Truman Capote’s First Love
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Hass on why Capote named his literary criticism award for Newton Arvin—the man he called “my Harvard.”
I couldn’t be more honored to have Robert Hass, whom my wife and I first met in 2009 over a wonderful dinner in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, as the author of the first TFP guest essay for 2025. As I wrote in the TFP introduction to that conversation, that evening was a joyous and healing experience for my wife and me. Hass was “charming, almost boyishly so, and more excited about my wife and her gifts as a chef and ceramicist than my questions.” Over the years, I maintained contact with him, writing to him and his lovely wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, sporadically. The next time I saw Hass was in 2018 when he’d come to the University of Iowa, where I was teaching journalism, to accept the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin for his brilliant essays in A Little Book on Form. Hass, to his credit, said next to nothing about the book and his own writing. Instead, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner spent the entire acceptance speech educating the audience about Newton Arvin, the distinguished literary critic and Capote’s former lover who was thrown out of Smith College in 1960 after he was arrested for possession of “obscene pictures” and “lewdness” and sent to a mental hospital for being a “homosexual.” Hass’s research was impressive, and he seemed to be on a mission to explain how far things had come in his own lifetime in regard to LGBTQ rights, and, perhaps, how far we still have to go. At any rate, I approached him before the award ceremony, not knowing if he’d recognize me. Surprisingly, he did. Smiling broadly, he offered me his hand, and said, “Michael, good to see you! How’s your wife?” Below, appearing in print for the first time, is an essay adapted from Hass’s moving address that day.
— MJ
Truman Capote’s First Love
By Robert Hass
When I received news in 2018 that a book of mine on poetics, A Little Book on Form, had received an award, I took notice of its full name: The Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism In Memory of Newton Arvin. And I assumed that there was a story there, and there is. Let me give you the short version.
Newton Arvin was born in Indiana, went to Harvard, and taught at Smith College in Massachusetts for four decades. He was a pioneering critic of American literature, a widely published and much-admired book reviewer, and he wrote biographical studies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Hawthorne (1929), Whitman (1938), Herman Melville (1950), and Longfellow (1963)—and over the years he wrote important essays on Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Henry Adams. In other words, he more or less acted out the history of the study of American literature as a discipline, which was only just coming into focus at Harvard when he was an undergraduate.
Arvin was gay. He was an emotionally fragile person who lived a quiet, scholarly life in a rural New England town, with two important exceptions. When he was in his 40s, he had an affair with Truman Capote, who was in his early 20s. And in 1960, shortly after his 60th birthday, he was arrested by the Massachusetts State Police for possession of pornography—mostly the era’s bodybuilding magazines with photographs of semi-nude young men. The arrest made headlines and the public shame nearly destroyed him. He was hospitalized, retired from Smith and was able to gather his forces and finish his last book, the Longfellow biography, before he died of pancreatic cancer in 1963 at the age of 62. Truman Capote died in 1984 and left funds for the establishment of the award in his will.
Here is a little longer version of the story. I am drawing on The Scarlet Professor, a biography of Arvin by a writer named Barry Werth. The title of his book seems to me not to be in particularly good taste. It exploits the scandalousness of what never should have been a scandal in the first place, though I understand that it was probably irresistible to try to encapsulate the public shaming in a New England town in the 20th century of a man who wrote a study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel about the public shaming of a woman, Hester Prynne, in a New England town in the 17th century. There is also an opera titled “The Scarlet Professor,” composed by Eric Sawyer, with a libretto by Harley Erdman, based on Werth’s book that blends Arvin’s story with Hester Prynne’s. It was performed at Amherst College in 2017 and a video of that performance can be seen online.
Newton Arvin was born in Valparaiso, Ind., in 1900. He was the youngest son among six children. His father, the vice president of a farm loan association, didn’t like his son and found him effeminate. He also disliked his son’s adolescent politics—he was an enthusiastic supporter of Robert La Follette whose Progressive Party was the form taken by Midwestern socialism in the age of Calvin Coolidge. Newton was a reader from childhood, went to Harvard at the age of 18 and graduated in 1921. He taught for one year at a boy’s school in Detroit and then took a job as a young professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where he taught for the next 37 years.
In this version of the story he lived the quiet life of a professor at an elite women’s college in a beautiful valley in western Massachusetts and when he was 46 years old at a writer’s retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he often spent summers, he met a 22-year-old writer from New York who had gotten some considerable attention from short stories he’d published in the era’s literary magazines. They fell instantly in love. Life for Newton Arvin suddenly and unexpectedly blossomed and Capote, who had lost his father and had a high school education, found a lover and mentor. “Newton,” he would say, “was my Harvard.” Their intimate relationship lasted for a couple of years during which Capote commuted on weekends to Northampton or Arvin to New York, and Capote worked on his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which he dedicated to Arvin. How the romantic relationship devolved into friendship isn’t clear. There are accounts of it in biographies of both Arvin and Capote, but my impression is that the habit of solitariness and secrecy—not uncommon to gay men in that era—went very deep in Arvin and so Capote’s openness and what would become his legendary flamboyance scared him. Arvin had tried in the 1930s marrying in order to live the age’s idea of a normal life and it hadn’t worked both because a heterosexual marriage didn’t answer to his desires or his wife’s and because he had a limited capacity for daily intimacy. He wanted to be reading and writing and left alone. Arvin and Capote remained friends and Arvin—increasingly fragile emotionally as he became an increasingly important and influential literary critic—went back to his quiet life until, in September 1960, a crusading Irish-Catholic attorney general for the state of Massachusetts launched a campaign to stamp out the use of the U.S. Mail to circulate pornographic materials. Three large Irish-Catholic cops from the Massachusetts State Police raided Arvin’s apartment, found the bodybuilding magazines, a few explicit homoerotic photographs, and Arvin’s journals in which the professor had recorded sexual encounters with some of his younger male colleagues.
The Boston newspapers announced that a smut ring had been uncovered at an elite, rural women’s college, that Arvin was the ringleader and that he had given police the names of other members of a sordid cabal that had shared pornographic materials and engaged in orgies. It was long alleged that Arvin, in his terror—he’d been living with fear of exposure of his homosexuality since he was 15 and it must have felt to him like a dark-winged nemesis descending on him at the end of his life—did, when the police asked him who else had seen the photos, name two of his younger colleagues at Smith. According to Barry Werth, when one of his colleagues asked him how he could have named names, he is said to have replied, “I couldn’t go through it alone.” More recently, however, Arvin’s nephew (his sister’s son), an attorney, reviewed the evidence and has argued that Arvin didn’t name his colleagues, and that the idea that he did was planted by the police to frighten further confessions out of the gay men they had under observation.
So it isn’t clear exactly what happened. But the upshot was that Arvin was hospitalized, tried and convicted, given a fine and a suspended sentence, and quietly retired from Smith on half salary, his shame deep, his life a shambles. Capote was holed up in a snowbound Swiss village finishing In Cold Blood during the trial and stayed in touch by letters that were sane and bracing. Arvin stayed sane, as he had always done, by working. He embarked on another biography of another 19th century American writer, Longfellow, a less taxing subject than his previous subjects, and a familiar turn. He finished the book and died of cancer in the winter of 1963 just as the book appeared. Truman Capote died in 1984 and left money for the award in Arvin’s memory. Leaving to us the question of what he intended to say with this gesture.
Here’s a slightly longer version of the story, beginning with Newton Arvin the critic. The important event for him at Harvard in 1917-21 was meeting Van Wyck Brooks who became his mentor and model. Brooks had graduated from Harvard in 1907 and had been hired to lecture on American literature. It’s worth remembering that the teaching of literature in the English language, especially very recent literature, was an innovation in the universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t know much about this subject, but I have the impression that until the mid-19th century it was assumed that a university education meant an education in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew to prepare young men for the ministry or the law or for medicine, the study of which was still thought to require some Latin. In the 19th century the methods of textual scholarship, especially the methods of German universities, were being applied to texts in those languages and were, as it were, transferred to establishing texts for Shakespeare’s plays and medieval and Anglo-Saxon poetry and this legitimated the teaching of literature in English—which had mainly been the provenance of secondary school teaching, at advanced levels.
Literary criticism as we understand it belonged to belles-lettres, like the essays of Matthew Arnold, and formed no one’s idea of how scholarship was conducted. But as the science curricula of universities began to change, so did curricula in the humanities, and in the U.S. one of the innovations, after a curriculum had been established for English literature, was the teaching of American literature. One of the earliest universities to offer such a course in the middle of the 1880s was the University of Iowa, which—not coincidentally—administers the annual literary-criticism award in Arvin’s name for the Capote estate. What that course looked like is a matter for further research. A turning point in this development was the publication of the Cambridge History of American Literature in four volumes from 1917-1921. That is, the apparatus for the study of American literature arrived at Harvard the same year that Newton Arvin did.
A couple of years earlier, in 1918, Brooks had published a book called Letters and Leadership, which called for a literary culture in the United States that would resist the mix of puritanism and commerce that dominated American life. It electrified the young Arvin and gave him a sense of direction. “Perhaps in a period like ours,” the earnest undergraduate wrote to a friend, “the man who does really first-rate criticism in the service of American letters will prove to be of more value in the long run than the men who content themselves with mediocre creative work. American art … needs someone to formulate ideals, to erect standards that shall be living and valid and not just dug out of the tombs of French and English literature, to study critically the American mind and American society and try to bring out the most valuable features in it.”
In retrospect, Arvin’s career exemplified the “first-rate criticism in the service of American letters” he had hoped to see. Hawthorne is a book of the 1920s, a part of the pioneering projects of asserting the aesthetic value of 19th century American writers and of beginning to think about what they tell us about American culture. Whitman is a book of the 1930s. Like most of the young critics born to the progressive era, Arvin’s thinking had been transformed by the Depression. His conversations with Brooks, Granville Hicks (Arvin’s closest colleague in the 1920s and 30s when Hicks had joined the Communist Party USA and edited the influential political and cultural journal New Masses), and famed critic, historian, and writer Malcolm Cowley had sharpened for him the question of what kind of politics to bring to the evaluation of a poet like Whitman. Melville: A Critical Biography was published in 1950 and received the National Book Award in criticism in 1951. In 1951 he also edited The Selected Letters of Henry Adams and in that decade continued to write essays on what he had helped to define as the classic American writers of the 19th century.
The invasion of his apartment and arrest came in 1960. Longfellow was published in 1963. Arvin died in March of that year of pancreatic cancer. At the time of his crisis in 1960, Capote, having moved to Spain to work on In Cold Blood, counseled Arvin, “Well, what’s happened has happened; and it has happened to many others—who, like Gielgud, took it in stride and did not let it be the end of the world.” (Seven years earlier, after being arrested for “persistently importuning male persons” on the streets of Chelsea, the English actor John Gielgud told a London courtroom, “I am sorry. I cannot imagine that I was so stupid.” Five days after his conviction, he received six curtain calls at the opening of a new play.)
Capote continued:
All of your friends are with you, of that you can be sure; and among them please do not count me least. Aside from my affection, which you already have, I will be glad to supply you with money should the need arise. This is a tough experience and must be met with toughness; a calm head, a good lawyer. This combination has won out over and over again for those similarly involved. I am certain it will all blow to sea; but meanwhile I am most awfully concerned for you.
Capote’s affection and sanity must have been a comfort to Arvin who was 60 years old at the time that his private life was invaded and he became a headline about public lewdness in staid New England. Other friends also gave him steadying support. The playwright Lillian Hellman, who famously refused to name names during the Hollywood Red hunt, wrote similarly from Martha’s Vineyard:
I would like to do anything I could, anything, and I hope you feel friendly enough towards me to tell me what I could do . . . Please don’t feel too bad. I know that sounds silly, but please don’t. There was a time when I thought the world had gone to pieces for me, but it didn’t, and it’s our duty to see that it doesn’t. Just you be sure that many, many people admire you and respect you.
Though it’s not clear whether Arvin had named names to the authorities, some of his colleagues believed that he had which must also have been difficult to bear. Whatever exactly happened, it is clear that his behavior—panic, breakdown—was not a profile in courage. From here, of course, the society that shamed him is the disgrace. And the world was beginning to change, to be changed by another generation of American writers. The California poet Robert Duncan, 20 years younger than Arvin, was drafted in 1942, told his draft board he was homosexual, and received a psychiatric discharge from the obligation to serve in the U.S. Army. Duncan had had several poems accepted by the The Kenyon Review, which was then one of the country’s leading literary quarterlies and edited by John Crowe Ransom. He had also had an essay accepted by Dwight MacDonald’s magazine Politics, “The Homosexual in Society,” making a case for the civil rights and civil liberties of homosexual men and women.
It was published in 1944—Duncan would have been 25—and John Crowe Ransom read it and returned Duncan’s poems. A decade later—1956—the young Allen Ginsberg, who had briefly been a student of Lionel Trilling at Columbia, published Howl and Other Poems, which contained the iconic line, “America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,” and which provoked the San Francisco district attorney to prosecute Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his City Lights Books for publishing it. The examples of the risk-taking young may or may not have been available to Newton Arvin, who pled guilty to the charges made against him by the State of Massachusetts, received a suspended sentence, retired at half-salary, and worked on his Longfellow biography.
After his trial and conviction, Capote wrote to him again:
Well, at least it’s over. If, as you say, you must resign from the college, I hope it is not without compensation—that would be most unfair; after all, in a few years you would have retired. And am I wrong in thinking you will receive other teaching offers? Being “on probation” doesn’t mean you have to stay in Northampton, does it? . . . If you need money, please say so; I have some, I really do, and it would not inconvenience me at all. Everything will sort itself out soon. Meanwhile know that I am thinking of you and love you very much.
Robert Hass is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner. His 2017 book A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry, was the recipient of the 2018 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. This essay was adapted from his acceptance speech for the award. Hass, an emeritus professor of English at UC Berkeley, is also a leading translator of poetry, most notably of Nobel Prize winner Czesław Milosz and Japanese haiku masters Basho, Buson, and Issa.
