A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our...
A poignant, distressing portrait of Arvin (1900–63), one of our premier literary critics, whose distinguished career as a professor and writer was destroyed by the revelation of his homosexuality.
Werth (Damages, 1998, etc.) employs his considerable reportorial and narrative skills to relate the sad case of Arvin, whose 37-year teaching career at Smith College and whose trenchant studies of Hawthorne and Herman Melville (among others) had earned him a peerless reputation in the groves of academe as well as in the larger literary world. The story begins on September 2, 1960, when the police arrive at Arvin’s door in Northampton, Mass., to arrest him for possession of pornography (a felony under Massachusetts law at the time). Faced with the very real possibility of a prison sentence, Arvin became an informer and gave police the names of others involved in what became known as the “Smith College Homosexual Scandal of 1960.” Werth then leaps back to 1924—the year Arvin arrived at Smith—and proceeds to outline his swift, astonishing ascent to the very pinnacle of his profession. Arvin’s friends—Van Wyck Brooks, Carson McCullers, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sylvia Plath—were a veritable Who’s Who of American literature. And the friendships weren’t entirely intellectual, either: One of Arvin’s lovers was Truman Capote, with whom he had a passionate two-year relationship and whose undying devotion supported him in his most trying times. Arvin had psychological problems throughout his life; he was institutionalized many times and in 1952 underwent a course of electroshock treatments. In the grim anti-gay decades of the mid-20th century, he had tried to live as a heterosexual (a marriage, a divorce) and as a closeted homosexual—decisions that shredded him psychologically. But when he could work, he worked spectacularly well (his study of Melville won a National Book Award). Werth devotes the final third of his book to the public humiliation of Arvin and some of his gay colleagues and ends with a brief update on the careers of the principals involved.
A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our national common sense.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49468-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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