To the Editors:
In his article on F. O. Matthiessen (June 1989), James W. Tuttleton gives a highly skewed account of Matthiessen’s attitude toward being a homosexual. Although Matthiessen might not have entirely accepted his sexuality by the standards of the Eighties, he was extremely advanced by the standards of the mid-Twenties, when he met Russell Cheney, his lover for twenty-five years. No evidence supports Tuttleton’s contention that Matthiessen’s suicide was caused by “self-loathing, confusingly and inextricably connected with his homosexuality.”
Tuttleton’s choice of evidence is one-sided and misleading. He contends from Lewis Hyde’s Rat and the Devil (1978), a selection of the Matthiessen-Cheney correspondence, that Matthiessen’s relationship with Cheney was “not without problems” (what lifelong relationship ever is?) caused by “Matthiessen’s negative view of himself as a homosexual.” The letters prove quite the opposite. It was Cheney who felt guilty about being gay and asked Matthiessen to stop having sex with him. Matthiessen’s response is a loving refusal:
[W]e were born as we are. I am no longer the least ashamed of it [being homosexual]. What is there to be ashamed of? It simply reveals the fact that sex is not mathematical and clear cut, something definitely to be separated into male and female. . . . Ashamed of it? Forty years ago, perhaps, when nothing was really known about it, I would have felt myself an outcast. But now that the matter has been studied scientifically, and the facts are there in black and
