GLR March-April 2026

blank paper.” Matthiessen also noted Melville’s sensitive ob servation in “Poor Man’s Pudding,” that the poor in America “suffer more in the mind than the poor of any other people in the world,” because they cannot reconcile the “ideal of univer sal equality” with the “grindstone experience of practical mis ery and infamy of poverty.” In Matthiessen’s reading of Melville, the poor have internalized the belief that their status is their own fault. Moreover, the effects of poverty were com plicated, in part, because the world blinds itself to the suffering it produces. As for civil and political rights in American Renaissance , Matthiessen occupied the “double consciousness” perspective that commentators on his life and writing have discussed, nav igating between accepted positions and his own points of view. This is on full display in his treatment of homosexuality. On the one hand, he described a passage from Whitman’s “Song of My self” as “vaguely pathological and homosexual,” but, on the other, he assigned the posthumously published novella Billy Budd the place of honor as Melville’s crowning vision of a “rad ical affirmation of the heart,” one tinged with homoeroticism. Billy Budd, characterized by Melville as a “Handsome Sailor” known for his youthful innocence, attracts the attention of the moody and ill-tempered master-at-arms, John Claggart. When Billy knocks over a can of greasy liquid at Claggart’s feet aboard the Bellipotent, Claggart responds with the ambiguous line: “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as hand some did it, too!” Matthiessen went on to add: “This is one of the scenes in which the writer of to-day would be fully aware of what may have been only latent for Melville, the sexual element in Claggart’s ambivalence.” For the remainder of the 1940s, Matthiessen wrote extensively about Henry James and the James family. These books included Henry James: The Major Phase (1944); Stories of Artists and Writers by Henry James (1944); The Notebooks of Henry James (1947): The American Novels and Stories of Henry James (1947); and The James Family, Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Sr., William, Henry, and Alice James (1947). In them, Matthiessen showed a willingness to look closely at private writings and overlooked writers. He had been interested in private correspondence going back to SarahOrne Jewett , whose letters to Annie Fields, Jewett’s partner in her Boston Marriage, Matthiessen read closely indeed. But now Matthiessen was willing to place private writing at the center of his thinking, such as when he edited James’ notebooks of pri vate musings that became his fiction. Considering Matthiessen’s growing appreciation for civil and political rights in the late 1940s, he helped give early credence to the writings of Alice James based on her strong voice and trenchant observations in her private diary, several decades before she became recognized as an important feminist voice. The event that pushed Matthiessen’s writing into new terri

F. O. Matthiessen in 1947.

lace did not win a single electoral vote, but Matthiessen bene fited from his association with the campaign in more general ways. He supported Wallace’s positions on economic and social rights, which included full taxation of capital gains, a national health insurance program, public day care, and public owner ship of banks, railroads, and utilities. But Matthiessen’s thinking on civil and political rights expanded, too. The Wallace cam paign also stood for desegregation, equal rights for women, and direct election of presidents. At the Progressive Party conven tion in Philadelphia that year, delegates from many states cited Wallace’s stance on racial justice as central to their support. Rep resenting Massachusetts, Matthiessen delivered a seconding speech for Wallace at the convention. § I N 1941, M ATTHIESSEN ’ S most influential and enduring book was published, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . Perhaps more than any other single book, it is credited with launching the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Matthiessen’s emphasis on eco nomic, social, civil, and political rights brought him to the works of Thoreau, Whitman, and especially Melville. He ap preciated Melville’s depiction of the social forces that shape people’s lives. In his analysis of the story “Tartarus of Maids,” for example, he observed that the author tried “to picture the ac tual conditions in a New England paper-mill,” singling out one of Melville’s desolate images from the story: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding

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