GLR July-August 2022

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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