Volume 25, Number 12 · July 20, 1978
The Private Life of F.O. Matthiessen
By Harry Levin
Rat & the Devil: Journal Letters of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney
edited by Louis Hyde
Archon Books, 408 pp., $17.50
When F.O. Matthiessen jumped to his death from a twelfth-story window of a Boston hotel on April 1, 1950, the shock reverberated far beyond his established orbit as a literary critic and Harvard professor. At the time there were other dramatic refusals to enter the second half of the twentieth century: notably that of Klaus, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, who gave up striving to find his own identity as a writer, and that of the gifted Cesare Pavese, who had begun by translating Moby-Dick into Italian and was scheduled to translate Matthiessen's most important book, American Renaissance. Officious voices were immediately raised to interpret the latter's suicide as an episode in the cold war. His latest book, From the Heart of Europe, had been an honest if ineffectual testimony for communicating across the Iron Curtain even as it was coming down. Active more and more as a Christian Socialist, starting from undergraduate activities at Yale, he had seconded the nomination of Henry Wallace for president in 1948. He had been in friendly touch with Bronson Cutting, Jerry Voorhis, Harry Bridges, and the Trotskyist labor leader Ray Dunne. He had reported on the miners' strike at Gallup, New Mexico, presided over the Harvard Teachers' Union, participated in fellow-traveling committees, and had freely signed many a left-wing petition.
Review, 4284 words
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