SOURCE: “Henry James: The Master and the ‘Queer Affair’ of The ‘Pupil’,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3, Autumn, 1995, pp. 75-92.

In the following essay, Horne discusses Matthiessen's reading of James's “The Pupil.”

Queer Affairs

Perhaps I can best indicate some of the troubles I want to raise in this essay by quoting from a 1990 volume entitled Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. One of the editors, Michael Cadden, has an interesting meditation on the great, homosexual critic F. O. Matthiessen—‘Engendering F. O. M.: The Private Life of American Renaissance’—where in effect he laments the accuracy of that comma separating ‘great’ from ‘homosexual’. Matthiessen's homosexuality only fully emerged nearly three decades after his death with the publication of his love-letters to the painter Russell Cheney; his enormously influential critical writing is extremely discreet about private matters. Cadden quotes Matthiessen at the opening of American Renaissance...