GLR March-April 2026

tory—autobiography and memoir—was Cheney’s death from thrombosis in 1945. Russell Cheney: A Record of His Work (1946/1947) is a memoir of their relationship dressed up as a monograph devoted to the painter’s œuvre. Matthiessen used letters that Cheney had sent to him and their mutual friend H. Phelps Putnam, a poet, to piece together Cheney’s development as a painter. He interspersed these with 65 images of Cheney’s paintings. The resulting book is strikingly personal and intimate, so much so that Jerome Mellquist described Matthiessen as Ch eney’s “long-time companion” in his review in The New York Times . Although the book did not tackle economic and social rights, its very existence owed everything to the depth of Matthiessen’s love for Cheney, his respect for his painting, and their privileged backgrounds—but also to a continued evolu tion in his thinking on civil and political rights, which argued for an expanded view of life and what could be shown, including his own life as a gay man. The book that comes closest to a memoir as traditionally un derstood is From the Heart of Europe (1948), an unusual hy brid work of memoir, travelog, and political commentary. It describes Matthiessen’s experience teaching American litera ture at Charles University in Czechoslovakia and the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization in Austria, a cultural ex change program started by three Harvard students in the after math of World War II. The book delves into Matthiessen’s biography, his schooling, including important teachers from Yale and the Hackley School, his private high school. After his death, his former students organized to have a memorial vol ume published about him, his writings, and his political ac tivism. They used material From the Heart of Europe towrite the biographical chapter titled “Education of a Socialist.” Matthiessen came close to acknowledging his homosexuality in print when he wrote beautifully and movingly about his re lationship with Cheney: “in any place I ever was with Russell Cheney I am pierced with the realization of how much he taught me to see, of how life shared with him took on more vividness than I have ever felt in any other company.” § A FTER C HENEY ’ S DEATH , Matthiessen’s advocacy journalism continued at a higher pitch than ever. He reviewed a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose edited by Mark Van Doren in which he criticized the editor’s squeamishness over “the more physical aspects of Whitman,” and for having characterized Whitman’s letters to his love interest Peter Doyle, a horsecar conductor in Washington, D.C., as “silly.” Matthiessen con cluded the review by arguing for the necessity of literature get ting at “the amplitude of our [American] life” and overcoming the genteel belief that only the happier and more pleasant as pects of life were suitable for literary expression. This is a theme Matthiessen took up even more forcefully in his biography of Theodore Dreiser, his last book. In Theodore Dreiser , which was published posthumously, Matthiessen emphasized economic and social rights with re newed vigor. But a funny thing happened. Dreiser’s particular expression of realism seemed to extend Matthiessen’s thinking on civil and political rights, helping him to envision still greater variety in the range of people’s lives that fiction could portray, including his own life as a gay man.

He appreciated what Dreiser had to say about the role of money in American life. He called Dreiser an American Balzac. For both men, there could be “no real political freedom without the removal of our vast economic inequalities.” In Matthiessen’s opinion, most Americans did not want to acknowledge the forces in life which Dreiser portrayed, such as “crass chance” and “fierce brutalities,” because they undercut the official ver sion of what life was supposed to be like in America. In his tangles with critics and censorship organizations, Dreiser knew what it was like to be an object of animosity in the eyes of the gatekeepers of American culture. Matthiessen’s po litical experiences in the last years of his life, as well as the harsh reviews of From the Heart of Europe , only furthered his sense of empathy. Matthiessen quoted Dreiser: “My own expe rience with Sister Carrie , as well as the fierce opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those who at tempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible. One dared not talk out loud, one dared not report life as it was lived, as one lived it.” For Matthiessen, Dreiser’s words must have held special meaning. In Dreiser’s emphasis on depicting life as it was actually lived, he found fur ther intellectual grounds for imagining that his life as a gay man might one day be represented in American culture. Over the next few years, several more posthumous works were published, including The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950), which Matthiessen edited, and Responsibilities of the Critic (1952), a collection of his essays and articles. But the most important and surprising was Rat & the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney (1978), edited by Louis Hyde, a college friend, to whom he bequeathed the letters. The letters are extraordinary: frank, tender, and searching. In them, Matthiessen frequently wrestled with his homosexuality, such as figuring out how to understand his relationship with Ch eney in a 1924 letter (“Marriage! What a strange word to be ap plied to two men!”); giving voice to anxiety over his homosexuality as in a letter from 1930 (“Am I just like any fairy?”); or making clear in a 1943 letter the depth of his lone liness and depression in response to Cheney’s frequent hospi talizations in the last years of his life (“I needn’t pretend that … loneliness hasn’t left me empty for long stretches of time”). The letters became a lens to view Matthiessen’s earlier work and trace how he moved in the direction of civil and political rights for gay men and lesbians, even when he had little lan guage for such representation. Thanks to Rat & the Devil , Matthiessen’s elevation of Melville and Whitman’s work can be read in a new light. Matthiessen has had an afterlife more like that of a writer than a literary critic. Much interest has settled on his tragic death and his long partnership with Russell Cheney as expressed in their letters. But the range of his writing and the threads of ad vocacy for economic, social, civil, and political rights suggest that Matthiessen wrestled with some of the hallmark issues of his day. His political activism was imperfect, but it was essen tial in helping him arrive at these questions. And trying to ex press the questions of the age in which he lived is why he should still be read today.

TheG & LR

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