"What I Have To Do"

Had he been of different temperament, Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen of Harvard University might well have rested content with his fame as a scholar. He was a bookish bachelor of mild manner and quiet voice, whose name had become one of the best known in the faculty. To his students, he was "Matthie," always ready to receive them in his book-lined study, always prepared to help them if he could. To scholars, he was the brilliant authority on Henry and William James, and the author of a penetrating book on the times of Melville and Hawthorne, American Renaissance.

But Professor Matthiessen was also an idealist in his own way, a man of deep concern about matters not touched directly by letters. Though painfully shy, he once accepted the presidency of the Teachers Union at Harvard, championed the rights of teachers whenever he thought them abused. Though never a Communist, he found himself in sympathy with many of the works of the U.S.S.R. and the Communist Party. Of Russia he wrote (From the Heart of Europe, 1948): "It knows what it wants, and brutalized as much of its practice may have been, it still points toward a goal that gives the dispossessed their only hope." He joined Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, lent his name and prestige to other Communist-front organizations. He was a sponsor of the Communist-inspired Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, spoke up for the eleven Communist leaders convicted in Judge Harold Medina's court. For a while his name made headlines. But recently, on leave from Harvard, he had been silent, busy with a new book on Theodore Dreiser.

One afternoon last week, Professor Matthiessen made his way downtown and engaged a room on the twelfth floor of the Manger, a commercial hotel next door to Boston's North Station. That evening he went out to dinner at the Beacon Hill home of his old friend, Professor Kenneth B. Murdock. Though their talk was mostly of books and poetry, Matthie seemed unusually depressed. About 11:30 he said goodbye. Shortly afterward he got to his room in the downtown hotel, spread out a note to whom it might concern. "I have taken this room in order to do what I have to do," it said. "How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind, I do not know. But as a Christian and a Socialist, believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions."

Then, within a few minutes after entering his room, Francis Otto Matthiessen, 48, took off his spectacles, stepped to the window, climbed over the sill and dropped to his death.

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