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

In this provocative and unsettling look at the consequences of America's puritanical "need to punish," Barry Werth explores the tragic story of one of America's great literary minds whose life and career were shattered by the "Pink Scare." Newton Arvin (1900-1963) was one of America's most esteemed literary critics, admired by Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman, and mentor to Truman Capote. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and in 1951, won the National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville.As a scholar and writer, Arvin focused on the secret, psychological drives of such American masters as Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and identified the witch-hunt mentality that lies deep in the American psyche. Born and raised in the constrained society of Protestant Indiana, Arvin was a social radical and an unproclaimed homosexual. He came through the Red Scare relatively unscathed, but when the national antismut campaign followed, his apartment in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was a distinguished professor at Smith College, was searched and relatively mild homoerotic materials were confiscated. He was arrested for possession of pornography, accused in the press of being a leader of a "smut ring," and forced to choose between friendship and survival. After naming several men, he despaired at his own guilt and confusion, and banished himself to the state mental institution overlooking the Smith campus. From there public shame and the fear of his associates began to unravel his connections with the esteemed institutions that had been the cornerstones of his life. InThe Scarlet Professor,Barry Werth probes into the virulence with which even the most marginal "sins" are pursued in the fever of America's recurring puritanical crusades. His insights into the tangle of political and moralistic fanaticism underlying America's social landscape provide a forthright and compelling perspective on the dangers of a society where the possibility of a "private life" no longer exists. ButThe Scarlet Professoris not just a political parable. It also a story of redemption.

Barry Werth brought the story of Newton Arvin and the "Smith College Homosexual Scandal of 1960" to national attention for the first time in almost forty years in <i>The New Yorker. </i>Werth is the author of <b>The Billion-Dollar Molecule </b>and <b>Damages</b>. In addition to <i>The New Yorker</i>, his articles have appeared in the<i> New York Times Magazine, GQ, </i>and <i>Outside.</i> He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1924 NORTHAMPTON

It was near dusk when Arvin entered the narrow, ill-lit walk-up next to Lambie's dry goods store on Main Street. Though he was still new in town, a shy, frail twenty-four-year-old Smith instructor, he affected a jaunty contempt as he hastened past the second-floor doorway of Dr. John C. Allen, President Calvin Coolidge's dentist and closest friend. As Arvin knew, Coolidge had started his political career as Northampton's mayor, and his homestead was a wood-frame duplex a few blocks from Arvin's six-dollar-a-week room in a boarding house. Anyone with an atom of love for Dear Old Hamp proudly supported Coolidge's re-election effort. Not Arvin. Like most members of his famously Lost Generation, he reviled Cool Cal and small towns. In August, he'd offered to lead the local campaign for seventy-four-year-old "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Coolidge's third-party opponent. Now, in the lingering heat, he continued upstairs to the International Order of Hibernians' hall to preside over the opening of Northampton's La Follette Boom Club.

Privately, Arvin leaned toward Bolshevism and dismissed La Follette as a relic of the trust-busting, pro-farm spirit that had exhausted itself before the Great War. Arvin's generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, had emerged from that war to "find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." His peers were busy thronging to the profane cities, disdaining Great Causes, and baying after pleasure and art. Yet Arvin relished the subversiveness of becoming, as he would boast in his next Harvard Class Report, "president of the La Follette Club in the President's hometown." Haunted by wanting other men, doubting his ability ever to fit in, he embraced the role of political outcast. He could champion progress but not his real self.

He took the podium and, with surprising vehemence—glee, even—flayed the two major political parties. The Democrats, he said in a high-toned, punctilious Midwestern voice—a voice the critic Alfred Kazin would call "larger than the man"—stood for "sectionalism, bossism, and watchful wobbling." He reserved harsher words for Coolidge and the Republicans, whom he called "incurably identified with economic privilege of the darkest kind."

As a radical with no local roots—and no desire for any—Arvin ably proved his impertinence. But as a political organizer trying to enlist a conservative, nostalgic citizenry, his instincts were—and would be—less keen.

Paddle fans beat indolently overhead as seventy-five men and women fanned themselves in the hard wooden folding chairs. With his slight build, Arvin was scarcely the picture of a rabble-rouser. He had a gentle, inviting face, pale as milk. His gray-green eyes glinted anxiously behind gold wire-rim spectacles, his prim lips hid several teeth in need of removal, and, receding above a domish, lightly pocked forehead, his soft brown hair, already thinning, lay flat. Only his clothes—a sturdy three-piece suit, soft-collared shirt, and silk tie—announced greater temerity than would have been expected of the mild young clerk who inhabited them. He raised his voice and his rhetoric. Only through the independent candidacy of La Follette, he told the crowd, could the left "lay the basis for a Progressive Party with a kick in it, and put the fear of God in the hearts of the politicians."

Afterward, as he returned home, Arvin was reminded how much the darkened town belonged to Coolidge and the past, not to him. Directly across Main Street, past the trolley tracks and overhead wires, stood the pinnacled, rock-faced county courthouse, the fifth on the site, where Coolidge had begun his law career. Just to its left rose the stolid beaux arts fa?ade of the Northampton Institution for Savings, where, as a young man, Coolidge, who preached hard thrift and frugality, had served as vice-president. Beyond the bank soared the ninety-foot soot-blackened brownstone spire of the First Congregational Church, on the ground where, two centuries earlier, the fiery Protestant divine Jonathan Edwards had launched the apocalyptic frontier revival known as the Great Awakening, in which the mass fervor for combating Satan rose to such a pitch that Edwards's cousin slit his own throat in an anguished attempt to cleanse an impure conscience and appease an angry God.

Indeed, Northampton, a lovely if fading county seat and farm center of twenty thousand, cupped against the foothills of the Berkshires, could not have stood more proudly for the catchpenny puritanism that Coolidge promised to the country and that Arvin's generation reviled—what the Massachusetts-bred writer Robert Benchley called that "old time New England streak . . . that atavistic yearning for a bad time if a bad time is possible." To the right of the courthouse, across King Street, glittered the town's grand new vaudeville house, originally to be named the Mayflower but earlier in the year—with no intended irony for a town that, until seventy-five years earlier, banned stage plays because they fostered "immorality, impiety, and a contempt for religion"—renamed the Calvin.

And yet Arvin, who came from Valparaiso, Indiana, felt flushed with a sense of purpose, of belonging. He was intoxicated by the challenge of living in the enclosed, forbidding social world around him, something that as recently as a year ago he doubted he would be able to do. All he wanted was to be a literary critic. But even the most bookish scholar had to be a man of action, a citizen. In the new world, passivity was the gravest crime, and it was necessary for those who saw the truth about America to tell it, in word and deed.

Far from being discouraged by the weak turnout, Arvin relished his status as leader of the town's anti-Coolidge renegades. Not only had he got himself in the trenches; he was in back of enemy lines, pinned down by barrages, his position hopeless. A few days earlier he had written to his best boyhood friend, a young Chicago labor lawyer named David Lilienthal, about his decision to stump for La Follette: "I think it will possibly save me from the kindnesses of a lot of respectable (and very dull) people who rather enjoy a literary radical but gag at a political one." Now, the day after the rally, he wrote to Lilienthal again, boasting—and joking—about his newest success.

Coolidge, famously parsimonious, was known, even during Prohibition, to like bourbon, pouring shots for himself and visitors from a bottle he kept in the lower compartment of his washstand. There was a famous story about him, which Arvin must have known, that on the night in 1918 when he was elected governor of Massachusetts, a guest noticed an old friend sitting on the bed in Coolidge's dollar-and-a-half room in a boarding house—without a drink. "Bill's already had hisn," Coolidge had snapped at the visitor.

Writing to Lilienthal, Arvin reported; "The movement is promising well here in the seats of the sot." Whatever his intentions, they excluded staying in Northampton long enough to care whether its patriotic citizens disliked his lampooning their favorite son as a cheap drunkard.

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Excerpted from The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal by Barry Werth
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