GLR July-August 2022

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.

history of a politic provocative rom A

ally divisive era. ance set against the

Monsieur

.com BuckJones

July–August 2022

13