The Scarlet Professor

Over the weekend I finally finished reading The Scarlet Professor by Barry Werth, a biography of the literary critic and Smith professor Newton Arvin. Arvin won a National Book Award and wrote several respected biographies -- but he's remembered as the target of a pornography bust in 1960, which targeted him because he was gay. And once he had been confronted, he immediately named a couple other smith instructors who also had some material then considered obscene (pretty tame by our standards, and it was later ruled not obscene but not before the lives of the three men had been ripped apart). It's a terrible sad story, especially since you know the whole time where it's going, but still interesting -- and a good reminder of how horribly many gay people suffered, within living memory for many. The book held special resonance for me since much of it takes place in Northampton, Mass., home of Smith College. I was born in the same hospital where Arvin died (four years afterwards) and grew up in the area. I rode horses and worked at the Smith College stables in high school (right below the state mental hospital where Arvin was admitted multiple times) and my first internship at a 'real" newspaper was at the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton and my cousin and her family live there today. So I know the place a bit, and it was interesting to read about its social and political climate in the earlier parts of the 20th century. (In a completely gratuitous aside, check out the city of Northampton's official website, above -- and compare it in ease of use and general user-friendliness to, say, the city of Key West site. Not to be all they-do-it-better-where-I-came-from, but ...)

Back to the book: It's in the collection of the Key West library -- as soon as I get around to returning it, you can check it out.

Some self horn tooting

The last book review I wrote as editor of Solares Hill (though probably not the last book review I will write for Solares Hill) is in the current edition of Solares Hill. It's a good nonfiction read called 40 Days and 40 Nights by a fellow named Matthew Chapman. It's about the trial in Dover, Pa., over the introduction of intelligent design into high school science classes. Chapman happens to be a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, who (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) figured out natural selection and who is the demon of those who oppose teaching science in science classes. You can get my review in the Solares Hill PDF or online at The Citizen's web page, www.keysnews.com (the Solares Hill book review is posted there every week, WAAAAAAY down at the bottom of the page).Also in the Citizen and on its web page is my husband Mark Hedden's birding column, which this week happens to concern books about birding -- also the subject of a recent talk he gave at Voltaire Books. Sad to say I've only read one of the titles he discusses, The Song of the Dodo (and I agree with his assessment -- it's a great book -- so great I actually loaned it to someone who never returned it -- and bought another hardcover copy to replace it -- it's never being loaned again). Just to bring things full circle, Quammen's most recent book, also a very good read, is a biography of, you guessed it, Charles Darwin. On a totally unrelated note, as long as I'm linking to my own stuff I might as well throw in the new FKCC Library Blog post I wrote about a cool interview from the Paris Review with Key West's own Harry Mathews.

Can you read this?

Megan Marshall -- author of the excellent biography "The Peabody Sisters" and panelist at next year's Key West Literary Seminar -- has an interesting piece on Slate today. Marshall, who knows a thing or two about deciphering migraine-inducing handwriting (the Peabody sisters would actually use stationery twice -- writing first horizontally, then turning the paper and writing across their own writing, creating the beautiful but mind-boggling pages like the one pictured here).Marshall is commenting on the uproar over Robert Frost's notebooks as annotated by scholar Robert Faggen (who incidentally is coming to The Studios of Key West later this year). She's more sympathetic than many of the scholars who have attacked Faggen. It's an interesting insight into the hard work of literary scholarship.

Weekend read

Looking at a publisher's catalogue of upcoming titles, I was interested in one by a writer named Kate Summerscale. Her new book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, is about a Victorian detective who became a model for a lot of great literary detectives. But the catalogue also referred to her previous book, The Queen of Whale Cay. That sounded interesting, so I looked it up. The story was REALLY interesting, about a classic 20th century eccentric, Marion "Joe" Carstairs, an heiress to the Standard Oil Fortune who became a very successful motorboat racer -- and very out-of-the-closet lesbian -- in the 1920s, then retreated to an island in the Bahamas as public opinion turned against her. Even better, it turned out that the Key West library had the book on the shelf. So on Wednesday evening, I stopped by and got it. It's a small book (literally), and a quick read.

Turns out Summerscale used to work for the British paper the Daily Telegraph, which is famous for its hilarious and outrageously candid obituaries, which is how she learned about Carstairs. When I heard that, I decided to check out the Telegraph online just to see if they had these great obits every day. Of course there are a limited number of Carstairs types out there -- but the Telegraph does the best it can with its material, and the obit editor has a pretty entertaining blog.

Getting ready for 09

The 2009 Key West Literary Seminar is looking back -- specifically at historical fiction with some history thrown in. One of the historians we've invited is Jill Lepore and I just finished reading her book The Name of War, about King Philip's War and how it has been recorded and interpreted in American history. Sadly, I managed to grow up and receive an alleged education in New England and still had no clear idea what King Philip's War was until I read "Mayflower" by Nathaniel Philbrick last year. I thought it was one of the French and Indian Wars, since they're named after royalty. Oops.

Philbrick's book takes King Philip's War as a kind of coda to the initial landing and establishment of the Plymouth Colony (it was Philip's father, Massasoit, who made the initial contact and alliance with the English settlers, to the Native Americans' later regret and dismay). It's popular history, written with the layperson in mind. Lepore's is more academic but still very accessible. And it's really interesting on the whole issue of who controls the narrative of history, from the English settlers who initially wrote vivid accounts of the carnage -- to help justify sending Native Americans to slavery and death -- to the early 19th century Americans who staged an overwrought play called "Metamora," starring Philip as a sort of proto-Revolutionary American.

Interesting stuff. And since I'm finally about to return this book to the Monroe County Library, others can check it out.