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A Dream Still Invincible? The Matthiessen Tradition robert k. martin  An aging gay man, Reeve, lies in a hospital bed, the victim of gay-bashing by a young hustler he had picked up in a bar. In the adjoining bed, a working -class boy spends his time watching television waiting for his thumb to heal. Reeve’s friend, Howard, openly gay and effeminate, brings some reading matter, copies of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and T. F. Slater’s The Invincible City, the latter a barely concealed echo of F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance.1 This is the opening of Mark Merlis’s 1994 novel, American Studies, concerning the narrator and protagonist who passes much of his time recalling the life and work of Slater/Matthiessen.2 The phrase “the invincible city” is taken from one of Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, the first line of which is “I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth” (LG 133). Merlis’s use of this line makes it clear that, for him, Matthiessen’s citation of Whitman is a central part of a revaluation of Matthiessen’s (and Whitman’s) politics. Merlis alludes to this relatively little known Whitman poem at several places in the novel. Merlis sees Matthiessen (as I shall call him when thinking of the critical voice) as caught in an impossible contradiction of idealism — wanting a perfect world and knowing it is impossible to find — just as literature of the American Renaissance period was torn between a necessary idealism and a tragic knowledge that such perfection could only exist in a dream. Merlis’s comment about Slater speaks perfectly of Matthiessen: “He was looking for a ticket to the impossible city that lived only in his book” (64). This comment can also apply to Whitman and particularly to the “Calamus ” poems, product as they are of unfulfilled desire and longing. Of course, one must feel that deep need in order to write, one must dream even if one knows that most dreams are not realized. The “impossible” dream is also the “fabulous city,” a term taken in both its colloquial and formal meanings. Slater’s death is a product of the homophobic hysteria of the 1950s, of his internalization of guilt. (Merlis has advanced the action of the Slater section by two years, to 1952, to make clear the connections between the persecution of homosexuals and that of Communists, although the public denunciations of homosexual “security risks” had already begun in early 1950.) Slater kills himself because he cannot, like Matthiessen, reconcile the ideal love presented positively in Whitman and ironically in Fuzzy Walgreen’s Pindar with the reality of the gay bar of the violent hustler. That Fuzzy should specialize in the author of the Olympian odes adds an extra note of irony. Fuzzy teaches Greek but cannot bear to think of the sexuality of Greece. This does not, however, mean rejection of all hope, of all ability to (in Forster’s term) “connect”; it means recognizing the moments of joy when they present themselves. It means, as Merlis puts it, thinking of Whitman’s democratic vision and Matthiessen’s socialism , “the revolution isn’t ever coming, the city of friends is beyond the margins of the map. All you can do is wait for the intervals when the guns are silent and grab whatever you can” (235). It is a diminished form, a somewhat chastened realistic idealism and an echo of Foucault’s micropolitics. Admirers of Matthiessen (and they are still many) have tried to claim that American Studies does not give an accurate portrait of Matthiessen. Merlis makes a number of conscious changes, focusing, for instance, on Slater’s romantic obsessions with his male students, and he leaves out entirely Matthiessen’s lover, painter Russell Cheney. But he very accurately captures the witch-hunts of the postwar period and offers what is probably the best reading of American Renaissance anywhere. Craig Seligman, reviewing American Studies in the New Yorker, sees the novel as “abject in its resignation,” but it would be more accurate to speak of accepting, of the loss of a dream. Seligman claims that “Matthiessen was anything but tragic,” but in fact Matthiessen saw a tragic spirit in America and viewed his own life as tragic.3 To have endured the interrogation of his loyalty, he who founded that project of studying and celebrating American culture, is...

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