m erve e mre Fulbright Love Imagine that it is 1947, and that you, one of the first Fulbright Scholars to Eastern Europe, have been tasked with “promoting love between nations? ” How would you go about doing such a thing? Or rather, how would you scale “love,” a seemingly private and affective state, into a transnational bond? This brief essay reads F.O. Matthiessen’s 1948 Fulbright memoir From the Heart of Europe to show how Americanist criticism developed a political project of love at mid-century. This project had various institutional dimensions, including the foundation of American studies departments in Europe and Asia; the consecration of an American literary canon keyed to Whitmanian “amativeness”; and the international circulation of thousands of American literary scholars acting as “warm-hearted communicators,” 1 a phrase favored by Robert Spiller, president of the American Studies Association (ASA) in 1954 and 1955, and one of the first administrators of the Fulbright Program. In reading From the Heart of Europe, however, I consider a more micro-sociological approach to affective politics. By micro-sociological, I mean the speech acts, gestures, bodily movements, sensory perceptions, and interaction rituals that were performed in the pursuit of love, both individually and socially. For Matthiessen, I argue, these actions manifest themselves most obviously in transnational scenes of literary pedagogy in Eastern Europe. Attending to his descriptions of these scenes helps to recuperate the collaborative and interactional techniques that route affect through such practices as close reading and textual interpretation, canon formation, classroom discussion, and translation. In considering these textual practices, I revisit some familiar questions about the relationship between mid-century literary criticism and transnational politics from an unfamiliar vantage point. How did Matthiessen and his fellow scholars use scenes of literary reception to theorize the strength and durability of transnational exchange? To what degree could such local encounters prompt national subjects to abandon their attachments to the postwar or Cold War state? What alternative attachments were formed in its place? How long could such attachments last? My essay thus looks backwards to a crucial archive in the foundation of global American studies, and, at the same time, grounds that archive in a more granular and detached approach 1 Robert Spiller, “American Studies Abroad: Culture and Foreign Policy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 366.1 (July 1966): 1-16. 142 m erve e mre to reading love out of Matthiessen’s descriptions of his actions and interactions. Such a reading stands in contrast to the readings of love produced by psychoanalysis or affect theory, the standard approaches to affective politics. 2 From the Heart of Europe is particularly well suited to this method of analysis. Whatever else it may be - an elegy for international socialism, an uneasy repudiation of American empire - Matthiessen’s text is first and foremost a meticulously detailed description of his lectures, syllabi, and classroom and conference activities during his year as a Fulbright Scholar in Eastern Europe. To sketch a very brief history: Matthiessen’s responsibilities began in 1947 at the inaugural Salzburg Seminar, where he delivered the keynote address; continued in Prague, where he taught for a semester in the fledgling American studies department at Charles University; and concluded with a lecture tour through Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia. The Heart of Europe records and, in doing so, reflects upon these everyday performances of pedagogy, which have long been neglected in favor of the memoir’s more explicit ideological pronouncements. But there’s reason to believe that Matthiessen’s account of his pedagogical self-presentation offers an even more revealing object of study. As Alfred Kazin, also in attendance at the Salzburg Seminar noted: “Much of the drama at the seminar is provided by F.O. Matthiessen who fascinates the European students, holds them in his grip, through an astonishing personal intensity, a positively violent caringness about everything he believes in and is concerned with that he cannot suppress in public. What drives the man and torments him so? ” 3 While a number of critics and biographers have provided compelling answers to Kazin’s question, I am interested in what it might mean to perform an “astonishing personal intensity” or a “positively violent caringness” to one’s students, and how that might align with the real contexts of literary reception Matthiessen was in the process of designing. As he announced at the outset of From the Heart of Europe, Matthiessen’s goal at the Salzburg Seminar was to devise a set of criteria that would clearly distinguish between “our best and our worst writers,” who Matthiessen worried were “read indiscriminately” as they all seemed to offer “something new” to consumers of American culture abroad. Matthiessen believed that the worst American writers were those who presented “a lively story,” but betrayed “a lack of distinction in language.” 4 Distinction in language, and particularly the distinction of literary language, is always produced by the dialectical interplay between literature and mass culture in a socio-historical process that encompasses many different ideologies of class and status, without being reducible to any single one of them. Thus Matthiessen dismissed the “crude sensationalism” of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Paul Cain’s pulp fiction, and Mary O’Hara’s ranch stories as the worst writing America had to offer; 2 See the debate between Michael Hardt and Lauren Berlin over the phrase “for love or money,” in Cultural Anthropology 26.4 (2011): 676-91. 3 Alfred Kazin, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 83. 4 F.O Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford UP, 1948) 25. All future citations are in-line and from this edition. Fulbright Love 143 a dismissal touched off by a New Critical valorization of formally difficult writing, but simultaneously registering the alleged inferiority of regional literature, popular literature, and Hollywood-friendly writers. Despite the overtly American subjects of these works - Southern Reconstruction, urban living, the Wild West - Matthiessen feared that these texts’ lack of literary distinction, compounded by their thematic material, would “project[t] an imaginative violence” about America to international audiences, a violence that would “seem authentic to Europeans” after the horrors of World War II. Against the institutional legacy of state-sponsored brutality experienced by Europeans in prisoner-of-war and concentration camps, Matthiessen proposed the “masterfully exact style” of America’s best writers as a “critical luxury” with which to combat the recent deprivations of political and civic society. The mission of American studies abroad, he suggested, was to show how “a new expression of that awareness [and] discrimination” in reading the American literary canon could link literary expressions of solidarity to lived social relations, helping to once again “build the civilization” of Europe after its devastation by fascist forces (55). But for Matthiessen, this new expression of aesthetic discrimination took its inspiration not from craft but from love: first, love as a political aesthetic to be consecrated in the best writing that America had to offer; and subsequently, love as a performative act that Matthiessen would repeatedly evoke in his classroom readings. In articulating love as an aesthetic category, Matthiessen’s Salzburg teachings in From the Heart of Europe traced the origins of love to two emblematic figures in American poetry, Walt Whitman (“the poet as inspired seer”) and Poe (“the poet as craftsman”), who Matthiessen presented in tandem as exemplary and complementary theorists of democratic intimacy (149). While Whitman’s vision of a maximally inclusive fraternity had already found a receptive audience in European Marxists ranging from Ferdinand Freiligrath to George Lukács, and while the World Peace Council would soon use Leaves of Grass as the primary text in its campaign against Cold War imperialism, Matthiessen’s task was to remind his readers of the essentially American nature of Whitman’s affective politics. Thus his seminar at Charles University, “on the age of Whitman and Melville” (112), emphasized the politically and socially enabling aspects of “adhesive love,” a sensual awareness of the body that Matthiessen claimed made “our literature” distinct (36). The embodied poetics of democratic love, Matthiessen proposed, had to be understood as an antidote to the possessive logic of “finance capitalism” (143, 176) that had troubled Whitman in 1840, and continued to trouble Matthiessen in his complicity with American internationalism. Only Whitmanian sensuality, he told his students, could counteract the exploitative and alienating nature of the liberal capitalist agenda, which invested disproportionately in the abstractions of individual liberty and equality over embodied, fraternal feeling: What makes Whitman the central figure in our literature affirming the democratic faith is that he does full justice, as no one else does, to all three elements in the classic French articulation of that faith. Liberty and equality can remain 144 m erve e mre intellectual abstractions if they are not permeated with the warmth of fraternity […]. Whitman knew, through the heartiness of his temperament, as Emerson did not, that the deepest freedom does not come from isolation. It comes instead through taking part in the common life, mingling in its hopes and failures, and helping to reach a more adequate realization of its aims, not for one alone, but for the community. Something like this was what Whitman had in mind when he said that his ‘great word,’ the one that moved him most, was ‘solidarity.’ (90; italics mine) Just as Spiller’s “warm-hearted communicator” was responsible for transmuting formally sensitive criticism into social feeling, Whitman’s amorous address - “the heartiness of his temperament” - brings to life the chilly “intellectual abstractions” of democratic faith through the “warmth of fraternity.” Here the metaphor of the animated American body politic is literalized in the act of “mingling,” a term Matthiessen invoked time and again in American Renaissance (1941) to describe the conjoining of “flesh and spirit” essential to a thriving democracy. 5 Such adhesive love emerged as the aesthetic suture of American political community - the glue that bound American social institutions to an American canon that was in the process of being stitched together. Consider, for instance, how Matthiessen’s reading of Whitman in his role as a Fulbright scholar reframed, in turn, his reading of Moby-Dick, a novel which he claimed for the canon not because of Ishmael’s Emersonian self-reliance, as William Spanos and others have asserted in their readings of American Renaissance, but for how an embodied love united Moby-Dick’s minor and marginalized characters. 6 “More than ever before,” Matthiessen wrote, “I was moved by the scene where little Flask, the third mate, has mounted upon the shoulders of his harpooner, the massive Negro Daggoo, in order to see farther over the ocean’s surface. Melville reflects how ‘the bearer looked nobler than the rider.’ Such reflection on the lack of any superiority owing to a race’s whiteness is peculiarly moving today when so many of the possibilities for any real democracy, both at home and in our relations abroad, depend upon the continual reaffirmation of that self evident truth” (Heart 36). The “peculiarly moving” quality of the scene inheres in Matthiessen’s reading of bodies touching - “little Flask” mounted upon the shoulders of the “massive Daggoo” - and touch, in turn, enables a “real” democratic conjoining between distinct races, ethnicities, and nationalities. “Whitman helped me begin to trust the body,” Matthiessen confessed to his students and colleagues at the start of his keynote lecture at the Salzburg Seminar (23). This was more than just an idle confession. Matthiessen also elided his critical readings with his self-conduct as a teacher, amorously aestheticizing the contact between his body and his students’ bodies in the practice of reading. Like Melville’s motley crew of harpooners in Moby-Dick, merrily squeezing one another’s hands as they extract sperm from the entrails of 5 F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford UP, 1941) 524-6. 6 William Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 30-35. Fulbright Love 145 a dead whale, Matthiessen proffered the body as a superior medium for intimate, empathic, and non-semantic communication. “We had no language in common,” he wrote after teaching a seminar in Bratislava, “and though only a fraction of a conversation can filter through an interpreter, you can have the curious sense - since you have so much more time to study the other person’s eyes and mouth and gestures - that you are establishing a close relationship after all” (151). Here, only the close study of another’s eyes, mouth, and gestures - a study conducted while simultaneously reading and discussing American literary texts in two separate languages - can overcome the “sensual hardness” (7) that, according to Matthiessen, has precluded American “men of good will” from establishing “any real relationship” with “the people surrounding them” (8). But the communicative and communal powers of the body are hardly limited to the moments that risk being lost in translation. Once Matthiessen arrives in Prague, his narration of his teaching experiences linger on the embodied intimacies of reading. The Dean of Charles University’s Philosophy Faculty and concentration camp refuge, Jan Kozak, “has a face both sensitive and shrewd” that Matthiessen cannot help but fixate on it during his faculty orientation (Heart 93); and Kozak’s “slightness of frame” - his vulnerable exterior - is made all the more vulnerable by Matthiessen when he recounts how Kozak “kept his spirit alive” by piecing poems together “from the torn sheets of a book that the Nazis had sent to the camp as toilet paper” (109). When one of his students, upon reading Leaves of Grass, speaks passionately of the American doctrine of self-reliance, Matthiessen notes a “light […] strong on his face” as the illumination provided by his textual interpretation lights up his visage (111). Later, Matthiessen watches as his star pupil Jarka’s “big, seemingly tireless body” (114) pours over The Cambridge History of American Literature (1907-21); another student offers a “broad mouthed generous smile” (136) as he gazes at Matthiessen over a copy of Moby-Dick; and yet a third raises a pair of “sensitive friendly eyes” (159) to bond over a mutual act of literary interpretation. All of these scenes however pale before the climactic scene of transnational mingling, which takes place on October 4, 1947 on St. Francis Day - Matthiessen’s name day, he notes in his journal. After his students serenade him over and over again with the abolitionist song “John Brown’s Body,” “four of them grabbed my shoulders and feet, tossed me in the air, and bounced me, gently, on the floor. After this all the men shook hands with me, I was kissed by the girls, and felt that I was really in” (98). As the pinnacle of Matthiessen’s pedagogy, it seems fitting that Matthiessen’s body - the body of the scholar here to rescue Eastern European civilization from the damage done to it by World War II - presents itself as the site of adhesion. Matthiessen finds himself grabbed, tossed, bounced, kissed, and fully embraced to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” a performance so distinctly embodied that it would seem anathema to critical discourse. And yet the relationality that 146 m erve e mre Matthiessen institutes through his own body and its non-semantic, intersubjective attunements is nothing if not a product of critical reflexivity, albeit a very different model of criticism than one we are accustomed to seeing today. That Whitman’s poetry of physical adhesion should inspire Matthiessen to attend to his own body and its non-semantic, intersubjective attunements makes a great deal of sense - after all, that’s precisely how Whitman once imagined communicating the “adhesiveness or love … making the races comrades, and fraternizing all” in Democratic Vistas. What requires some more creative critical maneuvering, however, is Matthiessen’s attempt to make the poetry of T.S. Eliot or the art-novels of Henry James amendable to the same affective reading practices, when such works seem to assert their autonomy from the preoccupations of social reality so adamantly. Matthiessen’s reading of first James, and later Eliot, strives to recast high modernism’s emphasis on aesthetic autonomy as a humanist discourse, a counterintuitive reframing of New Critical dogma that begins with Matthiessen’s lecture on The Portrait of a Lady at the Salzburg Seminar. In a reflexively emotive moment of critical address, Matthiessen divulges to his audience that James’s “peculiar poignancy had never been more affecting than when reading The Portrait of a Lady in a Europe so different from the undisturbed world of [James’s] prime”; a poignancy that inhered in “the release that James can give today” (45). According to Matthiessen, the temporal dimension of such poignancy - the cathartic distance between James’s “prime” and “today” - was what had “impelled several young American soldiers … to turn to [James] while they were in the army” (45). “They had felt a great need, during the unrelenting outwardness of those years,” Matthiessen speculated, “for [James’s] kind of inwardness, for his kind of order as a bulwark against disorder”; James’s writings had offered “not an escape” into the impersonality of the aesthetic, but a “renewed sense of dignity of the human spirit” through the beauty of a self-consciously crafted interiority (46). Reading Henry James in the trenches - it’s an uncanny wartime image, and one cannot help but wonder if Matthiessen is telling the truth, or if the anecdote sets up an especially canny strategy for justifying James’s place in this version of the American canon. The obvious counterpart to Matthiessen’s stylistic critique of Margaret Mitchell and her cohort of crude sensationalists, James’s attentiveness to style offers an affective and reparative antidote to the war’s devastation of the human spirit. Formal refinement stands as a “bulwark against disorder”; a battlefield metaphor deployed here as the last line of defense against the emotional and intersubjective violence perpetrated by a lack of attention to cultural distinction. What James’s aesthetic offers the Fulbright Scholar is not a rabbit hole into the autotelic bliss of the art-novel, but a “renewed sense of dignity” in the relation between one’s feeling self and the structures of social order. In a conference presentation entitled “Das Menschenbild der neuen amerikanischen Literatur” (“The Concept of the Human in New American Literature”) that he gave at the Austrian International College at Alpbach toward the end of his trip, Matthiessen claimed that Eliot could be read in much Fulbright Love 147 the same way - or at least, the later Eliot; the Eliot of “Four Quartets,” whose turn to a proto-confessional poetic mode towards the end of his life paralleled Matthiessen’s deliberate distancing of himself from New Criticism during his year spent in Eastern Europe universities. In his paper, Matthiessen read aloud to the students and colleagues gathered an excerpt from the climactic fourth movement of “Little Gidding,” Eliot’s final quartet and a poem of international pilgrimage, which he prefaced with the important historical detail that it was “written against the background of the air raids” (56): “The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love.” The “agonizing nature of love,” Matthiessen informed his rapt audience, had emerged for both him and Eliot from the war’s “fire of destruction” and the “fire of purification” that followed it; a purification not only thematized by Eliot, but also stylistically enacted by the regularly rhymed stanzas, which “double throughout” the poem the love they trumpet. The “essentially critical nature of American literature,” he proclaimed to his listeners at Alpbach, did not inhere in the mythical intricacies of “The Waste Land” - the cornerstone of New Criticism’s high modernist cosmopolitanism - but in Eliot’s blazing evocation of love in “Little Gidding.” Only doubling down on love, Matthiessen concluded, would clarify, or distill, the central tenet of American literature to the Austrians: an audience Matthiessen believed had been led astray by the crude fashionings of American reportage; an audience “whose Nazi government during the war made much use of Upton Sinclair to demonstrate to the corruption of American society” over its warm fraternity (57). As taught by Matthiessen, a critic determined to perform his own passionate declarations of feeling, Eliot’s formal purification of love in his later poetry gave readers access to the “sense of life that comes through expert expression” (58) - a sense of life offered by the Fulbright Scholar as an act of love. Matthiessen could thus use love to connect his (and Eliot’s and James’s) notions of craft to a political institution of literary-critical pedagogy. Today nothing seems more conventionally canonical than the authors or texts Matthiessen cobbled together on his Fulbright tour of Eastern Europe, using the criterion of love to restock USIS libraries with Melville and James’s novels, organize syllabi, and encourage American studies research programs among his students and contacts. But at the time, nothing seemed more unnatural to Matthiessen’s peers - even scholars similarly committed to promoting love between nations, like Spiller and Kazin - than the formally inchoate body of works he had chosen to unite and circulate under the banner of American literature. A perplexed Kazin tried to, but could not, make sense of Matthiessen’s syllabus and lectures in his journal. “I knew from Matty’s 148 m erve e mre book on Eliot and especially his grand work American Renaissance,” Kazin wrote, “how much he saw writing in terms of the artist’s ‘craft’ - a tradition linking James, Eliot, Hawthorne, really connected by the highly selective tradition rising out of poetry Eliot had founded, and which certainly did not apply to loose novels like Moby-Dick” (85). Love, as Matthiessen conceived of it - a state of connectivity that could unite literary themes and aesthetic forms with his embodied pedagogical practice - exceeded craft. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that love mobilized craft to help secure its particular configuration of affective energies - reciprocity, liveliness, social belonging. In turn, the legacy of making love that was so indelibly imprinted onto the Fulbright program and its early institution of American studies abroad would quickly assert itself as the central preoccupation of many generation of Fulbright scholars to come. Works Cited Berlant, Lauren. “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages.” Cultural Anthropology 26. 4 (2011): 683-691. Hardt, Michael. “For Love or Money.” Cultural Anthropology 26. 4 (2011): 676-682. Kazin, Alfred. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941. ---. From the Heart of Europe- New York: Oxford UP, 1948. Spanos, William. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Spiller, Robert. “American Studies Abroad: Culture and Foreign Policy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 366.1 (July 1966): 1-16.