Weathervane Newsletter Fall 2001

Book Review: Better Dead than Read

America's rehabilitation of Herman Melville in the 20th century along with the rediscovery of Nathaniel Hawthorne's haunted tales was largely due to literary critic, Newton Arvin. Admired by Edmond Wilson and Lillian Hellman, Arvin was one of America's most esteemed scholars. Ironically the very obsessions and dark passions Arvin saw as the underside of American culture proved to be at the root of his own undoing.

Arvin came to Northampton in the 1920s as a young Smith professor. In the Age of Coolidge, Arvin campaigned for Lafollette's Farmer-Labor Party in the 1924 election. But it was not his politics, nor his shy retiring nature that set him apart. After an excruciatingly painful marriage, Arvin entered the discrete underground inhabited by homosexuals in America. He was a mentor to Truman Capote who lived with Arvin in Northampton. "Newton was my Harvard", Capote later recalled.

Arvin was also a presence at the Yadoo Writers Conference. Carson McCullers was among his protégées. In 1951, he won the National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville. But the repressive atmosphere of the Cold War began to chill discourse and behavior, even in Northampton.

Though Arvin did not hide his left leaning views, a police raid on his apartment uncovered homoerotic "smut" - in fact, comparatively modest photos that would not make today's prime-time viewers blush. What followed was not a pretty picture. In a frantic attempt to save himself, Arvin "named names," implicating fellow Smith faculty members. In the end, several faculty were let go, and Arvin suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced into "retirement".

Barry Worth tells a good story, and was this not an isolated event, would remain just that. But the Arvin case takes it place among others in Northampton history: the Mary Parsons witchcraft trial and the tragic Daley and Halligan hanging being the most notorious. It is a story that Hawthorne would recognize as being right in the American grain.

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