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

The Scarlet Professor--Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal * Barry Werth * Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday * $26

The biographer's tale

Newton Arvin was a leading literary figure--until a "pornography" charge destroyed his career

Crazy as it seems, there's more to gay rights than seeing ourselves represented in some sexy sitcom or nifty advertising campaign. Fundamentally, gay rights are about legislation: safeguarding our jobs, property, and First Amendment freedoms. And few books demonstrate the importance of gay legal protection more than The Scarlet Professor, a compassionate and compelling biography by Barry Werth.

Scrupulously researched and historically grounded, The Scarlet Professor recounts the sometimes sad, frequently sensational, but ultimately very human story of Newton Arvin, an award-winning literary critic who was also Truman Capote's mentor and onetime lover. Known among academics during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s as a critically acclaimed biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, Arvin gained particular notoriety in 1960, when undercover cops stormed into his Massachusetts home with a legally questionable warrant and arrested the 60-year-old scholar for possessing "pornography," consisting mostly of male muscle magazines. A victim of the recently revived Comstock Act, which impelled the U.S. Postal Service to seize any mail it suspected of transporting "obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy" material, the introverted Arvin suddenly found himself in jail, charged with trafficking in obscenity and compelled to name names of others similarly engaged. Forcibly "retired" from Smith College, where he taught for 37 years, Arvin watched overzealous police investigators arrest his gay friends and peers on charges including possession of pornography as well as sodomy and other "abominable and detestable crimes against nature." Through it all, Arvin continued to write until he died of cancer in 1963.

Set largely between the McCarthy era and the Stonewall rebellion, The Scarlet Professor dramatically captures that period's pernicious homophobia and the educated class's growing resistance to it. More than a cautionary tale of gays' tenuous place in a society without laws to protect them, the book is a riveting character study of a fiercely intelligent and insular man coming to terms with his sexuality. In and out of psychiatric hospitals (not unlike many brilliant people of his time), frequently suicidal, and incapable of forming a mutually loving relationship, Arvin is also portrayed as an unflappable survivor, intellectually honest, and identifiably complex. The Scarlet Professor vividly captures the troubled times and too quickly forgotten life of the quietly courageous Arvin, with all his foibles, fears, and achievements. And for that, Werth has written one of the most emotionally engaging and socially relevant books I've read in quite a while.

Barry Werth: A study in Scarlet 

Hoping gays and lesbians will want to read about an important period in their history, Barry Werth eagerly spoke to The Advocate about his fascinating new book, The Scarlet: Professor. From his new Northampton, Mass., office--Arvin's former apartment--he talked about being a straight man writing about gay sexuality, about pre-Stonewall America, and about the lessons learned from Arvin's tumultuous life.

As a straight married man, what drew you to this story about a troubled but brilliant gay man?

This is a story of someone whose private life was violated. With Arvin, it involved homosexuality, but that need not be the case. I think we all have secrets we don't want the world to know.

In writing the book, did you learn a lot about gay male sexuality?

I realized that desire isn't something any of us have a lot of control over. Culturally, there may be a great gulf between gay and straight men, but at a primal level, I don't think there is.

Arvin had a number of straight male friends who didn't know about his homosexuality. Does that surprise you?

It's really stunning to me how unspoken things were back then. Even today, we see what we want to see, and people can make great efforts to disguise who they are. Between these two dynamics, it's possible to know someone very well and not know them at all.

What do you think gay men and women today can learn from Arvin's ordeal?

This is a puritanical country at its core, and we have this need to persecute from time to time. Even though much has changed, it is something that has happened and still can happen. Arvin's life shows us that we are entitled to a private life and that it: must be defended.

Bahr writes for The New York Times and Us magazine.