SOURCE: “Double Consciousness and the Cultural Politics of F. O. Matthiessen,” in Monthly Review, February, 1983, pp. 34-56.

[In the following essay, Marx elucidates Matthiessen's political ideology and determines how these beliefs impacted his literary work.]

The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on ‘Change. What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves in the care of a Providence. But in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

His given names were Francis Otto, his friends called him Matty—and still do—but on the title pages of his books and to his readers generally he is F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950). No writer in the last half century has had a greater influence on the prevailing conception of American literature and its relation to our history. He was a prolific, accomplished literary scholar and cultural historian whose masterwork, American Renaissance (1941), remains an indispensable text in American studies; a Harvard teacher whose principles and passion won him a devoted student following; a committed trade unionist, member and sometime president of the Harvard Teachers'Union; a socialist, lifelong partisan of the left and, of special pertinence here, an early benefactor of this journal. “It was owing to … [his] interest and generosity,” wrote the editors soon after his death, “that we were able to found Monthly Review:”¹

But Matthiessen's desire for an explicit affiliation with a socialist movement was frustrated. For a short time in the early 1930s he was a member of the Socialist Party, but he soon lost patience with its lack of militancy and its inability to enlist working-class support. Much as he wanted to belong to an organized socialist party, he never seriously considered joining the Communist Party because, among other things (as he repeatedly explained), he was a Christian, not a Marxist.

To aid a Marxist journal while declaring his differences with Marxism was characteristic of Matthiessen and his resolute heterodoxy. Doctrinal consistency was of little concern to him. What mattered most in politics were social justice, peace, and civil liberty, and like many left-tending intellectuals whose allegiances were formed in the era of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, he came to believe as a matter of principle in a united front, or coalition, of all left-wing parties. Before the defeat of the fascist powers that policy had been a manifest necessity; it was the only policy, indeed, that made sense in the presence of Hitler, Mussolini, and their potential allies within the capitalist democracies. After 1945, however, collaboration with Communists took on a very different meaning, and the fact that Matthiessen was not a Marxist did not spare him, along with many on the left, from becoming entangled in the historical trap created by Stalinism.

In the fear-ridden aftermath of the Second World War he was, more than ever, convinced of the need for a united front. The Cold War was beginning, nuclear weapons were a terrifying novelty, and the effective purge of Communists from the American labor movement looked to be the first stage in a far-reaching repression of all dissent. During the autumn of 1947, after having taught with immense satisfaction at the first session of the Salzburg Seminar, Matthiessen was a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague. At that time a Czech regime led by Eduard Benes was attempting to work out a compromise, or middle way, between East and West. After returning home, Matthiessen quickly wrote a book, From the Heart of Europe, based on the journal he had kept while abroad. There he admiringly describes the Benes regime as an exemplary effort to mediate between Soviet collectivism and capitalist democracy.

While the book was still in press, however—in February 1948—the Czech Communists seized power. Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister whom Matthiessen had met and liked, died under mysterious circumstances (he either jumped or was pushed from a window). These events came as a real blow to Matthiessen. Although he was invited to make last-minute revisions in his account of the situation in Czechoslovakia, he decided instead to add, as a long footnote, most of a letter from a Czech friend explaining—and very nearly condoning—the coup. The letter suggests that Masaryk, a man “more sensitive than rational,” probably had killed himself. It also argues that most Czech workers did not care about “freedom of mind,” only about “economic freedom,” hence their unhesitating support of the new pro-Soviet regime. His correspondent's conclusion is that this Czech “revolution” was aimed at “limiting freedom and democracy for some, only to give it back, revived and strengthened, to all.” (pp. 187-89) Although Matthiessen did not explicitly endorse this viewpoint, it is a good example of the kind of rationalization to which he, like many of us at the time, lent respectful attention.

In domestic politics Matthiessen also remained faithful to the waning ideal of a united, suprasectarian left. During the election of 1948 he was an active supporter of the Progressive Party, and at its national convention he gave one of the speeches seconding the nomination of Henry Wallace for president. The Wallace candidacy was widely attacked as another cynical Stalinist stratagem, and Matthiessen's involvement in it, along with the publication of From the Heart of Europe, made him a conspicuous target for red-baiting. By now the persecutory fever, soon to be known as McCarthyism, was rising. People on the right and the left accused Matthiessen of being a “fellow traveler” or “dupe” of Communists. The House Un-American Activities Committee interrogated him, Life magazine went after him, and Irving Howe wrote what he himself called a “very harsh and polemical” piece about him in Partisan Review.

These political attacks surely contributed to Matthiessen's growing sense of isolation in the period leading up to his premature and violent death. Early in the morning of April 1, 1950, he jumped to his death from a Boston hotel window. In the last of several postscripts to his suicide note he wrote: “How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind I do not know. But as a Christian and a socialist believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions.”² This widely publicized statement, along with the other political circumstances surrounding his death, helps to explain the legendary character of Matthiessen's reputation. In the press, especially outside the United States, his suicide was depicted as a political act, and he was perceived by many as having been a casualty of the Cold War.

But Matthiessen knew better. However much the oppressive political atmosphere had deepened his melancholia, he knew very well that it was not the major source. In the body of his final note, with a certainty sharply contrasting with his conjectural postscript, he emphasized his state of exhaustion and the “many severe depressions” to which he recently had been subject. By now we know a lot more about his mental condition during the winter of 1949-50 than anyone knew, or cared to discuss, at the time. By his own account his state of mind then resembled the acute, suicidal depression from which he had recovered, after a brief hospitalization, twelve years earlier. (In 1938 he also had had an impulse to jump to his death from a high place.) But a vital difference between the two episodes, as Louis Hyde suggested not long ago,³ is that in 1938 Matthiessen's closest friend and lover, the painter Russell Cheney, was standing by, ready to help him re-enter the world. They had lived together for some twenty years before Cheney's death in 1945, and all of us who knew Matty well in his own last years were aware of his desperate loneliness. What most people could not have known much about before the publication of the Matthiessen-Cheney letters in 1978 was the nature—the closeness, depth, and centrality—of the relationship between the two.

It comes as something of a shock, if also as an encouraging index of cultural change, to realize that as recently as 1950 Matthiessen's friends considered his homosexuality unmentionable—at least in print. Nowhere in the Collective Portrait, including John Rackliffe's otherwise astute “Notes for a Character Study,” is there any forthright reference to the subject. Nor does it figure in the life of Edward Cavan, the fictive Harvard professor whose suicide, more or less undisguisedly based on Matthiessen's, is the catalytic event in May Sarton's 1955 novel, Faithful Are the Wounds. Perhaps this is more surprising, since homosexuality was to be a prominent theme in Sarton's later novels. The distorting effect of this inhibition is discernible in just about everything that has been written about Matthiessen, but it presumably will be corrected by George Abbott White. A Boston teacher and psychotherapist who never knew Matthiessen, White already has devoted several years to gathering material for a thoroughly documented biography.⁴

The fascination that Matthiessen continues to exercise upon new generations of scholars is unusual. Most scholarly writing is quickly superseded and most scholars are quickly forgotten—perhaps never more quickly (or deservedly) than in the United States in these days of enforced academic publication. One reason that Matthiessen is an exception, of course, is that his work occupies a unique place in the development of modern American studies. When he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the early 1920s, the study of literature was still dominated by Germanic philology and a bland, documentary form of literary history. But Matthiessen responded sympathetically to two fresh, seemingly antithetical approaches to literature, and in bringing them together he developed his own critical method.

One of the new approaches was the analytic formalism identified with the early work of I. A. Richards and the essays of T. S. Eliot, soon to be known as the New Criticism. To Matthiessen this meant a liberating concern with the text itself and a belief that form, or the “how” of literary practice, is as important as the content or the “what.” Close attention to the power of individual texts became an essential principle of his criticism. Almost everything he wrote was directed at the understanding and evaluation of particular works; he disliked the idea of using literature as raw material for the construction of some other kind of scholarly edifice. The critic's ultimate aim should be to redirect the reader to the text with heightened understanding. In teaching and writing he found the analytic methods developed by the “new critics” immensely useful, and he was confident that they could be detached from the reactionary mandarinism that so often accompanied their application.

Besides, the other new approach embraced by Matthiessen was, in the broadest sense of the word, political; it entailed an appreciation of the indirect ways in which the greatest American writers had lent expression to distinctive aspects of national experience. From the beginning he recognized that the significant interactions between literature and society occur well below the level of a writer's express political ideas, opinions, and institutional affiliations. Politics in this sense begins with assumptions about human nature, society, and even, for that matter, literary form and practice. In The Rediscovery of American Literature (1967), an examination of six scholar-critics who helped to recast the way we think about our literature, Richard Ruland credits Matthiessen with having contributed the decisive, culminating work. Following Van Wyck Brooks, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Stuart Sherman, and H. L. Mencken, Matthiessen completed the job of liberating America's cultural past from the deadly grip of WASP Victorianism.

It is hard to remember how provincial, belletristic, and unremittingly genteel the reigning conception of our literature was before the publication of American Renaissance. To be sure, the authority of that official canon had been undermined by the work of D. H. Lawrence, V. L. Parrington, and Yvor Winters (as well as those discussed by Richard Ruland). The fact remains, however, that Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier still occupied prominent positions in the canon, and American literature in its entirety was condescendingly regarded by American as well as British professors of English as a minor offshoot of British high culture. Rather than attack the dominion of the Brahmins, Matthiessen simply applied the method of close reading to demonstrate the clarifying power and pleasure available to readers of his five major writers: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville. By carefully elucidating particular texts and the concepts of form behind them, he revealed for the first time just how inventive, bold, and intellectually robust the classic American writers had been. All of these writers lent expression to the egalitarian, self-assertive, well-nigh anarchic energy released by the American system, although two of them (Hawthorne and Melville) also recognized the destructive form that energy could take in our ruthless economic individualism. All of them illuminated the deep conflicts, or contradictions, in the life around them. From a classical Marxist viewpoint, to be sure, Matthiessen's conception of these conflicts—the central theme, for example, of the “individual” in conflict with “society”—is too abstract, too obscurely related, if at all, to the opposition between social classes. But of course the character and extent of class conflict in the northern American states before the Civil War remains a subject of serious historical controversy. In any case, Matthiessen's emphasis upon the contradictions rather than the harmonies of meaning, value, and purpose marks an important turning point in American studies. It signaled the virtual disappearance of the older, complacent idea of our national culture as an essentially homogeneous, unified whole.

Another reason for the continuing fascination with Matthiessen is that his work embodies a rare combination of scholarly dispassion and personal engagement. It did not occur to him that his strong convictions might skew his perceptions, partly because he tended to think of the critic's job as divided into two distinct stages. In the first stage he or she is a disinterested reader, holding off judgment, open to every possible implication of the text, with the aim of seeing the work whole, including the most serious flaws in the best-liked works. Matthiessen was impatient with ideologically bound students who tried to tailor the evidence to fit a priori schemes. In the second stage, however, the critic is permitted—indeed obligated—to bring in all his or her pertinent convictions. True criticism, like all scholarship in the humanities, is finally an act of the critic's whole being. Everything that Matthiessen wrote was part of his lifelong project of discovering what he himself believed. Unlike most academic writing, therefore, his work conveys a strong sense of passionate involvement.

It is not surprising that interest in Matthiessen and his work was renewed during the resurgence of radicalism in the Vietnam era. To many young teachers and activist intellectuals he provided an example of the engaged scholar. The editors of a volume of essays on literature and radical politics (including one on the role of ideology in Matthiessen's American Renaissance) dedicated the book to his memory.⁵ More recently, Giles Gunn and Frederick Stern, neither of whom knew Matthiessen, have written books about him as a critic. Both focus upon the relationships among his critical principles, his practice, and his extra-literary ideas. Gunn is chiefly concerned about the bearing of his religious ideas upon his criticism, whereas Stern is more interested in his politics.⁶

Frederick Stern's book is a sympathetic, searching examination of Matthiessen's work by a literary scholar with avowedly “radical left-wing concerns.” At the outset Stern describes his excited discovery of American Renaissance when he was an undergraduate in the late 1940s. What impressed him was the fact that a book could be passionately devoted to a political ideal (literature for a democratic culture) yet still be a work of rigorous scholarship, “not a piece of propaganda.” Later Stern wrote a doctoral dissertation, an early version of the present book, called “The Lost Cause: F. O. Matthiessen, Christian Socialist as Critic.” As the title suggests, Stern interpreted Matthiessen's career as a finally unsuccessful if admirable effort to fuse his various commitments (literary, religious, political) into a logically coherent, workable whole. My impression is that Stern's earlier analysis had a sharper critical edge—a fact that presumably explains why he dropped the phrase “The Lost Cause” from the original title. What most interests Stern is Matthiessen's effort to reconcile “views of life as disparate as Christianity, socialism, and ‘the tragic’.” (He rightly stresses Matthiessen's belief that tragedy, as a literary kind, and the tragic view of life, are touchstones of aesthetic and intellectual profundity—of ultimate wisdom.) But Stern recognizes that Matthiessen was no system-builder, and that abstract theorizing was uncongenial to him, and he therefore touches lightly upon the alleged irreconcilability of his subject's basic commitments. In view of the “seemingly incompatible elements” in Matthiessen's thought, Stern concludes that he succeeded in developing “a remarkably unified critical structure.”

But the quest for unity in Matthiessen's thought may be misleading. Even the use of “Christian Socialist” to describe him implies a greater cohesion and certitude than he ordinarily claimed for his own beliefs. “I would call myself a Christian Socialist,” he wrote, “except for the stale and reactionary connotations that the term acquired through its current use by European parties.”⁷ Although he occasionally invoked the term, he also knew that to American ears it sounds bloodless, feeble, and foreign. The phrasing he more often used, “a Christian and a socialist,” suggests the yoking together of separate, not easily combined, religious and political beliefs. The point is not merely that Matthiessen, like Emerson and Whitman, set little store by logical consistency. (He liked to quote Whitman's witty lines: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”) The more important point is that he recognized a positive, generative value in the embrace of opposed ideas. Unlike the conventional academic empiricists, the disengaged “experts” who unify their thought by narrowing its scope, he habitually tested his mental reach by widening the boundaries of his sympathies. This habit of mind is in my view a key to Matthiessen's creativity and to the close affinity he felt with the five writers who are the subjects of his most important book.

Their heroic effort to cope with powerful contrarieties of thought and feeling is a central if largely tacit theme of American Renaissance. In the opening sentence Matthiessen warns us that he is starting with the book's hardest problem: Emerson's habit, like Plato's, of stating things in opposites. In rejecting the formal or “linear” logic he associated with Lockean empiricism, Emerson opted for a compelling but risky way of thinking he called “double consciousness.” Its worst feature, he confessed, is that we lead two lives which “really show very little relation to each other.” One is a life of immediate, daily, practical experience, closely bound up with our physical existence, “all buzz and din”; the other is largely inward, less implicated in the present than in the past and the future, in memory and desire, “all infinitude and paradise.” This divergence, as Matthiessen noted, is traceable to the familiar Kantian distinction between two modes of perception, understanding and reason, but he was less interested in the European sources of the idea than its characteristically American applications. In shifting the Kantian notion from the realm of learned metaphysical discourse to discourse about ordinary experience, Emerson had subtly changed it; what had been an idea chiefly concerned with two ways of knowing the world reappeared as an idea about two ways of living in the world.

Each of the writers Matthiessen focuses upon in American Renaissance tended, like Emerson, to construe experience as a pattern of antinomies. Even Hawthorne, who was the least sympathetic to Emersonian idealism, was obsessed by the gap between the two worlds he inhabited: the solid, beef-and-ale, mercantile world of Salem, and the disembodied, free-floating, evanescent world he created out of his ideas and imaginings. A scholar less exacting about evidence, more prone to generalization than Matthiessen, might have tried to correlate this pervasive sense of doubleness, or inner conflict, with some general theory of conflict in society. But Matthiessen characteristically held back. He had been sharply critical of earlier attempts by liberal and Marxist critics to impose a political template on literature, and he recognized the pertinence to American literature of the New Critics' emphasis upon the inner tensions—the irony, paradox, and ambiguity—embodied in literary texts. In his measured criticism of Granville Hicks, whose Marxist interpretation of American writing had elicited Matthiessen's creedal “counterstatement,” he explained what he did not like about the work of most politically oriented critics. In drawing close analogies between literature and politics, he said, they invariably succeeded in blurring the essential distinctions between them. Marxist critics, like Hicks and V. F. Calverton, often invoked “fatally easy simplifications of society,” and their work was marred by the crude notion that writers only can have an adequate knowledge of their age “by coming to grips with its dominant economic forces.” As for a liberal critic like V. L. Parrington, Matthiessen was most put off by his dismissive attitude toward the distinctively aesthetic aspects of literature—his tendency to derogate writers like Hawthorne or James because their work was deficient in explicit political meaning.⁸

His own method of placing writers in their historical context was to recreate the network of ideas and images relating them to earlier or contemporary writers and artists working in other, often more popular, modes of thought and expression. In American Renaissance he ranges from folklore to ship design to political oratory to genre painting to architectural theory. One of the admirable things about the book is that Matthiessen manages to set forth this remarkably rich body of material without resorting to any general claim, or overarching thesis, about the character of the bonds between literature and the encompassing collective life we call “society.” But such a thesis is latent in American Renaissance; it is embodied in the many correspondences that each writer's version of the double consciousness⁹ enabled him to establish with the conflicting forces at work—economic, racial, political, regional, ethnic, religious—in a nation veering toward Civil War. The idea of depicting reality as a clash of opposites, whatever its ultimate validity, was immensely useful to writers attempting to see through the turbulent, opaque surface of nineteenth-century American life.

Two of their most important literary inventions may be interpreted, in Matthiessen's account, as devices for coping with the debilitating sense of disunity engendered by the double consciousness. Emerson's theory of organic form, borrowed from Coleridge and put into practice by Thoreau and Whitman, was in essence a program for achieving in art the still unachieved but ostensibly emergent coherence of American life. The three American writers were, in the philosophic sense, idealists, and they tended to regard the ability of a nation's artists to transcend conflicts or divisions in thought (or art) as evidence—a kind of optimistic forecast—of the nation's ability to resolve analogous conflicts in reality. If they were the yea-sayers of the American renaissance, Hawthorne and Melville were the skeptical naysayers. Hawthorne's method of bipolar symbolism, later adapted to his own uses by Melville, was designed to figure forth the essentially ambiguous, illusory character of the relationship between ideas and things. The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick call into question the transcendentalist belief in a close correspondence, an “organic” relatedness, between nature and culture. Hawthorne's letter “A,” officially designated to stand for “adultery,” is subverted by Hester to mean “art” or “angel.” And whiteness, in the world of Moby Dick, may be taken to represent all things pure and virtuous or, simultaneously, the most hideous morbidity and evil. Ambiguity is inherent in the nature of things. As apprehended by the aesthetically unified but tragic vision of Hawthorne and Melville, the divided consciousness Emerson had posited is an expression of an unresolvable contradiction.

To appreciate why the double consciousness had a special resonance for Matthiessen, one has only to read the Matthiessen-Cheney letters. There we get some sense of what it was like, before the Second World War, to be a Harvard professor and a homosexual: the double life that he and Cheney felt compelled to live, and the many humiliating concealments and dissimulations it entailed. It is not surprising, then, that Matthiessen had a heightened sensitivity to the many variations in our literature on the theme of the disparity between appearance and reality. His own experience also made him particularly responsive to the inability of many of our most gifted writers to sustain a unified vision long enough to compose—fully compose—more than one book. (It is a striking fact that if we put aside the single masterpieces of Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, the status of these men as “major” writers immediately comes into question.) Matthiessen was acutely aware of the insights the double consciousness allows and the precarious situation it creates—a situation that Emerson likens, in his essay on “Fate,” to that of a circus rider with one foot planted on the back of one horse and the other foot planted on the back of another. To many of our artists and intellectuals, the creative life has meant just such a risk of being pulled apart by the very conflicts, conscious and unconscious, private and public, that energized their work.

.....

It is revealing, in the light of Matthiessen's receptivity to dialectical modes of thought, to reconsider his ambivalent attitude toward Marxism. He made his final, most cogent statement of his views on that subject in his 1949 Hopwood Lecture, “The Responsibilities of the Critic.” After his usual disclaimer (“I am not a Marxist myself but a Christian”), he went on to explain his belief that the principles of Marxism “can have an immense value in helping us to see and comprehend our literature.”

Marx and Engels were revolutionary in many senses of that word. They were pioneers in grasping the fact that the industrial revolution had brought about—and would continue to bring about—revolutionary changes in the whole structure of society. By cutting through political assumptions to economic realities, they revolutionized the way in which thinking men regarded the modern state. By their rigorous insistence upon the economic foundations underlying any cultural superstructure, they drove, and still drive, home the fact that unless the problems arising from the economic inequalities in our own modern industrialized society are better solved, we cannot continue to build democracy. Thus the principles of Marxism remain at the base of much of the best social and cultural thought of our century. No educated American can afford to be ignorant of them, or to be delinquent in realizing that there is much common ground between these principles and any healthily dynamic America.¹⁰

But he quickly followed this affirmation with a denial that Marxism contains “an adequate view of the nature of man,” or that it “or any other economic theory” could provide a “substitute” for a critic's primary obligation to elucidate the interplay of form and content in specific works of art.

In 1949 Matthiessen's conception of Marxism as “an economic theory” was by no means idiosyncratic. On the contrary, it more or less accurately identified a version of Marxism in high favor during the Stalin era: a self-consciously hard, economistic, and essentially positivistic view of the world. It was positivistic in that it embraced a dichotomy between “scientific” thinking (including Marxism) and all other kinds of thinking. The scientific kind allegedly provides access, as physics does, to the underlying laws governing surface phenomena, whereas other non-scientific kinds inevitably tend to be superficial, sentimental, utopian, idealistic—in a word, unreliable. They do not yield true knowledge. From the retrospective viewpoint of the cultural historian, this Marxist-Leninist invocation of “science” belongs in part to a much wider tendency of thinkers to borrow, on behalf of any social or political theory, the impressive authority of the natural sciences as vehicles for arriving at hard, preferably quantitative, verifiable, exact knowledge.¹¹ This dichotomy between Marxist science and bourgeois apologetics comported with the absolutist, authoritarian political doctrines emanating from Moscow. But it would be wrong to attribute the dominion of this positivistic style of Marxism only to the power and influence of the Third International. For one thing, as Paul Sweezy reminds me, this tendency already was present in less dogmatic form in the work of such earlier followers of Marx as Kautsky and Plekhanov. For another, we should remember the incomplete state of the Marxist canon in Matthiessen's time. Even at the end of the Stalinist era such a conception of Marxism was made more plausible by the fact that several important countervailing texts, notably the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (the “Paris Manuscripts”) and the Grundrisse, were not yet available.

What made this mid-century version of Marxism particularly objectionable to Matthiessen was the rank, seemingly ineradicable philistinism it fostered. Many Marxists of the era were Zhdanov types who tended, as Leon Trotsky put it, to “think as revolutionaries and feel as philistines.”¹² They regarded religion, philosophy, art, all ideas and activities not bearing directly on the hard material facts of life, as mere derivations from those facts, and so they consigned literature to the flimsy “superstructure” that allegedly rests on society's material (economic and technological) “base.” It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this compelling architectural metaphor in disseminating the simple-minded reductionist ideas that passed for a Marxist theory of culture in that period. Even as originally invoked by Marx, the metaphor had been unfortunate—it is static and it lends itself to the mechanistic idea of a one-way, from the bottom up, interaction between the “real foundation” of society, the economic base, and the entire political, legal, and ideological superstructure. In recent years the metaphor has been the subject of extended discussion by Marxist theorists,¹³ and the complicated question of its validity cannot be settled here. What remains clear, however, is that during the 1930s doctrinaire Marxists often removed the metaphor from its theoretical context and applied it so literally that it could be said to validate the undialectical notion of a direct economic determination of all ideas and, indeed, of all human behavior.

What might have given pause to Marxist critics of literature is the close resemblance between this philistine attitude and the characteristic utilitarian attitudes of bourgeois Victorians. Thus, Thomas Gradgrind, Dicken's archetypal nineteenth-century business philosopher, was a vehement exponent of a mechanistic base-and-superstructure model of reality. This was the aspect of “Marxism” that Matthiessen found most repugnant. In trying to explain himself to his Marxist friends and associates, he often recurred to their evident inability to take religious experience, even the religious experience of the past, seriously. “If any of you really believe that religion is only ‘the opiate of the people,’” he said at the dinner given in his honor when American Renaissance was published in 1941, “you cannot hope to understand the five figures I have tried to write about in American Renaissance.”¹⁴

In retrospect Matthiessen's rejection of what he took to be Marxism is doubly ironic. For one thing, some of today's practicing Marxist critics, Raymond Williams for example, would consider Matthiessen's literary theory (either as exemplified by his practice or as expressly set forth in the Hopwood Lecture) to be more acceptable—closer to their own theories—than the rigid economistic version of Marxism that Matthiessen found repugnant. This is not the place to review the remarkable development of Marxist thought since 1950, but its correlative literary theory has become a much more supple mode of analysis, far more responsive to the formal, aesthetic dimension of literature, than it was in Matthiessen's time. That is partly a result of the fact that Marxists have recovered and in some measure reinstated the work of the young (Hegelian) Marx that had been dismissed by the 1930s commissars of culture as hopelessly utopian and idealistic.¹⁵ To recover the work of the young Marx, incidentally, is not necessarily to belittle the importance of the passage Marx had effected during the 1840s from an Hegelian to an historical materialist viewpoint. But the overall tendency of Marxist thought during the last twenty years has been to allow much greater historical efficacy to ideas and non-material culture than was allowed by the mainstream Marxism of the Stalin era. It is this development which now makes Matthiessen's thought seem less distant from Marxism than he himself believed it to be.

The striking fact is, moreover, that the ideas of the young Marx had emerged from the same body of thought that Matthiessen wrote about with so much sympathy in American Renaissance. In Hegel and in post-Kantian idealism generally, Marx and the American writers who were his contemporaries—especially Emerson—shared a common philosophic legacy. In Marx's essay “On the Jewish Question,” written in 1843, roughly a year after Emerson's initial published formulation of the “double consciousness,” the young Marx had set forth a similar distinction. Adopting terms used by Feuerbach, he distinguished between a person's awareness as an individual, activated by the self-serving imperatives of material life in a capitalist society, and a person's awareness of being a member of the human species—or “species-consciousness.” In Western culture the sense of partaking in “species-life,” formerly embodied in Christianity, had been displaced to the political state. The result of this divided consciousness, for Marx as for Emerson, is that people find themselves leading two almost completely unrelated lives.

The perfected political state is, by its nature, the species-life of man as opposed to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the political sphere, as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the play-thing of alien powers.¹⁶

Although Matthiessen's own work exhibits some aspects of this post-Kantian legacy (one writer has referred to his “profound grasp of humanist dialectics”¹⁷), he did not recognize the significance of the close affinity between the ideas of the young Marx and those of Emerson. This is surprising because Matthiessen had been a publicly avowed socialist for some ten years before the appearance of American Renaissance, and during that time he often had deplored the absence of a working-class socialist movement in the United States. Under the circumstances, he might have been expected to seize upon the initial conjunction and subsequent divergence of proto-Marxism and American literary thought (exemplified above all by Emerson) as a way of illuminating the vexed issue of “American exceptionalism.” (Among the advanced capitalist countries of the world the United States is “exceptional” in the failure of its intelligentsia to take Marxism seriously, in the failure of socialism to gain a mass following, and in the absence of a working-class socialist party.) Unfortunately Matthiessen ignored the entire subject. This lacuna, along with his conspicuous inattention to Marx and Marxist thought in a book notable for its wide-ranging allusiveness and its highly individualized perspective, is in large measure attributable, I believe, to Matthiessen's overreaction to the shallow, mechanistic Marxism that prevailed during the 1930s.¹⁸ Yet the lack of explicit attention to Marxism in American Renaissance is somewhat misleading. In his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era.

The second irony in Matthiessen's rejection of what he took to be Marxism is that he nevertheless allowed that doctrine to skew his own political thinking.¹⁹ Some of the very formulas he repudiated within the context of literary theory informed his response to the political “line” emanating from the Soviet Union. This is not to suggest that he condoned the Stalinist repression, but rather that his opposition to it was softened by the received justification for that authoritarian regime. Like many other non-Marxists, Matthiessen was impressed by the anti-fascist policies of the USSR during the early 1930s, and his thinking about the long-term prospects in Russia followed the standard first-things-first logic inherent in the base-and-superstructure model of social reality. (Notice, incidentally, the uncritical way in which he invoked that treacherous metaphor in the passage from the Hopwood Lecture cited above.) He assumed that the aim of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was to build the indispensable economic base for socialism, and that during the period of primitive socialist accumulation a degree of authoritarianism was a more or less unavoidable necessity. The fact that Russia had not had a bourgeois revolution, and that it was a peasant society without democratic institutions, gave added credence to this viewpoint. At bottom the cogency of the argument rests on a fundamental assumption of historical materialism—one that Matthiessen, for all his protestations about not being a Marxist, was intermittently prepared to accept: the ultimate, long-term, or “in the final analysis” primacy of a society's economic structure. Hence the need for the non-Communist left to reserve judgment or, in effect, to tolerate a hiatus between the building of the economic base and the raising of a truly socialist (hence truly democratic) superstructure.

This widely accepted latitudinarian argument was behind Matthiessen's adherence, even after 1945, to the “united front” strategy. He had long since abandoned the liberal reformism typical of American academics; he thought of himself as a radical, and did not require instruction on the systemic character of our society's problems. Then, too, he was acutely aware of the reactionary use to which anti-Communism was being put in the early years of the Cold War. “One of the most insistent clichés of the right and even of the liberal press,” he wrote shortly before his death, “is that there can be no cooperation on any level between Communists and non-Communists.”²⁰ But of course the insoluble problem was to define the extent of that cooperation. At the local level it involved the elusive issue of “Leninist” tactical duplicity, and on the global level it involved the question of limits (in duration and severity) to the allegedly temporary “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But in the rush of events there was no time for Matthiessen (or anyone else) to clarify, much less resolve, these questions. Commenting on the support that Matthiessen and other non-Communists gave to Henry Wallace's presidential candidacy in 1948, Professor Stern simply notes that they were “mistaken about the possibilities and realities of Soviet life after World War II.” They were listening, he says, to “their own wishes rather than to evidence and reason.”²¹ He might have added that Matthiessen, trapped between Stalinism and reformism, was accepting a kind of casuistry that he had identified and pointedly rejected in the interpretation of literature.

But it is doubtful, finally, whether Matthiessen's objections to Marxism would have been satisfied by the work of today's revisionists. To be sure, he would have been far more sympathetic with the “humanist” Marxism of Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse, or the literary methods of Williams, than he was with the orthodoxy of his time. In his arguments against that doctrine, indeed, Matthiessen anticipated many of the current arguments within Marxism—especially those leveled by E. P. Thompson against the ideas of Louis Althusser.²² Matthiessen charged Marxists generally, as Thompson does Althusser, with constructing their theories at too great a distance from the hard evidence—the concrete particularities—of political life. And like Thompson, Matthiessen felt that mainstream Marxism, with its bias toward economic reductionism, tends to neglect that half of culture which derives from the affective and moral consciousness. For Matthiessen, as for Thompson, a crucial shortcoming of the work of twentieth-century Marxists has been their neglect of the imaginative and utopian faculties of humanity. Unlike Thompson, however, Matthiessen did not believe that those faculties could be adequately accommodated within any form of historical materialism.

Hence Matthiessen's continuing adherence to his unfashionable, demanding, explicitly political version of Christianity. He took the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself as “an imperative to social action.” Indeed, it was “as a Christian,” he said, that he found his “strongest propulsion to being a socialist.” He acknowledged that this distinguished his religious views from those of “most orthodox Christians of today.” It also distinguished his conception of human nature from the one he imputed to Marxism: a simplistic, psychologically shallow notion of human perfectibility; by asserting its rational, economic interests, the working class might be relied upon to achieve liberation for—eventually—all humankind. In contrast to this sanguine view, and under the influence of Freudian psychology and Nieburhian theology, Matthiessen endorsed the doctrine of original sin—the idea that human beings inescapably are “fallible and limited, no matter what … [the] social system.”²³ At this point his belief in the tragic character of human experience impinged upon, and in a sense joined, his commitment to Christianity and to revolutionary socialism. The essence of tragedy, in his view, is the ultimate inseparability of the human capacity for destructiveness, or evil, and the capacity for nurturance, or good. In effect Matthiessen was disavowing the millennial strain that runs through Marxism and indeed the entire left tradition of political thought. This optimistic tendency of mind underestimates the psychological or, more broadly, behavioral constraints upon social amelioration. “Evil is not merely external,” he wrote in distinguishing his views from both the shallow Marxism and the complacentt Christianity of his time, “but external evils are many, and some societies are far more productive of them than others.”

Today the political import of Matthiessen's religious belief, with its attendant critique of Marxism, is more obvious and more telling than it was during his life. At that time, when only one nation professed a commitment to revolutionary Marxism, the shortcomings of Soviet society were relatively easy to explain away. But the coming to power of revolutionary socialist movements around the world has made it more difficult to ignore the discrepancy between political realities and the millennial expectations of Marxism. Today many of the arguments within Marxism turn upon fundamental issues raised by F. O. Matthiessen forty years ago.

Notes

1. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, eds., F. O. Matthiessen: A Collective Portrait (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), p. vii. This book originally appeared as a special issue of MR in October 1950. A list of the books about Matthiessen mentioned in this review appears on p. 55.

2. The complete text of the note appears in A Collective Portrait, pp. 91-2.

3. Rat & the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, Louis Hyde, ed., Introduction (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1978), pp. 3-4.

4. White expresses his interest in the problem in his review of Rat & the Devil: “‘Have I Any Right in a Community That Would So Utterly Disapprove of Me If It Knew the Facts?’” in Harvard Magazine (September-October, 1978), pp. 58-62. Harry Levin also discusses the problem of Matthiessen's homosexuality in a trenchant review of Rat & the Devil, “The Private Life of F. O. Matthiessen,” New York Review of Books (July 20, 1978), pp. 42-46.

5. George Abbott White and Charles Newman, eds., Literature in Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972). White's contribution is “Ideology and Literature: American Renaissance and F. O. Matthiessen,” pp. 430-500.

6. Giles B. Gunn, F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1975); Frederick C. Stern, F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

7. From the Heart of Europe, p. 72.

8. “The Great Tradition: A Counterstatement,” a review of Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition, in The Responsibilities of the Critic, Essays and Reviews by F. O. Matthiessen, John Rackliffe, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 198. Matthiessen's scathing review of V. F. Calverton's earlier effort to interpret American literature from a Marxist vantage, The Liberation of American Literature, is reprinted in the same collection (pp. 184-189). For Matthiessen's reservations about Parrington, see the Preface to American Renaissance.

9. An obvious problem, too complex to be resolved here, is whether the “double consciousness” refers to one state of mind or several states. Among the distinctions with which it is associated in American Renaissance are (1) Kant's “understanding” versus “reason”; (2) Emerson's “natural facts” versus “symbols”; (3) Thoreau's acting versus self-observing selves; (4) Whitman's “soul” versus “other I am”; (5) Hawthorne's daylight recording of material reality versus his moonlit vision of an imagined world; and (6) Melville's upper air of benign appearances versus an undersea realm of murderous realities.

10. The Responsibilities of the Critic, p. 11.

11. But this is not to suggest that all assertions of the “scientific” character of Marxism are tainted by vulgar “scientism.” To resolve this complex problem it would be necessary, in each case, to consider the particular sense of “science” being invoked.

12. Quoted by Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 1.

13. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 71-72; G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 217-248; Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, pp. 3-16; Paul M. Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981) pp. 20-25; E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 157-62; Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review 82, November/December, 1973, and Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 75-82. If a consensus can be said to be emerging from this discussion, it is the need to preserve the indispensable premise of the Marxist theory of history, namely, the primacy of the forces of production as ultimate determinants of the limits within which any society and culture can develop and, at the same time, the need to rid the theory of the static, unidirectional implications of the base and superstructure model.

14. A Collective Portrait, p. 142. Here Joseph H. Summers is quoting Matthiessen's impromptu remarks from memory.

15. A particularly compelling testimonial to the intimidating effect of such an anti-utopian bias, or what he calls “the scientific/utopian antinomy,” is E. P. Thompson's reconsideration of his own 1955 study of William Morris. In a “Postscript: 1976” to the reissue of the book, Thompson vividly describes how his earlier treatment of Morris had been skewed by his adherence to what he later came to reject as an excessively rigid, mechanical materialism. At issue, he believes, is the place of “moral self-consciousness” and “a vocabulary of desire” within Marxism, and its tendency to fall back, in lieu of these, upon the old utilitarian ideal of “the maximization of economic growth” (p. 792). See William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 763-816. For other formulations of a less rigid Marxist literary theory, see Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), and The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977).

16. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), pp. 26-52. The quotation is from pp. 34-35. Emerson's concept of the double consciousness, cited by Matthiessen in American Renaissance, p. 3, is from his essay, “The Transcendentalist” (1842).

17. Maynard Solomon, Marxism and Art: Essays Classical and Contemporary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 275; quoted in Stern, F. O. Matthiessen, p. 223.

18. “Over-reaction” because Matthiessen, with his aversion to theory in general, and his failure to devote himself to extra-literary problems with anything like the seriousness he devoted to literature, simply ignored the available work of Marxist or quasi-Marxist theoreticians from which he might well have profited. Among them were T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Kenneth Burke, Lucien Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, George Lukacs, and Hans Meyer. (The fact that all but Burke were Europeans also suggests the distorting effect of Matthiessen's preoccupation with American thought.) Stern discusses the reasons for Matthiessen's failure to come to grips with Marxist cultural theory in F. O. Matthiessen, pp. 221-231.

19. On this subject I am relying on first-hand experience as much as on Matthiessen's published writings. Between 1945 and 1950 I spent a great deal of time with Matty in my capacity as a graduate student, a fellow tutor in the History and Literature department at Harvard, and as a friend. We had many long conversations on these issues. For corroboration I have relied on Jane Marx, my wife, who participated in many of those conversations, especially during the summer months we spent with Matty in Kittery, Maine. I also have had the benefit of criticism of this essay by former friends of Matthiessen's: Richard Schlatter, Paul Sweezy, J. C. Levenson, and G. R. Stange.

20. “Needed: Organic Connection of Theory and Practice,” Monthly Review (May 1950), p. 11. This was one of two posthumously published fragments bearing on the problems of the left. The other, “Marxism and Literature,” was a brief that Matthiessen had prepared for the defense in the trial of the leaders of the Communist Party (U.S.A.) under the Smith Act. Monthly Review (March 1953), pp. 398-400.

21. F. O. Matthiessen, p. 27.

22. Thompson's attack on Althusser is contained in “The Poverty of Theory—or an Orrery of Errors,” The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); for a useful interpretation of the argument, see Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, op. cit.

23. His clearest statement of his creed appears in the autobiographical section of From the Heart of Europe, pp. 71-91, reprinted in A Collective Portrait, pp. 3-20.