I have been reading the book of essays and transcripts of speeches of the late F.O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) entitled The Responsibilities of the Critic, which was published posthumously after Matthiessen's suicide on April 1, 1950. Matthiessen had been a top literature professor at Harvard, and was a professed Christian Socialist, and a Popular Front New Dealer, which meant he cavorted with Communist Party members. He was the first president of the Harvard Teachers' Union, and seconded the nomination of Henry Wallace for the ill-fated presidential candidacy in the even more ill-fated, and Communist Party tinged, Progressive Party in 1948.
In Matthiessen's suicide note, which he penned before jumping from a tenth story of a hotel window, Matthiessen wrote, "I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective." Notwithstanding that note, it seems to me more likely his deep depression into which he had fallen into following the death in 1945 of his longtime companion, Russell Cheney, an impressionist artist, and his feeling the walls closing in from the House Un-American Activities Committee for his involvement in so many so-called "Communist fronts," played more of a direct role. He also had a close relationship with Harry Dorman, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and spent time in the Land of Enchantment in the 1930s. Matthiessen's main book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1940), is a must read for those who aspire to deepen one's already significant knowledge of the New England literary and other arts in the early to mid 19th Century. For those not already familiar with the references and figures of the period, I admit Matthiessen's book to heavy sledding. I find Van Wyck Brooks' books to be an important pre-requisite to reading Matthiessen.
Ironically, I found myself to Matthiessen through my reading various May Sarton novels, having read Sarton's fictionalized account of Matthiessen's life and death, Faithful Are the Wounds (1955). It is a novel informed by those she knew who knew Matthiessen, as Sarton's father, George Sarton, was a famous chemistry professor at Harvard in that same early to mid 20th Century period. However, because this was 1955, and Sarton was not yet writing novels highlighting homosexuality (something she did starting in the late 1960s), Sarton's character is simply portrayed as the eternal bachelor too caught up in politics to care about any deep persona relationship. In retrospect, and in our more enlightened time, is a major mark against the novel.* However, I found the novel compelling in its presentation of how the Red Scare affected academia and those sensitive souls such as Mattiessen, which is consistent with the suicide note. I found the novel deeply touching.
In any event, I am happy to report the title lecture, "The Responsibilities of the Critic," from a speech Matthiessen made at a small liberal arts college in Michigan in 1949, is online. It is compelling reading as one goes deeper into the speech. His insights as to the rise of television, of highbrow and lowbrow art, Italian cinema and Hollywood, are outstanding and deeply prescient. His discussion about the Red Scare is hauntingly and poignantly prophetic.
These past months, I have immersed myself in May Sarton and Matthiessen, and their writings have been a salve to the wounds of the mindless political discourse emanating from cable news media and, generally, our species acting like its own meteor. I have found Sarton's intelligent breezy writing style, with penetrating insights throughout, and Matthiessen's post-World War II elegance, something he shares with Richard Hofstadter and the great post-WWII historians**, to be a joy to read just before putting my head on the pillow to go to sleep. As I read Sarton, who died in 1995, and Matthiessen, I find I am a bit saddened to have missed meeting them. However, I find I read them as if they were in conversation with me, and find their presence comforting and, of course, enlightening.
*The irony is there is now the first LGBTQ Chair named in Matthiesssen's honor, an honor he may have ironically found awkward, due to his wanting to keep his private life something only known to friends or family. I should also add I am reading my seventh Sarton novel, having completed and greatly enjoyed, in order of when she wrote the novels, The Shadow of a Man (1950), Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), The Poet and the Donkey (a novella, 1969), Kinds of Love (1970), Anger (1982), The Magnificent Spinster (1985), and The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989). I thoroughly enjoyed all of these, with the singular exception of the novella, which I found wandering and not much of a plot line. I have written of Sarton in an earlier drive-by, but I am still trying to wrap my head around a full treatment of her work. I can say, in shorthand, her work is what some may call a woman's writer, but, if I use that phrase for her, it is one for high praise, instead of the usual derision one often hears in that phrase. She writes with a demand that her reader be intelligent enough to know who James Conant was, and with respect to similar references she makes in her works. As I said in the drive-by, reading Van Wyck Brooks prepared me to grasp the subtleties in her novels. I bean with Kinds of Love and The Magnificent Spinster, and think others may find that a good starting place, as well.
** Here, I think of C. Vann Woodward, David Morris Potter, and Henry Steele Commager, as my top faves. Others include Rayford Logan and the still ticking and kicking--nearly a century old--William Leuchtenburg.
