How to Research and Write a Biography, with Scott Bane

SCOTT BANE’S JOURNALISM HAS appeared in Contrary Magazine, Into The Void, Christopher Street, The Huffington Post, and Poets & Writers. His essays are in The New England Journal of History, The Gay and Lesbian Review and Cleaver magazine. His new book is out, it’s A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. It’s just out, in fact, from Bright Leaf Books, an imprint of the University of Massachusetts Press. Listen in as we discuss how to research and write a biography.

Powered by RedCircle

Marion: Welcome, Scott.

Scott: Hello there, I’m happy to be here.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy to have you here. And let’s open our conversation with the topic of discovery and reaction. Writers react to things in their world. In fact, to succeed as artists, we must react. And you reacted one day in 2003, while thumbing through the newspaper you came upon a review of the book, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture,  by Douglass Shand-Tucci, a book about gay men at Harvard, highlighting the relationship between F. O. Matthiessen the scholar and Russell Cheney the painter. And my audience is writers, so let’s talk about this moment of a-ha. Did you look up from the newspaper and say to whoever was closest, “I want to write a book about these men,” or did you try to talk yourself out of it? Because writers talk themselves out of as many good ideas as they talk themselves into, I think. So talk to us about leaning into the appeal of the story of these men and their union.

Scott: Sure. Thank you so much. After reading the review, it led me to the library to look up Matthiessen’s book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. And opening the book in the author’s note, right at the beginning, it was place stamped Kittery, Maine, and my parents’ first house was in Kittery. Where we came home when I was a baby, where we came home to. And I was bowled over by that. I knew about Matthiessen and Cheney’s relationship from the review in The Times of The Crimson Letter. And suddenly it’s like, Oh my God, what does Kittery, Maine, have to do with this extraordinary relationship between these two men? And that really is what started me. I just started reading everything I could and one thing led to another.

Marion: That’s lovely. See, I just love this about reaction. What we react to, I think so many writers think, well, that’s not a valid connection, that my parents had a house in Kittery, Maine. It is the most valid of responses because you had an affinity. And Francis Otto Matthiessen is one of the foremost and most important literary scholars of the first half of the 20th century. He helped fix the recognition of such literary figures as T. S. Eliot and Henry James. And he’s the founder of American studies. So he’s been well covered in numerous articles and three books. And Cheney is an American painter whose work was shown in many venues.
But your differentiator in this book is your attention to how the union of these two anchored their endeavors, and allowed in Matthiessen’s case for his work to, as you write, push the cultural envelope from inside, rather than rip it open from the outside, in a time when we did not have the identity language of now. So you’ve just talked to us about how it was Kittery that brought you, that was the portal in. So where along the way did you start to formulate this idea that the union itself was what gave these two the strength in their endeavors?

Scott: Sure. It was really when, as I say, I started reading everything that Matthiessen had written, starting with American Renaissance. And then as you correctly pointed out the book about T. S. Eliott, the book about Henry James, and the book though that really cemented the idea of wanting to focus on their relationship was a book of their correspondence published in 1978, entitled Rat and the Devil, Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. “Rat” and “the Devil” were Cheney and Matthiessen’s nicknames, if that’s the right word to use, for their participation in the elite senior society at Yale, Skull and Bones. And reading these letters, they’re extraordinary how intimate and touching and honest they were. It was really eye opening. So that really made me want to focus on both of them and really to try and give Cheney his equal due as Matthiessen’s partner.

Marion: And you do, it’s lovely and absolutely equal. So we’ve all heard that Picasso quote, that “All art is subversive,” and it sure gets a lot of play these days on social media, perhaps to its detriment. I’m kind of tired of seeing it. But I have to admit that my eye is really drawn to the subversive repositioning of some people to their rightful place these days. I love that Emily Dickinson has a sex life in the Apple TV production of “Dickinson,” and that The New York Times runs long overdue obits of women who were otherwise ignored in their time. These are subversive experiences and that they upend what we think.
And in your book, you skillfully relate the union of these men as being supportive and life enhancing, as we hope any union can possibly be. And I don’t know if you were thinking about being subversive, but merely stating the fact of gay life in the early 20th century by laying down fact as plain fact of the supportive homosocial communities you portray, of the existence of a union such as this one, of the real matter of factness of this union on some level, feels, well, to me like part of that subversive reclamation, but you know, that’s me. So is it?

Scott: Hmm, I would say yes, it was. That one of the things that impressed me about when I started this project, a number of Matthiessen students were still alive, and I tracked them down and interviewed many of them, not all of them, but many of them, starting with Leo Marx who just died in November of last year. I’m not quite sure exactly when he died, but Leo Marx was still alive. And almost all of Matthiessen’s students to a T said, “We all knew he was gay, but we did not talk about it. That was not something you talked about in polite company.”
So it was interesting to me that both men and their relationship was accorded a certain degree of latitude. And as I say in the book, it was predicated on a very unique set of circumstances. For example, they did not depend on the local community in Kittery, Maine for their livelihoods. Both of them had come from wealthy families. So they were accorded this degree of freedom. But it was also interesting to me that they could not cross the line of a more public declaration of coming out. Several people said they thought Matthiessen had started to envision a different world where people could come out toward the end of his life, in the last few years of his life. But for much of their time together, they did not think in those terms. So it was fascinating to me to try and document that.

Marion: Yes. And you mentioned Kittery and I want to ask you about, well into your book, A Union Like Ours, The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, you describe a 1936 article from the Kittery Press about one of Cheney’s art exhibits that describes the men as partners. And you go on to remind us of the unthinkable status of gayness at that time, and what this word could only mean then. And I immediately flashed to your 2021 essay in Hippocampus under the headline, “A Union Like Ours,” in which you cover your own union with your now husband, David, and you include twin stories of your separate illnesses. It’s a really deft piece of work and I’ll put a link of it in the transcript. And it includes a moment when you’re critically ill and a doctor questions David’s relationship to you. And David, who is not yet your husband at this time, in this one scene steps out of his usual, mild mannered, bow tied, horn rimmed glass answer type of person, and he says to the doctor, “Partner.” And the doctor retorts, “We’ll say friend.” And David replies, “No, we’ll say partner.”
And then you have this beautiful line in which you say love in a terrifying situation gives people strength they might not know they had. So I can imagine that these stories, yours and David’s and Matthiessen’s and Cheney’s hold one another up in some way and are informed by one another, but I’m sure I’m missing most of how. So can you just speak to that for a moment, because there’s a beauty between those two stories.

Scott: Sure. I have no memory of that moment in the hospital when I was the subject of grand rounds. As I describe in the piece, I was suffering from anterograde amnesia. But David told me the story after I got out of the hospital and started to get better, which in itself was a long journey. And I could easily imagine what that scene was like. As I think I say in the book, in my later dealings with this doctor, he was a tough piece of work and he was abrupt. And as I also say in the book, as one of the foremost experts in epilepsy in the country, he had that freedom.
But what impresses me about that, and it has a great deal to do in my mind with David having been a reporter at the New York Times and very well acquainted with interviewing important and sometimes self important people, and being able to hold his own with those and not being cowed by that. And how important it was at that moment to claim that space for our relationship. This was before I was diagnosed, no one knew what was wrong, and I kept getting sicker, and we were dependent on that doctor. And it’s a hard thing to walk the line between wanting to stay in somebody’s good graces, but also not being cow-towed by their reactions.

Marion: Yes, absolutely. It’s a beautiful moment. And it’s very gracious of you to share it with us. It’s really intimate. And I found there was a lot of intimacy in your reporting of the book. You literally let us more than glimpse the meeting of Matthiessen and Cheney, the way Cheney tousles Matthiessen’s hair when parting after their first meeting allows us to feel like we’re there. So how would you describe the emotional control of the writer who engages in this kind of search? To do your work, you have got to believe that this is not an invasion of privacy, of course. I mean, there’s just a fundamental mindset in which you dig, right? But what is that, in fact, when we visit another life as a biographer, how would you characterize that? The permission and the going in and having a look. Because the result is an enormous, wonderful scene of intimacy, but I just always wonder what it’s like to dive into somebody else’s life like this.

Scott: Great question. And the foundation of it for this particular story is how incredibly well documented Matthiessen and Cheney’s lives are. Especially for the time when both were alive. As I believe I say early on in the manuscript, during their lifetimes they exchanged 3,100 letters. So there’s this very rich documentation to draw off of. And while I absolutely tried to shine a light on all aspects of their lives, including some of the more difficult ones, because both of them had their own health challenges, Matthiessen with probably some form of manic depression and Cheney with tuberculosis and in his later years alcoholism. To try and be honest, but also be respectful and show compassion. That to me was the most important thing, that nothing was off limits, but to be respectful and show compassion.

Marion: Yeah. And it’s beautiful. You hold that line marvelously. And I want to give another example of that. Staying with this idea of intimacy, you have a lovely paragraph deep in the book in which you state that Matthiessen had an unwillingness to be defined solely through the prism of his sexuality. And you do the same for them. You hold that line, giving us gems of real intimacy that have not one thing to do with sexuality when you take up the naming of their cats.
So to bring up T. S. Eliot again, “The naming of cats,” as he says, “is a difficult matter; it isn’t just one of your holiday games.” And you have in these pages, not only the special nicknames that men had for one another, but the nicknames of the cats and the fact that Cheney and Matthiessen developed a special language which built on their private language of nicknames to talk about their cats.
It’s a small detail. It has a huge effect on the reader as we feel fully the intimacy of this union, one that perhaps obliterates any biases we might have about who and how we love. For so many writers, the feeling when we write memoir fiction, biography, is the feeling that we’re drowning in detail, and we have to choose. We have to curate the best of the best. And this is a beautiful choice, really requiring a jeweler’s eye for detail. So talk about making that choice amid the 3,100 letters and all the other details from which you choose to illuminate for us this bond, how did you choose the cats?

Scott: Well, because the cats were so important to both of them. And in the playfulness of the names, as well as their private language, I don’t think Matthiessen and Cheney are the first, nor are they the last couple to have that. I think that probably is true for a lot of couples. It’s certainly true for David and me. There are all sorts of little special words, expressions that are markers of our relationship. So for example, one of them that comes to mind is egg salad for the word excellent. And David, again, being a great reporter, he wrote a Scott and David dictionary. It’s all of two pages long, but-

Marion: Oh, love it.

Scott: We have that, and it is a record of our relationship. And when I watched Matthiessen and Cheney doing the same thing, or David and me doing the same thing as Matthiessen and Cheney, depending on your perspective, I thought this is timeless. This is what some couples do. Not all of course. But it’s a marker of intimacy and shared experience.

Marion: It’s perfect. In our family, on the grocery list, you don’t write avocados, you write lawyers, because abogado-

Scott: Perfect.

Marion: Anyone looking at our shopping list would say, “They’re crazy. There’s oranges, milk, lawyers, whatever, wheat germ,” you know?

Scott: That’s perfect. That’s exactly it.

Marion: Yeah. That’s exactly what you got with that choice. And that’s what I’m trying to get at for the writers listening, that jeweler’s eye, that choosing, that curation is so important. And it’s not that we want everything. It’s we want the things that make the point about your argument.
There’s another great moment, there are many great moments in the book, and I enjoyed the book thoroughly, but along with the letters there are other artifacts you view in your reporting. And so there’s a photo of Matthiessen standing naked in the surf that you saw. And it has a dual role in the book. When you first read about it, the reader feels this almost inexpressible sense of freedom he was experiencing at the time. It’s very emotional. And it heightens your argument that he’s reaching pinnacles of his very self because of this union, that his love for Cheney heightened his appreciation of art, literature in the world more generally.
And later you refer to that photo again, illustrating that when he takes a teaching job at Harvard, he must relinquish that kind of freedom that the photo captured. And you write that the very self he had found, quote, “Could not be pushed back underground without the sense of he was being buried alive.” So biographers have to step forward and make such statements, clicking together for us the facts into story. So when you first saw that photo, did you know you were going to be able to use it twice that way? Did you just say, “Oh, cool photo. Oh, that’s good. Let’s see what comes of that.” Just talk a little bit about that evolution sometimes of the physical that we get offered when we’re researching somebody and not quite knowing or knowing from the beginning what you’re going to do with it.

Scott: Oh, sure. That’s a great question. And I love that photo. I’m pretty sure as I believe I say in the book that it took place at Seapoint Beach, which is a beach in Kittery. I went there when I was growing up, my mother didn’t like it. She felt it was too isolated, but we did go there sometimes. And just seeing that photo and seeing him with the big piece of seaweed draped around his neck and covering his genitals like a feather boa, I loved it. As I say, Kittery and being in Kittery with Cheney gave Matthiessen a chance to relax and let go and have fun and just all of that. And I would also say again, probably my own life served as a touchstone in this, that there have been times, as I think I say in the book, David and I go a lot to Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. And there have absolutely been times at the end of a day when we’ve gone swimming that we’ve been skinny dipping.
And skinny dipping with someone you love is a profoundly special… It’s like what it must have been like to have been in Eden, if you believe in that. It’s a primordial experience. And again, I thought this is why this was so important to Matthiessen. It allowed him to tap into those things. And they were so powerful that as I say later in the book that he couldn’t push that self down without the sense that he was being buried alive.
Again, he and Cheney were living in a more repressive era than we live now, but the era was changing. And I think it’s all the millions of individual decisions like that and experiences like Matthiessen and Cheney’s that lead to the place of like, no, I can’t just turn this off. This is who I am. And one’s personal life is separate from one’s professional life, but in the best of worlds there is some continuity between the two. And he was moving toward that.

Marion: I just love how generous you just were in that answer about skinny dipping. We have this sense of biographers, I think we have this sense of biographers, of reporters, deploying cool detachment from their work, but that’s not cool detachment. And in the best possible way, you just showed us how to understand what that photo meant. To know that draping the seaweed around your body, to know that skinny dipping with the one you love has a primal intimacy, to understand that means you recognized in that photo what he became in this relationship, because you were able to become it too.
And I think that lack of cool detachment, it’s so generous of you to bring that up, because I think there’s so many people listening to this for whom that will liberate them to some degree, to understand that you do bring your own sensibility into the room when you write, you bring your pathology, you bring your whole self. You’re not supposed to leave those responses home, quite the opposite. I don’t know that a different person would have the same response to that photo, but I love the one you had because I had it too. I got teary at the first description of it. So beautiful.

Scott: Thank you.

Marion: So I want to just talk for a minute about how to write into what we don’t know. You were not there. And while you have done exhaustive research and you obviously bring a beautiful palette of sensibilities to the responses you have to all of that research, you fully brought these men into our lives. But when confronted with the unknown, you walk right into it, in one passage asking directly about how Matthiessen and Cheney portrayed their relationship to a house guest at their home in Kittery, you actually propose it to us as a question.
And it’s the authority you have established as knowing their sensibilities that you use when you are able to write, answering your own question you say, quote, “They were most likely discrete and formal because that’s who Matthiessen and Cheney were as people.” So let’s talk about writing into the void and the authority you need to do so. When did that authority reveal itself to you? I mean, you’re an essayist, I’ve read your essays. You definitely have a beautiful voice and authority, but this takes real authority to just ask and answer and say, “I know now because I know a bit about them.” So did that come in pieces or did it come, that authority, how did that develop?

Scott: That’s a great question. And I would say it developed over time. Some of it was the product of being married to a New York Times reporter who read my early drafts.

Marion: God, that’ll do it.

Scott: And would say to me, “You don’t need to attribute this, you know this at this point, you can say this, just say it.” There was some of that on occasion. And in other instances, as you rightly point out, I did an exhaustive amount of research, largely about topics that were very interesting to me such as treatment of LGBTQ people pre-Stonewall, or the history of the organized labor movement. I mean, some of it was just basic research to start to learn about things so that I could make a more informed judgment when I could.

Marion: Mm-hmm. As we wrap this up, let’s talk about that, and there’s an awful lot of American history behind this tale. It is staged beautifully with great details about how we viewed others, each other, ourselves in the time. And then of course we’ve got The Depression and we’ve got the history of Yale and Harvard and we’ve got a lot here. So as we wrap this up, speak to us about how to choose what to use. As you just said, you read and read and read and read, but you ultimately as an author have to choose what to use and more to the point what to leave behind of the story of the rest of the world. So what are you basing that you stay in and you go out kind of selection process on as you’re building a book?

Scott: Great question. A lot of it was based on my own reading of Matthiessen and Cheney’s lives, that I would get to an event, so for example when Matthiessen was involved in covering a riot in Gallup, New Mexico, I would get to something and not really know what it was. And so some of it was my own curiosity. Or get to something that I knew vaguely what it was such as Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid, and wanting to fill that out.
There is a lot of research on the cutting room floor. I mean, sometimes I would write something and it would go on too long and it was a matter of cutting it back. Having much research condensed in a couple of sentences, that would be more dictated by the story, the pacing, but a lot of it started from my own curiosity and wanting to know more. And the big thing was that as I’ve said and have tried to correct the historical record, it has been repeated over and over and over again that Matthiessen testified before the House on American Activities Committee. And so I went and tried to find that testimony. And when I couldn’t find it, I discovered that he in fact never did testify. So trying to answer those questions for myself was really where it started. Then over time it was shaped by the overall story.

Marion: Well, we love your curiosity and I cannot wait to read what you write next. I’m deeply grateful for this book. We should all be deeply grateful for this book. Thank you, Scott. Thank you so much for coming along today and good luck with the book. It’s a beautiful read.

Scott: Thank you, Marion. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you this afternoon.

Marion: You’re most welcome. The writer is Scott Bane. His essays are available online. His new book is A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. Get it wherever books are available. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more in the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.