Newton Arvin

Frederic Newton Arvin (August 23, 1900 – March 21, 1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors.

After teaching at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for 38 years, he was forced into retirement in 1960 after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the possession of pictures of semi-nude males that the law deemed pornographic.In 2006, ''The New York Times'' described the objectionable materials as "'beefcake' magazines and pictures of men — illegal pornography then, but much of it like today's Calvin Klein underwear ads."
• McFadden, ''The New York Times'', February 20, 2006.

Arvin was also one of the first lovers of the author Truman Capote.

Life and career

Frederic Newton Arvin was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, and never used his first name. He studied English literature at Harvard, graduating ''summa cum laude'' in 1921. His writing career began when Van Wyck Brooks, the Harvard teacher he most admired, invited him to write for ''The Freeman'' while he was still an undergraduate. After a short period teaching at the high school level, Arvin joined the English faculty at Smith College and, though he never earned a doctorate, won a tenured position. One of his students was Sylvia Plath, the poet and novelist.

He taught at Smith College for 38 years and was Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English during the year before his retirement in 1961. He rarely left Northampton for long, nor did he travel far. He visited Europe only once, in the summer of 1929 or 1930. He spent a year's leave of absence in the mid-1920s as the editor of ''Living Age'', a weekly compendium of articles from British and American periodicals.

Arvin often wrote about political issues and took public political positions. For example, in 1936, on the day when Harvard celebrated its 300th anniversary, he joined a group of 28 Harvard graduates in an attack on retired Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell for his role years earlier on an advisory Committee to Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller that found that Sacco and Vanzetti had received a fair trial. Among his co-signors were editor Malcolm Cowley and author John Dos Passos.

His first book-length publication, ''Hawthorne'', appeared in 1929. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1935 provided him a respite from teaching during which time he completed a biography of Walt Whitman.

In 1939 he became a trustee of Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was also a frequent writer-in-residence. There in the summer of 1946 he met and began a two-year affair with the young Truman Capote. Newton addressed him as "Precious Spooky" in amorous letters that went on to discuss literary matters. In 1948 Capote dedicated his novel ''Other Voices, Other Rooms'' to Arvin, and he later described how much he learned from Arvin saying: "Newton was my Harvard".

Arvin came to national attention with the publication in 1950 of ''Herman Melville'', a critical biography of the novelist. It won the second annual National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1951."National Book Awards – 1951"
National Book Foundation, accessed March 19, 2012

Alfred Kazin thought it

the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville I have seen. It is marked not only by a thoroughly convincing analysis of his creative power and its limitations, but, what is most sharply felt in the book, a wonderfully right feeling for the burning human values involved at every point in Melville's struggle with his own nature... . He is concerned with the man's evolution in a way that leaves an extraordinary impression of concentrated sympathetic awareness.

He particularly valued how Arvin's integration of the details of Melville's biography–his Calvinist background, the mental breakdown of the father he so loved, his mother's transformation by his father's failure and early death–exposes Melville's "grandeur and weakness."''The New York Times''
Alfred Kazin, "The Burning Human Values in Melville," May 7, 1950
accessed January 7, 2010

Arvin was elected a member of the National institute of Arts and Letters in 1952. Edmund Wilson wrote that of all critics of American literature only Arvin and his teacher Van Wyck Brooks "can themselves be called first-rate writers."''The New York Review of Books'': Benjamin DeMott, "The Sad Tale of Newton Arvin", November 29, 2001

Though Arvin's ''Whitman'' reflected some of his leftist sympathies in the 1930s, he responded to the Cold War with renewed cultural patriotism. In a 1952 essay titled "Our Country and Our Culture", in ''Partisan Review,'' he wrote:

Scandal

In 1960, the office of the United States Postmaster General (then Arthur Ellsworth Summerfield) initiated a campaign against the distribution and possession of homoerotic materials then deemed obscene. At the same time, local officials in Northampton were engaged in an anti-homosexual crusade. (See Lavender scare.) On September 2, officers of the Massachusetts State Police arrested Arvin on pornography-related charges. The police charged Arvin with "being a lewd person" and charged both him and a Smith faculty colleague, Edward Spofford, with "possession of obscene photographs." Police said Arvin led them to Spofford and that both implicated other male faculty members. Arvin, they said, admitted "displaying the photographs at his apartment and swapping them with others." Further reports specified that the pictures were of males, later revealed as issues of '' Grecian Guild Pictorial'' and ''Trim: Young America's Favorite Physique Publication'', containing pictures of semi-nude men.''The New York Times''
Charles McGrath, "Shadows of Yaddo," October 23, 2008
accessed January 5, 2010For the finding of the General Counsel's Office of the Post Office Department with respect to these publications, see United States Postal Service

, accessed January 6, 2010

Arvin eventually pleaded guilty, paid fines of $1200, and was given a one-year suspended sentence and placed on probation.

Smith College suspended Arvin from teaching, but kept him on half salary until retirement age. Yaddo removed him from its board, but soon offered him a fellowship, though he never visited the colony again. Not long after his arrest, Arvin spent some time in Northampton State Hospital, to which he was admitted for suicidal depression.Caleb Crain

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