The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered By Scandal - Barry Werth - Hardcover - 1 ED

SEPTEMBER 17, 1924 NORTHAMPTON It was near dusk when Arvin entered the narrow, ill-lit walk-up next to Lambie's dry goods store on Main Street. Though he was still new in town, a shy, frail twenty-four-year-old Smith instructor, he affected a jaunty contempt as he hastened past the second-floor doorway of Dr. John C. Allen, President Calvin Coolidge's dentist and closest friend. As Arvin knew, Coolidge had started his political career as Northampton's mayor, and his homestead was a wood-frame duplex a few blocks from Arvin's six-dollar-a-week room in a boarding house. Anyone with an atom of love for Dear Old Hamp proudly supported Coolidge's re-election effort. Not Arvin. Like most members of his famously Lost Generation, he reviled Cool Cal and small towns. In August, he'd offered to lead the local campaign for seventy-four-year-old "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Coolidge's third-party opponent. Now, in the lingering heat, he continued upstairs to the International Order of Hibernians' hall to preside over the opening of Northampton's La Follette Boom Club. Privately, Arvin leaned toward Bolshevism and dismissed La Follette as a relic of the trust-busting, pro-farm spirit that had exhausted itself before the Great War. Arvin's generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, had emerged from that war to "find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." His peers were busy thronging to the profane cities, disdaining Great Causes, and baying after pleasure and art. Yet Arvin relished the subversiveness of becoming, as he would boast in his next Harvard Class Report, "president of the La Follette Club in the President's hometown." Haunted by wanting other men, doubting his ability ever to fit in, he embraced the role of political outcast. He could champion progress but not his real self. He took the podium and, with surprising vehemenceglee, evenflayed the two major political parties. The Democrats, he said in a high-toned, punctilious Midwestern voicea voice the critic Alfred Kazin would call "larger than the man"stood for "sectionalism, bossism, and watchful wobbling." He reserved harsher words for Coolidge and the Republicans, whom he called "incurably identified with economic privilege of the darkest kind." As a radical with no local rootsand no desire for anyArvin ably proved his impertinence. But as a political organizer trying to enlist a conservative, nostalgic citizenry, his instincts wereand would beless keen. Paddle fans beat indolently overhead as seventy-five men and women fanned themselves in the hard wooden folding chairs. With his slight build, Arvin was scarcely the picture of a rabble-rouser. He had a gentle, inviting face, pale as milk. His gray-green eyes glinted anxiously behind gold wire-rim spectacles, his prim lips hid several teeth in need of removal, and, receding above a domish, lightly pocked forehead, his soft brown hair, already thinning, lay flat. Only his clothesa sturdy three-piece suit, soft-collared shirt, and silk tieannounced greater temerity than would have been expected of the mild young clerk who inhabited them. He raised his voice and his rhetoric. Only through the independent candidacy of La Follette, he told the crowd, could the left "lay the basis for a Progressive Party with a kick in it, and put the fear of God in the hearts of the politicians." Afterward, as he returned home, Arvin was reminded how much the darkened town belonged to Coolidge and the past, not to him. Directly across Main Street, past the trolley tracks and overhead wires, stood the pinnacled, rock-faced county courthouse, the fifth on the site, where Coolidge had begun his law career. Just to its left rose the stolid beaux arts fa'ade of the Northampton Institution for SavingWerth, Barry is the author of 'The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered By Scandal - Barry Werth - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780385494687 and ISBN 0385494688.