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Title: The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
ISBN: 0385494696
Author:
Barry Werth
Publicate Date: 2002-03-05
Publish: 2002-03-05
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.00
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.53
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.17
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1: A Shameful Bit of History
I picked this book up after reading Arvin's classic bio of Herman Melville (which is itself worth checking out). Werth's treatment of the tale is reminiscent of the genre of non fiction I like to call "The Expanded New Yorker Article". That's fine, I love the New Yorker, but the weakness endemic to the genre is the feeling that 150 pages would suffice (and you're reading a three hundred page book). Regardless, I read the whole book and don't regret it.
Werth's treatment of Arvin's tortured feelings about his own homosexuality are sad. Arvin's own betrayal of his friends and lovers at the hands of the authorities is pathetic. The fact that the "Homosexual Scandal of Smith College" (of which Arvin was the primary figure) dates to 1960 is astonishing.
It's impossible not to have sympathy for the man, but the bottom line is that he snitched on his comrades(i.e. he named names and testified for the prosecution in a co-defendant's appeal), and that taints his legacy.
I would imagine this would mostly appeal to young academics (and would be academics). That probabaly explains why there are 13 reviews of this book on Amazon!
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2: To be an intellectual in America
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.
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3: Engrossing true story of professor embroiled in sex scandal
Read THE SCARLET PROFESSOR, an engrossing true story
about a college professor embroiled in a sex scandal . . . Newtown Arvin published groundbreaking literary studies in his 37 years at Smith College, and he cultivated friendships with the likes of Lillian Helman and Truman Capote . . . a social radical and closeted homosexual, he somehow survived McCarthyism.But in September of 1960, his apartment was raided and his
collection of erotica was confiscated . . . it was then that his troubles began . . . he was brought to trial, and in doing
so, he also named names of other so-called pornographers. I found this part of the book particularly fascinating, in that
it helped give me a better feel for America's moral fanaticism
during that time period . . . even if you're not a fan of
biographies, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised
if you give this one a chance. There were many memorable passages; among them:
The following day he [Newton] wrote to her again:
"I realize how good I ought (and must) be to you in
order to make you happy and keep you by me. I wish
that I could be a god and a saint and a knight and a
good companion for your sake." If Arvin was to fail as
a husband, it would not be for want of trying. [from his journal] Reading of student papers, bluebooks,
etc. a form of torture, though inescapable at best. What
gives the extra turn of the screw is, of course, the
debased English in which most of them are written.
Reading them is a matter of rubbing an iron file over
one's teeth, or holding urine in one's mouth, or having the
racket of a bulldozer in one's ear for an hour or two on
end. Physical tiredness inevitably ensues. The sudden seizure of his secret history completed the
shattering of Arvin's world. When he saw police returning
with the slender volumes, opening them, flipping through
their limited pages--beginning to decipher the penciled
hieroglyphics that unlocked his innermost life--it was as if
there was nothing left of him to take or preserve. He was
in utter panic, shaking his face fallen.
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4: Talk about filling a wrong place in time....
Barry Werth's "The Scarlet Professor" is a rather dry but thorough account of Newton Arvin's self-destructive collision with the stultifying socio-political reality of post-WW II America. As a communist homosexual, his well-deserved place as a respected national scholar and critic was a train wreck waiting to occur in that era of various mass hysterias. The J. Edgar Hoover/McCarthy era, in fact, becomes the more fascinating part of this decades-long drama; we are along with cadres of feds'n'cops as they coordinate and close in on the laughably Mitty-esque "ringleaders" in the series of "smut" busts. How simple things were when the nation was so self-righteous that police squads fanned out across the land to root out stacks of gay pics and mags in people's private homes. The most lasting and valuable upshot of all this high-sounding puffery was the Mapps v. Ohio ruling that disallowed use of any evidence seized in the warrantless busts these over-zealous Christian soldiers performed.America's puritanical silliness aside, the book relates Arvin's personal failings, self-loathing, doubts, and travails as being the focal catalyst of much of what has become conventional wisdom regarding Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Longfellow. Of each, Arvin was able to discern a specific experiential and/or psychosexual linkage with himself; it is this synthesis that acts as Arvin's Rosetta stone in deciphering the deeper deconstructions of his authors` lives and works. I'll leave the more esoteric literary arguments to others. Read this as a historical document of an era rapidly fading from America's contemporary memory - so long as you don't take stone bosom-covering AG Ashcroft too seriously. He would have fit right in during those strangely paranoid fifties.
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5: The Literary World Re-visited
This book was given to me as a gift so I felt an urge to read it right away. It was a B+. It's about the literary life of Newton Arvin who was shattered by a scandal in 1960. I was born in 1959 so it was interesting to me to read of what was going on at the time. It ventures into the closeted homosexual literary elite. This book gave me other book ideas that I really want to read like: The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, Letters & Leadership by Van Wyck Brooks, Roderick Hudson by Henry James, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson, Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote, and other books that were actually written by Newton Arvin. This book is a great book for any aspiring writer and/or a lover of literature. A few lines that captured me in the book that will give you a flavor for it are:
It seems our worst fears are always more than justified.
I shan't advise you. If I were you I would follow my impulse or interest, and get to work.
He recoiled from loving and from being loved, which, taken away, left little worth living for.
He felt more trapped in Northampton...which, if nothing else, had made small-town life easier to bear by fostering certain illusions: stability, permanence, and a sense of home.
He craved solitude, a place of his own as a tranquil and sacred abbey.
'You know how much I love you'...'It is a luxury only to allow oneself to SAY it from time to time.'
...if I ever really began a 'letter' to you it could have no imaginable end--or even beginning--for it would just have to circle for ever and ever, like a great wheel, about the one central fact...
Like most of us aging and lonely people, what he wants is it get away from HIMSELF & unfortunately you take yourself wherever you go!
In short, there are sunny days, and there is memory, and--hardest of all--there is choice.
...the deepest betrayals usually came not from one's enemies but from one's friends and associates.
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