The Scarlet Professor:
Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
By Barry Werth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 325 pages, $26
In the final moments of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Stanley Kowalski rips an ornate paper lantern off a light bulb, turning its harsh glow on the broken figure of Blanche Dubois. After all the humiliation Stanley heaped upon Blanche earlier in the play, enough to reduce her to madness, this act inflicts the final indignity. As Tennessee Williams wrote of Blanche in his stage directions, “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.”
What shatters Blanche is not brutality alone but brutality in the service of bitter truth. Bowling, belching, playing poker with the boys, Stanley indeed affronts everything rarefied in Blanche. But he knows, too, that her precious veneer covers unruly appetites, appetites briefly sated by one-night stands with traveling salesmen. The bare light bulb, then, destroys Blanche by assaulting her with reality.
That scene from “Streetcar,” with all of its multiple meanings, came powerfully to mind as I read “The Scarlet Professor,” Barry Werth’s exceptional biography of Newton Arvin, the eminent literary critic caught in a homosexuality scandal in 1960. Like the fictional Blanche, Arvin struggled to reconcile the refined tastes he embodied for the public as a donnish Smith College professor and the sexual desires that animated his private life. His own Stanley Kowalski arrived in the form of four Massachusetts state police officers who raided his apartment near the Smith campus in Northampton one late-summer afternoon and seized the muscle magazines, pornographic movies and personal journals that revealed the gay life Arvin had led furtively, often ashamedly, over nearly a half-century.
“For Arvin, it was hellish, all of it,” Werth writes. “He had always known that something like this could happen, yet as four of the men penetrated his rooms . . . he was paralyzed, beyond fear. . . . He had retreated to the far margin of life, and still they had found him out. He felt helpless, a mollusk without its shell.”
Werth narrates the raid in the opening pages of “The Scarlet Professor,” and the book could have succeeded well enough by holding to its apparent course: the tale of a sensitive aesthete battered by an insensitive world. Werth, however, goes wider and deeper, for Arvin was much more than the sum of his degradations.
The sex scandal forms only part of an expansive and fascinating biography of Arvin. His life takes Werth through the Popular Front radicalism catalyzed by the Great Depression (in which Arvin was a fellow traveler) and the development of a body of American intellectuals devoted to the national literature (in which Arvin figured prominently). Werth deftly uses Arvin’s acclaimed studies of Whitman, Melville, Longfellow and Hawthorne to limn the critic’s own character, and this book’s title of course harks back to the classic novel of an adulterer’s discovery and punishment, “The Scarlet Letter.” As Arvin wrote in his biography of Hawthorne:
” ‘Crime itself, no matter how monstrous, seemed to him less insidious than concealment. . . . The essential sin . . . lies in whatever shuts up the spirit in a dungeon where he is alone.’ “
Werth conveys Arvin’s own concealment and its psychic price with piercing accuracy. As a child in a provincial Indiana town, the frail, lonely Newton could hardly fathom the sexual message his mind and body were sending. As a bachelor professor in his 30s, he strove to deny it with an awkward, short-lived marriage to a former student. As the middle-age lover and mentor of Truman Capote in the late 1940s, he shrank in fright from the young novelist’s uncloseted existence. Werth writes at one point in a chilling bit of presentiment:
“On a night in late November, [Capote] took Arvin to Harlem for an annual drag dance at the Celebrity Club, a mostly gay dance hall, where, in the midst of parading queens, they were caught in what they thought was a police raid. Though the officers were only checking for fire-code violations, Arvin groaned, ‘My reputation, my reputation,’ and went to hide, terrified, in a phone booth.”
Even before his arrest, Arvin had paid terribly for his hidden life, sinking into alcoholism and depression for extended spells, being committed willingly and unwillingly to mental hospitals. It speaks volumes about the discomfort of being a gay man in the years before Stonewall that Arvin actually found comfort and respite as a psychiatric patient. So when the state police burst into his apartment in 1960, mounting one local skirmish in the national war against “smut,” the arrest threatened to drive Arvin to either insanity or suicide.
Arvin was forced out by Smith, retired on half-salary after a 37-year career. He was dropped as a member of the Yaddo writers’ colony after a 33-year association. A man of the left who well understood the principle of not informing, Arvin named the names of several gay colleagues on the college faculty, imperiling their futures and debasing himself.
And yet Arvin refused to play out Blanche Dubois’ destiny. For all his seeming fragility he survived the scandal, and in the wake of his public disgrace he clung to his work, completing an accomplished biography of Longfellow shortly before dying of cancer in 1963. “What was clear to others, if not to Arvin himself,” Werth says at an earlier point in the book, “was that underneath his weak exterior he possessed a steely resolve. In spite of himself, he had learned to survive his worst fears, and to suffer alone while none but his closest friends knew how close he was to the edge.”
There is no better epilogue for Arvin than the description of him that Werth quotes from the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks: ” ‘A quiet man with a violent mind, . . . who would gladly have stood against a wall and faced a fusillade for his convictions.’ “
Or perhaps I am wrong. The greatest epilogue may be Werth’s own book. “The Scarlet Professor” manifests precisely the traits that Arvin’s literary biographies did: acute insight, deep compassion and an utter respect for language. I cannot recall a book of non-fiction in the decade since Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “The Last Fine Time” that has demonstrated such mastery of the craft, sentence by meticulously wrought sentence. Nothing in Werth’s two earlier books, “The Billion-Dollar Molecule” and “Damages,” anticipated the leap he has made here.
“A literary biographer,” Werth writes of Arvin, “must share an essential bond with his subject.” Werth himself has more than met the standard in “The Scarlet Professor.”
