A UNION LIKE OURS
The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney
by Scott Bane
Univ. of Massachusetts Press
302 pages, $24.95
BOTH RUSSELL CHENEY, the visual artist, and F. O. Matthiessen, the Harvard professor who founded the field that we now call American Studies, came from wealthy families. The Cheneys owned an entire town in Connecticut, South Manchester, where they housed the people who worked in their silk manufacturing factory, a business that did millions of dollars every year until the Depression and the rise of artificial fabrics. Matthiessen’s father owned Westclox, the clock manufacturer, not to mention thousands of acres in California that he eventually developed. Both men went to Yale, where each was admitted into the senior society Skull & Bones. Though there was a 21-year age difference between them—Cheney was born in 1881, Matthiessen in 1902—they both belonged to the same America, really, one in which colleges like Yale and Harvard educated young Protestant males from “good” families with inherited wealth.
Now all that’s changed. If you were to walk across Harvard Yard today between classes, you’d see a student body that looks more, as the saying goes, like America—though Asian-American parents have accused the university of using an admission process that discriminates against Asians in a lawsuit that’s currently being argued before the Supreme Court. But in the 1920s, Harvard and Yale were still associated with what we now call privilege. Matthiessen, who was raised by his mother after his parents’ divorce, grew up in Tarrytown, New York, where he was enrolled at the Hackley School. At that time he would go into Manhattan to hook up with men he picked up in theaters, public washrooms, and parks. Psychiatrists would later attribute Matthiessen’s attraction to older men to his lack of a father figure, and perhaps that was a factor when, still in college, he met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe.
It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least.
After returning to the U.S., they went their separate ways, Matthiessen back to college, where in 1923 he was tapped by the senior society Skull & Bones, Cheney to his family’s compound in Connecticut. But they began a correspondence that was published in 1978 as Rat & The Devil: The Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney—a selection of the some 3,100 letters they exchanged over the course of their lives. Rat was the nickname given to Cheney by his Skull & Bones classmates; Little Devil was Matthiessen’s.
It seems incredible that one of the things one did when being initiated into Skull and Bones, a club whose membership was composed of the sons of the New England Protestant elite, was to confess one’s sexual past to fellow members. Cheney was alarmed when Matthiessen told him that he planned to tell them about his love for Cheney. But a Skull and Bones brother who went on to become the editor of Fortune magazine was nothing but encouraging: “Thank God you found it!” he wrote Matthiessen. “Vision—love—sympathy… I only know that you have found what you needed—what we all need—what we are put on the earth to find.” The reaction Cheney got when he told a homosexual friend what Matthiessen had done was less idealistic; he simply warned Cheney to be discreet.
And so began a lifelong relationship. Matthiessen went on to get a doctorate at Harvard, and become a beloved head tutor at Eliot House—even though he disliked “the arid remoteness from actuality of academic life,” as he wrote Cheney, and asked: “My God, why have most people connected to a university given up all desire to live?” And then there was the closet. Matthiessen knew very well that had he come out, he would not have been allowed to teach at Harvard. (“Have I any right in a community that would so utterly disapprove of me if it knew the facts?”) Later he would run up against President James Bryant Conant’s plans to make Harvard a great research institution, thereby reducing the role of the tutorial in a Harvard undergraduate education (which, to Matthiessen, was its essence). He disliked the “piddling little papers” that doctoral candidates wrote that only inspired other piddling little papers. Nevertheless, Matthiessen turned his dissertation into a book. Years later, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) made him a full professor and arguably the leading literary critic in America. Cheney, on the other hand, was marginalized as a New England regionalist whose paintings may be found at museums like the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.
In A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane carefully tracks both men’s careers through the changes in American culture that they were either reflecting or contributing to. Cheney struggled with critics who derided him for being too much in the thrall of American Impressionism at a time when the art scene was embracing Modernism. Matthiessen’s political causes got him in trouble with the FBI. Convinced that economic inequality was deforming his country’s politics, he not only supported the American labor movement but refused to hide his admiration for Soviet Russia.
What Bane’s extremely readable book is about, however, is the relationship between the two men and their struggle to make a home for themselves, physically and metaphorically, in a country that had not even begun to imagine gay marriage. At first the two men seemed mismatched. Matthiessen’s euphoria at having found the love of his life was countered by Cheney’s suggestion that this camaraderie did not mean they had to have sex with one another. We never learn what their sexual arrangement was. Cheney seems to have been interested in rough trade. In later years he would pick up hitchhikers, who on one occasion not only beat him up but stole his car. But such escapades were part of his appeal for Matthiessen. Whether or not Cheney was a father figure, it seems clear that Matthiessen regarded the painter as a free spirit whose knowledge of the world and love of art were preferable to his own cerebral way of regarding things. While Matthiessen would devote himself politically to “the People,” Cheney was attracted to persons—many of them working-class fishermen in Maine, where he and Matthiessen later bought a house near Portland—the sort of men that Marsden Hartley, another gay painter, used as subjects in his portraits.
Bane’s smart, sensitive study of a gay couple has its share of phrases like “might have been” and “probably,” which is all a biographer can do when inner thoughts have not been recorded on paper. Within these limitations, however, Cheney comes across as a recognizable type—an artist who got drunk, picked up hitchhikers, befriended working-class men, and suffered a New England Brahmin’s sense of his family’s expectations—whereas Matthiessen remains a bit out of reach. Considered a “stuffy formalist” by some of today’s critics, the high-minded idealist who found his way to cruising spots in New York when only a teenager seems to have wanted nothing more than a way to “express his love.” But he was full of contradictions—a progressive socialist who was simultaneously the head tutor in Harvard’s preppiest house, a man who was loved by his students but could be angry and brusque, someone both extremely ambitious and combative, but so depressed that at one point he checked himself into McLean Hospital in Belmont (near Boston) for treatment.
The Cheney family soon suspected that Matthiessen was more than a friend to their sibling. One relative, a brother-in-law, hired a detective to spy on the couple—anticipating the way the FBI would later open up a file on Matthiessen for his political sympathies. Several of Cheney’s friends believed that the source of hia limitations as an artist were his inability to separate himself from his family and its large compound in South Manchester. It was only when Cheney and Matthiessen purchased a house in Kittery, a coastal town in southern Maine, that the two men finally had a place of their own. There, like Willa Cather and Edith Lewis on their island off the coast of the same state, they could entertain friends, who knew about their relationship—in other words, like Cather and Lewis, the male version of a Boston marriage—an arrangement that seems to have been much less tolerated when the lovers were men.
But in Kittery they seem to have found happiness. Cheney began painting new subject matter, and Matthiessen was already a full professor after the success of American Renaissance. G&LR poetry editor David Bergman claims that “Matthiessen and Cheney constructed much of their sexual identities from what they read.” Among the books in their house in Kittery, for example, were volumes by John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, and Marcel Proust. Matthiessen’s own work enlarges our view of being different. Before the writers Matthiessen credited with the American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne—American literature had been part of a more “genteel” tradition featuring writers like Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. Hawthorne investigated in The Scarlet Letter what we might call a secret vice; Whitman was the bard of manly love; and the two Transcendentalists were, to say the least, free spirits. What none of these writers dealt with, however, was what came to blight the happiness Matthiessen thought he’d found with Cheney—not just the tuberculosis Cheney battled for much of his life, but the fact that he turned out to be a classic alcoholic.
As such, Bane’s book eventually becomes a very sad story. A cold, disillusioned note enters Matthiessen’s letters to Cheney after yet one more relapse, and treatment at institutions like McLean and the Hartford Retreat. Various theories about the cause and cure of alcoholism determined the care that Cheney received at each place. But all of them associated drinking with “sensitivity,” and “sensitivity” with homosexuality. At one point he was subjected to medically induced seizures and shock therapy. No one seemed to realize that the problem was addiction. Two months after he had returned to Kittery after drying out in 1945, he died in his sleep of a thrombosis.
From then on, Matthiessen seems to have been doomed. The main reason was the loss of Cheney. But at this point, he was also being watched by the FBI. The bugaboo of American politics was Communism, and Matthiessen’s support for Harry Bridges, the union organizer, and his favoring the election of Henry Wallace in a presidential election, were enough to cause suspicion. Given what Putin has done in Ukraine, it’s especially depressing to read Matthiessen’s comment on the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia after World War II. “The Czechs regard the Soviet Union with gratitude for their liberation.” Or his answer when Mary McCarthy, at a peace conference in New York in 1949, asked him what would have happened had Thoreau practiced civil disobedience in Stalin’s Russia: “I do not think that Thoreau or Emerson could exist very well in the present Soviet Union. Nor do I think that great figures like Lenin could have existed very well in twentieth-century America.” The Boston Herald’s story about this exchange called Matthiessen a Communist dupe.
Years ago, when I learned that a Harvard professor named F. O. Matthiessen had committed suicide because of depression induced by world events, I thought it odd that politics could lead a person to kill himself. After reading A Union Like Ours, it seems clear it was the loss of Cheney, the aridity of spirit, and sheer loneliness, that led Matthiessen to jump out a hotel window in downtown Boston in 1950. He had lasted no more than four years without Cheney.
Bane wonders what might have happened had Matthiessen met Harry Hay, arguably the founder of the modern gay rights movement; Hay’s campaign might have been the perfect union of Matthiessen’s idealism and his sexuality. Bane’s answer is mixed: “Matthiessen would have been unfazed by Hay’s membership in the Communist Party. But in response to Hay’s more self-assertive stance on homosexuality, Matthiessen would likely have retreated. The tragedy of Matthiessen’s premature death is that he could have lived to see the Stonewall Riots of 1969 marking the beginning of gay liberation.”
Philosopher Hannah Arendt said that the task of man is to make a home for himself on earth, and that is what Matthiessen was trying to do with Cheney, successfully at times, particularly when they set up their household in Kittery. On those Thanksgiving days when they hosted friends, they were simply a gay couple whose cats were named Pretzel, Zuzu, Miss Pansy Littlefield, and Lady Vere De Vere. But then Cheney’s addiction to alcohol became insurmountable. Reading the last part of A Union Like Ours is akin to reading The Lost Weekend. It does not, however, make the story of Matthiessen and Cheney any less heroic. They were, after all, attempting to create a life for which society would have no tolerance for decades to come.
In 2009, the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus raised $1.5 million to fund the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality. What its namesake would have made of choosing one’s pronouns is no more predictable than what would have happened if he had met Harry Hay. But surely the words Matthiessen wrote to Cheney at the beginning of their relationship are all the more admirable because of that: ”We stand in the middle of an unchartered, uninhabited country. That there have been unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything for ourselves.” And so they did.
Andrew Holleran is the author of the new novel The Kingdom of Sand.
