GLR July-August 2022

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 .

The G & LR

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