Premonitions of the Literature to Come: Newton Arvin in Harper’s Bazaar, March 1947

I’m in Northampton, MA today, at the Smith College archives, where I am researching the life of Newton Arvin. My partner Dustin Schell and I are adapting Barry Werth’s biography of him, The Scarlet Professor, into a screenplay. Much of the story of him that is known is of a few shattering moments in 1960, when he became the center of a scandal after his arrest by the local police’s Pornography Squad. But here, among his papers, the celebrated critical mind that fostered writers as varied as Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and Sylvia Plath comes into view. I was struck by this paragraph from an article of his, “The New American Writers”, published in Harper’s Bazaar, March 1947:

“The literature I can foresee coming into existence here may well be a profoundly realistic and even, in a better sense than the old one, a naturalistic literature. It would not be realism in the rather plodding and prosaic sense; it would be, I think, a form to which we could apply some such phrase as the one painter’s use—“Magical Realism.” It would not be naturalism in the old biological and documentary sense; but it might very well be–I believe it will be–naturalistic in a deeper and more genuinely human sense. I mean by this that it would be essentially faithful to the nature of things as we know them to be—to physical nature, of course, and to biological nature, but also to the nature of man himself, who, if he is an animal, is an animal of a very special sort, an animal whose mind deals most characteristically in symbols, and who can master his experience only when he has transmuted it in emblems, in allegories, in myths. A neo-naturalism, then, if you wish, a humanized and poeticized naturalosm, a naturalism not of the document but of the myth—such may well be the literature that the near future has in the making for us.”