February
1, 2002
Barry
Werth, Author of The Scarlet Professor, to Speak February 7 at
Mount Holyoke
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Barry
Werth
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"There are stories
that reveal the inner lives of their time and place, and I think
this is one of them," says Northampton writer Barry Werth.
The story Werth alludes to is that of distinguished literary critic
Newton Arvin and his unwilling role in the Smith College homosexual
scandal of 1960. In Werth's book, The Scarlet Professor: Newton
Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Doubleday, 2001),
the author chronicles the fall from grace of Arvin, an unproclaimed
homosexual. Werth finds dramatic irony in the fact that Arvin,
in his landmark 1929 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, "discovered
a connection between secrecy and guilt, and," continues Werth,
"Arvin had his own secret." Like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter, Newton Arvin was, as Werth sees it, "punished
for his secrets." Werth will discuss The Scarlet Professor
Thursday, February 7, at 4 pm in Mary Woolley Hall's New York
Room. The Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership
and the English department are cosponsoring the program.
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In the early 1960s,
Arvin (1900–1963), a professor of American literature at
Smith College for nearly four decades, was arrested for receiving
pornographic materials through the mail. Werth notes that the
materials were "beefcake" magazines, "the kind
of thing you'd see in a Calvin Klein ad today." Yet in these
years, America was gripped by the "Pink Scare," when
homosexuals were arrested without due process, exposed by the
press, and declared mentally ill or disloyal. "This was six
or seven years after McCarthyism ran out of gas," says Werth.
It took place during the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign,
he continues, "a dramatic moment in the history of American
civil rights."
It was September 2,
1960, when three state troopers, a town police officer, and a
United States postal inspector pounded on the door of Arvin's
Northampton apartment. Arvin admitted the men, who began searching
his apartment. As Werth tells it, "Arvin was ashen. He could
hear doors banging shut, gruff shouts, booming footsteps, snickering
murmurs—and sickening silences in between. It was in the
closet that Jagodowski [one of the state troopers] found his journals.
The twenty six-by-nine-inch clothbound daily diaries going back
to 1940 were stacked neatly atop a built-in three-drawer bureau
with brass pulls. Jagodowski hadn't been seeking them and had
no inkling of their value, but added them to the cache, on the
chance they might be useful. […] The sudden seizure of his
secret history completed the shattering of Arvin's world."
Under interrogation—confused
and plagued by guilt—Arvin "named names," identifying
several men to whom he had shown the pictures. Two of the men
Arvin implicated, Joel Dorius and Edward Spofford, were untenured
members of the Smith College faculty. While Arvin was retired
quietly on half pay, Spofford and Dorius were less able to weather
the ensuing furor. Despite protest from Smith's faculty, Spofford
and Dorius were fired by the Smith College Board of Trustees in
1961.
Werth first learned
about Newton Arvin when he read Gerald Clarke's biography of Truman
Capote, in which Werth discovered that the author of In Cold
Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's "was Arvin's
first great lover. They fell in love and were deeply attached
to one another in the late '40s," says Werth. "Arvin
had a tremendous influence on Capote as well as Carson McCullers.
He cultivated young talent and was especially perceptive of the
Southern Gothic style. He was one of the pioneers of American
studies. There was no one to speak of [in this field] before [Arvin]
started writing in the ‘20s about Hawthorne, Melville, and
others. He was very respected and admired by other great critics
of the day." Arvin's biography of Herman Melville won the
National Book Award in 1951.
Werth's exposé
of the case has brought renewed attention to Smith College's treatment
of Spofford and Dorius. (Arvin died in 1963, but Spofford and
Dorius are alive.) Recent articles in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
have reported on Werth's efforts to get Smith to apologize to
the former professors—"to look back and redress what
I consider to be a real injustice—and in some way compensate
them for their suffering," he says. Spofford and Dorius were
fired by Smith before the courts had a chance to exonerate them.
They were eventually acquitted on appeal. But it was too late
to prevent their academic careers from being capsized. Smith College's
board of trustees says its members "are sympathetic to the
concerns" behind the request for reparations to Spofford
and Dorius, and that it is working on a suitable response. Additional
information and an opportunity to comment on the case are provided
at http://saqonline.tortus.com/aarticle.epl?articleid=453.
Barry Werth is the
author of Damages: One Family's Struggles in the World of Medicine
(1998) and The Billion Dollar Molecule: The Quest for the Perfect
Drug (1995). He recently wrapped up his January Term course,
Covering the Campus.
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