Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library) - Softcover

Tanenhaus, Sam

 
9780375751455: Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375751459 ISBN 13: 9780375751455
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions.

A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sam Tanenhaus was the editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of The New York Times. From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote often on politics. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. Tanenhaus’s book Whittaker Chambers: A Biography won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Aus dem Klappentext

Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions.

A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1     
Vivian
 
Jay Vivian Chambers was born on April 1, 1901—April Fool’s Day, as he liked to point out. He was named for his father, Jay Chambers, a graphic artist at the New York World. The boy’s middle name, chosen by his mother, Laha, dismayed her husband and also its bearer, called Vivian all through childhood. Jay, however, refused to utter the hated syllables and so inflicted on his son the nickname Beadle, evidently a comment on his demeanor, watchful, grave, and severe.
 
In 1903, after a second son, Richard, was born, Laha decided the young family should move from their apartment, near Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and resettle in the suburbs. She loathed New York City and missed the open spaces she had known in her own childhood, spent in Wisconsin.
 
Jay resisted the move. A city boy from Philadelphia, he enjoyed Brooklyn, its brownstones and tree-lined pavements. He liked too the easy access, by elevated subway, to his Manhattan office and the theaters and galleries he frequented. Also, he had recently lost his job at the World to a news camera, and although he soon found new employment—with a design studio on Union Square that did book covers and magazine illustrations—the venture was in its infancy and its prospects uncertain.
 
But Laha, insistent and strong-willed, prevailed over Jay, who was passive and retiring, and in 1904 the family moved to Lynbrook, a pretty coastal village on Long Island’s South Shore, twenty miles east of Manhattan, with a population of less than two thousand. The year the Chamberses moved there, Lynbrook got its first water mains and its first brick building, M. L. Levinson’s Hardware Store.
 
The family took up residence on Earle Avenue, an unpaved street lined with silver maples.4 The house, formerly a postal coach stop, was a sturdy clapboard structure, two stories plus a slope-ceilinged attic. It sat back from the street on a swatch of lawn. Though in need of repair, 228 Earle Avenue gave every appearance of being a suitable place for the young family to achieve stability and for Laha to regain the “paradise” of upper-middle-class respectability she had known in childhood.
 
Laha’s father, Charles Whittaker, a Scottish immigrant born in 1840, had immigrated to Milwaukee in 1845, with his parents and twelve siblings. In 1869, a language teacher and principal in Milwaukee’s public schools, he married Mary Blanchard, a fetching sixteen-year-old with wide-set eyes and a broad forehead. She came from Wauwatosa, a grouping of frame houses set among oak and maple groves, near the banks of the Menomonee River. The descendant of Huguenots, Mary spoke fluent French. Many years later she taught Vivian the language, using a convent primer.
 
Even as he advanced his pedagogical career, Charles pursued other interests. He was the founding publisher of Milwaukee’s first city magazine and registered several patents. But he suffered stinging reversals. In 1878, when Laha was seven, her father was forced to auction off the substantial house he had built only two years before near Milwaukee’s exclusive “Yankee Hill,” overlooking Lake Michigan. In 1880 Charles and Mary Whittaker departed Milwaukee, tracing the southern sweep of the Great Lake to Chicago. Laha, their only child, stayed behind at the Home School, a private academy in Racine. In Chicago Charles manufactured and sold brass castings—and again went bankrupt, losing everything just in time to foreclose on Laha’s long-held dream of attending an elite college in the East.
 
She went instead on the stage, touring the Midwest and Far West with stock companies. After six or seven hard years she gave it up and joined her parents, who had moved again, this time to New York. They were now operating a lunch counter on West Twenty-third Street, in Manhattan, and living above it in tiny, cramped rooms. Laha came to cook and waitress and help care for her father, afflicted with cancer of the tongue. Charles Whittaker died in 1899, at age fifty-nine. He left his widow and daughter a twelve-dollar-a-month Civil War pension, fifty dollars’ worth of kitchen utensils, and a couple of hundred books.
 
By then Laha had met Jay Chambers, a customer at the eatery. He was short, dark, plump, and boyish—and five years Laha’s junior. A recent graduate of Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, he had come up to New York to work as an illustrator at the World, a job he obtained through his father, James Chambers, a well-known journalist. After a two-year courtship Jay and Laha were married in January 1900 over the strenuous objections of the groom’s mother, Dora, who judged Laha unworthy of her only son. In her indignation Laha taught her sons that their father came from inferior stock, deficient in “breeding.” The truth was that Jay had reached below his station to rescue her, a penniless waitress nearing thirty with a history on the provincial stage.
 
These distinctions meant little to Jay. He cared only for art. A product of the 1890s, the mauve decade, he quietly deplored middle-class standards of respectability. While Laha strove to establish the family in Lynbrook, Jay stood to the side, mocking. He regarded the suburbs and their inhabitants with droll disdain. He once bet a friend he could walk to Lynbrook’s center, the “Five Corners,” clad only in his pajamas and not attract a single comment from his complacent neighbors. He won the bet. At home he raised the gaudy pennant of aestheticism. He wore a linen “samurai robe,” planted a large replica of the Venus de Milo on the living room floor, and mounted on its walls a permanent exhibition of his bookplates (prized by collectors) and whimsical Christmas cards (prized by his friends).
 
It amused Jay to adorn the house, but he steadfastly refused to fix it, despite its poor condition. The yellow exterior coat had been bleached of color by the salty ocean winds. The shutters, a sickly green, nagged at their rotted hinges. The interior was even worse. One day a portion of the dining room ceiling dropped. Laha covered the hole with cheesecloth. Vivian and Richard watched transfixed as mice nested in its bulges, their scampering feet leaving “twinkling” impressions. Another project was the wallpaper, aged and blistered. Jay would not replace it. Laha wrapped up her few valuables and took them to Manhattan pawnbrokers, returning with enough cash to hire a team of workmen. When the job was finished, Jay said nothing. Laha’s sobs “were dreadful to hear.”
 
But she was not deterred. With or without Jay’s encouragement, she was determined to carry her mission forward, to conquer Lynbrook in the name of her sons, anchoring them in the community. She was elected president of the local mothers’ club and was on the committee that founded and staffed the village’s first library. She also secured entrance into the “exclusive” Friday club, limited to thirty-five women, most of them “wives of leading figures,” with newcomers drawn from a waiting list. Laha’s dramatic “monologues” and “readings” were a staple of the club’s afternoon entertainments.
 
Yet the Chamberses never quite blended in. Neighbors found them “clever” and “brilliant” but faintly disreputable. The house, cluttered with Jay’s artwork and the mismatching “antiques” Laha rummaged up, had the appearance of a seedy museum. And its curators were themselves odd: the plump, aloof artist who rode the commuter train in virtual silence; the actressy wife...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375751459
ISBN 13 
9780375751455
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
661
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780394585598: Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0394585593 ISBN 13:  9780394585598
Verlag: Random House Inc, 1997
Hardcover