Do the Dead Choose Their Biographers?
by Scott Bane
The New York Times has given me many good things in life. There is my partner (later husband) of 30 years, David, who retired from the Times at the end of 2017 after 42 years of service, although he continues to work as a part-time curator of an in-house museum of New York Times history. And then there is the American literary critic F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950). A 2003 book review in the Times introduced me to Matthiessen’s most famous book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), describing it as a love letter to his life-partner, the painter Russell Cheney. September 2024 marked the 100th anniversary of Matthiessen and Cheney’s fateful meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris that set sail from Pier 55 at the foot of West 15th Street bound for Le Havre by way of Plymouth. From that day, the two men became a couple, later settling in Kittery, Maine from 1930 to 1945, when Cheney died. Kittery is a small town along the Maine coast, right over the New Hampshire border, next to York, where I grew up.
A native of Pasadena and later based at Harvard, Matthiessen was a luminary in early-to-mid-20th century literary studies, who helped establish American Studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws on and integrates diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, especially history and literature. Given the range of his public and private writing, Matthiessen could be described as an early creative nonfiction writer, publishing nine books that included literary criticism and biographies; a monograph devoted to Cheney’s painting soon after his death; and an unusual work best characterized as a hybrid political essay, travelogue, and memoir. Matthiessen wrote roughly seventy-five articles and essays that included book reviews and advocacy journalism, often focused on organized labor’s struggles. On top of all of this he edited five additional books and made numerous contributions to anthologies and collaborative works.
Contemporary scholars have wrestled with Matthiessen’s legacy in three books and numerous articles. Beginning in the 1980s, his work came under increasing scrutiny, reassessment, and criticism from academics who argued that his literary judgments were too narrow, because they slanted white and male, although not entirely heterosexual. Others pointed out that Matthiessen never fully reconciled his literary and political positions, and that he skimmed the surface of divisions in American life, notably with his inadequate treatment of the U. S. Civil War in American Renaissance.
Then there is Matthiessen’s life and death by suicide, which continue to fascinate. Matthiessen’s story and his relationship with Cheney have given rise to three novels. These include: Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) about the Matthiessen-like character Edward Cavan, who takes his own life purportedly over his thwarted progressive political ideals; American Studies (1994) in which the first person narrator recounts his relationship with faculty advisor Tom Slater, a Matthiessen-like character who dies by suicide; and most recently American Scholar (2023), where Matthiessen and Cheney hover as intellectual and emotional inspiration for the novel’s main character James Fitzgerald.
Over the summer of 2003 after reading the Times book review, I would take American Renaissance and a number two pencil to a quiet hill in Central Park to read of a summer afternoon. American Renaissance quickly became one of those books that I wished I could eat. I know that sounds loopy, but there have been books that I so strongly wanted to incorporate into my being that I have imagined eating them. I chewed on my number two pencil instead, as I took notes in the margins.
American Renaissance considers the work of five writers in the period of 1850-1855, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Matthiessen didn’t stop at literature; he tapped painting and sculpture in an attempt to form a cohesive narrative of cultural history. Matthiessen asks: Why does this moment of collective expression occur when it does? What do the works of these writers and artists say about life in America? For example, Matthiessen wrote about Moby Dick: “The strong-willed individuals who seized the land and gutted the forests and built the railroads were no longer troubled by Ahab’s obsessive sense of evil, since theology had receded even farther into their backgrounds. But their drives were as relentless as his, and they were to prove like him in many other ways also, as they went on to become the empire builders of the post-Civil War world.”
In the book, Matthiessen also began to articulate a nascent queer literary and artistic canon in his focus on Whitman’s poetry, Melville’s novella Billy Budd, and Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole among others. As I dug into Matthiessen life and work, often a personal association anchored his scholarship: Cheney had suggested Matthiessen begin reading Whitman’s poetry. Matthiessen shared with Cheney a photo of himself standing naked on Sea Point Beach in Kittery with a big piece of seaweed draped around his neck and providing just enough modesty. Like the men in The Swimming Hole, Matthiessen appreciated the pleasures of skinny-dipping. That Matthiessen did all of this, while living long before gay rights movement or even the civil rights movement, fascinated me. If personal associations could be Matthiessen’s starting point, maybe they could be mine, too? Transcending time, I connected to a queer lineage through this place that had been so critical in shaping who I became.
American Renaissance spoke to me for other personal reasons, too. In my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had taken a history seminar with about 15 students entitled The Individual and Society in Antiquity and the Renaissance. The course introduced me to the idea that literary works, in addition to their artistic merits, could also reveal something of the time in which they were created. A book could be like a geological cross-section of soil and sediment that discloses different stages of the earth’s crust age. The idea captivated me. When I read American Renaissance nearly 20 years had passed since my freshman history course. But reading the book, I felt as though I were recapturing part of myself that I had unconsciously dropped along the way to adulthood and earning a living.
I also discovered Rat and the Devil: The Journal Letters of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, an edited selection from Matthiessen and Cheney’s nearly 3,100 letters that they exchanged with each other between meeting in 1924 and Cheney’s death. Cheney was Rat, and Matthiessen was Devil. Cheney’s nickname originated from his family, while Matthiessen picked-up his nickname in Skull and Bones, the elite senior society at Yale, to which both he and Cheney belonged. The letters meant so much to Matthiessen that early on he bought a strong box, in which to store them for safe keeping. Matthiessen’s letters are articulate, perceptive, and searching: “Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us know of a parallel course. We stand in the middle of an uncharted, uninhabited country. That there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything ourselves. And creation is never easy.” For Matthiessen his relationship with Cheney illuminated both his life and literary studies. “My union with you during those seven weeks [in Italy] brought me to a state where I thought that for the first time I knew the meaning of love, and perhaps felt some ability to express this white sacred flame in my life and work.”
After the publication of Rat & the Devil in 1978, commentators on Matthiessen’s life and work noted how much he would have hated having his personal life exposed in public. His former student and later colleague at Harvard, Harry Levin, rather unceremoniously trashed Rat and the Devil in The New York Review of Books. “As for the violation of his privacy, I have little doubt that Matthiessen would have hated it, and Cheney was even more self-conscious about the stigmata of homosexuality.” Levin’s assessment of his former teacher and colleague was probably true; he knew Matthiessen well. But in 1945, when Matthiessen wrote his Last Will and Testament, he specifically singled out the letters and left them to a Skull and Bones brother, suggesting that he appreciated their significance. Even if he never could have imagined the letters being published, he wanted what was contained in them – the expression of love – to live on. In 2024, the letters may well be Matthiessen’s most important contribution, if not to literature, then to history.
I set off an expedition to learn as much as I could about Matthiessen and his work, Cheney and his painting, their backgrounds, and their life together. I visited the Beinecke Library at Yale to read the originals of Matthiessen and Cheney’s letters. In connection with a 2009 exhibition of Cheney’s paintings, I took a tour of the couple’s former home in Kittery, which seemed idyllic, sitting on the rocky coast overlooking the ever-changing blue, green, and gray ocean. Eventually, I created a timeline of all my notes about Matthiessen and Cheney’s life together, as captured in their letters, Matthiessen’s books and reviews, and Cheney’s paintings. Nearly two decades later this had grown into A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, which was published in 2022 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle.
It was uncanny the way it all happened: stumbling across Matthiessen in the pages of the New York Times, being reminded of a moment of my own early intellectual flowering, Matthiessen and Cheney’s connection with southern coastal Maine, and then writing their story. It was almost as if Matthiessen and Cheney had chosen me rather than the other way around.
BIO
Scott Bane grew up not ten miles from where F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney made their home in Maine. A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney is Scott’s first book and was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction made by the Publishing Triangle. Scott’s essays have appeared in Down East Magazine, The New England Journal of History, and The Gay and Lesbian Review. The Boston Globe, HuffPost, and Poets & Writers among others have published his journalism. Into the Void and Christopher Street have brought out Scott’s fiction. Learn more at www.scott-bane.com.
