Bringing The Scarlet Letter into The Scarlet Professor: A Composer's Reflections

Abstract

Opera thrives on the collision of duty— to country, to family, to vocation—with the anarchy of passion. Verdi's Don Carlo and his father King Philip fight over a woman as the kingdom of Spain hangs in the balance. Bizet's Don Jose is torn from his military duties by the enchantress Carmen. Though an unlikely operatic figure, Newton Arvin, too, was pulled between forces: a solitary dedication to the life of the mind and a secret within himself that was to explode publicly, leading him to betray his colleague and close friend Ned Spofford. What makes Arvin's story particularly fascinating material for opera is the presence of the same narrative on both sides of the equation: the story of The Scarlet Letter, for Arvin both an object of study and an eerily prescient chronicle of his own conflicts. Arvin wrote vividly and personally about the book in his literary debut Hawthorne, and when in 1960 a scandal over possession of physique magazines illegally received by mail came to engulf him, it is easy to see the shadow of Hawthorne's work not solely in his public humiliation but retrospectively in the years of secrecy and shame that led up to his exposure.When Harley Erdman and I decided in 2014 to adapt Barry Werth's biography of Arvin, The Scarlet Professor, into an opera, we perceived that the collision of Arvin's literary persona and his real-life conflict offered more than enough drama to sustain an operatic intensity. There were some complications, though. First, how would we bring to life onstage a man whose most important experiences took place inside of his mind, and in engagement with the written word? Could a literary critic really come to life as an operatic protagonist?Second, we were quite cognizant that in Newton Arvin and The Scarlet Professor's other characters, we were depicting figures alive until relatively recently, figures whom some in the audience would know personally. Opera does not generally have a high standard of fidelity to historical fact, let alone to completeness of biographical detail. In telling this story fifty-seven years from and in the place of its occurrence, though, we felt a duty to capture the essence of the people and events, even while accepting some stylizations necessary for opera. We wanted our Arvin to be recognizable to any former acquaintances as the Arvin they knew. The operatic Arvin is weighted nonetheless toward the events and writings connected to his scandal. There is an unavoidable distinction between the complete biographical and literary Arvin and the operatic Arvin.We found in the pages of Barry's book directions to what proved to be the point of entry to Arvin as an operatic character, tracing back from The Scarlet Professor through Arvin's biography of Hawthorne to the character of Hawthorne himself. In Hawthorne, Arvin writes of how, upon returning from studies at Bowdoin, Hawthorne ensconced himself in a room in his mother's house for more than ten years, a room he termed “the dismal chamber,” cutting himself off from all social interaction in his pursuit of being a writer.Hawthorne's “dismal chamber” was both a place of art and a place of guilt. It provided the sanctuary needed for the gestation of writing while separating Hawthorne from the society that would, in Arvin's view, give him completeness as a human being and therefore as a writer. As Arvin describes, Hawthorne felt his “dismal chamber” as a place of shameful secrecy, where his view of humanity residing under a dark cloud of sin was incubated. Hawthorne's shameful secret is his forfeiture of a useful life for the purpose of making himself, in his isolation, into a “teller of tales.” Arvin quotes from Hawthorne's literary sketch “The Devil in Manuscript” as a barely disguised testament of his predicament: I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men—where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this. (Arvin 49) In Arvin's representation, Hawthorne's guilt resides primarily in the furtiveness and isolation in which his “sinful” conjuring of tales takes place. Barry Werth in turn quotes Arvin: The essential sin, [Hawthorne] would seem to say, lies in whatever shuts up the spirit in a dungeon where he is alone, beyond the reach of common sympathies and the general sunlight. All that isolates damns: all that associates, saves. (Werth 36; Arvin 59) Ensconced in his own “dismal chamber” on the top floor of 45 Prospect Street in Northampton, Massachusetts, a few steps from Smith College, Arvin may have felt similar conflict in isolating himself to incubate a succession of groundbreaking studies of the life and work of America's major literary figures, starting with Hawthorne. But his guilty retreat held an additional dimension; Arvin's “dismal chamber” also served as his closet. Being homosexual in an era when openness in his college surroundings was unthinkable, Arvin lived in a place not only of literary immersion but also of retreat and escape, a place where no human company could last in any enduring way. Among those cast out from his “dismal chamber” were Arvin's wife from a disastrous early marriage; his lover Truman Capote, whose long-term presence Arvin ultimately couldn't accept; and finally, his intimate friend Ned Spofford, his codefendant in pornography accusations that destroyed their friendship on an operatic scale.What sort of music might Arvin's dismal chamber contain? It seemed clear that any musical statement there would begin with a soliloquy centered on the chamber itself. Arvin would have been quite conscious of its Hawthornian parallels, and one can well imagine his speaking of the dismal chamber both in seriousness and in irony, as Hawthorne did. For such a pervasive image, a musical emblem, a leitmotif, seemed called for, and the five notes opening Arvin's aria, spinning centrifugally outward with their mix of major and minor, are used recurrently in the rest of the opera. This obsessiveness and pervasiveness underline a narrative unfolding after the fact from Arvin's brain, with nothing untouched by his remembering and imagining.Arvin's aria establishes the dual nature of his dismal chamber, its excitement as a hothouse for literary mind and its guilty isolation and secrecy. We realize right away that it is through the prism of Arvin's mind that much of the opera's drama will play out. Here the language of his thoughts is adapted from his writings on Hawthorne. Arvin's own fears and failings are expressed in how (in Harley's words) he represents the author: He failed to achieve roundness and roughness as a man.And his life became a centrifuge, as did his work—a dramatization of all those forces in our nationthat lead to fragmentation, disunion, isolation, despair. In the aria's final section, the comparison of Hawthorne with himself is made explicit. But in contrast to Hawthorne's sanctuary, from which Hawthorne voluntarily emerged into prominent public life, Arvin's dismal chamber has been violated, and like Hawthorne's creation Hester Prynne, he has been dragged from its safety to stand accused before the public.Setting the opera within Arvin's mind allows the narrative to flow naturally into episodes from The Scarlet Letter, with Arvin taking part in turns as literary critic and as participant. His outburst in the aria's final line: “[B]ut my body bound in public pillory!” summons Hester Prynne standing in shame before the town marketplace. The scene that follows is Hawthorne's story colored by Arvin's interpretation. In the manner of a fantasy, Hester's aria exaggerates the Hester of Hawthorne's novel, especially in its summary self-abnegation: “And thus I heed the fearful mark / Of shame upon my wicked breast / Forever[!]” with Hester's voice sinking deep into the chest range. This use of extremes is not merely for operatic effect; it identifies Arvin's moment of adopting Hester's guilt and shame as his own. He responds with a critical assessment: Hester Prynne, a stunning creation.How could one man's imaginationforetell our troubled world? Thus, Arvin stakes his critical interpretation as well as his personal identification on a sense of irredeemable sin embodied in Hawthorne's story.Arvin's identification with Hester has its limits. Though the exposure he comes to face is similar, his long-term existence in shameful secrecy identifies him still more closely with Hawthorne's second protagonist, the Reverend Dimmesdale. As the scene continues, Arvin steps into Dimmesdale's skin, confronting Hester with the imperative of naming her partner in transgression. Once again, Arvin's viewpoint shines through his impersonation of Hawthorne's character, particularly in the line “We are punished not for our sins but for our secrets.” No such thought is uttered by Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, but this idea is explored in Arvin's Hawthorne: No theme, from the beginning, had seemed to plumb greater depths in Hawthorne's imagination than that of the dark connection between guilt and secrecy. Crime itself, no matter how monstrous, seemed less hideous to him than its concealment; and a comparatively trifling misdeed became to his vision the deadliest of evils if it remained hidden and unconfessed. (Arvin 59) Harley's libretto lines amplify Dimmesdale's demand for the name of Hester's accomplice to a personal plea for exposure and release: Thy silence only tempts him towardFurther acts against our lord.Free for once the shameful man from this dark secret. Through Arvin's accused eyes, the fantasy enactment of this scene thus become poignantly personal. As the scene concludes, the narrative veers further toward Arvin's subjective interpretation in the shadow of his own predicament. Hawthorne's third protagonist, Chillingworth, joins the scene, not as Hester's incognito husband, but as Officer Regan, the state police sergeant who obsessively pursued Arvin and his colleagues with the purpose of uncovering “a predatory ‘college sex ring’” (Werth 233). The trio of Hawthorne's characters, backed by incantations of shame from a chorus of townspeople, fully emerges as Arvin's personal nightmare as his colleague Helen Bacon enters and shakes Arvin awake.The merging of this and subsequent episodes from The Scarlet Letter with the narrative of Arvin's personal story serves several purposes. In addition to serving as a point of entry into Arvin's mind, and establishing his mind as the true setting of the opera's events, the scene just described establishes the stakes that literary interpretation carries for the ensuing drama. It is through interpretation of The Scarlet Letter that we approach the story's central mystery: How could Newton Arvin, a man long invested in social action and a literary pioneer of gay poetics in American authors, have named the names of his friends and colleagues, both to the police and in court? How could he have betrayed Ned Spofford, a man he loved, and passively accepted the accusations against him while Spofford fought the case to the state Supreme Court?In approaching such sensitive questions, it is particularly important to keep the operatic Arvin accountable to the biographical, literary Arvin. Christopher Castiglia, in The Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, speaks of Arvin's criticism as a model for reinvigorating modern critical practice with hope for social transformation. Castiglia describes how Arvin's work rests on an “imaginative idealism that motivates us in all of our daily activities” (Castiglia 121). Arvin practiced a criticism “whose skill is to enhance the power of imagination—to visualize a social organization that breaks the seemingly imperative precedents of the ‘real’—and to yoke that imagination to the dispositional idealism fundamental to queer humanism.” Arvin's brand of socialist humanism thus underlies his groundbreaking examinations of the role of sexuality in the work of Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. It also underlies Arvin's critique of Hawthorne's seclusion in the dismal chamber: Exhibiting a good degree of identification with his subject, Arvin vacillates between blaming Hawthorne for his self-seclusion and, with increased vehemence, condemning Hawthorne's era for its uncritical investment in public and private conformity that offered free-thinking and imaginative individuals no choice but to withdraw, as Hawthorne did, from public life. (Castiglia 124-25) Castiglia's study is geared toward renewed interest in Arvin's work, which remains regrettably under the shadow of the scandal that derailed his career. Castiglia makes a fascinating and convincing case for finding social heroism in Arvin's literary imagination, and the groundwork for eventual social transformation in the pioneering queer humanism of his writings. But the scandal remains important history, and understanding the ideals to which his writing aspired, and the complexity of his identification with his literary subjects, only heightens one's sense of the degree of conflict between Arvin's beliefs and his actions. Arvin could recognize and criticize in Hawthorne's isolation the forces he himself was resisting, both in his criticism and in his life. Arvin's work sought to transcend the dismal chamber's strictures, but his resigned acceptance of his fate when faced with accusations that the socialist humanist Arvin could only have viewed as injustice suggests that there remained within him a streak of The Scarlet Letter's fatalistic sense of enduring sinfulness.Arvin's operatic interlocutor with regard to The Scarlet Letter comes in the form of his onetime lover, Truman Capote, who emerges as an apparition in two succeeding episodes from The Scarlet Letter. Announced by jazzy saxophone riffs, Capote barges into the forest scene between Hester and Dimmesdale, pulling Arvin out of character to mock his obsession with an outdated story. Offering his tacit example as an out-and-proud gay man, he sneers at Dimmesdale's inner turmoil and suggests that he simply carry Hester off and lay the whole grim story to rest. The ensuing literary exchange over whether or not to follow Hawthorne's tale to its ordained conclusion represents a struggle within Arvin, in whose mind the debate is raging. To reject the literary rightness of the fates of Dimmesdale and Hester would be to signify a rejection of the seriousness of their sin, and of Arvin's own. Arvin considers this, but stepping back into Dimmesdale's role, he rejects Hester's plea for escape: If I were to cross one thousand seasmy shame would be with me still! It is at this moment of assertion of his own guilt that Sergeant Regan appears to arrest Arvin.The ensuing losses—of his academic position, of his personal reputation and privacy, of his intimate friendship with Ned Spofford and close alliance with Helen Bacon, of his many professional associations, and of the credibility of his social mission, as his friends continued without him into the civil rights battles of the 1960s—might mark a fatalistic conclusion parallel to the death of Dimmesdale. But even in Hawthorne's telling, Dimmesdale's confession marks a moment of release, and the biographical aftermath for Arvin was not simple. Having gone through the worst he could imagine and lost everything he valued, Arvin returned to publish a final biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow before his death from cancer in 1963. He wrote in response to the consolations of Capote in the scandal's aftermath, “[A]t least I've grown up at last” (Werth 298). Could it be that having nothing more to lose had lifted some of the sense of guilt and shame from Arvin's shoulders?We chose to read events that way for the opera's conclusion. As Capote interrupts Arvin's half-hearted attempt at suicide, the two resume their debate over how the enactment of The Scarlet Letter ought to end. When Arvin steps back into role as Dimmesdale, Arvin this time transforms the narrative, delivering a valedictory to the assembled townspeople that is not a dying confession but a repudiation: People of New England,Ye that deem certain acts unholy,Ye that despise certain ways of the heart,Ye that would brand some human behaviorWith the scourge of a scarlet letter —Behold me now—A man no less and no more sinful than any of you. In Arvin's new imagining, Dimmesdale liberates Hester and leaves the town with its judgmental eyes for a new and unknown future. The suggestion is that, for Arvin, some of the world's judgment has been lifted from his shoulders, pushed by the trauma of events into absurdity and irrelevance. It is a bittersweet ending to a bracing story.Was Newton Arvin, despite the socialist humanism that animated his literary vision and his aspirations for a more just society, unable to imagine a world where he could have acted differently when the scandal engulfed him? Failing to live up to one's duties and ideals is the stuff of operatic tragedy. And yet, there is a scene at the midpoint of The Scarlet Professor in which fantasy and actuality meet for a moment.Resolved to a platonic friendship of mutual adventure and discovery, Arvin and Ned head to The Arch, a gay bar in Springfield. The exact narrative is not specified in these ten minutes of wordless music and dance. It comes on the heels of an intimate dinner scene where the pair listens to the newly released Fischer-Dieskau recording of Schubert's Winterreise, a cycle on themes of loneliness and unrequited desire. As the scene shifts, Schubert's music mixes with strains of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” before launching into driving dance music. Wordless female voices, evoking at once the Andrews sisters, Debussy's Sirens, and Wagner's Rhine maidens, carry the spirit of Judy Garland's anthem forward in the midst of the dance floor tumult. The use of what would become an anthem of the Stonewall era may be anachronistic, but the experience of Arvin, Spofford, and others who sought a moment of self-acceptance and expression of their true selves in the refuge of sanctuaries such as The Arch was both fantastical and forward-looking. Here, more than in the sad aftermath of his public shaming, Arvin was able to live out the imaginings of social transformation embodied in his writings.