A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

by Scott Bane

Overview

“An example of how two men could—precariously and passionately—live together and love each other in the America of the 1930s and 1940s.” —Colm Tóibín, New York Times-bestselling author of The Magician

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love, and remained inseparable until Cheney’s death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

Situating the couple’s private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the United States. From the vantage point of the present day, with marriage equality enacted into law, Bane provides a window into the realities faced by same-sex couples in the early twentieth century, as they maintained relationships in the face of overt discrimination and the absence of legal protections.

“A nuanced exploration of a marriage, one characterized by great joy but also buffeted by tremendous conflict (societal, financial, and health-related).” —R. Tripp Evans, author of Grant Wood: A Life

“A smart, sensitive study of a gay couple…extremely readable.” —Gay & Lesbian Review

“An arresting account of how a same-sex relationship endured.” —Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613769126
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	06/29/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	314
Sales rank:	482,399
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

SCOTT BANE is a program officer at The John A. Hartford Foundation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: Do the Dead Choose Their Biographers? 1

1 The Search for Companionship 7

2 "Between the Old and the New" 26

3 Falling in Love: The Exuberant Years 48

4 A Star Is Born 65

5 Making a Home in Kittery 89

6 Shining in a Dark Time: Politics and Painting in the Depression 107

7 In Sickness and in Health: The Hartford Retreat, McLean Hospital, and Baldpate Hospital 127

8 The Green Light across the Piscataqua 145

9 Losing Touch: Life without Cheney 174

10 Aftermath and Afterglow 202

Epilogue: Getting Married After All 213

Notes 225

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

In A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane carefully tracks both men’s careers through the changes in American culture that they were either reflecting or contributing to . . . [A] smart, sensitive study.”—Gay and Lesbian Review

“[P]articularly impressive in Bane’s work is the thorough, 360-degree view he gives to his subjects' lives . . . A Union Like Ours is an absorbing read and a significant addition to America’s sociological and intellectual history.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“Scott Bane shows the relationship between F. O. Matthiessen and the painter Russell Cheney as an example of how two men could—precariously and passionately—live together and love each other in the America of the 1930s and 1940s. His book enriches our knowledge of the gay past.”—Colm Tóibín, international best-selling author of The Magician: A Novel

“A Union Like Ours succeeds as a nuanced exploration of a marriage, one characterized by great joy but also buffeted by tremendous conflict (societal, financial, and health-related).  I came to know these men, their life together, and their creative output in a layered way.”—R. Tripp Evans, author of Grant Wood: A Life

“The relationship between Cheney and Matthiessen is a terrific subject. Bane is in his element when writing about intimacy and about the pathologization of homosexuality in the early twentieth century.”—Lance Richardson, author of House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

“[T]his is an arresting account of how a same-sex relationship endured amid societal conflicts and a solid examination of the men’s respective works.”—Philip Oliver, Library Journal 

“A Union Like Ours is an absorbing read and a significant addition to America’s sociological and intellectual history.”—Martha Anne Toll, Washington Independent Review of Books

“[This book] can be read as exemplary of the kind of biography worthy of ‘American Renaissance’….”—Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

From the Publisher