Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  Cheney was forty-three and Matthiessen only twenty-two when the two began what might have been no more than a shipboard romance: the older man, an increasingly established artist, was on his way from New York to Italy to paint; the younger one would disembark first, in order to take up the second year of a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, where he planned to write a thesis on Oliver Goldsmith.

  In the year following the ocean voyage, except for brief reunions on the Continent, the two of them work out, in near-daily letters, the nature of the permanent relationship they are determined to form. “That there have been other unions like ours is obvious,” writes Matthiessen, “but we are unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything for ourselves.” Coltish, literary and idealistic, he declares that he and Cheney will have “a marriage that demands nothing and gives everything,” even if they won’t use that heterosexual term for the union. “Feller, my own dear feller, we have found the key to life, haven’t we?”

  Matthiessen tells Cheney that he is trying to make himself “worthy of your love,” a process that includes struggling to keep sex a pure thing between just the two of them. Courting temptation in order to resist it, he takes a late-afternoon stroll by Marble Arch (“The place in London most flagrant”) and reports the results: “Of course I could have stopped in that gesturing crowd. I could have drunk in a lot of luscious slime through my eyes. But who would want to when he can throw back his shoulders, and walk into the sunset, and be at peace with his soul and you?” Cheney, also prone to lust (and to renunciations even more sweeping and unsustainable), gently urges the younger man “to live and stop watching yourself live.”

  Eager for Cheney’s protection and tutelage in the ways of the world and the heart, Matthiessen already has his own serious vocation for teaching, a calling that, coupled with the books he would produce about classic American writers, will make him a star professor at Harvard. His view of literature is forthrightly Arnoldian; what’s inside a novel or poem remains without value “unless it can enrich a man’s life.” The young critic’s political engagement follows logically from this, and it proves serious: we see him voting for the New Deal (until something more plausibly radical can come along) and rallying support for a Cambridge bookseller who’s been threatened with the workhouse after selling Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  But the life of action can take place only during hurried breaks from the academic assembly line of lectures and papers and conferences and committees to which Matthiessen is lashed: “This morning I was sent a senior who is working in the eighteenth century and wants to write his dissertation on Beattie (My God! I couldn’t even remember who Beattie was …).” Even before he becomes the head tutor in one of Harvard’s undergraduate houses, Matthiessen wonders to Cheney if he isn’t letting himself “be spread as thin as shellac.” Repeated term after term, his routine is “nerve-wracking, alternately very interesting and exhaustingly futile.” For all Matthiessen’s desire to enliven academic writing and enlarge the audience for it, he can never quite shake his sense that scholarship may be smothering the life of the very literature it’s supposed to clarify: “with such sand slowly piling up how long is it going to be before the house is entirely covered?”

  Though far more disciplined than Cheney, whom he scolds for squandering time away from painting, Matthiessen still knows that the older man he loves is the one engaged not in the business of mere explication but in actually creating something. Within months of their first meeting, Cheney had reflected that, thanks to Matthiessen’s enlivening presence, “[t]he black hateful veil between myself and my work is torn.” Six years later, finishing the portrait of a gas-station owner in Santa Fe, he speaks of another breakthrough, one that erases any remaining separation between himself and his work: “the painting of that picture was as sudden as a flashlight explosion. No consideration, no careful preparation, and God damn it, it lives and breathes and this studio is a different place because it is here.” In fact, he tells Matthiessen, he has “crossed the border line into being me.”

  The very nature of criticism keeps the younger man from ever experiencing such transport. His books can admirably illuminate the works of others, but they cannot glow from within, and the yearning for it to be otherwise seems visible in the style of his letters. Compared to Cheney, he is the more self-conscious performer, wishing to appear clever (“[my] trick little mind”) and inclined to self-reference in the third person.

  Like literary criticism, love letters are a form of writing that can never quite compete with the real thing—the flesh-and-blood presence of the beloved. But even so, in their long correspondence Cheney and Matthiessen succeed in making themselves remarkably available to each other. Early in the relationship, Matthiessen claims to “keep going entirely on the anticipation of [Cheney’s] letters;” all he has to do is “tear the envelope and Oxford and the world fall away.” A letter from Cheney converts the older man’s “evening alone with Beethoven” into a still-living hour into which Matthiessen can now step. The letters, Matthiessen marvels, “let me live your whole life with you,” a phenomenon that Cheney, thousands of miles away, assures him is mutual: “I live with you all the time.”

  When in 1929, Matthiessen holds Cheney’s letter to his cheek, “letting the full sense of you flood over me,” he probably doesn’t realize that he is making a gesture learned from Cheney himself, who five years before had written of the exquisite frustration involved in receiving one of Matthiessen’s letters

  just as my friend Henry Poor came to take me out for all day. I couldn’t read it till I stole the time to do so down in the Museum. Couldn’t read the letter, but there it was in my pocket, and I’d slip my hand in and hold it, and a couple of times I’d hold it against my cheek, the sense of being with you strong.

  Even during the Second World War, when Matthiessen is in Massachusetts and Cheney away in the Southwest, they will connect themselves by listening to the same live radio concert: “Mahler has just finished—very rich and full, wasn’t it?” writes Cheney on a Sunday in November 1944.

  What they are up against, socially and psychologically, is never far from the page. At the start of their partnership in 1924, the very young Matthiessen pronounces the two of them “beyond society. We’ve said thank you very much, and stepped outside and closed the door.” But he can never long stop worrying about what might be getting said back in that room he’s vacated. Six years later, in the thick of his Harvard success and responsibilities, he writes: “My sex bothers me, feller, sometimes when it makes me aware of the falseness of my position in the world. And consciousness of that falseness seems to sap my confidence of power. Have I any right in a community that would so utterly disapprove of me if it knew the facts?” When the university’s professor of public speaking comments on his “blurred and soft” enunciation, Matthiessen wonders: “Am I just like any fairy?”

  Cheney absorbs similar hurts even in the bohemia of Santa Fe. “I hate like poison to write it to you,” he tells Matthiessen around Christmas 1929: “A telegram to [Phelps Putnam] was on the table when I got up containing the words: ‘our best to Cheney and his little boys’ signed Hester and Larry … I wrote ‘inexcusable’ across it and am sending it back to Larry. At least I leave it here on the table [for] Put to mail if he thinks best. It plain broke me—such indecency.”

  In the long run, alcoholism did the worst damage to Cheney and his relationship with Matthiessen, who observed the affliction with a mixture of perplexity and anger. In April 1942, when Cheney is in a sanatorium, the younger man writes: “I don’t think that I goad you into drinking but once you’re started I’m sure that my intensity doesn’t help matters any. I wish that I could learn not to be so torn to pieces by your deceptions, which, though ugly, are only symptoms of your by then desperate state.” For his part, Cheney is contrite, resolute and naïvely optimistic about the possibility of change. But he never conquers his condition, and less than a year before his death in 1945 is writing in a manner tha
t seems already posthumous: “don’t worry about me. [Dr.] Mera will fix me OK in about four days. I will look out. Weedsie, you have the most beautiful loyalty the world has known. You are a very lovely character, and you have had the entire love of another feller.”

  Matthiessen may have been mystified by Cheney’s binges, but he was no stranger to his own kind of blackness, a severe recurring depression. His occasional sense of life’s pointlessness (“God how I want to put my head in your lap,” he writes Cheney) could sometimes be alleviated by working even harder than usual, but he was still left to wonder whether his own “bright scrutiny, the self-knowledge which I have believed to be my sureness in making my life an integrated one” hasn’t “left nine-tenths of the iceberg hidden.”

  In late 1938, having become suicidal, he receives treatment in Massachusetts at McLean Hospital, the site of so much Brahmin literary misery. Determined to “find my way back to the light,” he receives a guilty letter that Cheney writes from their house in Maine: “I fight my own devil who whispers I have drained too much life from you by my constant demand lately for help and backing.” The reference is to a terrible bender Cheney went on after the great hurricane of that year, an episode that left him wanting to die and left Matthiessen confronting the possibility that he would. In a long journal-letter written at McLean, Matthiessen reflects: “Having built my life so simply and wholly with Russell’s, having had my eyes opened by him to so much beauty, my heart filled by such richness, my pulse beating steadily in time with his in intimate daily companionship, I am shocked at the thought of life without him. How would it be possible? How go on from day to day?” He has become, he realizes, his own hostage to fortune: “When you give yourself entirely to love, you cannot demand that it last forever. For then fear intrudes and there I am.”

  During this breakdown, Matthiessen’s “death wish” assumes the form of “agonizingly vivid images of jumping out of a window”—the fate he would actually inflict upon himself, from the twelfth floor of Boston’s Manger Hotel, in 1950, five years after Cheney’s death. However terrible this end, readers of the love letters Matthiessen wrote and received may be drawn to see it as the high price life demanded for fulfilling the hope he had expressed, as a shining certainty, to his new love a quarter century before: “You’ll give me balance, a touch with life. And instead of being an energetic accurate little machine, why I may be a personality.”

  * In Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, letters perform something like the opposite task, sustaining Robbie’s hopes of eventual romance with Cecilia after he goes to prison because of her sister’s false accusation of sexual assault. The letters are wonderful consolation until Robbie’s release, when they force an unforeseen consequence upon his and Cecilia’s reunion. The two of them “sat down, looked at each other, smiled and looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless catechism of polite query and response.”

  * Davis’s most recent book, Go Ask Your Father (2009), recounts his DNA-based quest to determine whether Morris was indeed his biological father.

  CHAPTER SIX Spirit

  Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

  Mother Teresa, letter to

  Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, 1979

  THE WRITER OF A BOOK such as this finds himself grasping at synonyms for the main subject—whatever will let him avoid the sentence-after-sentence repetition of “letters.” What’s available, alas, seems pretty musty and artificial-sounding. One might get away with “missive” a couple of times in the chapter on love letters, but the word looks awfully silly anywhere else. “Epistle” is another creaky, thesaurus choice—except perhaps here, at the start of a chapter about the letters of priests and philosophers and other seekers after life’s essential spirit.

  “Epistle” remains the agreed-upon term for the open letters—apostolic spreadings of good news and chastisement and doctrinal elaboration—addressed to the early Christian church’s far-flung potential converts. Saint Paul is the New Testament’s most prolific letter writer, and his Epistle to the Romans perhaps the central explanation of his new faith’s demands. This momentous communication really had two initial audiences, as Thomas Bokenkotter explains in his Concise History of the Catholic Church; it was “intended for Jerusalem as much as for Rome,” in the hope that it would “clear up any remaining doubts the Jewish Christians still entertained” about the Gospel’s new precedence over all previous Law.

  The epistle begins, more or less, as a thank-you letter, expressing gratitude to the Romans for their remarkable ongoing conversion. But it doesn’t take many short chapters for Paul to hit his stern or-else stride. The choice for waverers, he makes plain, is between joy and death: “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (11:22). The apostle’s favorite technique is to harrow his new flock with rhetorical questions—“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”(6:1)—and to say “God forbid” when the temptation for his audience may be to answer yes.

  But the weak in spirit can take comfort from the autobiographical shout that splits the epistle in two: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (7:24) cries Paul—a daunting admission of need from someone who’s been vouchsafed visions on a road to Damascus that the recipients of his epistle will never get to travel themselves.

  Thirteen centuries later, Ibn Abbad of Ronda would be trying, through his Letters on the Sufi Path, not to get a spiritual movement off the ground so much as to keep the factions of an existing one united in the celestial air. The advice he writes to his followers is marked by, more than anything else, a calm, soothing empathy: “In short, you are a man with faults,” he tells one correspondent. Well, so is Ibn Abbad. It is actually a gift to be disgusted with one’s spiritual condition and sins, he argues; what else provides the opportunity to repent?

  The high decibels of Pauline epistle are largely absent from Ibn Abbad’s letters. (In fact, after laying out one complicated piece of theology, he charmingly confesses, “I am not swayed by my own line of argument.”) But the two proselytizers have in common a strong belief that while the spirit gives life, the letter—i.e., the law—killeth. The importance of mystic truth over formal learning is perhaps Ibn Abbad’s principal message. He himself may move from topic to topic, but he urges his listeners not to wear themselves out with spiritual searching: “If, therefore, what you seek is already found and present to you, why do you look beyond Him and why do you search for mediation from other than Him?” Ibn Abbad is happy for his letters of individual counsel to be seen and debated by others, no matter if they earn the scorn of “Zayd or ‘Amr”—individuals his translator identifies as the Arabic equivalents of “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  Even for this comforting Moroccan mystic, urging the seeker to look for what’s already in sight, the journey, the needy man’s self-chosen setting out on foot, remains, as it does perhaps in all the creeds of the world, the central metaphor for spiritual growth. The religious epistle probably has its closest genre-cousin in the travel letter; on occasion, even today, the two will combine into one. The director of the Western Buddhist Order, the former Dennis Ling-wood, who became the monk Sangharakshita following his World War II service with the British army in India, has for years stayed in touch with his disciples (“Dear Dharmacharis and Dharma-charinis”) through open letters, keeping them posted (as we still say) about his activities and whereabouts, sometimes in rather numbing travel-diary detail: “we had a late meal at Hockneys, followed by a quiet browse in the Centre bookshop.” As the leader of an established sect—neither the upstart Church of Paul nor the troubled movement o
f the Sufis—Sangharakshita can often make his trip reports sound like filings by a UN secretary-general (“In the course of the last three-and-a-half months we have visited eight FWBO centres in four countries”), but even if the author seems more occupied by the bureaucratic than the beatific, there are still the occasional self-examinations that get made and then offered as strength for others’ journeys: “Was thought indeed dependent on physical energy, and if so to what extent?” These speculations, ready for mass spiritual mailing, can be prompted by simple personal discoveries, such as Sangharakshita’s late-in-life one that, Buddhist contemplative though he may be, he is suffering from high blood pressure—perhaps exacerbated by stress.

  IN NOVEMBER 1833, a year after resigning as a pastor of the Second Church of Boston, thirty-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson first mounted a public lecture platform, secular wooden space that he would come to regard as the “new pulpit” of New England. Emerson spent most of his life preoccupied with what he called, in a letter to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, the “stone walls of in-communicability [that] exist between mind & mind,” but in shifting back and forth from the public hall to the private letter, he occasionally had trouble adjusting the tenor and amplification of his own utterance: “I really did not mean when you asked me for a letter to write a homily,” he apologizes to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, one of the Harvard students who asked him to give the Divinity School address, in August of 1839.

  Letter writing appears often enough as a subject in Emerson’s letters to give the reader a strong feeling of their moment of composition, whether it occurs on the high seas (“Forgive these ricketty faltering lines of mine; they do not come of infirm faith or love, but of the quivering ship”), or in a parlor, when Emerson finds himself distracted by others’ chatter: “forgive me this gossiping letter—I had company in the room so you must fill out its elliptical logic.”