibly onward, distances and colors that carry the breath with them, the mountains in which the Gods of the Utes walked in the cool of the day.”
They almost died, however, during this honeymoon-like visit. A flash flood—caused by the torrential rain of a summer squall—swept past their rental cabin as they fled to high ground.
Believing the flood was caused by years of livestock overgrazing the area, the couple began a lifelong quest to preserve the natural beauty of the Western landscape. Bernard wrote articles, edited by Avis, criticizing the cattle, timber and dam-building interests they thought were spoiling the untamed frontier.
The young couple eventually moved to Cambridge, while Bernard sought work at Harvard and continued writing, and had two sons—Gordon and Mark. When Florian was too old and sick to live alone in Ogden, they brought him to Massachusetts until he died in 1935.
In a 2021 interview with the University of Utah, Mark fondly recalls family driving trips out west. The Ogden Standard Examiner—for which both Bernard and I wrote as young men—reported on three of those trips in 1940, 1946, and 1950.
On any given trip, Bernard told reporters he was doing research for “a history of western expansion” or as a member of the National Parks Service advisory board. He also reminisced about fishing trips on the South Fork of the Ogden River and advised aspiring writers to “make black marks on white paper” to launch a career because “writers are people who write.”
The 1953 story included a photo with Avis and Mark, and quoted Bernard as “flabbergasted” that Trappist monks had established a monastery in Huntsville. The only mentions of Avis call her “charming” and note her hair color, but she was so much more than just that.
In the early 1950s, an aspiring chef and writer named Julia Child sent Bernard a letter from Paris praising his Harpers magazine column criticizing stainless steel knives. Avis handled her husband’s correspondence and replied, starting a long correspondence and friendship between the two women.
They did not meet in person until 1954, during a cocktail party at the DeVotos’ Cambridge home. Before then, however, they exchanged over 100 letters, which were published in the 2010 book As Always, Julia.
Avis was highly involved and influential in editing and guiding to publication Julia’s best seller Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After trying a few early recipes at home, Avis wrote in 1953, “Honest to God, Julia, you have brought a revolution into this household. I wholly expect the completed book to cause a real revolution.”
The Los Angeles Times has said, “If Child was the mother of the modern American interest in cooking, Avis DeVoto was its midwife.” Avis found the property at 103 Irving Street that was Child’s house for 40 years. The home’s iconic kitchen, designed by Julia’s husband Paul, hosted three of Child’s TV shows and now sits in the Smithsonian museum.
Bernard died unexpectedly in 1955 when he was just 58 years old. Ogden had not always loved him, but did mourn him. The Standard-Examiner even called Bernard a “Literary Giant.”
Avis wrote to Julia about her grief, “I don’t feel shock so much as complete emptiness…it was if he had stepped down an open manhole. I feel he just went off into space. And I feel in the most curious way cheated of all that anguish.”
When they heard the sad news, Julia sent Avis a plane ticket so she could join the Childs on a short trip to Europe. They remained friends for the next three decades.
During those many years, which lasted longer than her marriage to Bernard, Avis helped Child with her iconic cooking show. “The French Chef” aired on Boston public television—and even in my hometown Ogden—from 1963 to 1973.
Avis also supervised Stegner’s biography of Bernard, worked as a book editor and secretary, and saved Cambridge trees and historic buildings from demolition. And like she did for Bernard, Avis answered Julia’s fan mail…for twenty years.
Julia acknowledged Avis’s priceless contributions to her fame and success in writing several times, and quietly set up a trust fund to help support her old pen pal. They spoke together for the last time on the evening of March 6, 1989, a day before Avis died.
Their story truly is a compelling example of the power and beauty of female friendship, summarized best I think in a letter from Julia to Avis, “All from one kitchen knife. It was a miracle, wasn’t it? To think that we might easily have gone through life not knowing each other, missing all this free flow of love and ideas and warmth and sharing.”
I take issue with only the first sentence of that letter. It all started when Avis fell in love with a man from Ogden.
(Note: photos from Schweber’s book.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
