The Sense of an Ending

Jay Grossman, in “The Sense of an Ending,” starts from Virginia Woolf’s insight: “There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation . . . because of some queer quality in them which makes them . . . our... [ view full abstract ]

Jay Grossman, in “The Sense of an Ending,” starts from Virginia Woolf’s insight: “There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation . . . because of some queer quality in them which makes them . . . our own.” Recounting the life story of F. O. Matthiessen—the literary scholar and political activist who leapt to his death from a window of Boston’s Hotel Manger—is first of all to confront questions of narratorial omniscience, since the biographer always-already knows something Matthiessen does not: until he opens the window, and perhaps not even then, Matthiessen does not know he will commit suicide. But what else does the narrator know that his subject doesn’t, or can’t? And what parts of this knowledge rightly figure in telling Matthiessen’s story? How do our own struggles within the academy for political relevance, for example--for the status and value of expertise and knowledge making--resonate against Professor Matthiessen’s own? Whose story am I telling when I set out to tell queer Matthiessen’s, who was born just ten years after Walt Whitman died, and whose partner was born into Emerson’s America? Troubling the unspoken relation between his and mine affords an opportunity for thinking biography’s status, both past and present.