THE INFLUENTIAL literary critic, writer, and activist c (1902–1950) measured writers by the degree to which they could express the spirit of the times in which they lived. He lifted this idea from T. S. Eliot, about whom Matthiessen wrote an early book. But even before The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), he had been moving in this direction in Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), which was the first biography of Jewett, and Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), which grew out of his Harvard doctoral thesis. In these books, he examined both the literary works and their connections to the cultures from which they sprang.
Throughout Matthiessen’s life, he was politically engaged, and his activism led to expressing these central questions and concerns of his own day. In college at Yale, he became interested in organized labor issues. During the Great Depression, the cause of greater economic equality became a central animating theme in his life and work. But he also pushed for freedom of expression and racial equality and witnessed the foundations for the Civil Rights movement in the 1940s.
Taking the full body of Matthiessen’s writing, both public and private, he was extraordinarily prolific in his short lifetime, publishing nine books that encompassed literary criticism, biography, and memoir. He edited five additional books and wrote roughly 75 essays, articles, and book reviews. On top of all of this, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945), who was the love of his life.
Matthiessen and Cheney dated their relationship to a 1924 transatlantic voyage aboard the Paris. Matthiessen was returning to New College, Oxford, for the second year of his Rhodes Scholarship; Cheney, 21 years older and from a wealthy family of silk manufacturers, was traveling back to Europe to paint. From the time Matthiessen disembarked at Plymouth, the two men began a relationship in which 3,100 letters were exchanged. The letters were occasioned by the fact that Matthiessen spent the school year in Cambridge, at Harvard, where he began to teach in 1929, while Cheney lived full-time in Kittery, Maine, in the house they shared over weekends, holidays, and summers. Five years after Cheney’s death, when their twenty-year relationship had ended, depression closed in on Matthiessen, who took his own life, jumping from a twelfth-floor hotel window in Boston.
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Matthiessen’s activism on behalf of economic and social rights didn’t start in full until 1935, when he joined a group of activists and lawyers investigating a labor riot in Gallup, New Mexico, a coal mining town, about 200 miles west of Santa Fe, where he and Cheney were on an extended visit. In labor organizing efforts, the Communist-affiliated National Miners’ Union successfully appealed to unemployed Mexican workers because of the union’s openness to everyone regardless of race or ethnicity. Tensions rose when union members began receiving federal unemployment benefits. When one of the workers, whom his fellows believed had been unjustly evicted from his home, appeared at a court hearing, a riot broke out between right-wing extremists and migrant workers. It resulted in over 100 migrant workers, many of whom did not speak English, being arrested. Fifty-five were charged with murder, 48 faced the death penalty, and many others were deported on immigration charges. Matthiessen’s article about the riot for The New Republic stands up well against the historical record. Not surprisingly, he cast the events in a broader cultural context, noting “the strong-armed frontier refusal to recognize labor unions,” and holding the mining companies to account for “their own social irresponsibility.”
When Matthiessen and Cheney returned to the East Coast, Matthiessen helped organize the Harvard Teachers’ Union, whose membership grew to nearly 200 right before World War II. When Harvard dismissed two popular, left-leaning economists, Matthiessen joined David Prall, a philosophy professor and then president of the Harvard Teachers’ Union, and submitted an open letter to The New Republic protesting “how far short [Harvard] had fallen of any conception of democracy, justice or wise educational policy.” Then, in 1941, when the U.S. Naval Academy refused to play a lacrosse game against Harvard if they allowed a Black student to participate, Harvard capitulated and removed the player. Under Matthiessen’s direction, the Harvard Teachers’ Union joined the NAACP in denouncing the Harvard Athletic Association’s complicity in racism.
Advocating for freedom of expression and protesting against racial discrimination, in 1944 Matthiessen involved himself in the Strange Fruit case. Strange Fruit is a novel by Lillian Smith that depicts an interracial romance. The book was “banned in Boston” thanks to the Watch and Ward Society, a censorship organization. Matthiessen joined Harvard colleague Bernard DeVoto in purchasing a copy of the book, leading to a summons and fine being issued to the bookseller, Abraham Isenstadt. Once again, Matthiessen used the power of his pen, writing in The Harvard Crimson: “It is thoroughly shameful for such a book to be banned in Boston at the very time when we need to examine every phase of our American race problems with something of Lillian Smith’s care and wisdom.”
Another key event in the evolution of Matthiessen’s political activism was his support for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in the 1948 Presidential race. At the polls that year, Wallace did not win a single electoral vote, but Matthiessen benefited from his association with the campaign in more general ways. He supported Wallace’s positions on economic and social rights, which included full taxation of capital gains, a national health insurance program, public day care, and public ownership of banks, railroads, and utilities. But Matthiessen’s thinking on civil and political rights expanded, too. The Wallace campaign also stood for desegregation, equal rights for women, and direct election of presidents. At the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia that year, delegates from many states cited Wallace’s stance on racial justice as central to their support. Representing Massachusetts, Matthiessen delivered a seconding speech for Wallace at the convention.
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In 1941, Matthiessen’s most influential and enduring book was published, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Perhaps more than any other single book, it is credited with launching the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Matthiessen’s emphasis on economic, social, civil, and political rights brought him to the works of Thoreau, Whitman, and especially Melville. He appreciated Melville’s depiction of the social forces that shape people’s lives. In his analysis of the story “Tartarus of Maids,” for example, he observed that the author tried “to picture the actual conditions in a New England paper-mill,” singling out one of Melville’s desolate images from the story: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” Matthiessen also noted Melville’s sensitive observation in “Poor Man’s Pudding,” that the poor in America “suffer more in the mind than the poor of any other people in the world,” because they cannot reconcile the “ideal of universal equality” with the “grindstone experience of practical misery and infamy of poverty.” In Matthiessen’s reading of Melville, the poor have internalized the belief that their status is their own fault. Moreover, the effects of poverty were complicated, in part, because the world blinds itself to the suffering it produces.
As for civil and political rights in American Renaissance, Matthiessen occupied the “double consciousness” perspective that commentators on his life and writing have discussed, navigating between accepted positions and his own points of view. This is on full display in his treatment of homosexuality. On the one hand, he described a passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as “vaguely pathological and homosexual,” but, on the other, he assigned the posthumously published novella Billy Budd the place of honor as Melville’s crowning vision of a “radical affirmation of the heart,” one tinged with homoeroticism.
Billy Budd, characterized by Melville as a “Handsome Sailor” known for his youthful innocence, attracts the attention of the moody and ill-tempered master-at-arms, John Claggart. When Billy knocks over a can of greasy liquid at Claggart’s feet aboard the Bellipotent, Claggart responds with the ambiguous line: “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” Matthiessen went on to add: “This is one of the scenes in which the writer of to-day would be fully aware of what may have been only latent for Melville, the sexual element in Claggart’s ambivalence.”
For the remainder of the 1940s, Matthiessen wrote extensively about Henry James and the James family. These books included Henry James: The Major Phase (1944); Stories of Artists and Writers by Henry James (1944); The Notebooks of Henry James (1947): The American Novels and Stories of Henry James (1947); and The James Family, Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Sr., William, Henry, and Alice James (1947). In them, Matthiessen showed a willingness to look closely at private writings and overlooked writers. He had been interested in private correspondence going back to Sarah Orne Jewett, whose letters to Annie Fields, Jewett’s partner in her Boston Marriage, Matthiessen read closely indeed. But now Matthiessen was willing to place private writing at the center of his thinking, such as when he edited James’ notebooks of private musings that became his fiction. Considering Matthiessen’s growing appreciation for civil and political rights in the late 1940s, he helped give early credence to the writings of Alice James based on her strong voice and trenchant observations in her private diary, several decades before she became recognized as an important feminist voice.
The event that pushed Matthiessen’s writing into new territory—autobiography and memoir—was Cheney’s death from thrombosis in 1945. Russell Cheney: A Record of His Work (1946/1947) is a memoir of their relationship dressed up as a monograph devoted to the painter’s œuvre. Matthiessen used letters that Cheney had sent to him and their mutual friend H. Phelps Putnam, a poet, to piece together Cheney’s development as a painter. He interspersed these with 65 images of Cheney’s paintings. The resulting book is strikingly personal and intimate, so much so that Jerome Mellquist described Matthiessen as Cheney’s “long-time companion” in his review in The New York Times. Although the book did not tackle economic and social rights, its very existence owed everything to the depth of Matthiessen’s love for Cheney, his respect for his painting, and their privileged backgrounds—but also to a continued evolution in his thinking on civil and political rights, which argued for an expanded view of life and what could be shown, including his own life as a gay man.
The book that comes closest to a memoir as traditionally understood is From the Heart of Europe (1948), an unusual hybrid work of memoir, travelog, and political commentary. It describes Matthiessen’s experience teaching American literature at Charles University in Czechoslovakia and the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization in Austria, a cultural exchange program started by three Harvard students in the aftermath of World War II. The book delves into Matthiessen’s biography, his schooling, including important teachers from Yale and the Hackley School, his private high school. After his death, his former students organized to have a memorial volume published about him, his writings, and his political activism. They used material From the Heart of Europe to write the biographical chapter titled “Education of a Socialist.” Matthiessen came close to acknowledging his homosexuality in print when he wrote beautifully and movingly about his relationship with Cheney: “in any place I ever was with Russell Cheney I am pierced with the realization of how much he taught me to see, of how life shared with him took on more vividness than I have ever felt in any other company.”
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After Cheney’s death, Matthiessen’s advocacy journalism continued at a higher pitch than ever. He reviewed a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose edited by Mark Van Doren in which he criticized the editor’s squeamishness over “the more physical aspects of Whitman,” and for having characterized Whitman’s letters to his love interest Peter Doyle, a horsecar conductor in Washington, D.C., as “silly.” Matthiessen concluded the review by arguing for the necessity of literature getting at “the amplitude of our [American] life” and overcoming the genteel belief that only the happier and more pleasant aspects of life were suitable for literary expression. This is a theme Matthiessen took up even more forcefully in his biography of Theodore Dreiser, his last book.
In Theodore Dreiser, which was published posthumously, Matthiessen emphasized economic and social rights with renewed vigor. But a funny thing happened. Dreiser’s particular expression of realism seemed to extend Matthiessen’s thinking on civil and political rights, helping him to envision still greater variety in the range of people’s lives that fiction could portray, including his own life as a gay man.
He appreciated what Dreiser had to say about the role of money in American life. He called Dreiser an American Balzac. For both men, there could be “no real political freedom without the removal of our vast economic inequalities.” In Matthiessen’s opinion, most Americans did not want to acknowledge the forces in life which Dreiser portrayed, such as “crass chance” and “fierce brutalities,” because they undercut the official version of what life was supposed to be like in America.
In his tangles with critics and censorship organizations, Dreiser knew what it was like to be an object of animosity in the eyes of the gatekeepers of American culture. Matthiessen’s political experiences in the last years of his life, as well as the harsh reviews of From the Heart of Europe, only furthered his sense of empathy. Matthiessen quoted Dreiser: “My own experience with Sister Carrie, as well as the fierce opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those who attempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible. One dared not talk out loud, one dared not report life as it was lived, as one lived it.” For Matthiessen, Dreiser’s words must have held special meaning. In Dreiser’s emphasis on depicting life as it was actually lived, he found further intellectual grounds for imagining that his life as a gay man might one day be represented in American culture.
Over the next few years, several more posthumous works were published, including The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), which Matthiessen edited, and Responsibilities of the Critic (1952), a collection of his essays and articles. But the most important and surprising was Rat & the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney (1978), edited by Louis Hyde, a college friend, to whom he bequeathed the letters.
The letters are extraordinary: frank, tender, and searching. In them, Matthiessen frequently wrestled with his homosexuality, such as figuring out how to understand his relationship with Cheney in a 1924 letter (“Marriage! What a strange word to be applied to two men!”); giving voice to anxiety over his homosexuality as in a letter from 1930 (“Am I just like any fairy?”); or making clear in a 1943 letter the depth of his loneliness and depression in response to Cheney’s frequent hospitalizations in the last years of his life (“I needn’t pretend that … loneliness hasn’t left me empty for long stretches of time”). The letters became a lens to view Matthiessen’s earlier work and trace how he moved in the direction of civil and political rights for gay men and lesbians, even when he had little language for such representation. Thanks to Rat & the Devil, Matthiessen’s elevation of Melville and Whitman’s work can be read in a new light.
Matthiessen has had an afterlife more like that of a writer than a literary critic. Much interest has settled on his tragic death and his long partnership with Russell Cheney as expressed in their letters. But the range of his writing and the threads of advocacy for economic, social, civil, and political rights suggest that Matthiessen wrestled with some of the hallmark issues of his day. His political activism was imperfect, but it was essential in helping him arrive at these questions. And trying to express the questions of the age in which he lived is why he should still be read today.
Scott Bane is the author of A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney.
