IF AT SOME POINT during your formal education you read Moby Dick, The House of Seven Gables, Walden, or any other 19th-century American literary classic, you indirectly felt the influence of Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950). It was his book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) that defined the canon of American literary classics. The book was so influential that it helped launch American Studies as a discipline, one that integrates fields such as literature, history, film, anthropology, and sociology, among others.
Matthiessen also wrote influential books about Sarah Orne Jewett (a distant relative on his mother’s side), T. S. Eliot, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote the kind of cultural history that electrified me as an undergraduate, affirming that every work of art, literary or otherwise, stood on its own artistic merits—but also could open a window onto the historical moment of its creation.
Matthiessen was no lonely scholar, cloistered away in his study. Inspired by his mother’s Unitarian faith, he fought for social justice from the earliest days of his career at Harvard, when he rallied influential professors and university publications in support of the owner of the Dunster House Bookshop in Cambridge, which had been entrapped by the Watch & Ward, a censorship organization, into selling a copy of the banned book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Many years later, when the U.S. attorney general published lists of nearly eighty organizations it deemed “subversive,” Matthiessen, a self-proclaimed socialist, had supported nearly ten of them. His political activism reached a pinnacle when he gave a seconding speech for the nomination of 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace.
The first stop was the Beinecke Library at Yale, which houses Matthiessen and Cheney’s 3,000 letters. The reading room at the Beinecke is a mid-century modernist dream—serene, quiet, and cool. It was a privilege to spend a week there. Rat and the Devil, a selection of Matthiessen and Cheney’s correspondence, had been published in 1978, but now I got to read everything. When the first box arrived, I practically shook as I removed the cover. I sat and read for hours and hours. From their correspondence an even clearer picture emerged of their relationship. I was captivated by the emotional connection between the two men. Moreover, I recognized all the local landmarks and businesses from childhood that served as a backdrop to their lives. A year later, as part of a one-day conference in Maine devoted to Cheney’s painting, I had an opportunity to take a tour of the couple’s house in Kittery. The current owners left the house largely untouched since their deaths. Cheney’s paintings still hung on the walls. The two men’s books lined the shelves. All the proto-gay books that existed at the time were there: Love’s Coming of Age, Towards Democracy, The Intermediate Sex, and An Unknown People, by Edward Carpenter; Walt Whitman and Studies of Greek Poets, by John Addington Symonds; Walter Pater’s Greek Studies; Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex; and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The next stop was the F. O. Matthiessen Room at Harvard’s Eliot House. The room had been Matthiessen’s office; his old-fashioned oak desk keeps watch on the Eliot House courtyard. The room now houses Matthiessen’s collection of English and American literature. There are complete sets of the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Henry James—all the writers whose work Matthiessen wrote about so perceptively and sensitively. His two libraries encapsulate Matthiessen’s divided soul—gay books at Kittery, professional books at Harvard. On the walls are framed documents and photographs, including Matthiessen’s seconding speech for Henry Wallace and letters from T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, among others. Several of Cheney’s paintings hang on the walls, including: Nubble Light, which features the lighthouse in my hometown; Down East, a landscape of a New England fishing village; and what to my mind is Cheney’s best portrait of Matthiessen, done in Florence in 1926, two years after they had fallen in love. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but this room in Eliot House tested that belief. Matthiessen’s books, Cheney’s paintings, the framed letters, and the photographs all deepened and solidified my sense of the two men. As with reading their correspondence in the original, visiting the couple’s home in Kittery, and seeing exhibitions of Cheney’s paintings, I could sense their presence at Harvard. The final stop was Springfield, Massachusetts, to visit Matthiessen’s grave, which happened on a cold, clear November day. From the local bus station I set off on foot to the Springfield Cemetery, where Matthiessen is buried next to his mother. His body had been returned to the Orne-Pratt family plot after he took his own life on April 1, 1950, by jumping from a twelfth-story window of the Manger Hotel in Boston. In the years leading up to his suicide, he had been hounded in the press as a communist sympathizer, but Cheney’s death five years earlier had cast a shadow of depression over his life from which he never recovered. Matthiessen’s grave is pleasantly situated underneath a tree at the top of a hill overlooking the grounds. I left a pen on his grave to say thank you. In 1994, a novel based on Matthiessen’s life titled American Studies, by the late Mark Merlis, was published to considerable acclaim. In 2012, an endowed chair for LGBT studies was established at Harvard by the Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus, the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality. Scott Bane’s journalism has appeared inHuffington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, andPoets & Writers. He lives in New York.
