The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin -- A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal

Rating:
Summary: The Story of a First Class Rat
Review: "The Scarlet Professor" is the story of a rat. A man who betrayed his closest friends and thereby destroyed their careers and changed the course of their lives. Prof. Newton Arvin, when charged with the possession of homoerotic pictures and magazines, "sang like a canary," as they used to say in ganster movies. This puzzled many of his closest friends, veterans of the McCarthy era who managed NOT to name names during the Communist witchhunts of the '50s. And Arvin had many famous friends. One lover was Truman Capote, who was less than half his age. But the flaw in "The Scarlet Professor" might be that Newton comes across as a rat on every page. He was a whining hypochondriac; he was not attractive physically (at least in photos); he was not magnetic in conversation. So what lure did he have? Barry Werth does not address this. "The Scarlet Letter" is a wonderful book to read right now as a reminder of how poorly pre-1960 America treated homosexuals, communists and the mentally ill. It is also a good argument against those who would broaden police searches and seizures. It presents a nice snapshot of life in a women's college as it used to be lived.

Rating:
Summary: At long last, the whole story is told
Review: For years ths 1960 scandal involving Smith College faculty and others has been whispered and gossiped about, rarely accurately. Finally, Barry Werth has taken the time and trouble to put all the pieces together, the ruthless behavior of corrupt police, the virtual "reign of terror" the incident engendered, the utter devastation wrought upon the lives and careers of several teachers, most notably the distinguished American literary scholar and critic Newton Arvin. Werth is a skilled researcher, a fine narrator, and above all an honorable and just writer. He makes no judgments, leaving the reader to make his own. It is hard to believe, in this relatively liberated day, that the merest suggestion, the slightest hint of homosexuality, was sufficient to destroy lives, careers, reputations. Even honorable academic institutions like Smith College did not behave admirably in this woeful tale of a monumental miscarriage of justice. Above all, set in the context of his biography, the whole incident ruined the life of a brilliant scholar, teacher, and critic whose fragility rendered him incapable of coping with the barbarism of a biased and inept judicial system. I was there and lived through it: it is, alas, all too true. This is an important book and ought to be on the MUST READ list of every American interested in the preservation of civil liberties.

Rating:
Summary: To be an intellectual in America
Review: Newton Arvin was a distinguished literary critic, scholar, and college professor whose influence on the early days of American literary studies is still felt today. In 1960, as the age of McCarthy's witch-hunt mentality drew to a close, Arvin and his friends were targets of a police raid, where relatively mild homoerotic materials were seized. The men were arrested and accused of having a "smut ring", leading to their felony convictions, as well as the loss of their jobs and the shame of being revealed as homosexual in 1960. Werth's biography is not only about Arvin's personal and literary life, but is also about America at this time, the puritanical crusades it supported, but which proved their own undoing. Werth's writing is a bit dull during the first half, but as it progresses, and Werth explores Arvin's life in relation to his friends (including his once-lover Truman Capote) and to the world, it becomes a fascinating story of a man who fell from grace, but who didn't let it destroy him. Not only is this a compelling sliver of gay history, but it also showcases the lives of intellectuals in a country where intelligence is progessively devalued.

Rating:
Summary: A Sad, Lonely, Productive, and Fascinating Life
Review: Newton Arvin, a professor at Smith College for Women, could have fallen from grace during the McCarthy years, because he had a pinko history. He could have been ostracized because of his divorce in 1940. But he avoided scandal from his divorce and his politics, only to fall hard to it in 1960, when he was arrested for possessing pornography. Arvin still has a fine reputation among students of literary history because of a series of biographies of nineteenth century American writers, but now is otherwise obscure. His story is told in _The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal_ (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday) by Barry Werth. This is a biography that seamlessly weaves together Arvin's literary interests and the hidden parts of his life, producing a memorable picture of a loner trying to make his own way in a hostile land. It is also a fine summary of an episode of regrettable American repression.

Arvin grew up in Valparaiso, a backwater of Indiana, and knew he was different from other boys. He went on to Harvard, and then to teaching literature at Smith. What he loved was reading and working earnestly on critical biographies of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Longfellow. Werth's book shows how in successive examination of these giants, Arvin was also examining himself, coming to a better understanding of his own quiet secret life. Arvin didn't really get an understanding of his own homosexuality until he was in his forties. Of course he kept the secret from most others, but revealing it to himself initially overwhelmed him with shame. The panic and depression he felt over it would color his frequent psychiatric hospitalizations all through his life; he would go through rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. He eventually allowed this part of his personality to express itself in cruising, in the New York Bath scene, and in taking lovers such as Truman Capote. What brought Arvin down was a postal campaign against "pornographic filth in the family mailbox." The idea seems quaint and stupid now, although we fret over the same issues on the Internet, but the Massachusetts police became adept at making porno arrests as a political favor for politicians who wanted to look good in the papers. The self-righteous police arrested Arvin in 1960 for simply possessing homosexual pornography, and his world collapsed. It didn't matter, of course, that in a few years, owning pornography would no longer be a crime (and some of the examples of the items for which Arvin was arrested, illustrated in the book, look positively wholesome). He was an intellectual asset to Smith, which treated him compassionately, and his many friends found ways to support him, but to the end of his life, he remained a solitary, brilliant man who cultivated loneliness.

He found redemption again in writing, and worked on his memoir, which was never published, but which Werth has been able to study, along with the diaries. Worth's research has enabled him to write thoroughly and dispassionately about this unhappy, gifted man and what was at the time the expected treatment of homosexuals and porn fiends. This is not a gay-rights polemic, but a thorough and fascinating examination of a unique life and time.

Rating:
Summary: Important historical document of forgotten event
Review: September 2, 1960 isn't exactly a day which will live in infamy. It is however, the day on which Professor Newton Arvin, award winning biographer of Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman, became the most prominent victim of Eisenhower's "pink scare" and the key player in the Smith College homosexual sex scandal. "The Scarlett Professor" is an exhaustive biography of one of the nation's most influential, albeit mostly forgotten, literary critics. A mentor of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote, Arvin taught the classics at Smith for 36 years. Then, caught in a sting spearheaded by the postmaster general, Arvin plead guilty to possession of "pornographic" materials and implicated a number of his associates. Plagued by depression throughout his adult life, Arvin was forced to resign his teaching post and spent his final years in and out of pyschiatric facilities. Barry Werth has adroitly rendered, not only the world of Newton Arvin, but a tragic and, until now, egregiously overlooked episode in our nation's history. An important and impressive book.