Matthiessen, Francis Otto

MATTHIESSEN, FRANCIS OTTO (1902–1950). One of the twentieth century’s most influential literary scholar/critics, F. O. Matthiessen was born in California, grew up in Illinois, went to Yale as an undergraduate and, after two years in Europe as a Rhodes scholar, attended Harvard for his graduate degrees. He began his career as an instructor at Yale (1927–1929), and then returned to Harvard, where he was an admired teacher, adviser, and campus and community activist.

Like the New Critics (e.g., John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks), Matthiessen stressed close attention to the text itself, to the tones, images, and ambiguities of the words on the page. Yet he also insisted that each text should be examined within its social and political as well as literary contexts, and he showed a passionate concern for the contemporary impact of the literature of America’s past. He argued that the insights into the national character articulated by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, and the ideals of freedom and equality that they affirmed, provide a “literature for our democracy.” These words appear in the preface to Matthiessen’s major book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), which, as Sacvan Bercovitch has stated, “reset the terms for the study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired the growth of American Studies in the United States and abroad.”

Matthiessen’s life was multifaceted, and his personal, professional, and political interests and loyalties were precariously balanced. He was an Ivy League professor; a homosexual; a Christian; a socialist; a left-leaning radical who wrote favorable studies of the conservative authors T. S. Eliot (1935; rev. 1947) and Henry James (1944); a believer in the primacy of high artistic standards whose final book focused on the stylistically clumsy Theodore Dreiser (1951); an advocate of equality and inclusiveness who rarely wrote about women authors (an exception is his first book, on Sarah Orne Jewett, 1929) and not at all about African American authors (not one is included in Matthiessen’s edition of the Oxford Book of American Verse, published in 1950).

Matthiessen was involved in progressive groups and organizations, including the Harvard Teachers Union and the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union. He told the critic Daniel Aaron that “only his conviction of Original Sin” prevented him from becoming a member of the Communist Party. A former student, the literary historian Leo Marx, noted that “one hundred years ago in New England he might have been a minister,” adding that Matthiessen referred to his appointment at Harvard as “accepting a call.” During the postwar years, Matthiessen was viewed with suspicion and hostility by the political Right and the anti-Stalinist Left (e.g., Irving Howe).

The scholar Marjorie Garber has observed that while Matthiessen sought to keep separate his literary, political, and sexual identities, “such stories always intertwine.” We perceive this inter-connectedness (or, rather, the struggle for it) in Matthiessen’s explorations, revelations, and concealments in his sensitive and tactful, incisive and hesitant, response to and interpretation of the sexually complex, democracy-proclaiming Whitman in American Renaissance. It is present as well in allusions to and invocations of Whitman in letters that Matthiessen wrote to Russell Cheney (1881-1945), a painter whom he met in 1924 and with whom he lived (as Matthiessen termed it) in “the peace of absolute union” for two decades.

In the first pages of American Renaissance, Matthiessen called attention to the belief embraced by Emerson and his great contemporaries that “there should be no split between art and the other functions of the community, that there should be an organic union between labor and culture.” He maintained that “the true function of scholarship as of society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share.”

This is a powerful and moving aspiration that Matthiessen aimed to fulfill. But it was a constant challenge for him, a source of both inspiration and torment. The writer Pearl Kazin Bell, one of Matthiessen’s graduate students in the 1940s, recalled an incident when he was teaching Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. Some in the large lecture-hall giggled among themselves about references in the text to adultery, sex, and divorce, which impelled Matthiessen to shout in anger: “Doesn’t any of you know what it means to be neurotic, to have one’s sexual being twisted with pain, as O'Neill has revealed in this play? Does no one in this class know what sexual betrayal can do?” Shortly after this outburst, he said to Bell, “How could I have let myself go in that way?”

We now are aware of the limits of and gaps in the literary criticism and cultural history that Matthiessen wrote, the anthologies he edited, and the syllabi he prepared. For him as for others in the academy of the 1930s and 1940s, neither Frederick Douglass nor Harriet Beecher Stowe were significant, perhaps not even visible. But Matthiessen was, and he remains, a central figure in the history of American literature and American Studies. Even more, we find his legacy in his quest—as he defined it in American Renaissance—for “wholeness,” for the integration of the individual and society, the private and public, the personal and political. Matthiessen said about Melville that this writer made fervent “demands upon life.” This is the commitment that motivated Matthiessen himself, and it illuminates his distinction and, ultimately, his tragedy. He committed suicide in Boston on 1 April 1950.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986).

Cain, William E. F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Howe, Irving. “The Sentimental Fellow-Travelling of F. O. Matthiessen.” Partisan Review 15 (1948).

Stern, Frederick. F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Sweezy, Paul M., and Leo Huberman, eds. F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951.