Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story (review)

Early in the evening of July 20, 1960, Charles Fenton, a Professor of English at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, checked into the Washington Duke Hotel, the second tallest building in town. He eventually went to the hotel's top floor, the twelfth, removed a screen from a hall window, crawled along a narrow outside ledge, and leapt to his death. A widely syndicated UPI obituary article noted that Fenton was 41; that he had been a member of the Duke faculty for two years; that he had served with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II; that he was a graduate of Yale University; that he had published biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Vincent Benét; that he had won the Twentieth Century Fox Doubleday Award (for an unpublished 1944 novel); that his edition of Benét's letters was due to be published in October; that he had received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957-58, and that he had been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies grant the previous May "and planned to use it to complete his fifth book—The Last Great Cause: Spain 1936-39." Radio commentator Paul Harvey, in his terse report on Fenton's suicide, patronizingly observed, "Funny how those who have everything . . . don't seem to know how to enjoy it."

It is in response to these glib and facile summaries of Fenton's life and accomplishments that Scott Donaldson addresses his biography. Among Fenton's students at Yale was Donaldson, who, as an undergraduate, took Fenton's English 77 (Daily Themes) course in the fall of 1949. He recalls that Fenton looked much younger than his actual age of 30—"[w]e took to him as more like any of us than his colleagues in the English department"—and that his students had learned that he had left Yale in his sophomore year, had been shot down and survived while flying during the war, had been a newspaperman upon his return, and that he was writing a book on Ernest Hemingway: "In short he had done and was doing the things we ourselves yearned to do."

Later that academic year, Donaldson chose to write his senior honor's thesis on Hemingway's short stories and Fenton served as his mentor. When Donaldson attempted to pass off a long term paper he had written for Fenton's own mentor Norman Holmes Pearson as his thesis, he was caught and denied graduation with his class in June 1950; but Fenton stuck with the miscreant, who made a visit that summer to Fenton's Madison, Connecticut, home to discuss revising the thesis. Although Donaldson admits, "I do not remember precisely what [Fenton] said" that day, he does recall, "I left . . . with this idea somewhere in the back of my consciousness. I was no Charlie Fenton, but he was doing the kind of work I might be capable of and living the kind of life I might enjoy." In the six decades since that summer day on the shores of Long Island Sound, Donaldson has certainly justified Fenton's support; he has become one of our leading critics and biographers of twentieth-century American literature. His books and essays all display a welcome and rare combination of meticulous research and readable prose (possibly due to the fact that, like Fenton and Hemingway, Donaldson served an apprenticeship as a newspaperman). He acknowledges that, for much of the time since 1960, he has been haunted by the question that surely must have troubled many others who knew Fenton— "What in the name of heaven had driven this charismatic man to kill himself?"—and felt that he "owed to his memory to tell the story as well as I could." This he has certainly done, bringing to the narrative of Fenton's life and career the same effective blend of indefatigable archival skills and the gift of telling a compelling story in an engaging manner that he has displayed...