Sentimentalizing Gay History: Mark Merlis, Alan Hollinghurst, and the Cold War Persecution of Homosexuals

ROBERT J. CORBER Sentimentalizing Gay History: Mark Merlis, Alan Hollinghurst, and the Cold War Persecution of Homosexuals This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Following the revelation in 1985 that Roy M. Cohn, the notoriously closeted powerbroker who in the 1950s served as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, was dying from aids, the media seemed determined to rewrite the history of McCarthytsm from a deeply homophobic perspective that seriously distorted the anti-gay pogroms of that era.1 Reviving a category of Cold War political discourse that Cohn himself helped to formulate, he was depicted as a maladjusted, self-hating homosexual who had undermined national security. Cohn had supposedly infiltrated the nation's political institutions and embarked them on a campaign of political and sexual terror they would otherwise not have undertaken. In this way, the media sought to absolve the nation of its responsibility for the virulent homophobia of the Cold War era. Rather than a product of the institutions and ideologies ofheterosexuality, the anti-gay pogroms emerged as part of a right-wing plot orchestrated by Cohn and several other notoriously closeted homosexuals (J. Edgar Hoover, Cardinal Joseph Spellman, perhaps even Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 1 16 Robert J. Corber McCarthy himself) who tried to deflect attention from themselves by scapegoating more vulnerable homosexuals. In his acclaimed first novel, American Studies (1993), Mark Merlis tries to intervene in this homophobic construction of Cold War nationalism by recovering the homosexual subtext of American studies, a subtext all but forgotten in scholarly discussions of the discipline's formation. Based loosely on the life of F. O. Matthiessen, the literary scholar and fellow traveler widely considered to be the founder ofAmerican studies, Merlis' novel tells the story of Tom Slater, a Harvard English professor who is both a homosexual and a member ofthe Communist party, an especially fraught combination of identities during the Cold War. Although he is expelled by the party after it determines that his study of nineteenth-century writers fails to conform to its line on American civilization, Slater nevertheless refuses to name names when subpoenaed to appear before a state senate committee investigating communist infiltration of Harvard. Martin van Leunen, the university's politically ambitious president, fearing negative publicity, tries to pressure Slater into recanting his testimony by threatening to expose the professor's homosexual affair with a student. His tactics backfire, however , when in a highly ambiguous act of resistance, Slater commits suicide , thereby thwarting the president's attempts to intimidate him into repudiating his political past. In raising the possibility that Matthiessen's suicide may have been sexually as well as politically motivated, Merlis' novel helps to reorient the project that has dominated American studies since its inception, namely, its attempt to identify the Americanness of American literature and culture. Discussions of Matthiessen's suicide in 1950, shortly before he was to appear before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee , rarely comment on the vexed relation between his homosexuality and his fellow traveling, which in the context of the Cold War construction of "the homosexual" as a national-security risk, would have marked him as doubly subversive.2 The failure of scholars to consider adequately the question of Matthiessen's homosexuality inadvertently reproduces the very repressions and omissions that the founding of American studies entailed for him. As Jonathan Arac has pointed out, in authorizing an American Renaissance, Matthiessen was forced to conceal his homoerotic interest in writers such as Whitman to whom Sentimentalizing Gay History117 he looked for affirmation of his homosexuality. Although Merlis risks simply reversing the shortcomings of the scholarship—he tends to emphasize Matthiessen's homosexuality at the expense ofhis fellow traveling —he returns those repressions and omissions to consciousness, exposing in the process the aspect of American national identity that they so graphically illustrate, its constitution through the disavowal or repression of homosexuality...