If you've taken any cultural and intellectual history courses that focus on literature, or courses in American studies, or advanced courses in American literature before 1865, you know who he is, because you've probably heard of his most famous book: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. You may have read some of it, or even all of it. You probably know he was gay, you probably also know he was what we'd call today a left liberal which means that in the late 1940s he was considered a Communist (and yes, he DID flirt with the party during the 1930s) and that he committed suicide. 63 years ago today, in fact. I've wanted to memorialize him here for some time now, but I missed his birthday (February 19, 1902) so now we're remembering his memory. Harvard University has already, with an endowed chair for a visiting professor of Gender and Sexuality. As it turns out, Matthiessen would have made a terrific Kossack.
Francis Otto Matthiessen was born into a fairly wealthy family in Pasadena, California. When his parents divorced (his father was apparently a piece of work), he and his mother moved in with her parents in LaSalle, Illinois. His paternal grandfather had became very rich after founding the Big Ben Clock company, and Matty (as he was called) had a very secure trust fund. Prep school, then Yale (where he was chosen for Skull and Bones, and this is important in our study), and a Rhodes scholarship.
In 1924, he met the painter Russell Cheney, some 21 years older than him, on the ocean liner Paris; Matthiessen was on his way to Oxford to resume residence for his second year as a Rhodes Scholar, while Cheney was on his way to Venice to paint. Cheney was also a Yale graduate, financially independent, and a member of Skull and Bones. This is Russell Cheney in 1930. The attraction was immediate. The thing about Skull and Bones (all this is via unpublished material that Matthiessen scholars have investigated) is that members are supposed to share confidences, to keep them confidential, and to give each other support for life. Both Cheney and Matthiessen had apparently come out to their fellow members, if not to the larger world.
And they left letters. Collected and published by Matthiessen's friend and literary executor Louis Hyde in a volume called Rat and the Devil. To no lack of consternation from some of his illustrious students, as it happens (if you have access to a library database, Harry Levin's review of this, "The Private Life of F.O. Matthiessen," in the New York Review of Books [July 20 1978] is interesting). Because these were two men very much in love. Matthiessen to Cheney, January 28, 1925:
We love each other, we have accepted each other, and now it requires great energy of creation to fashion our inner lives so that they can endure the many months that we are destined to be apart during the next fifty years.
Lots of this. It's fascinating, and yes, they had both read
Edward Carpenter to figure themselves and each other out.
So Matthiessen after his Oxford years went to Harvard for his graduate work and took up a position teaching there in 1929 while Cheney painted mostly at the country house they bought in Kittery, Maine, which became the center of their life together; Matthiessen, while at Harvard, took an apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston. Matthiessen was one of only two people teaching American literature at Harvard during the 1930s. His politics also moved to the left. President of the Harvard Teacher's union, delegate to the Massachusetts Federation of Labor and the American Federation of Teachers. Supporter of Harry Bridges -- national chairman of the Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges, in fact -- and giver of the seconding speech for Henry Wallace at the Progressive Party Convention in 1948. But early in 1939, in the throes of writing American Renaissance, Matthiessen suffered a partial nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for nineteen days, and he would suffer bouts of depression for the rest of his life.
American Renaissance was published in 1941, and it's a remarkable achievement. It's a study of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman who, as Matthiessen says in the introduction, participated in an
extraordinarily concentrated moment of literary expression
between 1850 (
The Scarlet Letter) and 1855 (
Leaves of Grass). Yes, it leaves out the women who published during this five-year span, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, and yes, it has come under a lot of pressure for restricting the canon (Where's William Lloyd Garrison? Where's Frederick Douglass?) but when you consider that American literature wasn't being taught at ALL in some places, this is a very big deal book and one of the founding texts of the discipline of American Studies. It's a study of cultural democracy in antebellum America, and yes, as the scholar Henry Abelove notes in
his book of essays, Deep Gossip
[An] erotic focus . . . is hinted at in the book's select cast of characters -- Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne and Emerson -- the first three of whom were then, as they are now, particularly amenable to appropriation by gay readers in search of predecessors.
And this is the painting reproduced in the book to represent what Matthiessen means by "renaissance":
The Swimming Hole, Thomas Eakins, 1884-1885, Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, TX
You know, the hints and clues and codes I've talked about in my diaries about James McCourt and Quatrefoil. There if you know about them, not there if you don't.
And then his life began to fall apart. Russell Cheney died in 1945, and since the relationship, in the tradition of the era, was left unrecognized by all but his Skull and Bones friends, this, a letter from Robert Penn Warren cited by Abelove, is exemplar:
I envy you your acquaintance with Cheney. He must have been extraordinarily rewarding company.
Um, contrast this with the expressions of sympathy you find
here and
here. And yes, his politics (unfairly) caught up with him as publications like
Life magazine and the
Boston Herald began to put him on lists as a dupe of the Communist party and as a fellow traveler and the students at Harvard asked him to remove himself as the faculty sponsor to the Liberal Club. So, 63 years ago today, he checked into a room at the Manger Hotel near Boston Garden, left the keys to his apartment, his Yale Skull and Bones key, and a note identifying himself as a professor at Harvard, and jumped out of a window on the twelfth floor. Depression.
Yes, Mark Merlis wrote a book called American Studies (1994) that's supposed to be about Matthiessen. Yes, it has a REAL fancy epigram
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins
by Walter Benjamin, yet. Yes, he sends up the entire field of American Studies in one paragraph
That seminar above all, that famous seminar of his, that he first had the audacity to call "American Studies." Nowadays, that means dissertations on "Gilligan's Island." But that wasn't what Tom [the character who's supposed to be Matthiessen] meant at all. He never meant to study America, the whole shebang, in all its imbecile complexity. For him, there were maybe three hundred Americans in as many years. They dwelt together in a tiny village. Cambridge/Concord/Mannahatta, Puritans and Transcendentalists exchanging good mornings, and Walt Whitman peeping in the windows. A little Peyton Place of the mind, small enough that Tom could know every byway and every scandal. I am not certain that Tom, in his life, ever uttered words like "Idaho" or "Utah." Not unless there was a strike there.
That's about all of the book that's worth reading, and where it comes from is explained in the acknowledgement to Merlis's
second book, which
sfbob and I will be reviewing for the LGBT Literature series at Readers and Book Lovers some time in May. I think that book,
An Arrow's Flight, is MUCH better than this book, and I don't buy Merlis's reading of Matthiessen at all (his Matthiessen puts a shotgun in his mouth and blows his brains out because he was caught schtupping a student). For me this is taking far too much license. Matty was frankly never interested in boys. On top of that, Merlis doesn't do the 1950s well at ALL. No thanks.
And a good Kossack? Here's how Matthiessen described his politics in From the Heart of Europe (1948):
In '32, with the depression at its worst, I thought that here at last was a chance for the Socialists to regain the broad base they had developed under Debs, and I joined the party. Roosevelt's speeches . . . struck me as little more than the promises of a Harvard man who wanted to be president. . . . Roosevelt in office was something quite other than I had foreseen, and after he began to effect even some of the things for which [Norman] Thomas had stood, I voted for him enthusiastically, though always from the left, until his death.
Mon semblable, mon frere, Matty. Rest in peace.
A Note on Sources: Aside from the books mentioned above, I used material from Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, eds., F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950): A Collective Portrait (1950) and William E. Cain, F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism(1988). Chrislove, you MUST read the Abelove book when you get a chance (it's short) because there's an essay in it that I need you to explain to me about the attitudes about the past that he says today's LGBTQ students bring to the classroom.