Clare Spark: F.O. Matthiessen: Martyr to McCarthyism?

[Clare Spark, an independent scholar, is the author of Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, and she blogs at http://clarespark.com.]

According to Jennifer Burns, historian and biographer of Ayn Rand, F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) was a victim of McCarthyism, hounded to death by zealous anticommunists. She does not provide evidence for this claim. While reading Ayn Rand’s novels and then two recent biographies, I was struck by the representation of Rand as another Captain Ahab: destructive, bossy, and, though an atheist, something of a Russian Jew. Similarly, Ahab was and continues to occupy the Romantic Wandering Jew archetype in the most important Melville literary studies. Their predecessor was Harvard professor F.  O. Matthiessen, like Charles Olson, a hero to many in the New Left. For the first time on this website, I am looting a section of the seventh chapter of my book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent State UP, 2001, paperback rev. ed. 2006). It reflects my politics at the time of writing, and I would revise it slightly were it to be republished today.What matters is the gross distortion of Moby-Dick that remains perpetuated in both high and popular culture. Ahab is Hitler is Jew is archetypal American, exceptional only in his capacity for mindless destruction of Nature and non-white peoples.

[book excerpt:] Charles Olson’s friend and mentor F.O. Matthiessen participated in Irving Babbitt’s antibourgeois offensive: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, a monumental study of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman, appeared in 1941; it was the organic synthesis that American literature professors opposed to Marx, Freud, and Parringtonian “economic determinism”[i] had demanded since the mid-1930s (and even earlier). In Professor Merton M. Sealts, Jr.’s view, Matthiessen’s New Criticism [ii] had rescued his generation from the art-erasing politics of Vernon Parrington:

[Sealts letter to me:] In the mid-sixties, shortly after I began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, a graduate student came into my office to tell me, excitedly, that he had discovered a book that would release him from “the tyranny of New Criticism”: Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought! To his surprise I observed that when I was a graduate student (1937-1941) it was New Criticism that had released me from the tyranny of works like Parrington’s…the “history of ideas” approach to American literature that was current in the 1930s had talked about everything except the literary quality of the texts under discussion–either because “literary quality” was supposedly lacking in those texts or because the commentators themselves were unable to recognize it. It was Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) that assured many of us that what we planned to teach was worth teaching as literature.[iii]

Although he claimed to be fusing history and literature, in practice, the organicist Matthiessen set himself against both disciplines, leaving himself helpless to act either on his own behalf or that of humanity. By removing the study of literature from its “economic, social and religious causes” (but not from “its sources in our life”) and focusing on “what these books are as works of art,” then fulfilling the “double aim…to place these works both in their age and ours,” Matthiessen radically dehistoricized literary texts. One could move forward and backward between T.S. Eliot, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, or between Ahab and Hitler because historical specificity and concrete institutional referents had been banished: works of art gave birth to other works of art and yet, though fictions, their characters spoke to us today as if freshly minted. Matthiessen’s understanding of social conflict was expressed in timeless dualisms– Reason v. Passion, Good v. Evil, Civilization v. Savagery, or Heart v. Head: these antagonists made literature and history alike, but religion overwhelmed history and political science. In his draft Introduction to a selection of Melville’s poetry (1944), a pencilled addition mapped the Melville problem in the functionalist style as “Melville’s continual concern with the unending struggle, with the tensions between good and evil: within the heart and in the state, political, social, and religious.”[iv] And Matthiessen’s readings of “literary” qualities could be deficient in formal analysis or even accuracy, because he had appropriated nineteenth-century American literature to support the counter-Enlightenment corporatist goals of twentieth century progressive reform, eliminating textual facts that contradicted the lessons to be drawn from such works as Moby-Dick or Billy Budd, all the while (implicitly) distancing himself from Weaver and Mumford by p