Faithful are the wounds

M. Sarton

This novel tells of Edward Cavan, a dedicated professor's suicide amid the political pressures of the McCarthy era. In real this is a fictionalizing of the life and suicide of the critic F. O. Matthiessen. Here, in what could be called a case of "compound closeting," a closeted lesbian writer "re-closets" an already camouflaged gay man by making no reference to Matthiessen's homosexuality and to the role that the death of his lover Russell Cheney played in his suicide, proposing instead that Matthiessen's stresses were all professional and political (the accepted public explanation at the time of his death in 1950).