Closet, coup, and Cold War: F. O. Matthiessen's From the Heart of Europe

Boundary 2

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 171-200

  Redding, Arthur ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650107468     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-33-1-171     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Kenneth Boulding, interview by George Abbot White, September 1965, quoted in White, "Teaching America: The Critical Vision of F. O. Matthiessen" (PhD diss., Charles University, Prague, 1992), 50-51. The work of George Abbot White, a tireless Matthiessen advocate for three decades now, has been invaluable. Though White has not yet produced a long-promised critical biography, his various essays on Matthiessen's life and work were assembled into a PhD dissertation submitted to Charles University in Prague in 1992. This dissertation, which includes detailed analyses of Matthiessen's lengthy FBI files and an exhaustive investigation of his will (which was contested by his family), is a devoted disciple's testimony to the currency of Matthiessen's political radicalism.
2. Barrows Dunham, "Statements by Friends and Associates," in F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 102.
3. F. O. Matthiessen, note, April 1, 1950, quoted in John Rackliffe, "Notes for a Character Study," in F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950): A Collective Portrait, 91-92.
4. Robert Lowell, Notebook (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 172.
5. In his introduction to Rat and the Devil, for example, Louis Hyde insists that the "root cause" of Matthiessen's depression "lay elsewhere" than political despair and might rather be found in the loneliness he felt after the death of Russell Cheney (F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, ed. Louis Hyde [Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978], 3. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text as RD). While I want in no way to ascribe causes or assign motives, I would suggest in this essay that the inescapable configurations of the nascent cold war make it impossible to extricate the personal from the political in this manner.
6. F. O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 77. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text as FHE.
7. Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977), 679.
8. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 77.
9. F. O. Matthiessen, "The Responsibilities of the Critic," in The Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews by F. O. Matthiessen, ed. John Rackliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 7.
10. Eric Cheyfitz has argued persuasively that American Renaissance was in no way revolutionary: "The force of American Renaissance . . . resided not in any striking originality, but in its ability to consolidate what was already the growing consensus of this largely white, male, middle-class, and Protestant oriented audience" ("Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution," American Quarterly 41, no. 2 [1989]: 349). For Cheyfitz, Matthiessen, despite his radical politics, remained true to this mainstream nationalist aesthetic his entire life. While it is true that the nationalist internationalism of the popular front had its limitations, Matthiessen's final works provide an attempt to rethink his own orientation along with a deliberate resistance to increasingly calcified cold war ideologies. As I argue, however, it was the damage wrought by the cold war, which rapidly diminished the terrain to stake out any kind of unaligned critical stance, that foreclosed upon the revolutionary potential of his thinking.
11. See, for example, James H. Justus's insistence in a 1994 review that "even those critics passionately guided by a self-righteous social agenda are still closer to Matthiessen than they are to Derrida" ("The Way We Read Now: The Americanist Legacy of the 1980s," Sewanee Review 102, no. 4 [1994]: 664).
12. Justus's point is that revisionist scholarship, including David S. Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988)
13. and David Leveranz's Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), echoes and emulates Matthiessen's method and approach, even as it quibbles with his oversights.
14. See also Marc Dolan, "'The Wholeness' of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism," American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1992): 27-57.
15. Additionally, in her effort to salvage a usable past, Myra Jehlen closes her American Incarnation: The Individual the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986) by appealing to Matthiessen's "humanism" as a historical opportunity that would be lost during the cold war years (228-35). I wish simply to underscore Matthiessen's currency; his life and work should be radically reconsidered in any revisionist attempt to rethink (and even recover from) the many distortions intellectual and sexual life suffered during the cold war.
16. Donald Pease, "Moby Dick and the Cold War," in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 114.
17. Pease, "Moby Dick and the Cold War," 116.
18. Sidney Hook, "The Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom," Partisan Review 17 (1950): 718;
19. quoted in Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2nd ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 129.
20. Enikö Bollobás, "Dangerous Liaisons: Politics and Epistemology in Post-Cold War American Studies," American Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2002): 565.
21. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (New York: Longman, 1981);
22. and Gayle Rubin, "Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267-319.
23. See also John D'Emilio, "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). As he observes, "the Cold War era's pre-occupation with the homosexual menace [was] an integral component of post-war American society and politics" (236).
24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 48.
25. David Bergman, "F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual," Raritan 9, no. 4 (1990): 70.
26. Though I am citing the essay that appeared in Raritan, Bergman republished "F. O. Matthiessen: The Critic as Homosexual" in his Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
27. See also Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 43-45;
28. and Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
29. In her exhaustively detailed No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Ellen W. Schrecker carefully outlines the evolving legal distinctions between witnesses' strategies of invoking the First and the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court upheld "that HUAC did not violate the First Amendment by asking suspected Communists about their political activities" (128). Thus "the only way that a witness could refuse to answer a committee's question and still be protected against a contempt citation and possible jail sentence was to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the basis that answering the questions would tend to incriminate him" (129), a tactic increasingly adopted during the 1950s.
30. Paul M. Sweezy, "Labor and Political Activities," in F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950): A Collective Portrait, 75. This is Sweezy's version of what Matthiessen said at the HUAC.
31. F. O. Matthiessen, "New Standards in American Criticism, 1929," in The Responsibilities of the Critic, 181.
32. A significant part of the emerging cold war rhetoric at the time involved the effort to link immigrants (homosexuals and other minorities) to the Communist menace within. A typical, if extreme, example can be found in Marilyn Allen's Alien Minorities and Mongrelization (Boston: Meador, 1949), which begins, "Alien dissident discordant minorities are an unassimilable, disruptive, incompatible element in an otherwise largely homogenous Anglo-Saxon population. . . . These discordant minorities are composed of Negroes, Jews, Communists" (9). Historical approaches at the time were largely dominated by the influential work of Matthiessen's colleague at Harvard, Oscar Handlin, director of the Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America. His book The Uprooted won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1952.
33. The international theme, already pronounced in Matthiessen's Henry James: The Major Phase (London: Oxford University Press, 1944),
34. is even more pronounced in his The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Knopf, 1948).
35. See, in particular, the chapter entitled "Europe and/or America," 286-314.
36. Don Sparling, "Under Western Eyes: Closely Watched Czechs," in Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers, ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 1995), 295.
37. After the 1946 elections, the largest party in the National Front Government was the Communist Party, headed by Klement Gottwald. When President Beneš unexpectedly accepted the resignation of opposition ministers, the stage was set for "Victorious February," a "bloodless" takeover of the state by the Communist Party. Unfortunately, there are very few thorough histories of Czechoslovakia available in English. One recent cultural history is Derek Sayer's The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
38. Franz Hollering, "The Head and the Heart," Nation, September 1, 1948, 293-94;
39. quoted in William L. O'Neill, A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (1982; repr., New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), 179-80.
40. Irving Howe, "The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen," Partisan Review 15 (1948): 1125, 1128-29;
41. quoted in Pells, The Liberal Mind, 111.
42. Howe, "The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling";
43. Schrecker delivers the rather grim verdict that there was simply no "meaningful opposition" (No Ivory Tower, 282) to McCarthyism on the part of university administrators and academics, and, moreover, that this failure to resist was by no means preordained; it resulted from a variety of factors, among them bureaucratic ineptness and personal cowardice. Richard Ohmann's survey of "English and the Cold War," in The Cold War and the University, ed. Andre Schiffrin (New York: New Press, 1997), argues that, in the early years, English departments benefited from a sort of noninterference pact between their discipline and global politics and economics. Aside from sporadic grumblings over McCarthy's philistinism, therefore, no significant opposition was mounted, nor, it was thought, merited.
44. On the situation at Harvard University, see, for example, chap. 7 of Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman's Education and Politics at Harvard: Two Essays Prepared for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975).
45. Matthiessen, Henry James, 151.
46. Bergman, "The Critic as Homosexual," 72.
47. Mathiessen, American Renaissance, 230.
48. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 535.
49. Jay Grossman, "The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen's Whitman, Whitman's Matthiessen," American Literature 70, no. 4 (1998): 825.
50. While I haven't space to discuss Matthiessen's treatment of Whitman at any length here, I should point out Whitman's uneasy place (and the vexed problems of male homoerotic politics) in the history of the American Left. For a rather brilliant detailed reading of Whitman's political legacy, see Bryan K. Garman, "'Heroic Spiritual Godfather': Whitman, Sexuality, and the American Left, 1890-1940," American Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2000): 90-126.
51. May Sarton, Faithful Are the Wounds (1955; repr., New York: Norton, 1985), 132.
52. On bar culture, see, for example, Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997);
53. and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
54. On gays and lesbians in Boston, see Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland, compiled by The History Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), which includes a picture of Matthiessen and Cheney.
55. Sarton, Faithful, 144. There are at least two (and possibly three) fictional renderings of Matthiessen. Mark Merlis's genealogy of the American closet, American Studies (1994; repr., New York: Penguin, 1996), transforms Matthiessen into the somewhat predatory Tom Slater, driven to suicide when the university threatens to expose his liaison with a vengeful student. As Grossman points out, however, both novels portray Matthiessen as fundamentally alone, thereby slighting the importance of queer "marriage."
56. In F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), William Cain claims that Matthiessen was also the model for the character of Theodore Parker (whose tragic flaw is his inflexible idealism)
57. in Truman Nelson's historical novel, The Sin of the Prophet (Boston: Little, 1952), which was dedicated to his memory.
58. He merits a sympathetic, if cursory, paragraph in Vincent Leitch's American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 89,
59. but is entirely overlooked in Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), for example.
60. In Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
61. Jonathan Arac, "F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance," in American Renaissance Reconsidered, 91.
62. Citing his book on T. S. Eliot, Russell Reising argues in a similar vein that "seeing life whole may well be what Matthiessen endeavored, yet his inherited formalist framework made a denial of his social orientation a convenient option" (Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature [New York: Methuen, 1986], 173).
63. For Larzer Ziff, Matthiessen is quite simply an aesthete (Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America [New York: Viking, 1981], vii).
64. Giles Gunn, F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1975), 193.
65. The only other full-length study of Matthiessen is Frederick Stern's F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
66. A fairly thorough survey of Matthiessen's work can also be found in Richard Ruland's The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
67. Ironically, however, Cain, after insisting that Matthiessen was "uncomfortable" with his sexual orientation, insists that "the facts of Matthiessen's sexual . . . life . . . do not have much bearing at all" on his work (Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism, 48).
68. While Gunn is disappointed in him as a Christian, and Cain attacks him from the left, O'Neill digs in from the right in his study of Stalinism and American intellectuals: Matthiessen's "politics were the opposite of his scholarship, being immature, sentimental, partisan, and wrong" (A Better World, 175), and "his politics were a betrayal of everything he stood for otherwise" (179). O'Neill's reasoning here is rather astounding; Matthiessen had always distanced himself, methodologically, from scientific Marxism and had never been tempted to join the Communist Party, in large part because he remained a devout Christian. And thus, says O'Neill, "because the appeal of Stalinism was religious" (183), Matthiessen was the quint-essential Stalinist apparatchik: "Matthiessen approached the Soviets on his knees" (183).
69. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Knopf, 1978), 168. Kazin is commenting partly in reaction to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.
70. See O'Neill, A Better World, 408n31. For Cheyfitz, however, the obverse is true; he complains of the "continual circumspection of Marxism by Christianity or of content by form or of history by literature" ("Matthiessen's American Renaissance," 351) in Matthiessen's writing.
71. Such a line of reasoning relies on a conception of the popular front that conspiratorially narrows an individual's capacity to choose. Pease is tellingly indifferent to the matrix of Matthiessen's book. Michael Denning's recent, encyclopedic The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (London: Verso, 1997) should help overturn the general perception of the period as offering merely a homogenized middlebrow set of cultural and political options. Denning's impressive volume testifies to the range and richness of popular front critical activity, much of which has been simply forgotten. Although American Renaissance is a centerpiece, Denning repeats the charge that Matthiessen's concern with the formal aspects of literature provided a framework for the "overestimation of literature" on the part of scholars during the cold war, a tendency that itself justified the denigration of earlier work (446).
72. Elsewhere Pease modifies his position. He repeats his reading more or less verbatim in a slightly modified version of his essay that appeared as "Melville and Cultural Persuasion," in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
73. In his 1990 review of "New Americanists," however, Pease castigates Lionel Trilling (in 1946) and Frederick Crews (in 1988) for aligning Matthiessen with "totalitarian ideology" ("New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon," boundary 2 17, no. 1 [1990]: 10).
74. Kenneth Lynn, "F. O. Matthiessen," in Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, ed. Joseph Epstein (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 116. There is no evidence whatsoever that this was the case. The tone of Matthiessen's very beautiful letters to Cheney indicates that quite the contrary was true.
75. Arac, "Authorizing an American Renaissance," 92.
76. As Michael Cadden notes, however, Arac himself bowdlerizes the text: "what's missing is the Whitmanesque hard on" ("Engendering F. O. M.: The Private Life of American Renaissance," in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden [New York: Routledge, 1990], 29).
77. Cadden, "Engendering F. O. M.," 34. For Cain, Matthiessen's sex life was simply not an aspect of his politics or his criticism. Sexuality is, and presumably should remain, irrelevant. Yet, as Bergman points out, "Cain's critical language is full of the worst masculine coding" ("The Critic as Homosexual," 71).
78. Rackliffe, "Notes for a Character Study," 76.