Authors: Gerald Clarke
Although they talked constantly, Newton, a man of the pen, also felt compelled to put his tender feelings on paper. “But you know, dearest T.C.,” he said in one note, “that if I ever really began a ‘letter’ to you it could have no imaginable end—or even beginning—for it would just have to circle forever and ever, like a great wheel, about the one central fact, and you know what that fact is, and there are either millions of ways of telling it or only one way. I love you dearly, and if you wish, I will write that over and over again until this page is filled up, and many more pages, like a bad boy kept in after school, whose teacher (in some perverse way) wishes to make him happy instead of wretched. Only I’m not a bad boy, and neither are you; we are very good indeed, and we shall be better and better as time wears on—for we are at the source of good, and we are drinking the water of truth, and what we are making between us is purely beautiful. Is it possible to be better than that?”
Newton had not read any of Truman’s stories—to answer the question Howard had asked in his letter of June 2—but he quickly did his homework at Yaddo and left him a note of praise, touchingly worded and elegantly phrased: “I have read three of your stories, dearest T.C., ‘A Tree of Night,’ ‘Miriam,’ and ‘Jug of Silver.’ They are very lovely and frightening and pure and tender, and they have given me a strange, beautiful experience. I respect you so much for having written them. They will gleam out in my mind from time to time for many days, and indeed much longer, like something seen suddenly and magically by snowfall or in some watery light: I have not found the right way of saying how real and yet how fantastically poetic they seem to me. A famous man once said (quotes) that there is no true beauty but has some mark of strangeness on it, and he was very right, and all good writers have always known it:
you
know it too, dear Truman, and no one can take the knowledge from you. It will deepen and enrich and amplify itself with every day you live, and there
need
be no end to what you can express for all of us of what it is to be human and afraid and in love and intensely happy. So many things! It’s all before you, and
you
won’t make the mistake of not boarding the train that is drawing out to your destination.
“It would not be possible, it seems to me, for me to cherish you more tenderly, with more of myself, than I already do, but if it were possible, the reading of your stories would have that effect. Where did you come from, Truman? and how did I find myself moving toward the point where you were? It’s the agency of some beneficent geniuses, I can only imagine.”
Newton had only one worry while he was imbibing the water of truth, and that was that in falling in love with Truman he had injured Howard. “As for T.C. I can hardly broach that subject in this letter,” he nervously wrote Howard on June 17, beginning several days of what was to be a flurry of charming, richly brocaded letters between them. “My head is still whirling with quite a different kind of vertigo from that I complained of to you, and I am too deeply moved to talk about it easily. The important thing for the moment is that this should not in some clumsy way be made still another source of anxiety and confusion to
you.
”
Whatever he felt, Howard could scarcely have answered more graciously than he did two days later: “You dope—how can you think for a moment that a
rapprochement
(to use a very feeble word for what I surmise to be the circumstances) between you and T.C. would cause me the least iota of anxiety or confusion—would be the source to me of any emotion but the warmest delight? I have never in my life known in anyone, man, woman, or child, such delicacy and purity of feeling as is the native
habitus
of T.C.’s psyche, nor can I think of anyone on the wide earth except you, my dear, more capable of responding to these feelings as they should be responded to or with a more abundant store of wisdom and experience to enrich and deepen them. God’s benison on you both.”
Thus assured, Newton felt emboldened to describe the heavenly rapture he was experiencing inside what he called a magic ring. “You are very understanding and imaginative, as I secretly knew you would be about T.C. and me,” he answered, with obvious relief. “I only dislike so intensely the thought of giving you a moment’s pain that I ran out ahead of the unreal danger as if that would avert it! Now that I both intuit and ‘know’ how unreal it is, nothing is left—absolutely nothing, as it seems to me—to jar or discolor the unbelievable perfectness of this experience. I am hopelessly contradictory about it: at one moment I feel that I must tell everyone within hearing distance how preternaturally happy I am, and why; at another moment, I feel that I cannot and will not say one word about it to any mortal soul,
even you.
And for the time perhaps this latter is the wiser impulse.”
To which Howard replied on June 21 with more extravagant words and a bouquet of seventeenth-century poetry: “I can’t tell you, my dear, how glad I am all this has come about. It seems to me a miracle. Don’t you feel that every minute of your life is justified, all the scrupulous ‘cultivation’ of one’s sensibilities and perceptions, the keeping in trim of one’s psyche, the discipline of spirit that sometimes seems so hard until it is triumphantly vindicated by what it can bring to moments like these? And the false trails you have been up, the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t see what was good for them—and now the miracle of time that has brought forth T.C. Really, it gives me the
frisson
of an historic moment—a new marriage of Faustus and Helena.
“Do you remember a poem of Marvell’s called ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’? The title snapped into my mind one night when we were walking by the tennis court and T.C. with that incomparable elegance and grace of movement which is sometimes his ran to the violet bed there and sitting down cross-legged began to plait violets into the buttonholes of his shirt. I couldn’t find the poem at Yaddo and just looked it up. It has some charming lines:
Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born?…
Meantime, whilst every verdant thing
Itself does at thy beauty charm,
Reform the errors of the spring;
Make that—the tulips may have share
Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;
And roses of their thorns disarm;
But most procure
That violets may a longer age endure.
But O, young beauty of the woods,
Whom Nature courts with fruit and flowers,
Gather the flowers, but spare the buds,
Lest Flora, angry at thy crime
To kill her infants in their prime,
Do quickly make the example yours;
And ere we see
Nip in the blossom, all our hopes and thee.
Returning to Yaddo July 8, Howard was able to give his benediction in person. He looked like “a million dollars,” Newton wrote his friend Granville Hicks. But the next day Howard’s million dollars had shrunk to a few lackluster pennies, and he took to his bed. Whether it was actually seeing the two lovers together that did him in or some other emotional upset it is impossible to say; but it seems likely that despite all his generous remarks to Newton, he was more troubled by their liaison than he himself knew. How, indeed, could he not have been? “Howard was endlessly bemused by the affair between Newton and Truman,” said Brinnin, “and perhaps a little hurt.” On close inspection, even some of his gushing words of blessing reveal his ambivalent emotions. “A new marriage of Faustus and Helena” Howard had labeled their romance, ostensibly implying, in a high-flown literary way, that Truman’s youth would rub off on Newton and make him feel young too. But Newton, whose life had been spent probing beneath the surface of words, must have been a little jarred at hearing himself compared to Faustus and Truman to Helena: Helena, according to the legend, was one of the devil’s gifts to Faustus; in return, Faustus gave his soul.
Howard did not really recover until Truman left on July 17 for his
Harper’s Bazaar
assignment in New Orleans. “Much of the day spent with Howard,” Newton wrote in his diary on July 18, “early in the morning at his studio, lunch there, and then the evening here in my studio. Much converse about little T.C. naturally.” They had much to discuss. Newton’s honeymoon with little T.C. was over, but his romance had just begun, and they already had arranged to meet in August at Newton’s home in Massachusetts.
Truman’s departure had changed the atmosphere at Yaddo, and Howard and Newton were not the only ones to notice it: the catalyst for so much of the evening’s amusement had disappeared, life was duller, and those who remained behind had to search out their own fun. It was as if autumn had arrived two months early, and the leaves had prematurely turned to a melancholy gold. “Suddenly the tower room was empty, the cabals of the breakfast table dispersed,” said Brinnin. “Adrift, those of us left at Yaddo began to look for partners at Ping-Pong, Chinese checkers, croquet. Relieved of the nightly jostle for position, old friends met in an atmosphere of affectionate contempt. Truman was everywhere. To speak of him would have certified his absence. No one did.”
W
AS
Newton an important critic? Truman had asked Brinnin. An important critic like Edmund Wilson? Brinnin, who taught at Vassar College and was supposed to know about such things, answered yes on both counts—and he was right. Newton was not nearly so well known as Wilson, and he did not have Wilson’s enormous range, but in his own field, American literature of the nineteenth century, he ranked at the top of the list. He wrote biographies of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville, the last of which won the National Book Award in 1951. His judgment was shrewd and sound, and he probably knew more about the Golden Age of American letters than any critic other than his old friend and mentor, Van Wyck Brooks.
He was immensely, almost impossibly learned in other literatures too—he read French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and a little Greek—and one of the distinguishing marks of his criticism was his ability to place American literature in a broad historical perspective. Alfred Kazin, also a critic of considerable reputation, appraised his Melville biography as “the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville I have ever seen,” and wisdom and balance, rather than advocacy or innovation, characterized most of Newton’s writing. If he was passionate about anything, it was good writing; bad writing, he said, is a kind of immorality. His own style, as can be seen in his letters to Howard and Truman, is both lively and precise. Wilson himself praised him for his “charm of style,” adding that “among the writers who have really devoted their lives to the study of our literature, I can think of only two who can themselves be called first-rate writers: Van Wyck Brooks and Newton Arvin.”
When he said Newton had devoted his life to a study of “our literature,” Wilson meant it in the conventional career sense; but Newton really had devoted his life to literature—so much so, indeed, that it can almost be said that he had no life outside of books. Born in Valparaiso, Indiana, in 1900, he found the world most congenial on the printed page: his father, a successful businessman, spent most of his time in Chicago or Indianapolis; on those rare weekends when he returned home, he fought with his wife and made fun of Newton for being a sissy, which, by ordinary standards, he was. “Misbegotten”—which is to say contemptible—is the label Newton later applied to his younger self. He escaped East to Harvard, but once again buried himself in books, giving not a moment, as he regretfully recalled, to anything that might be considered fun. He was, in his own eyes and probably everybody else’s as well, a grind, a drudge. Although he graduated summa cum laude, his father, implacable still, refused to allow Newton’s admiring mother to attend the graduation ceremonies.
After Harvard, he went to Smith, where he remained, except for a few brief excursions into the wider world, for the rest of his life. One of the Seven Sisters, the female equivalent in those days of the male Ivy League, Smith was one of the few places in which a man like Newton could have existed. Located in Northampton, in the hills of western Massachusetts, several hours away from both Boston and New York, the college offered a feeling of isolation and protection, which in Newton’s mind were almost synonymous. He rarely left, and even weekend trips to New York would often be cut short as he raced, in a seeming panic, for the first available train from Grand Central. “He was a fearful, timorous man,” said Daniel Aaron, who was one of his best friends on the Smith faculty. “He really could not tear himself away from Northampton; that was a bastion of safety for him.”
Deeply ashamed of being homosexual, he made the mistake of marrying one of his students, Mary Garrison, in 1932. A large, vibrant, strikingly handsome blonde, she was his opposite in almost every way, blessed with what he called “high animal spirits.” She was outgoing where he was shy, vivacious where he was dispirited, resilient where he was depressed. Her temperament was, in fact, very much like Truman’s, and Newton was probably drawn to both for much the same reason—they gave him contact with life. Wanting to be honest with her, yet embarrassed to come right out and say he was homosexual, he tried to tell her by showing her a poem by another homosexual, Walt Whitman, which he thought would explain everything.
Primeval my love for the woman I love,
O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you!
Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,
The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
I ascend—I float in the regions of your love, O man,
O sharer of my roving life.
Did she understand it? he asked anxiously, in what must have been a moment of high intellectual comedy. She said she did, and he was so relieved that he inquired no further. Her interpretation of those extremely ambiguous lines was, in fact, as different from his as his may have been from Whitman’s. She thought the poet was talking about a conflict between a man and a woman and that Newton, in his oblique and indirect fashion, was warning her that their marriage might be difficult. His real message escaped her, and the result of such confusion was eight years of misery for both of them: Newton’s bride, unlike Howard’s, did not know then or for several years thereafter that her husband was homosexual.