An Icarian Fall

To learn the meaning of his leap to death What need to know the wounds he carried down To his crushing sleep?

These are the opening lines of Karl Shapiro’s in memoriam for F. O. Matthiessen, whose death leap in 1950 shocked his contemporaries and still resonates among older scholars of American literature. Charles Fenton clipped the New York Times story on the incident and tucked it in his copy of Matthiessen’s masterwork, American Renaissance (1941). In 1960 Fenton jumped off the roof of the tallest hotel in Durham, North Carolina, where he was a rising star in Duke’s department of English. His momentum launched him beyond the sidewalk and into the street. Fenton’s death occurred only a year before the shotgun suicide of his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway.

Aghast at Arthur Mizener’s probing biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway vowed to repel any such encroachment upon his own psychic depths. Fenton was among the young academic Turks planning to do just that in their Ph.D. theses. When discouraging letters did not deter them, Hemingway threatened to withhold permission to quote from his work—a prohibition that would have wrecked their careers.

Hemingway ultimately relented, and Fenton promised to confine himself to the author’s juvenilia. After publishing The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway in 1954, Fenton proved to be a promising and prolific critic. But, despite publishing some essays, a biography of Stephen Vincent Benet, plus a volume of his letters, he was denied tenure at Yale. Nevertheless he still seemed poised for a fine academic career.

Why?—the inescapable question posed by every suicide, especially when a literal failure of life trumps ostensible success. William Styron asserts in Darkness Visible (1990) that depression involves so many interlocking factors in “fathomless permutations” that determining a definitive cause is impossible.

Scott Donaldson agrees, but he does adduce some of the likely factors in Fenton’s death. In the psychological literature Styron found consensus on a single point: “Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.” Along these lines Donaldson traces Fenton’s recurrent dark spells to a childhood trauma he never revealed and then to his desertion from the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War ii. (See “Bomber Boy” in this issue.) By convicting himself of cowardice, Fenton lost for himself the respect his peers so willingly accorded him.

William Faulkner would later invent a head wound he supposedly sustained in the RCAF: his steel badge of putative courage. Fenton, for his part, would inflate the count of his combat missions. But, in doing so, he sold short the true measure of his heroism: on bomber runs that amounted to suicide missions—only five of the forty men who had trained with him survived.

Nowadays Fenton would be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But, had a medical palliative existed in his time, Fenton would have renounced it; for he attributed the lesion on his conscience to purely moral causes. The paradox, as Donaldson suggests, is that only an exceptionally principled man would have taken on the full weight of responsibility for betraying his principles.

Although Fenton settled down after the war into midcentury American conventionality, embracing the work ethic and the homely domesticity expected of a man when maturity was the watchword, his rebellious streak eventually overcame his self-restraint. He went rogue in 1960, when he fell in love with a graduate student. In the generation before feminism, such an affair, if discreet, was generally tolerated, and often it was normalized by divorce and remarriage. But sanctions against conspicuous adultery were strongly enforced, and their imposition on Fenton precipitated a second major trauma. Like his desertion it centered on loss, the loss of whatever faith in his own moral fiber he had regained since the war.

Fenton plunged into the same “gray drizzle of horror” that Styron describes: a species of despair that, “owing to...