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The Lure of the Sea
R OLANDO J ORIF Melville at Sea I GNACIO D ARNAUDE
Paul Cadmus’ Art of Cruising M ARTIN D UBERMAN Joe Carstairs: Fastest Woman of Her Day W ILLIAM B ENEMANN Sailors on Trial in 1842
Terence Stamp as Billy Budd, 1962
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The Gay & Lesbian Review July–August 2022 • VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 4 WORLDWIDE
Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . ____________________________________ WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118
C ONTENTS
The Lure of the Sea
F EATURES
Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON J EREMY F OX M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER A NDREW L EAR D AVID M ASELLO
A New England Romance 12 A NDREW H OLLERAN
Harvard prof F.O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney in love
Sex and Gender in Native America 15 V ERNON R OSARIO
The term “Two-Spirit” belies a plethora of variations on a theme
Paul Cadmus’ Art of Cruising 18 I GNACIO D ARNAUDE
The Fleet’s In! set the stage for those raucus free-for-alls
The Sea and Sexual Freedom 22 R OLANDO J ORIF
From Typee to Billy Budd , Melville longed for something lost at sea
“A Dab of Tar on a Sailor’s Posteriors” 25 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN
— From an 1842 trial that delved into the secret lives of sailors
The Fastest Woman of Her Day 28 M ARTIN D UBERMAN
Joe Carstairs raced speedboats in the 1920s—and often won
R EVIEWS
James R. Gaines — The Fifties: An Underground History 32 H ILARY H OLLADAY Michal Witkowski — Eleven-Inch 34 P HILIP G AMBONE Susan McCabe — H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism 35 C ASSANDRA L ANGER
F ELICE P ICANO J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP Web Editor K ELSEY M YERS ____________________________________ Board of Directors
Morgan Thomas — Manywhere: Stories 36 R OSEMARY B OOTH Charles J. Shields — Lorraine Hansberry 37 C HARLES G REEN
James Kirchick – Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington 38 M ARK M ORAN Ulrich Baer, ed. – My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde ... 40 J EAN R OBERTA B RIEFS 41 Putsata Reang — Ma and Me: A Memoir 42 M ARTHA E. S TONE Toni Mirosevich — Spell Heaven and Other Stories 42 R UTH J OFFRE José Carregal – Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices in Irish Fiction 43 D ALE B OYER Shola von Reinhold — Lote 44 R EGINALD H ARRIS
Terence Davies, director — Benediction 48 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG Peeter Rebane, director — Firebird 50 B RIAN B ROMBERGER
P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS
G UEST O PINION — “Don’t Say Gay” Comes from a Tired Playbook 5 C ASSANDRA L ANGER C ORRESPONDENCE 6 I N M EMORIAM — Steve Neil Johnson, A Weaver of Mysteries 9 J OHN C OOK BTW 10 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . P OEM — “Sonnet for This Queer Body” 17 M ARINA C ARREIRA A RT M EMO — Hemingway and Hart Crane: Blood Brothers? 31 M ARK S HULGASSER P OEM — “Sheilah Graham and Me (Age 14)” 44 J OHN H ARRIS A RT M EMO —Welcome to the ’70s! 45 R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 46 A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — José Villalobos, Installation & Performance Artist 47 N EIL E LLIS O RTS P OEM — “Moses Parts the Red Sea” 49 R EMI R ECCHIA
S TEWART C LIFFORD A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) E DUARDO F EBLES D ONALD G ORTON ( CLERK )
R OBERT H ARDMAN J AMES H ARRISON D AVID L A F ONTAINE A NDREW L EAR R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) M ARTHA E. S TONE T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)
The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 844-752-7829. Rates : U.S.: $35.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $45.70(US). All other countries: $55.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2022 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org
July–August 2022
3
Summertime: ‘The Lure of the Sea’ FROM THE EDITOR T HE PHRASE “land’s end” has been applied to any number of seaside locales, perhaps most famously to three places in the U.S.: Provincetown, Key West, and San Francisco. The fact that all three are well known as LGBT meccas is surely not a coincidence. There’s something about these hard-to-reach coastal spots that has made them havens of tolerance and diversity, accepting of artists and gay people and other social outliers.
married with children, allowed his authentic self to roam. Melville qualifies as a case study for a thesis that William Benemann has advanced in his book Unruly Desires , namely that working as merchant marines was often the best option for gay men in the Age of Sail, far from the watchful eyes of con stables and priests. Here he focuses on an incident aboard a U.S. ship whose captain was put on trial in 1842 for devising a curiously pornographic punishment for an insubordinate sailor. The trial touched upon a truth about life at sea that was rarely acknowledged in polite society. When sailors come ashore, they are of course notoriously rowdy and randy and on the prowl. Their shenanigans were captured famously, and scandalously, by Paul Cadmus in his 1934 painting The Fleet’s In! , which depicts gay and straight cruising and schmoozing. As Ignacio Darnaude points out, this painting is one of several in which Cadmus depicted the har bor as a place of sexual temptation and discovery. A very different set of ambitions lured Joe Carstairs to the sea, where she raced speedboats at the highest level of competi tion, winning the coveted Duke of York trophy in 1926. Often sporting male attire and making little secret of her love of women, as Martin Duberman elaborates here, Carstairs was an American patrician whose friends included Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead, both known for their flamboyant sexuality. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
In literature and the arts, the lure of the sea has found its ex pression in a number of important LGBT works. One thinks of Jean Genet’s shockingly uncloseted tale of sailors in Querelle , or of Gore Vidal’s merchant marines in The City and the Pil lar , arguably the first openly gay novel published in English. Going back in time, we have a novelist like Thomas Mann, for whom Death in Venice was a way to explore his non-terrestrial desires; or Herman Melville, whose early years at sea furnished the material for his tales of manly adventure. Melville’s personal sexuality is still debated, but one could argue that he created some of the gayest novels ever written. It’s possible to read Moby-Dick as an allegory of good and evil, but that doesn’t explain why, when we read it in high school, some of us were inexplicably fascinated by this exotic world of men. And then there’s Billy Budd , which presents a case of simmer ing lust directed toward a beautiful young sailor. Adding Typee to the mix, Rolando Jorif argues that the sea is where Melville,
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GUEST OPINION
‘Don’t Say Gay’ Comes from a Tired Playbook C ASSANDRA L ANGER W ITCH HUNTS have always been as American as apple pie. Ambitious politicians running for office have often found it expedient to create “enemies of
Not satisfied with plying his machinations on students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, DeSantis and his cohorts are now looking for ways to extend their control of speech and morals to the university level. The word is out that professors at public institutions who are openly gay or sympathetic to LGBT rights will be scrutinized accordingly in hiring and tenure consideration. Now that “Don’t Say Gay” is law in Florida, DeSantis and his cronies are building on their sinister success by banning books. So far they’ve excluded over fifty textbooks that teach math in favor of books from just one company, Accelerated Learning. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin was the CEO of an investment firm that acquired Accelerated Learning, which is a leading contributor to DeSantis’ campaign. We have seen repeatedly how the Republican Party uses the politics of fear to silence its opposition. We need to recognize that they are actively conspiring to roll back gay rights. We’re seeing an insurgency of conversion therapies in some states. How long before they come after gay marriage? For anyone con cerned with our hard-won rights, “Don’t Say Gay” is a matter of life and death. We must push back for the sake of today’s youth. We must demand safe spaces for young people to explore their authentic identities and protect their right to be who they are. Cassandra Langer is a frequent contributor to these pages.
the people” to get elected or to increase their power. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was working from this playbook when he pushed through his “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” oth erwise known as “Don’t Say Gay,” which evokes memories of Joseph McCarthy, the Johns Committee, andAnita Bryant from times we thought we had left behind. The “Parental Rights” law prohibits any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to third grade and prohibits instruction on these topics that is not “age ap propriate or developmentally appropriate for students” in all grades through high school. What’s “appropriate” is to be de cided by the parents in a given school district—even though parents are not trained professionals in child development or classroom instruction. Guidance counselors and certified class room teachers have always been a lifeline for teenagers ques tioning their sexuality or gender identity, providing safe spaces where children could explore being themselves. Now teachers will be prosecuted by a “special magistrate” appointed by De Santis and company for counseling students on these subjects. Those found to be in violation will be fired.
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Correspondence
candidate in a safe Labour seat in 1983 but lost dramatically after a concerted anti-gay campaign against him was mounted. I was living in London at the time and re member that campaign vividly. The attacks on Tatchell were vicious—and effective. Gregg Blachford, Montréal, Québec Virginia and Vanessa Stephen To the Editor: In a review of The Annotated Mrs. Dal loway [March-April 2002], Vanessa Bell is identified as Virginia Woolf’s “friend.” Bell was actually Woolf’s older sister. Virginia and Vanessa were both daughters of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson; Woolf and Bell were their married names. By the way, while Woolf’s importance as a novelist is universally acknowledged, few people are aware that Bell was an accomplished painter—an early Modernist—and a mem ber of the famed Bloomsbury Group. Peg Cruikshank, Scarborough, ME Corrections In the May-June 2022 issue, in the caption for the still from the film Great Freedom , the actor on the left is Thomas Prenn (not Georg Friedrich) in the role of Oskar. The May-June 2022 issue contained a typo in the obit for Stephen Sondheim. He passed away on November 26, 2021 (not 2022). The March-April 2022 ran a poem by Joan Cofrancesco in which Jackson Pollock’s name was misspelled. We regret the error.
with George, like an amuse-bouche. He lin gered just long enough to persuade [Forster and his married lover Bob Buckingham] to have their portraits taken the following week at his studio. Then the Lyneses evaporated.” As Moffat also reported, Wescott wrote in an October 10, 1971, New York Times article ti tled “A Dinner, a Talk, a Walk with Forster” that the fourth dinner guest (in addition to Forster, Buckingham, and Kinsey) was “old friend of his and mine, Joseph Campbell, the Sanskrit scholar, who has both professed and written about comparative mythology.” He did not mention Lynes and his mother having been there for cocktails. As one would expect only two years after Stonewall, Wescott described Wheeler only as “my best friend” and Buckingham as Forster’s “friend of long standing, Robert Buckingham, a big, boyish man, a police of ficer, who (with his wife May) provided a family life when Forster wanted it in his later years.” For those unaware, Bucking ham and his wife (who sometimes claimed she didn’t know of her husband’s sexual re lationship with Forster) named their son after Forster, as did another of his lovers. Michael Bedwell, Terre Haute, IN Peter Tatchell and Parliament To the Editor: Regarding your introductory statement about British activist Peter Tatchell [“From the Editor,” May-June 2022 issue], a small clarification is in order. Tatchell has never served in Parliament. He ran as a Labour
Dorothy Healey’s CP Tenure To the Editor, I very much enjoyed reading the recent G&LR Pride Issue: Radical Pursuits [May June 2022). I especially appreciated the way that the discussion was framed in the edi tor’s introduction. In that issue, I read with great interest Martin Duberman’s article on the historical relationship of the American Communist and Socialist parties to homo sexuality and the LGBT+ movement. As al ways, Duberman sheds a discerning light on a fascinating topic. There is, however, one minor error in Duberman’s description of Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey. I knew Dorothy starting in the early 1970s, and I made a documentary about her in the 1980s titled Dorothy Healey: An American Red (available on YouTube). Duberman’s article asserted that Dorothy left the CP in 1968 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslo vakia. Actually, while she did resign from leadership in 1968, she did not leave the Party until 1973. Her reasons for leaving the CP were many, but her key reason was the lack of democratic process within the Party. As Duberman correctly noted, Dorothy left the CP but remained a committed leftist her entire life. In a public statement about her CP resignation on her KPFK radio pro gram, she said: “My hatred of capitalism, which degrades and debases all humans, is as intense now as it was when I joined the Young Communist League in 1928. I remain a communist ... albeit without a party.” Eve Goldberg, Santa Rosa, CA Lynes Missed That Dinner Party To the Editor: In Joseph M. Ortiz’ review of Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes [March April 2022], he makes a slight error con cerning an important gathering in New York in 1949 at which several literary titans of the 20th century converged. He describes a dinner party hosted by publisher Monroe Wheeler and his partner, writer Glenway Wescott, whose guests included novelist E. M. Forster, his lover Bob Buckingham, and sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Ortiz may have inferred from the following sentence in the book (page 427) that Lynes stayed for din ner: “When Monroe invited George and [his mother] Adelaide Lynes to pre-dinner cock tails so they might meet E. M. Forster in the company of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey...” How ever, he did not stay, and Ellenzweig does not state that he did so. Forster biographer Wendy Moffat put it this way: “It was a disarming idea to start
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IN MEMORIAM
Steve Neil Johnson, a Weaver of Mysteries J OHN C OOK A PIONEERING gay author of nine novels for adults, young adults, and children, Steve Neil Johnson died in Los Angeles on December 13, 2021, just one day shy of
male protagonists—one a prosecutor, one a vice cop—as they navigate the investigations of tricky murders and other crimes over the course of four decades of L.A. gay history, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Collectively, these books form The L.A. After Midnight Quartet . He was also the author of a novel for young adults featur ing a gay teen protagonist ( Raising Kane ), a stand-alone thriller ( This Endless Night ), and a children’s book ( Everybody Hates Edgar Allan Poe! ) under the pseudonym Rathbone Ravenford. Together with cowriter Gary Stephens, he also wrote several telenovelas, which included Palero . Johnson moved from New York City to L.A. in 1987, to gether with his boyfriend Don Hoover, who died of AIDS in 1989. Johnson was active in the L.A. Gay Writers Group with Stuart Timmons, Peter Cashorali, Rondo Mieczkowski, and Eric A. Gordon, among others, for as long as it lasted, and he continued sharing critical readings of the surviving members’ writings. In October 1989, Johnson met Lloyd Brown; the two were married in October 2014 (soon after gay marriage become legal in the U.S.), and Brown survives him. Johnson is also sur vived by a sister, Stephanie, and a brother, Gary, both of the Seattle area. The cause of death was reported as complications from non–small cell lung cancer. John Cook is a writer based in Los Angeles.
his 65th birthday. Most of his fiction was in the mystery/sus pense genre and featured gay male protagonists. He was twice a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery, for Final Atonement (1992) and The Yellow Canary (2012). For his contributions to gay literature, he was also honored by the ONEArchive at the University of Southern California Libraries. Born in Seattle on December 14, 1956, Johnson grew up there but left in the early 1980s to live in New York City with, as he liked to put it, “just a backpack (with a pair of cowboy boots tied to the back).” Producing his fiction in his free time, he worked the typical writers’ assortment of odd jobs starting in the mid-1980s. These included assisting earlyAIDS researchers, no tably Mathilde Krim, and working for the first openly lesbian District Attorney of Brooklyn, Elizabeth Holtzman. It was at the latter job that he began formulating the ideas and characters that would form his first novel, Final Atonement , featuring gay homi cide cop Doug Orlando, who would also appear in his second novel, False Confessions (1993). In recent years, Johnson completed a four-novel mystery series ( The Yellow Canary , The Black Cat , The Blue Parrot , and The Red Raven ) interweaving the changing lives of two gay
July–August 2022
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youngest member upon his elec tion in 2020. Cawthorn is a Trump Republican who looks like a mati nee idol from the ’50s and gets around in a wheelchair. He spews homophobic rhetoric with the best of them but lives with a staff member named Stephen Smith who’s clearly his lover. Report edly there’s a ton of incriminating evidence in the form of photos, videos, and screenshots of inti mate scenes. This and other reve
BTW
Let the Sun Shine In Invent a new problem, and right away you’ve created an opportunity: you can be the guy with the so lution! Such is the formula that Tucker Carlson has perfected on his Fox News show. For example, Carlson has promulgated the meme that male testosterone levels are declining worldwide— part of the right-wing narrative that masculinity is on the ropes. He recently brought on a guest named Andrew McGovern who had an explanation for the decline: men just aren’t letting their scrotums get enough sunlight these days. And the solution? It’s called “testicle tanning,” and it involves exposing the boys to what McGovern calls “full body red light therapy.” But go back: Does he mean to imply that at one time men’s scrotums did receive enough sunlight? When was that? Then, too, if peo ple are covering up more these days, it’s because we now un derstand the dangers of ultraviolet light. Making a point of exposing one’s reproductive organs to UV rays makes about as much sense as not getting vaccinated for Covid. Are these guys actively trying to kill their viewers? Dark MAGA The brief saga of Madison Cawthorn has come to an end (for now) with his defeat in the Pennsylvania pri mary. His meteoric rise to the U.S. Congress made him its
lations—including complaints of sexual harassment by other staffers—caused a panicky Cawthorn to marry his girlfriend before the 2020 election. But guess who accompanied them on their honeymoon to Dubai: Stephen Smith! After Cawthorn took office, the panic shifted to Congressional Republicans, who launched an investigation into his “inappropriate rela tionship.” His next move was to tell the media that Republi cans in Congress had invited him to sex orgies and offered him cocaine—which is when his Party support collapsed al together. In defeat, the never charming Cawthorn vowed re venge on his enemies, declaring that “It’s time for dark MAGA to take command.” That sounds scary, but it’s something we should probably know about. God Hates Inflation Right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk likes to blame transgender people for various social ills, including—wait
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for it—rising inflation! He doesn’t directly connect the two phe nomena but focuses instead on people’s beliefs about inflation and gender. What they have in common, Kirk avers, is that both are governed by “laws of nature” that people disregard at their peril. Just as you can’t create wealth simply by increasing the money supply (which is what causes inflation), you can’t change your gender through a simple act of will. But even if we accept both of these propositions, Kirk never explains how they’re causally connected. In the end, he falls back on the old Pat Robertson playbook of divine wrath and retribution—wrath over the visibility of transpeople, retribution as rising inflation—with no attempt to disguise the mash-up as other than completely ar bitrary. One could just as easily start with the current wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and posit that God has brought inflation to the land as punishment for these wicked laws. The End of Sex Aprominent white nationalist, Nick Fuentes is telling his male supporters that having sex with women is gay. He makes this astonishing assertion thus: “Having sex in itself is gay. ... Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses. I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s very sus[pect].” In other words, the sex act is a girly thing, so by abstaining totally, Fuentes boasts: “That makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.”A leader of the right wing “Groyper Army,” a violently racist, anti-Semitic group that participated in the Jan. 6th uprising, Fuentes has admitted that he once kissed a girl in high school, but after that he never wanted to kiss a girl again. At some point he starts to sound like General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove , whose disgust over spilling his “essence” with a woman leads him to start a nuclear war. It’s tempting to see Fuentes’ views as bizarre and unprecedented, but really it’s an old obsession he has stumbled upon, a rejection of (heterosexual) sex because of its association with women and the values they represent (love, nurturance, compassion). From the Puritans to the Nazis to today’s white nationalists, it’s baked into authoritarian movements past and present. Now It’s Official To be covered in The New York Times can be newsworthy in itself, even when the item being reported on isn’t newsworthy at all. Two cases in point: 1. A retrospective on Ed Koch, NewYork’s mayor from 1978 to ’89, addressed what has been an open secret for decades: the mayor was gay. Since Koch never came out publicly, The Times ’ story had the effect of making it official by—well, by being The Times . While presenting the ample evidence for Koch’s gayness, the paper didn’t address its own reticence on the topic. Some would call it complicity in Koch’s closetedness when he was mayor, which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis in NewYork. His desire to protect his secret may well have played a role in his slow and inadequate response to the plague. 2. On a less sinister note, The Times ran a lengthy piece on the fact that many lesbians like to read romance novels, treating it as a hot new trend. Ahem, this very magazine ran feature arti cles on lesbians’ love of romance fiction in 1995 and 2006. What The Times article did, yet again, was to make this phe nom official for the general public. So be it. Summer is here, and anyone walking along Herring Cove Beach in Province town on a sunny day can discover it for themselves. July–August 2022
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ESSAY
A New England Romance A NDREW H OLLERAN
B OTH RUSSELL CHENEY, the visual artist, and F. O. Matthiessen, the Harvard professor who founded the field that we now call Amer ican Studies, came from wealthy families. The Cheneys owned an entire town in Connecticut, South Manchester, where they housed the peo ple 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 West clox, 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 col leges 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-Ameri can parents have accused the university of using an admission process that discriminates against Asians in a lawsuit that’s cur rently 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 fig ure, 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
cal but intense understanding of a mutual problem,” Cheney wrote to the younger man. But Matthiessen would have none of it; he believed he’d found the person in whom he could find both emotional and sexual happiness. “My union with you during those seven weeks brought me to a state where I thought that for the first time I knew the meaning of love,” he wrote Cheney after a trip they took, “and perhaps felt some ability to express this white sacred flame in my life and work.” 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 com pound 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
F. O. Matthiessen
Matthiessen’s part at least. After graduating fromYale, the much older Cheney had been studying for more than a decade with artists like Amer ican Impressionist William Merritt Chase, and he had already had shows at galleries in New York. A much more worldly man, Cheney had to warn Matthiessen that the euphoria he was feeling was more about find ing another homosexual in whom to confide than it was a great love: “The base of our love is not physi Andrew Holleran is the author of the new novel The Kingdom of Sand .
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put on the earth to find.” The reaction Cheney got when he told a homosexual friend what Matthiessen had done was less ideal istic; 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.
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 suf fered a New England Brahmin’s sense of his family’s expecta tions—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 sep arate himself from his family and its large compound in South
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 Co nant’s plans to make Harvard a great re search institution, thereby reducing the role of the tutorial in a Harvard undergraduate education (which, to Matthiessen, was its
While still in college, F. O. Matthiessen met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe. It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least.
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 inAmerican 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 em bracing 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 eu phoria 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 sub jects in his portraits.
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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 elec tion of Henry Wallace in a presidential elec tion, were enough to cause suspicion. Given what Putin has done in Ukraine, it’s espe cially depressing to read Matthiessen’s com
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
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
ment 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 fig ures 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 win dow 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 mem bership 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 Thanks giving days when they hosted friends, they were simply a gay couple whose cats were named Pretzel, Zuzu, Miss Pansy Lit tlefield, 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 our selves.” And so they did.
words, like Cather and Lewis, the male version of a Boston mar riage—an arrangement that seems to have been much less tol erated 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 “gen teel” 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, how ever, was what came to blight the happiness Matthiessen thought he’d found with Cheney—not just the tuberculosis Cheney bat tled 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 ther apy. 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
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