Arvin’s Melville, Martin’s Arvin

Back in the Day

Twenty years ago, when I was finishing my dissertation, I asked Robert K. Martin if he had ever considered editing a collection of gay American writing. “It already exists,” he responded. “It’s called The Norton Anthology of American Literature.”

Back in the day, as they say, we were acutely sensitive to such ironies: for Robert’s implication was that gay literary criticism was not, or not primarily, a matter of recourse to the archives. For unlike the contemporary projects that brought to light the traditions, or countercanons, of writing by women and by African Americans, the days and years and decades and century-plus of gay writing in the United States produced the canon tout court. The challenge, and it was not inconsiderable, was to return something fundamental from the realm of the repressed, to look awry at a subject that had been shrouded in mystification, and to speak plainly — for success, contra Dickinson, did not in circuit lie. Rather, lies in circuit lie. In retrospect, success accrued at the points where the urgency of the project coincided with Robert’s familiar ease — inculcated through his Quaker education, the sincerity of his politics, and the range of his reading — with a plain style, a manner of exposition that clarifies without simplifying. And it was to this business of clarification, then, that Robert dedicated his own days and months and decades — from The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry and Hero, Captain, and Stranger, and through more than sixty essays — elucidating the plain and direct fact of homosexual presence, all the while refusing to entertain the fashion of regarding “presence” as a New Critical or historicist illusion.

Meanwhile, more theoretically inclined critics built on and enriched the potential of Robert’s work — most notably, of course, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose intricate mapping of homosocial dynamics, particularly the damaging effects of homosexual panic, explained in ecumenical fashion the stake that patriarchal culture has in not knowing what it knows. In broad terms, Sedgwick consolidated the “anti-homophobic” project by demonstrating the long reach of homo-social desire and its toxic corollary, homosexual panic.¹ It is clear, though, that the antihomophobic is not the same thing as the gay, and it would be a mistake to assume that the former has replaced, superseded, or rendered obsolete the latter. Their difference is not reducible, or not entirely reducible, to their respective emphases on the Derridean trace versus the manifest, connotation versus denotation, deconstruction versus historiography and cultural studies. Gay criticism, as practiced by Robert K. Martin, dwells more solidly in possibility — in particular, the emancipatory possibility of the literary itself, the “literary” as act and substance. It does not engage with occlusion. It is more commited to the work — or rather, to the work of the work — than to the text. It is largely self-reliant, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sense of the term; consequently, in locating a transhistorical impulse in American literature, it positions the “gay subject” squarely within the historical elaboration of the democratic project. In what follows, I want to take up — to clarify and to revalue — this matter of “the literary itself” and historical place in gay studies.

The Shock of the Old

In 2004, when Parkinson’s disease had already reduced the circumference of his world in unrelenting and inexplicable ways, Robert K. Martin published an astonishing essay: “Newton Arvin: Literary Critic and Lewd Person.”² In one very limited sense, it was a belated work, for the facts of the “Newton Arvin case” had already been set forth in Barry Werth’s 2001 book, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal.³ Werth’s is a trade book — one is tempted to say, a rough trade book — but putting aside its sensationalizing title, inspired perhaps by the Kitty Kelly tell-all, it does a credible job of recounting what the closeted life was like in the 1940s and 1950s, and the events and aftermath of Arvin’s arrest and prosecution in 1960 for the possession of what passed, back in the day, for “homosexual pornography.” Werth...