Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June/july 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 4
E O. Matthiessen: The Teacher As Creative Spirit
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
He went at his lectures obliquely, backtracking, leaving broken sentences scattered behind him. He assembled his arguments in such a seemingly haphazard way that occasionally one of his Harvard students would fret, “You can’t take good notes on Matthiessen’s lectures.” But again and again those of his students who had larger interests than tidy notebooks said he was the best teacher they had ever had. He taught literature, and he taught it tensely, angrily, exultantly. To him, ideas were things too spiky and potent to demean by folding them into the pat delivery of the “popular” professor. “When he gave a speech or lecture,” wrote one of his friends, “he not only spoke his whole mind but also engaged emotions which most people reserve for home.” And at his funeral, his colleague John Rackliffe saw “the sensitive, thoughtful, and grief-torn faces of students who had really learned and were still learning- ten, fifteen, or twenty years later—from Matthiessen.”
Francis Otto Matthiessen’s powerful ability to teach was the natural outgrowth of a ferocious desire to learn. He came to Yale in 1919, a seventeen-year-old boy fresh from a very brief stint in the Canadian Royal Air Force. Despite belonging to a wealthy Illinois manufacturing family, he chose to think of himself chiefly as a “small-town boy.”
He felt fortunate in his limitations. If you came to Yale from a tonish prep school, he said, “You wore the right Brooks suit, your soft white shirt had a buttoned-down collar, and you did nothing—except possibly drinking—to excess. But if you came … as I did, from a small prep school … you had the giddy sensation of a limitless domain opening out before you. ” He had no idea of what he wanted to study, though he inclined vaguely toward math. Instead, he wound up in an English literature course taught by Bob French, a man forthright and vigorous enough to convince Matthiessen that he wanted to teach literature too. French’s “candor and devotion were [his] model.”
Yale changed his life in another way: searching desperately for a bearable book on the reading list of a stupefying required economics course, he lit on The Acquisitive Society . Richard Tawney’s ideas on human equality and the evils of capitalism “have remained more living for me than anything else, except Shakespeare, that I read at college.” Matthiessen would be a pugnacious and unwavering socialist for the rest of his days.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Rhodes scholarship that sent him to New College, Oxford, where he took a B. Litt, in English in 1925. This smalltown boy had a Yankee contempt for the British: he found their manners irritating, their stuffiness enraging. Then and later he regarded direct and simple expression as one of the primary human necessities. It is a gauge of his breadth of mind that he was able to see past his strong